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In The New Republic, current Harvard professor Steven Pinker responds to former Columbia professor William Deresiewicz’s TNR article “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League” (which I briefly responded to here.) I was glad to see that Pinker includes several references to the research of one of my favorites, Caroline Hoxby.
HIGHER ED SEPTEMBER 4, 2014
The Trouble With Harvard
The Ivy League is broken and only standardized tests can fix itThe most-read article in the history of this magazine is not about war, politics, or great works of art. It’s about the admissions policies of a handful of elite universities, most prominently my employer, Harvard, which is figuratively and literally immolated on the cover.
It’s not surprising that William Deresiewicz’s “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League” has touched a nerve. Admission to the Ivies is increasingly seen as the bottleneck to a pipeline that feeds a trickle of young adults into the remaining lucrative sectors of our financialized, winner-take-all economy. And their capricious and opaque criteria have set off an arms race of credential mongering that is immiserating the teenagers and parents (in practice, mostly mothers) of the upper middle class. …
But the biggest problem is that the advice in Deresiewicz’s title is perversely wrongheaded. If your kid has survived the application ordeal and has been offered a place at an elite university, don’t punish her for the irrationalities of a system she did nothing to create; by all means send her there! The economist Caroline Hoxby has shown that selective universities spend twenty times more on student instruction, support, and facilities than less selective ones, while their students pay for a much smaller fraction of it, thanks to gifts to the college. Because of these advantages, it’s the selective institutions that are the real bargains in the university marketplace. Holding qualifications constant, graduates of a selective university are more likely to graduate on time, will tend to find a more desirable spouse, and will earn 20 percent more than those of less selective universities—every year for the rest of their working lives. These advantages swamp any differences in tuition and other expenses, which in any case are often lower than those of less selective schools because of more generous need-based financial aid. The Ivy admissions sweepstakes may be irrational, but the parents and teenagers who clamber to win it are not.
I was going to go through the rest of the article and excerpt the good parts for you, but it’s all good. It’s endlessly quotable, so go read the whole thing there.
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From Pinker’s article. An excellent piece on how the Left used to think about IQ testing:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119332/iq-excuse-egalitarianism-vs-meritocracy
I’d be somewhat surprised if the Harvard undergraduates are even the cleverest in the Boston area.
*THIS IS SPINAL TAP:Replies: @dearieme
Pinker is quite mad. Things are working as intended. He really thinks all this is an accident?
The New Republic has long had a willingness to print non PC articles related to intelligence by Pinker that they would never otherwise publish. For instance, on a possible genetic basis for Jewish intelligence, see http://www.newrepublic.com/article/77727/groups-and-genes .
Strange
Not going to happen. The academic left abandoned testing over a generation ago so as to hamstring their less-connected, less urban and wrong-thinking competitors’ children.
I come from a family with a lot of educators. One thing people don’t realize is how much academics and administrators try to game things for their own children, and even to some extent for their friends’ and extended families’ kids. This corrupts the system as much as anything.
We shouldn’t underestimate the power of academic nepotism.
Outstanding article. How does Pinker get away with this level of crimethink and still remain an influential and respected public intellectual?
Another great perk of going to an Ivy League school is that you’ll learn to use the singular pronoun “she” and the possessive “her” when the subject’s sex is unspecified, as evidenced by Mr. Pinker.
I have an acquaintance who is on the admissions committee for a middling graduate school. I can’t name it, but it is a recognizable name. He calls it middling and I’d say that’s being modest, but I don’t follow the rankings. I think most people would assume it a pretty good grad school.
Anyway, he has said for a few years that they mark down Ivy applicants. There’s an assumption that the grades reported by the applicant are inflated. A big spread between the transcript and test scores for Ivy applicants puts them on the wait list.
On the other hand, the so-called New Ivies are in demand. He says you see high test scores, but some struggles on the transcript. They like see that because it means the applicant had to work hard as an undergraduate. How they adjust for this sounds very subjective, but we have never got too far into the weeds on it.
Well, as someone who actually teaches at a uni in the Boston area, I would say that the average Harvard undergrad is a bit smarter than his compatriots at Boston University, Tufts, and Boston College*.Harvard undergrads, though, are probably outpointed in terms of sheer brainpower by the ones at MIT.
*THIS IS SPINAL TAP:
*THIS IS SPINAL TAP:Replies: @dearieme
It was MIT I had in mind.
“Deresiewicz complains that the kids today are just no good: they are stunted, meek, empty, incurious zombies; faithful drudges; excellent sheep; and, in a flourish he uses twice, “out-of-touch, entitled little shits.” I have spent my career interacting with these students, and do not recognize the targets of this purple invective.”
Pinker needs to get out more.
I couldn’t be bothered to finish Pinker’s article.
I scored an 800 on the critical reading portion of the SAT, but kept getting bogged down in Pinker’s choice of words.
It’s poor writing. He is straight up out of the 19th century with his try hard verbose status signaling.
I went to the University of Chicago in the late 1970s. At that time it was not too hard to get into (I doubt I could get in their now). Many of the students there were the smart yet alienated, high SAT scores with middling class rank (I was at the bottom of the upper 10% from my high school). I had a number of friends at Harvard and spent time on campus when I lived in Boston, My impression was that the Harvard students were not much smarter than their equivalent U of C but were more socially adept and more attractive. I went to Stanford for graduate school and found the undergraduates to be underwhelming, not intellectual and not really caring about their class (they did care about their grades). However, they were really good looking and athletic.
“Holding qualifications constant, graduates of a selective university are more likely to graduate on time, will tend to find a more desirable spouse, and will earn 20 percent more than those of less selective universities—every year for the rest of their working lives. These advantages swamp any differences in tuition and other expenses….The Ivy admissions sweepstakes may be irrational, but the parents and teenagers who clamber to win it are not.”
Exactly. Harvard and the Ivies trump the others, bar none. Perhaps throw in a few others (e.g. Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, MIT, CIT, Rice, Duke, Northwestern, UofChi for instance) and that’s it.
Basically, it’s confirming what many have known for all this time.
Pinker’s article is pure gold. I wish everyone in academics, and even more importantly, in HR read it.
Unfortunately, this is a battle that the scholars are not going to win. Leaders make more than scholars. Even though people with very high IQs, particularly in STEM, contribute more to society than well connected business and politics types, it’s those people that make the money. Will the recently hired Cantor create over $3 million in value per year? I doubt it. But, his connections will help Wall Street navigate the government bureaucracy. Lion of the Blogosphere calls this value transference, and it isn’t going away anytime soon. Until it does, it is rational for Harvard to accept the IQ 130 captain of the lacrosse team rather than the IQ 150 chemistry major.
My feeling is that there should be at least a few top schools in America whose criteria for admissions are well-defined and objective. The problem is that the only school that employs such an approach is both tiny and technically-focused: Caltech.Replies: @Steve Sailer
One of my anonymous readers said he had once worked in statistical modeling for the Admissions dept. at a Very Famous University on who gives the most money. The 130 IQ captain of the lacrosse team would be the beau ideal of the Endowment Development Department.
Why would one send one’s child to Harvard?
To become a Chinese/Jewish/Indian/homosexual banker/consultant/stock broker?
Harvard has not been American for decades.
Harvard (and HLS) is just an international brand name.
From the piece…
Clearly a nod to the HBD/pro-freedom-of-thought folks!
https://www.unz.com/isteve/harvard-pulls-larry-summers-on-ex/
The admission process can seem frustratingly opaque, and despite the fears of Pinker and Unz, I still believe the Ivies (along with MIT and Caltech) are meritocracies that select only the best and brightest. The Ivies have no trouble finding good scorers, what they also want are alumni that will bring money and prestige to the institution. I do agree we need more testing and testing is the best way to identity exceptionally talented youth, many of whom are bored with schoolwork and may get poor grades as a result. The Ivies, especially for high-paying majors, do provide among the best ROI for any institution of higher learning, so its no surprise it’s very competitive, and to dissuade anyone that meets the cognitive demands of attending from applying is stupid to say the least.
Here are the 25/75 SAT percentiles for Harvard:
SAT Critical Reading: 700 / 800
SAT Math: 710 / 800
SAT Writing: 710 / 800
So sure, Harvard isn’t JUST looking at intelligence, but it is certainly only selecting from the pool of highly intelligent.
And even with all the affirmative action, athletic recruiting, rural state preference (which still exists!) and catering to the rich and famous, even the bottom of the class is extremely smart.
Looking at the admissions of the college, HBS, and HLS is also interesting.
The B school is less selective for IQ than the college, the law school more so. If you can get a 175 or more on the LSAT (top 0.3% of a pool limited to college graduates who want to be lawyers, probably around 1 in 3000 of the general US population), then your chance of being admitted to HLS is above 70%. By contrast, while HBS certainly welcomes students with perfect GMAT scores, it won’t even get you to 50%.
Similarly, because IQ is especially important for high end lawyers, the LSAT discriminates in extreme detail between the top 1% of scorers. In fact, of the 60 possible LSAT scores, 8 are devoted to ranking the top 1% of test takers.
This is news to me. Could someone expand on how this works. For starters, I had no idea there were only 60 possible LSAT scores. Is this new or has it always been the case?
The thing is, for extreme IQ scores the difference between 130 and 150 may come down to a handful of questions. Harvard has a lot of 130 < applicants and they have to pick whoever they think will bring the most value to the university. Compared to public universities like Berkeley, Harvard, a private university with a very substantial endowment fund, is in many respects like a business. The drama applicant may have a higher IQ than the chemist..it's hard to know because testing extreme IQ is hard and IQ at the extreme scale does not always correspond with professions people think are 'smart'. Having an IQ >130 puts you among the best and brightest and such individuals can succeed without the Ivy League, although it def. helps no question. Testing can establish a cutoff of 130, but that still leaves thousands of applicants.
Question for Steve or anyone else who can answer this question:
The picture at the top of the Pinker article is of a massive room filled with desks and what appears to be a bunch of students taking a test of some sort. What is going on there? I notice the demographics lean heavily white (exclusively, as far as I can tell) and predominantly male. Any clue?
The pre-1995 SAT was better at >130, especially the tough Verbal.
“…will tend to find a more desirable spouse…”
Or a girlfriend who will want to pass her reproductive prime in some PhD program followed by years more of “stablushing” her career.
Or a girlfriend who will want to pass her reproductive prime in some PhD program followed by years more of "stablushing" her career.Replies: @International Jew
I meant “establishing”. (How come it doesn’t give me 4:00 to edit anymore?)
SAT Critical Reading: 700 / 800
SAT Math: 710 / 800
SAT Writing: 710 / 800
So sure, Harvard isn't JUST looking at intelligence, but it is certainly only selecting from the pool of highly intelligent.
And even with all the affirmative action, athletic recruiting, rural state preference (which still exists!) and catering to the rich and famous, even the bottom of the class is extremely smart.
Looking at the admissions of the college, HBS, and HLS is also interesting.
The B school is less selective for IQ than the college, the law school more so. If you can get a 175 or more on the LSAT (top 0.3% of a pool limited to college graduates who want to be lawyers, probably around 1 in 3000 of the general US population), then your chance of being admitted to HLS is above 70%. By contrast, while HBS certainly welcomes students with perfect GMAT scores, it won't even get you to 50%.
Similarly, because IQ is especially important for high end lawyers, the LSAT discriminates in extreme detail between the top 1% of scorers. In fact, of the 60 possible LSAT scores, 8 are devoted to ranking the top 1% of test takers.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Curle
It’s hardly beyond imagination that the top 12-20 universities in the country could get the SAT/ACT to offer an extension that would be reasonably valid up scores of what, under the current system, would be 900.
The current SAT is set up to give elite colleges excuses for not admitting the very smartest students but admitting the 125 IQ kid likely to be a big donor someday. That’s not unreasonable on the part of the colleges, but at least we used to have an SAT pre-1995 where you could be sure that people scoring 1550-1600 were exceptionally smart.
Why are not the SATs scored the same way with the actual raw score given on the subject exam?
Dan Kurt
I went to a CUNY school with a very high SAT score back in the 80s due to cost, one of my kids, who outscored me on the SAT, went to an Ivy school and I’m glad he did. Jobs are tough to come by now, have your kid go to a second rate school and see what opportunities come their way.
The picture at the top of the Pinker article is of a massive room filled with desks and what appears to be a bunch of students taking a test of some sort. What is going on there? I notice the demographics lean heavily white (exclusively, as far as I can tell) and predominantly male. Any clue?Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Anonymous
Stock photo?
Well, there is this place called MIT… rats, beaten to the punch. 😉
Hey, Pinker cited Ron Unz on asian admissions! Did not expect that.
At least Harvard Law is less silly than HBS (crossing myself, Orthodox style).
An acquaintance of mine just got a wonder gig at a super Washington law firm. She was the only one from a non-ivy law school hired in this year’s crop. But she was first or second at a flagship state uni. Her six-digit starting salary makes me blush and stare at my shoes.
Derb should modify his dictum — get a government job! — to include private sector jobs near the teats of Washington’s largesse. Really the money spewing is more like an opened fire hydrant on an urban street in August, 1968. Lot’s of kids dancing in the wasted water.
Beltway banditry is alive and well. These days, the real “welfare queens” are cross-dressing Iraqis and Afghanis who are getting ready to bug out — when the bad folks resume power — to Paris, Dubai, Geneva or London with the cash we American taxpayers dumped on them.
I didn’t understand Pinker’s analogy to the Harlem Globetrotters vs Washington Generals. Can someone explain it to me?
Why would we as a society want all the smart students to be concentrated in only a handful of schools? Much healthier to spread the wealth around. Better to dilute the power of these elite institutions. Lower tier institutions a just as capable of educating students and making a contribution to society.
The Harlem Globetrotters are a touring basketball team that puts on humorous exhibitions of skills. The Washington Generals are their opponents who accompany them and always lose because they always fall for the same tricks night after night.
It wouldn’t be unreasonable to put public pressure on super-elite employers like Goldman Sachs to at least make a pretense of recruiting at state flagship schools.
If we desire for super-elite employers to recruit at state flagship schools, we should be in favor of Harvard etc. not skimming off all the very brightest students in the nation. The more talent is spread into other schools, the more incentive employers will have to recruit there. Therefore, policies that dilute the intellectual capital and brand of Harvard (legacies, AA, athletes, donor potential) should, if they are not affirmatively promoted, at least not be opposed.
The thrust of much of the commentary on Ivy admissions seems to be: Let's make these institutions even more powerful, more elitist.Replies: @Steve Sailer
It looks like some sort of test is being given. The thing that sort of throws me is that the test takers are heavily white and male. The pic looks of fairly recent vintage and I’m assuming it’s American. So I’m surprised that there weren’t more asians (was there even one?) and females. If it’s some STEM final exam at any major university, you would certainly see more asians.
In any case, it is a striking photo.
When asked why he bet all his money on the Generals to beat the Globetrotters, degenerate gambler Krusty the Klown explained himself thus: The Generals were due!
I don’t follow your reasoning, Steve.
If we desire for super-elite employers to recruit at state flagship schools, we should be in favor of Harvard etc. not skimming off all the very brightest students in the nation. The more talent is spread into other schools, the more incentive employers will have to recruit there. Therefore, policies that dilute the intellectual capital and brand of Harvard (legacies, AA, athletes, donor potential) should, if they are not affirmatively promoted, at least not be opposed.
The thrust of much of the commentary on Ivy admissions seems to be: Let’s make these institutions even more powerful, more elitist.
If we desire for super-elite employers to recruit at state flagship schools, we should be in favor of Harvard etc. not skimming off all the very brightest students in the nation. The more talent is spread into other schools, the more incentive employers will have to recruit there. Therefore, policies that dilute the intellectual capital and brand of Harvard (legacies, AA, athletes, donor potential) should, if they are not affirmatively promoted, at least not be opposed.
The thrust of much of the commentary on Ivy admissions seems to be: Let's make these institutions even more powerful, more elitist.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Pinker is right now probably America’s top academic intellectual, so it’s appropriate for him to stand up for sheer academics.
Standing up for sheer academics at Harvard might more plausibly point to that conclusion (although not necessarily so). And it would be unsurprising that Pinker would be looking out for Harvard's parochial best interests. How does Pinker's interest in aggrandizing his own power and prestige via Harvard's influence his policy prescriptions?Replies: @Anon, @Steve Sailer
http://uncouthreflections.com/2014/09/05/steven-pinker-on-what-ails-higher-education-or-at-least-harvard/
I don’t think that standing up for “sheer academics” leads ineluctably to a policy position that the nation’s top test takers should be concentrated in only a handful of its good schools.
Standing up for sheer academics at Harvard might more plausibly point to that conclusion (although not necessarily so). And it would be unsurprising that Pinker would be looking out for Harvard’s parochial best interests. How does Pinker’s interest in aggrandizing his own power and prestige via Harvard’s influence his policy prescriptions?
Should read: "the nation's top standardized test takers."
Standing up for sheer academics at Harvard might more plausibly point to that conclusion (although not necessarily so). And it would be unsurprising that Pinker would be looking out for Harvard's parochial best interests. How does Pinker's interest in aggrandizing his own power and prestige via Harvard's influence his policy prescriptions?Replies: @Anon, @Steve Sailer
“…the nation’s top test takers…”
Should read: “the nation’s top standardized test takers.”
If you randomly take a thousand people and put them in a large auditorium, statistically, there will only be twenty out of the thousand who will have an IQ over 130. And only one with an IQ over 145. Anecdotally, from reading some comments, I think that there is also a lot of IQ score inflation to go with the grade inflation.
Nobel Laureate in Physics, William Shockley had an IQ of 125/129
Nobel Laureate in Physics, Richard Feynman had an IQ of 128.
Nobel Laureate in Medicine and Physiology, Francis Crick, had an IQ of 115.
They all have Ph.D.’s and went to elite schools and got top grades. But apparently all the >130 IQ’s are going to HLS.
My contempt for college admissions is huge. They are corrupt. A year ago or so, I wrote up a proposal that would make public schools something approaching meritocratic. Private universities are beyond saving; they will never give up legacies. what we need is for public universities to be forbidden to commit AA below a certain point, and stop accepting Chinese that don’t speak English.
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/an-alternative-college-admissions-system/
Good. Let them keep the legacies, so that second tier schools may benefit from smart students, too.
Given that CA is bending over backwards to accept people who can't speak English, what chance is there of what you ask.
Secondly, aren't you aware that the publisher of this website composed a 20,000-word essay that demonstrated widespread discrimination against Asians? It is impossibly hard for Asians to gain admission to the Ivies, so don't you worry: these colleges have stopped admitting Chinese kids who DO speak English, let alone those who do not. The percentage of Asians has remained constant for the past 2 decades, despite the fact that the quality of Asian students (as judged by National Merit Scholars, gold medals in physics, math and chemistry international olympiads, and top prizes in national and international science competitions) has skyrocketed in that period, while the quality of students in all other groups has gone down (even Jewish students, as that Jewish author readily admitted--in fact, that was one of the main points of the article).
Elsewhere, our good publisher Unz reassures us, in another article, that the percentage of native-born Harvard and Yale students has gone down only about 3 percentage points. In other words: the perception that international students, let alone Chinese students who don't speak English, are crowding out Americans is just that: a perception.Replies: @Udolpho, @Anonymous
A hypothetical.
Suppose Jews and blacks both had average IQ of 110 and Asians had average IQ of 9o.
Suppose Ivies were over-represented with Jews and blacks due to testing.
Suppose 90% of student at NY Studyvant school were Jews and blacks.
How would the Left regard testing?
Standing up for sheer academics at Harvard might more plausibly point to that conclusion (although not necessarily so). And it would be unsurprising that Pinker would be looking out for Harvard's parochial best interests. How does Pinker's interest in aggrandizing his own power and prestige via Harvard's influence his policy prescriptions?Replies: @Anon, @Steve Sailer
Harvard’s pretty doggone influential under its current system of admissions. I suspect the administration would suspect that Pinker is being naive and is proposing changes that would make Harvard into a sort of Greater Reed College. Portland’s Reed is an independent-minded small liberal arts college that has a terrific record of setting undergrads on the path to being professors in the humanities. But Reed is notably maladroit at playing the power and prestige game. (E.g., the USNWR ratings people just _hate_ Reed for various reasons).
Since the Ivies are selecting the pool from which tomorrow’s governing elite will be drawn, I favor affirmative action for all ethnic groups and geographical regions of the country. We need a governing class that represents the ethnic and geographical diversity of America (including rural vs. urban).. Imagine, as a thought experiment, an America governed exclusively by Ashekenazis and East Asians who grew up in NYC. Could that possibly work out? Why not?
As for a pure meritocracy, leave that to the MIT’s and CalTec’s. In fact separate the sciences from the liberal arts. They are two different beasts.
Agreed. This would be good public policy.
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/an-alternative-college-admissions-system/Replies: @Anon, @The most deplorable one, @Pascal
Private universities are beyond saving; they will never give up legacies.
Good. Let them keep the legacies, so that second tier schools may benefit from smart students, too.
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/an-alternative-college-admissions-system/Replies: @Anon, @The most deplorable one, @Pascal
and stop accepting Chinese that don’t speak English.
Given that CA is bending over backwards to accept people who can’t speak English, what chance is there of what you ask.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#/image/File:IQ_distribution.svg
Nobel Laureate in Physics, William Shockley had an IQ of 125/129
Nobel Laureate in Physics, Richard Feynman had an IQ of 128.
Nobel Laureate in Medicine and Physiology, Francis Crick, had an IQ of 115.
They all have Ph.D.'s and went to elite schools and got top grades. But apparently all the >130 IQ's are going to HLS.Replies: @syonredux
I’m assuming that that is using the White American mean (100); if the auditorium contained 1,000 Black Americans, the percentages would look rather different (the Black American mean is about 85).
In the case of Feynman, there is ample reason to doubt the accuracy of his score:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einstein/201112/polymath-physicist-richard-feynmans-low-iq-and-finding-another
The picture at the top of the Pinker article is of a massive room filled with desks and what appears to be a bunch of students taking a test of some sort. What is going on there? I notice the demographics lean heavily white (exclusively, as far as I can tell) and predominantly male. Any clue?Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Anonymous
It’s a shutterstock photo captioned: BELGRADE, SERBIA – CIRCA JUNE 2008: Students takes exam for university, circa June 2008 in Belgrade.
Found using Google’s reverse image search (a very useful tool).
I get that his argument promotes sheer academics and that that is an argument worth making. I am less sure that the subtitle of his article is correct, and that greater emphasis on standardized tests will fix the many problems he describes. It is pushing on a wet noodle. http://uncouthreflections.com/2014/09/05/steven-pinker-on-what-ails-higher-education-or-at-least-harvard/
I get that his argument promotes sheer academics and that that is an argument worth making. I am less sure that the subtitle of his article is correct, and that greater emphasis on standardized tests will fix the many problems he describes. It is pushing on a wet noodle.
http://uncouthreflections.com/2014/09/05/steven-pinker-on-what-ails-higher-education-or-at-least-harvard/
Since the Ivies are selecting the pool from which tomorrow’s governing elite will be drawn, I favor affirmative action for all ethnic groups and geographical regions of the country.
Agreed. This would be good public policy.
This all stems from the monopoly on signalling that colleges and universities in general enjoy, and taking that away is the only way to fix this particular problem.
“Good. Let them keep the legacies, so that second tier schools may benefit from smart students, too.”
That won’t work unless SATs of each student, each demographic, are made publicly available.
“Given that CA is bending over backwards to accept people who can’t speak English, what chance is there of what you ask.”
Not just California. But the people can stop it.
Agreed, Steven Hsu has pointed out the test that Feynman took very likely peaked at 140 IQ, that that was the highest score possible because it was designed to find learning problems with normal students, not identify genius among high achievers. Feynman’s longtime colleague and sometime competitor Murray Gell-Mann I believe scored above 180 IQ as a child, he started studying calculus in something like the third grade, and earned a bachelors degree from Yale at 18 and a doctorate in from M.I.T. at 20 or 21. Gell-Mann was over a decade younger than Feynman so apparently by that time they were using IQ tests to find high achievers.
Pinker’s post-anti-semitism list of Harvard contributions(recombinant DNA, Wall-Street Quants, The Simpsons, Facebook, and the masthead of The New Republic) is a lot less impressive when you remove the first entry. Does anyone know who he’s talking about? The only guy to ever win a Nobel prize for recombinant DNA was Joshua Lederberg, who attended Columbia despite being Jewish in the early 1940’s and appears to have no connection whatsoever to Harvard.
To become a Chinese/Jewish/Indian/homosexual banker/consultant/stock broker?
Harvard has not been American for decades.
Harvard (and HLS) is just an international brand name.Replies: @Chase
Well, not ‘Chinese’ stock broker/consultant. The bar is much higher for East Asians, as Steve Pinker notes in his TNR article, citing no less than the namesake of Unz Review. Pinker and Unz are hardly alone: Thomas Espenshade of Princeton has shown that EA have to score at least 140 pts higher on the SAT than whites with the same subjective qualifications, to have the same chances of admission.
The more people laugh at the Ivies, and at those people who take them hyper-seriously, the better off we’ll all be.
Interesting that Pinker mentions Ron Unz re: discrimination against Asians, but neglects to mention the other main point from Ron’s piece: that white gentiles are discriminated against as well. The other thing that irks me is that whenever legacy admissions are mentioned, it’s always assumed that the people getting the legacy spots are all lily-white Mayflower descendants who play the most WASPy sports possible (polo?). Hence the Oliver Barrett IV jab. Well, as far as I can tell, Jews have been overrepresented at Harvard for nearly a century, even with the quotas. So isn’t it entirely possible that a goodly chunk of the legacy admits are Jews themselves, who maybe aren’t quite as deserving of their unused spot in Pinker’s lecture as Archie Li from California or Mike O’Donnell from Idaho?
“Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam”
IQ is important, but it’s worth not getting carried away. There’s an old engineering saying (in some types of engineering) that “intelligence is vastly overrated”. This _doesn’t_ mean intelligence is unimportant. It means some areas need a lot of background knowledge, experience, intuition, and common horse sense about the area. Maybe even a particular personality type.
Does a higher IQ help you get all these things? Sure, probably. But that doesn’t mean that, in practice, just because someone has a high IQ that they invest the time to acquire all these things in a given area and perform better than someone with a lower IQ that knows the area well (even if they potentially could perform better).
Maybe Feynman’s reported IQ score was correct, but he just loved math and had worked with it for a long time, considerably longer than most of the students he was competing against. It wasn’t as if his reported IQ was low.
Math seems to be one of those areas where you need both a minimal IQ that is reasonably high and a lot of background exposure to the subject. It doesn’t help to have a high IQ if you are wondering “what does that squiggle mean?”. It’s like learning a new human language with a lot of idioms. Someone who knows the language well, “fluent as a native”, and who also knows all the idioms might well do better than someone who was potentially smarter. Smart doesn’t make up for simply not knowing.
The other thing is that while people tend to focus on Feynman, they leave out Julian Schwinger, whose example is especially relevant to this discussion on college admissions. Schwinger, who shared the Nobel with Tomonaga and Feynman, sometimes figures into discussions on college admissions because he was allegedly a victim of Harvard's anti-Jewish quotas (Feynman, however, did get in) though he was a top student from NY's science high school system. People also tend to forget about Tomonaga, who enjoyed none of the resources that Feynman or Schwinger had. While Feynman was surrounded by world-class talent at Caltech, Tomonaga toiled away in isolation during wartime Japan--yet was the first of the three to publish papers on the work that would earn all of them the coveted medal. So, who needs Harvard? Examples like this help put the heated admissions issue in perspective.
The typical student applying for a spot in Harvard’s class of 2019 is the child of somebody who graduated from college in, say, the later 1980s.
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/an-alternative-college-admissions-system/Replies: @Anon, @The most deplorable one, @Pascal
“Stop accepting Chinese that don’t speak English.” First of all, it’s ‘Chinese people who don’t speak English.’
Secondly, aren’t you aware that the publisher of this website composed a 20,000-word essay that demonstrated widespread discrimination against Asians? It is impossibly hard for Asians to gain admission to the Ivies, so don’t you worry: these colleges have stopped admitting Chinese kids who DO speak English, let alone those who do not. The percentage of Asians has remained constant for the past 2 decades, despite the fact that the quality of Asian students (as judged by National Merit Scholars, gold medals in physics, math and chemistry international olympiads, and top prizes in national and international science competitions) has skyrocketed in that period, while the quality of students in all other groups has gone down (even Jewish students, as that Jewish author readily admitted–in fact, that was one of the main points of the article).
Elsewhere, our good publisher Unz reassures us, in another article, that the percentage of native-born Harvard and Yale students has gone down only about 3 percentage points. In other words: the perception that international students, let alone Chinese students who don’t speak English, are crowding out Americans is just that: a perception.
It's a perception that reflects reality. You need to get out and visit some top schools.
America is for Americans.
Financial expediency is no longer a rationale for legacies: alumni contributions amount to 0.5% of Harvard’s $32 billion endowment. Tuition accounts for another 0.5%. Hedge fund and equities investments account for the rest, and these are curated by a vanishingly small number of well-connected alumni. The vast majority of Nicaragua-volunteering, tuba-playing, squash-playing students are not going to contribute substantially to the financial assets of Harvard or any other Ivy League.
My feeling is that there should be at least a few top schools in America whose criteria for admissions are well-defined and objective. The problem is that the only school that employs such an approach is both tiny and technically-focused: Caltech.
My feeling is that there should be at least a few top schools in America whose criteria for admissions are well-defined and objective. The problem is that the only school that employs such an approach is both tiny and technically-focused: Caltech.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Don’t forget Reed College.
Completely objective admissions at a small liberal arts college in the boonies? If true, I would’ve liked to have gone there. I suppose Reed did have one nonacademic requirement: that one play a woodwind.
The best thing you could do for higher education is burn down 2/3 of the universities, make them free to attend for qualified applicants, and toughen up the entrance requirements so that most students who aimlessly drift through libarts schools would be rejected and forced to attend a trade school. The average American does not need to extend adolescence for four to six years in High School Pro.
Secondly, aren't you aware that the publisher of this website composed a 20,000-word essay that demonstrated widespread discrimination against Asians? It is impossibly hard for Asians to gain admission to the Ivies, so don't you worry: these colleges have stopped admitting Chinese kids who DO speak English, let alone those who do not. The percentage of Asians has remained constant for the past 2 decades, despite the fact that the quality of Asian students (as judged by National Merit Scholars, gold medals in physics, math and chemistry international olympiads, and top prizes in national and international science competitions) has skyrocketed in that period, while the quality of students in all other groups has gone down (even Jewish students, as that Jewish author readily admitted--in fact, that was one of the main points of the article).
Elsewhere, our good publisher Unz reassures us, in another article, that the percentage of native-born Harvard and Yale students has gone down only about 3 percentage points. In other words: the perception that international students, let alone Chinese students who don't speak English, are crowding out Americans is just that: a perception.Replies: @Udolpho, @Anonymous
Chinese students also seem rather adept at cheating. Boo hoo hoo the Chinese are stigmatized. We don’t need more multiculturalism or HBD nerdery that supposes ethnicity and background are meaningless as long as the group in question is well-represented at LAN parties and anime conventions.
The IQ test that Feynman took was according to Steve Hsu designed with a low ceiling, even a perfect score would have have only given you a 140 IQ, it was designed more for diagnosing learning disabilities for average students than to find geniuses. Feynman finished first in a NYU city wide math competition his senior year in high school, he was also taking graduate level courses in physics as a sophomore and his math and physics scores on his graduate school exam to Princeton were perfect. Feynman’s colleague and sometime competitor Murray Gell-Mann started learning calculus in the something like the 3rd grade, his IQ I believe was over 180, and he graduated from Yale at 18, and had a doctorate from MIT at 20 or 21, but he was about a decade younger than Feynman, by then apparently NYC was trying to find geniuses.
Pinker’s article is quite entertaining, but he gets one thing wrong:
Oliver Barrett IV wasn’t rich and stupid. He was rich and smart. He graduated #3 from Harvard Law School and got the highest-paying Big Law job in his class.
Barrett being stupid wouldn't make sense in the story either -- where's the romance in a rich stupid guy falling for a girl poor and smart? What kind of hero is that for our heroine?Replies: @Art Deco
That is true, but it may have been fantasy projection on the part of Segal who is Jewish.
----------------
I think, for a while, it was true enough that Jews represented meritocracy, at least in relation to some wasp bluebloods who got into Harvard via legacy.
But over time, Jews developed their form of legacy. But the old Narrative is still invoked so as to suppress any honest discussion of the current reality.
It's like Jews keep on bringing up the golfocaust when it's old hat.
And SOCIAL NETWORK is totally phony baloney as Zuckerberg as social victim of Nazi Wasp clone twins.
The Narrative is important for it gives moral justification to power. Without the control of Narrative, power and wealth are just power and wealth. They become noticed, often with envy, resentment, and fear, by those with less wealth and power.
Indeed, imagine Jewish position today without the Narrative. We'd all realize that Jews, who are 2% of the population, own and control so much. We will speak truth to power.
But the Narrative prevents us from doing this because it says Jews 'rightfully' and 'meritocratically' earned everything through dint of hard work against the 'racist' and 'antisemitic' discriminatory practices of eeeeeeeeevil Wasps.
And there's also the Holocaust cult Narrative that goes, "if you notice Jewish power, you're repeating the 'old canard' about Jews being so rich and powerful, therefore you must be a crypto-Nazi who wants to kill Jews, etc."
When Jews had less power, they needed the Narrative to gain more power. Now that they have the power, they need the Narrative to prevent others from noticing and speaking truth to their power.
As Jews don't have the numbers--demographic power--to back up their elite power, they have to use the power of the Narrative to cower the majority population.
Of course, power can be held without control of the Narrative, but it's much more risky and the power will be seen as unjustified.
Batista and Shah of Iran had the money and the power(with military backing), but they had no control of Narrative. Without protection from the Narrative, they were seen as too rich and too powerful for their true worth. So, their days were numbered.
The Narrative in America says Jewish power is warranted because it righteously took power from the unrighteous power of Wasps. Without it, we'd just see a lot of Jews who are too rich and too powerful for what they're worth.
“First of all, it’s ‘Chinese people who don’t speak English.’”
I know, but I don’t think it’s “Chinese who”, but “Chinese that”. I could be wrong, though. That was my thinking. I’m not a grammar geek, and the “that/who” is one I find a good bit in my writing. I usually fix it, and if I miss one, I could give a damn.
“Secondly, aren’t you aware that the publisher of this website composed a 20,000-word essay that demonstrated widespread discrimination against Asians”
Aren’t you aware that I’ve written about it, too? Keep up if you’re going to be a moralizing ninny. And when you do finish doing your homework, and realize that I’ve written about it too, perhaps you’ll grasp that a) in this particular post I was discussing public universities, not private and b) in all cases, public and private, universities are *both* discriminating against Asians and accepting wholly unqualified international ones—fully aware that many of the resumes submitted are functional fraud.
“these colleges have stopped admitting Chinese kids who DO speak English, let alone those who do not. ”
This is demonstrably false, both for public and private universities.
Back to these international students: they generally speak good English, at least compared to the drunks in frat row who rarely speak in sentences even when they're not pasted. Secondly, they try twice as hard as native-born kids, especially in English, according to Babson professor Kara Miller. So, given that their English skills leave something to be desired, they try mightily to overcome this deficit, just as they try mightily to get a Diels-Alder reaction to work in lab or find a marker for melanoma. That is the kind of grit we need, according to Miller:
"My “C,’’ “D,’’ and “F’’ students this semester are almost exclusively American, while my students from India, China, and Latin America have - despite language barriers - generally written solid papers, excelled on exams, and become valuable class participants.
"One girl from Shanghai became a fixture at office hours, embraced our college writing center, and incessantly e-mailed me questions about her evolving papers. Her English is still mediocre: she frequently puts “the’’ everywhere (as in “the leader supported the feminism and the environmentalism’’) and confuses “his’’ and “her.’’ But that didn’t stop her from doing rewrite after rewrite, tirelessly trying to improve both structure and grammar."
"Chinese undergraduates have consistently impressed me with their work ethic, though I have seen similar habits in students from India, Thailand, Brazil, and Venezuela. ---Kara Miller, English Professor, writing in the Boston Gloobe
This corroborates my own experience as a TA in college. I was a reader, not a professor, but was forced to grade essays, many of them written by international students or FOB's. And often, even if they spoke good English, their writing skills were poor. Trust me, it's frustrating. However, what made my experience tolerable is that these are the kids who came back and said "Why can't you say it like that?" "Why should I use 'will' and not 'would'" They wanted to improve their English skills; it's not like they sail through college, expecting to party like Pinker's proverbial spoiled kids.
Finally, of course I know that colleges are still admitting Chinese kids--that was clearly hyperbole. Again, how did you miss this? You're setting up a straw men or, again, are humorless. Hyperbole just illustrates the point that these schools just want to put a cap on Chinese American kids, no matter their English ability.
If I am passionate about this topic, it is because of this: my English speaking ability is often judged even before I open my mouth, and the 'poor English' charge is often leveled as code for other insults. Once, I was in a cheering section of a basketball game, and a member of the opposing crowd shouted 'Say it in English' when, in fact, I was cheering in English. That's the way it is.Replies: @The most deplorable one, @Anonymous
You are some random cram school teacher who likes to throw wild, unsupported assertions and "observations" and then disappear when challenged with logic and evidences to the contrary, whose main claim to a very minor note on the web seems to be giving ammunition to white supremacists who can't, just can't, accept that whites may not be the best at everything ("What? East Asians might have a small average IQ advantage and higher test scores over whites? That's just due to Asian cheating! This person on the web says so because he teaches them! Everyone knows Asians just study for tests and are not interested in the substance of knowledge!").
Given this, is it really that surprising that people have heard of, and read, Unz's work and not your ramblings on the web? I can't tell if your problem is misplaced hubris or insecurity. Certainly there seems to be a bit of delusion at minimum.You will ignore this, but let me share my experiences again because I actually went to a top ten Ph.D. program and worked in academia at the university level.
At most Ivy League universities and other elite institutions, you will find that most international students speak excellent English, often better than native-born American students (because they learned it properly with correspondingly less influence of awful colloquialism). Setting aside the non-Asian students for the moment, even the Asian international students often have lengthy residential experiences in the United States (some even England) or they attended "international schools" in their native countries all their lives where English is spoken in total immersion.
At the graduate level, you will start finding foreign students who have more "normal" backgrounds in that they attended foreign universities where English is not the language of instruction and many of them do fare badly in rapid *spoken* English settings. However, especially in STEM fields, many such graduate students have extremely high levels of achievement in their chosen fields so that they are sought after rather keenly by American universities despite their limited English speaking abilities.
I have a distant relative who fits this stereotypical profile. He graduated from the top university in his country in Asia. He came to the United States to attend a Ph.D. program in electrical engineering. His spoken English was rather poor, but he was absolutely, by far, the top engineering graduate student at his American university. After obtaining his Ph.D., he briefly worked at Bell Labs (where he proceeded to invent several new processes and related products), after which he returned to his country and is now the department chair of the top university there, his alma mater. He holds numerous patents both in the United States and in Asia.
His English did improve dramatically once he lived in the United States for several years, but he never spoke it comfortably. It always seemed a bit strained. But he could read and write just fine, certainly well enough to convey the extremely technical nature of his work.
Obviously he was at the top of his food chain, but it is not unusual to find stories like this at notable graduate programs, again, especially in the STEM fields. In fact, a number of well-known Ph.D. programs maintain semi-permanent recruitment channels at top East Asian universities. Many Ph.D. advisors (i.e. guild masters of their lore and craft) find the students from these universities brilliant and hardworking despite their halting English speaking; it's actually something of a dirty little secret that the advisors coopt much of their students' work and ideas for their own publications. If the graduate student is lucky and the advisor is benevolent, he gets to be published as a co-author and share a bit of the glory. If not, he gets to toil and produce new ideas with nary a recognition until he gets his membership card in the guild punched. But that's the nature of the apprentice system under which Ph.D. programs work.
I was very fortunate. My advisors included me as a junior co-author on everything we did together, and I was usually given credit for my ideas and work and also was introduced to other notable figures in the field even from the first days of my graduate program. But many others were not so fortunate.
The 126 figure for Feynman seems right. He was a genius in his field, but not precocious like many super-high IQ people. He still had to take all the k-12 grades etc. What separates the 120-140 people from the >160 folk is that the later are advance so quickly that they are on a whole ‘nother level.
that’s favoritism . No different than liberals using quotas against whites except it’s quotas against well-qualified foreigners. Part of HBD, in contrast to politics, is about celebrating innate talent and skill of the individual in contrast to the forces of collective leveling.
And as has already been documented by social science, more people from different ethnic backgrounds means more distrust and lower rates of cooperation--period, no matter who they are. You're a fool for thinking the Indians and Chinese (who come from cultures which tolerate high levels of cheating) are going to harmoniously blend in.
If you take away the hidden affirmative action favoring whites, all the elite colleges in America would eventually end up with majority asian enrollments. Is that what Pinker wants?
I guess I still agree with her, at least viscerally.Replies: @Anonymous, @Art Deco
“Another great perk of going to an Ivy League school is that you’ll learn to use the singular pronoun “she” and the possessive “her” when the subject’s sex is unspecified, as evidenced by Mr. Pinker.”
-Yes, she did that throughout the entire article.
“I know, but I don’t think it’s “Chinese who”, but “Chinese that”. I could be wrong, though. That was my thinking. I’m not a grammar geek, and the “that/who” is one I find a good bit in my writing. I usually fix it, and if I miss one, I could give a damn.”
-I have seen, “I could give a damn” sometimes, but I think the correct form is,”I couldn’t give a damn”.
It’s all so different from UK academia, it’s like reading about a different universe. My impression is that the French ENArque system has some similarities as a sort of public-sector Harvard for the well connected political elite, but otherwise the US system seems unique in the West.
Automatic right of appeal for low grades? Wow.
I thought the big complaint in the UK was that the public schools perform the function attributed to Harvard in the the article Pinker responded to, producing leaders from the well connected smart or not. Isn't David Cameron mocked as one such person (rightfully or not)?
My white-American wife thinks that majority-Asian Universities would be a price worth paying for a meritocratic admissions system. Like most white Americans (and Brits) she thinks fairness – equal opportunity – is much more important than protecting white interests.
I guess I still agree with her, at least viscerally.
I guess I still agree with her, at least viscerally.
What is fair about being dispossessed of your own country and culture? I do not see the Chinese and Indians following this prescription of just turning their resources and social capital over to outsiders. India is building a wall around Bangladesh.
Let's see you and your wife open up your home and bank account to allcomers, bud. "Equal opportunity."
America is for Americans.
Oliver Barrett IV wasn't rich and stupid. He was rich and smart. He graduated #3 from Harvard Law School and got the highest-paying Big Law job in his class.Replies: @candid_observer, @Priss Factor
Yeah, that detail about Oliver Barrett IV struck me as wrong too, though I didn’t remember just how good a student he was.
Barrett being stupid wouldn’t make sense in the story either — where’s the romance in a rich stupid guy falling for a girl poor and smart? What kind of hero is that for our heroine?
Maybe Feynman’s reported IQ score was correct
And maybe not. The guy was a practical joker.
One of my favorite things about Pinker is that he seems to always pick his battles and go after the most harmful prominent intellectuals, like Gould, Gladwell, and the guy he’s responding to here.
About Reed College…. Steve Jobs attended for half a year, then dropped out due to lack of money, but audited classes for another year and a half. I just checked his wikipedia entry and one of his kids is named “Reed”.
I think the biggest problem with college is that parents send their kids “off to college” and start to slack off as parents. Big mistake. Parents should be very vigilant about what their kids do in college, they should esp. see to it that their daughters do not become binge-drinking hook-up sluts, and they should follow the advice of that Princeton mom (name?) who wrote a book advising girls to start husband-hunting at college. (Naturally she was ridiculed for it, because she struck a nerve.)
1. In my observation, the faculty at certain sorts of institutions despise their students.
2. They're quite guiltless in this contempt about certain subfractions of the student population. The woman is suggesting that there is something of value in these young men, something of value quite outside the ministrations of the faculty. Such a viewpoint cannot stand.
“toughen up the entrance requirements so that most students who aimlessly drift through libarts schools would be rejected and forced to attend a trade school.”
Like many otherwise knowledgeable people, Udolpho seems to be under the delusion that lots of people major in liberal arts, when in fact liberal arts majors are in decline and have been for some time. About three percent of students major in English, according to the most recent figures I could find. And English is popular compared to philosophy or art history.
@ Educationrealist Well, I think you are the ‘moralizing ninny’–for going on about universities admitting Chinese kids who supposedly don’t speak English (see below for what a Babson English prof thinks about Chinese students–hint: she’s impressed by them). At any rate, I’d rather be a moralizing ninny than a humorless oaf–did you not get the irony? It’s just funny that in the same sentence that you tie Chinese students with poor English skills, you use…well, poor English. It’s not just a question of ‘that’ vs. ‘who’–it’s also that using ‘Chinese’ as a noun is not proper English, just as using ‘human’ is not good English. Most English teachers would prescribe the phrase ‘Chinese person/kid/etc’ and ‘human being’. Not “We need to annihilate those humans!” Well, I’m not going to tell you to do your English homework, and you’re not going to tell me to do my ‘homework’ of digging up your old comments–who does that? However, it’s agreed: you have more nuanced ideas on the topic of Asian admissions than I had given credit to you for.
Back to these international students: they generally speak good English, at least compared to the drunks in frat row who rarely speak in sentences even when they’re not pasted. Secondly, they try twice as hard as native-born kids, especially in English, according to Babson professor Kara Miller. So, given that their English skills leave something to be desired, they try mightily to overcome this deficit, just as they try mightily to get a Diels-Alder reaction to work in lab or find a marker for melanoma. That is the kind of grit we need, according to Miller:
“My “C,’’ “D,’’ and “F’’ students this semester are almost exclusively American, while my students from India, China, and Latin America have – despite language barriers – generally written solid papers, excelled on exams, and become valuable class participants.
“One girl from Shanghai became a fixture at office hours, embraced our college writing center, and incessantly e-mailed me questions about her evolving papers. Her English is still mediocre: she frequently puts “the’’ everywhere (as in “the leader supported the feminism and the environmentalism’’) and confuses “his’’ and “her.’’ But that didn’t stop her from doing rewrite after rewrite, tirelessly trying to improve both structure and grammar.”
“Chinese undergraduates have consistently impressed me with their work ethic, though I have seen similar habits in students from India, Thailand, Brazil, and Venezuela. —Kara Miller, English Professor, writing in the Boston Gloobe
This corroborates my own experience as a TA in college. I was a reader, not a professor, but was forced to grade essays, many of them written by international students or FOB’s. And often, even if they spoke good English, their writing skills were poor. Trust me, it’s frustrating. However, what made my experience tolerable is that these are the kids who came back and said “Why can’t you say it like that?” “Why should I use ‘will’ and not ‘would’” They wanted to improve their English skills; it’s not like they sail through college, expecting to party like Pinker’s proverbial spoiled kids.
Finally, of course I know that colleges are still admitting Chinese kids–that was clearly hyperbole. Again, how did you miss this? You’re setting up a straw men or, again, are humorless. Hyperbole just illustrates the point that these schools just want to put a cap on Chinese American kids, no matter their English ability.
If I am passionate about this topic, it is because of this: my English speaking ability is often judged even before I open my mouth, and the ‘poor English’ charge is often leveled as code for other insults. Once, I was in a cheering section of a basketball game, and a member of the opposing crowd shouted ‘Say it in English’ when, in fact, I was cheering in English. That’s the way it is.
So, mediocre English. I think you have proven Education Realist's point.
(Of course, the fact that the grammar of Chinese is so different from that of English, despite the fact that they are both analytic languages, probably has a lot to do with her mistakes. However, what we are not told in that snippet is anything about her accent. Does she have problems pronouncing words ending with 'm' for example, because 'm' finals have been lost in Mandarin and I have heard native Mandarin speakers pronounce system very much like cistern.)Replies: @BlaisePascal, @BlaisePascal
* apparently you're no able to grasp context
Back to these international students: they generally speak good English, at least compared to the drunks in frat row who rarely speak in sentences even when they're not pasted. Secondly, they try twice as hard as native-born kids, especially in English, according to Babson professor Kara Miller. So, given that their English skills leave something to be desired, they try mightily to overcome this deficit, just as they try mightily to get a Diels-Alder reaction to work in lab or find a marker for melanoma. That is the kind of grit we need, according to Miller:
"My “C,’’ “D,’’ and “F’’ students this semester are almost exclusively American, while my students from India, China, and Latin America have - despite language barriers - generally written solid papers, excelled on exams, and become valuable class participants.
"One girl from Shanghai became a fixture at office hours, embraced our college writing center, and incessantly e-mailed me questions about her evolving papers. Her English is still mediocre: she frequently puts “the’’ everywhere (as in “the leader supported the feminism and the environmentalism’’) and confuses “his’’ and “her.’’ But that didn’t stop her from doing rewrite after rewrite, tirelessly trying to improve both structure and grammar."
"Chinese undergraduates have consistently impressed me with their work ethic, though I have seen similar habits in students from India, Thailand, Brazil, and Venezuela. ---Kara Miller, English Professor, writing in the Boston Gloobe
This corroborates my own experience as a TA in college. I was a reader, not a professor, but was forced to grade essays, many of them written by international students or FOB's. And often, even if they spoke good English, their writing skills were poor. Trust me, it's frustrating. However, what made my experience tolerable is that these are the kids who came back and said "Why can't you say it like that?" "Why should I use 'will' and not 'would'" They wanted to improve their English skills; it's not like they sail through college, expecting to party like Pinker's proverbial spoiled kids.
Finally, of course I know that colleges are still admitting Chinese kids--that was clearly hyperbole. Again, how did you miss this? You're setting up a straw men or, again, are humorless. Hyperbole just illustrates the point that these schools just want to put a cap on Chinese American kids, no matter their English ability.
If I am passionate about this topic, it is because of this: my English speaking ability is often judged even before I open my mouth, and the 'poor English' charge is often leveled as code for other insults. Once, I was in a cheering section of a basketball game, and a member of the opposing crowd shouted 'Say it in English' when, in fact, I was cheering in English. That's the way it is.Replies: @The most deplorable one, @Anonymous
I’m surprised you are impressed with anything from a Babson prof, but let’s go with it.
So, mediocre English. I think you have proven Education Realist’s point.
(Of course, the fact that the grammar of Chinese is so different from that of English, despite the fact that they are both analytic languages, probably has a lot to do with her mistakes. However, what we are not told in that snippet is anything about her accent. Does she have problems pronouncing words ending with ‘m’ for example, because ‘m’ finals have been lost in Mandarin and I have heard native Mandarin speakers pronounce system very much like cistern.)
You make a good point: we don't know anything about the student's accent and, therefore, speaking ability. In general, speaking ability is much better than writing, because after all English is spoken all over the world, including in Asia where this kid was from.
“Finally, of course I know that colleges are still admitting Chinese kids–that was clearly hyperbole. ”
It was? I suspect it was lost in translation. (hyuk)
“for going on about universities admitting Chinese kids who supposedly don’t speak English ”
This is a fact. Happens all time, even sometimes as the Ivies. But mostly at mid-tier public schools like Ohio State University. Certainly at the UCs. Many of them are simply stuck in remedial hell while the schools collect their tuition.
“it’s also that using ‘Chinese’ as a noun is not proper English, just as using ‘human’ is not good English”
Idiom. While you’re looking it up, check out “pedantic”. Then find a mirror.
If you scroll through the comments, there is far worse English being used; if I were pedantic, I would have pointed it out in my other posts. I didn't, because other posters don't happen to be harping about the poor English of nameless college kids. And, once again, I did credit you with having layered opinions on the admissions issue; it's frankly disappointing that your response is simply a put-down.Replies: @Twinkie
I guess I still agree with her, at least viscerally.Replies: @Anonymous, @Art Deco
My white-American wife thinks that majority-Asian Universities would be a price worth paying for a meritocratic admissions system. Like most white Americans (and Brits) she thinks fairness – equal opportunity – is much more important than protecting white interests.
I guess I still agree with her, at least viscerally.
What is fair about being dispossessed of your own country and culture? I do not see the Chinese and Indians following this prescription of just turning their resources and social capital over to outsiders. India is building a wall around Bangladesh.
Let’s see you and your wife open up your home and bank account to allcomers, bud. “Equal opportunity.”
America is for Americans.
Secondly, aren't you aware that the publisher of this website composed a 20,000-word essay that demonstrated widespread discrimination against Asians? It is impossibly hard for Asians to gain admission to the Ivies, so don't you worry: these colleges have stopped admitting Chinese kids who DO speak English, let alone those who do not. The percentage of Asians has remained constant for the past 2 decades, despite the fact that the quality of Asian students (as judged by National Merit Scholars, gold medals in physics, math and chemistry international olympiads, and top prizes in national and international science competitions) has skyrocketed in that period, while the quality of students in all other groups has gone down (even Jewish students, as that Jewish author readily admitted--in fact, that was one of the main points of the article).
Elsewhere, our good publisher Unz reassures us, in another article, that the percentage of native-born Harvard and Yale students has gone down only about 3 percentage points. In other words: the perception that international students, let alone Chinese students who don't speak English, are crowding out Americans is just that: a perception.Replies: @Udolpho, @Anonymous
In other words: the perception that international students, let alone Chinese students who don’t speak English, are crowding out Americans is just that: a perception.
It’s a perception that reflects reality. You need to get out and visit some top schools.
America is for Americans.
Like many otherwise knowledgeable people, Udolpho seems to be under the delusion that lots of people major in liberal arts, when in fact liberal arts majors are in decline and have been for some time.
About a third of the students at baccalaureate granting institutions graduate with degrees in academic arts and sciences; another 5% or so gain degrees in fine or performing arts.
A large chunk of those attaining occupational degrees are the issue of the teacher-training faculties. That’ll get you past the paper hoops these faculties (in conjunction with the unions and their allies in state education departments and state legislatures) put between intelligent people and the teaching profession. In most circumstances, it will not leave you better educated. A smaller scale scandal are the social work and library administration faculties.
Apart from that, you get the odd synthetic subjects like “health resources management” and the escalating title inflation (“Doctor of Physical Therapy” and “Doctor of Nursing Practice” to name two).
Pinker defends the elite college products as ‘creative’ because they’re over-represented among the writers, movie makers, musicians, art, TV, and etc.
But given the state of creativity today, maybe that is the problem. While Ivy products got the talent, they seem not to know much about the real world.
They know the craft but don’t notice the truth.
How have mainstream contemporary writers, movie makers, TV ever benefited native born Americans. This stuff is mostly poison.
Are they good for Americans? No.Replies: @Priss Factor
I guess I still agree with her, at least viscerally.Replies: @Anonymous, @Art Deco
About a generation ago, it was reported in The New Republic that the following shares of California’s racially disaggregated population of high school seniors met minimum standards for admission to the University of California at Berkeley, then the most selective of the state’s research universities: “Asians” (26%), whites (12%), hispanics (7%), and blacks (4%). As we speak, about 39% of California’s population is non-hispanic white, about 38% white, about 14% oriental or East Indian, about 6.5% black, and the rest miscellaneous. If the shares of each who qualify for Berkeley have remained the same, the balance of the student body would be 41% anglo-caucasian, 32% oriental and East Indian, 23.5% hispanic, 2.5% black, 1% misc.
“about 39% is non-hispanic white, about 38% hispanic”
Back to these international students: they generally speak good English, at least compared to the drunks in frat row who rarely speak in sentences even when they’re not pasted.
Thanks for the malicious caricature.
and they should follow the advice of that Princeton mom (name?) who wrote a book advising girls to start husband-hunting at college. (Naturally she was ridiculed for it, because she struck a nerve.)
1. In my observation, the faculty at certain sorts of institutions despise their students.
2. They’re quite guiltless in this contempt about certain subfractions of the student population. The woman is suggesting that there is something of value in these young men, something of value quite outside the ministrations of the faculty. Such a viewpoint cannot stand.
Barrett being stupid wouldn't make sense in the story either -- where's the romance in a rich stupid guy falling for a girl poor and smart? What kind of hero is that for our heroine?Replies: @Art Deco
One of Segal’s inspirations for the Oliver Barrett character was Albert Gore, whose family was nothing like the fictional Barrett’s but who was a mediocre student.
Pinker defends the elite college products as ‘creative’ because they’re over-represented among the writers, movie makers, musicians, art, TV, and etc.
How have mainstream contemporary writers, movie makers, TV ever benefited native born Americans. This stuff is mostly poison.
Are they good for Americans? No.
I still like a lot of movies, but so many areas of creativity have become so PC, putrid, tired, and inane.
Most of theatre is just 'gay' propaganda.
Most of Art is hype and tripe. I stopped going to contemp art galleries long time ago. I mean enough already.
Most of social/culture criticism is PC talking points to the Zzzzzzzzzzzzz power.
Besides, look at the great American film-makers of the 20th century: Griffith, Welles, Ford, Hawks, Peckinpah, Spielberg, Kubrick, and etc. They didn't go to no Ivy league school. Welles could have but didn't.
Creatocracy works different from strict meritocracy, even if such existed. Meritocracy can be judged by testing, but creatocracy cannot be known unless the talent is demonstrated through the doing. Meritocracy allows people to predict and pre-measure talent, but creatocracy can only be judged by the final product.
Consider that the Beatles and Hendrix couldn't even read music--though McCartney eventually learned how(though he didn't get any better). Beatles weren't even all that great as musicians. So, they would have failed meritocratic testing on music. But they were very creative, indeed in ways that most Ivy League credentialed music majors were not and could never be.
------------------
The question of meritocracy vs non-meritocracy is probably the wrong one to ask when it comes to the Ivies.
It's all about relative meritocracy.
To some extent, everyone at Harvard got in through some measure of meritocracy. Even a bottom-feeder like Michelle Obama did better than most blacks students in America.
And even not-the-most-intelligent Jews at Harvard who were accepted for something other than SAT scores are surely smarter than most Americans. Kevin MacDonald rags on about Elena Kagan, and though he's probably right that she was favored for her Jewishness(and lesbianness), she seems like the type who did her homework.
If you're a total dumbass, you don't get into Harvard.
And this goes for the old days of Wasp rule too. Though some dimbulbs might have gotten in through legacy or big donations, I'm thinking most of them were smarter than most other wasps.
I mean Harvard and Yale could not have held their mystique for so long if it just took in a mostly dumb rich people. No way. Same for Oxford and Cambridge. (In the novel THE CALL by John Hersey, the two sons go to Yale. I wonder if sons of Christian missionaries were favored in some way back then.)
So, it was always about meritocracy but relative than perfect meritocracy.
It was like with sports. Though old sports culture discriminated against blacks, it still looked for the best white athletes.
Harvard was never about pure meritocracy, especially since it got into the habit of selling its credentials to rich people. As Harvard became associated with excellence, superrich folks wanted their kids to go there. So, Harvard make exceptions to the principle of meritocracy to accept such students in exchange for huge donations. It's really corruption and bribery but justified on grounds that the money would be well spent. A sort of paradoxical arrangement: Harvard is the best because it takes only the best and won't tolerate the non-best, but its 'best' brand is up for sale to the highest bidders whose children are far from the best, but then, the money will be used to further the best-ness of Harvard.
That’s a photo of Harvard’s graduate level business school. It’s not the entire class, but the demographics are also stylized. I’ll assume along with Pinker’s photo, this group isn’t representative of the class, but rather for magazine use.
I’ve read that if standardized testing was utilized then the Ivy League would look more like Stuyvesant High School. Is there no better middle ground between today’s holistic admissions and IQ/SAT testing?
Key word: more! more!! more!!!
Zuckerberg commented on this article on Facebook:
The Winklevoss twins haven’t done much, despite each sitting on a fortune over $100 million. Compare that with how active the early employees of Paypal have been, starting genuinely useful companies like Tesla, Yelp and LinkedIn.
Favoritism is a natural side effect of cooperation. You work better with people you relate to and who share your perspective–and, crucially, with whom you have a history that establishes their trustworthiness. The semi-autistic HBD perspective is that nothing matters but your IQ score and how well you fit into rigid environments that require passive behavior. This is why silliness abounds among the HBD set.
And as has already been documented by social science, more people from different ethnic backgrounds means more distrust and lower rates of cooperation–period, no matter who they are. You’re a fool for thinking the Indians and Chinese (who come from cultures which tolerate high levels of cheating) are going to harmoniously blend in.
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2014/09/steven-pinker-on-harvard-admissions-ignoring-the-elephant-in-the-room/#more-24610
Suppose Jews and blacks both had average IQ of 110 and Asians had average IQ of 9o.
Suppose Ivies were over-represented with Jews and blacks due to testing.
Suppose 90% of student at NY Studyvant school were Jews and blacks.
How would the Left regard testing?Replies: @Priss Factor
The problem is the scoring than the testing.
So, mediocre English. I think you have proven Education Realist's point.
(Of course, the fact that the grammar of Chinese is so different from that of English, despite the fact that they are both analytic languages, probably has a lot to do with her mistakes. However, what we are not told in that snippet is anything about her accent. Does she have problems pronouncing words ending with 'm' for example, because 'm' finals have been lost in Mandarin and I have heard native Mandarin speakers pronounce system very much like cistern.)Replies: @BlaisePascal, @BlaisePascal
Like any columnist worth his or her salt, Miller is going to use a more extreme example to prove a point. The point Miller was making is that _even_ though the student’s English was mediocre, she made an all-out effort to improve it. If the student she wrote about had okay or good English skills, the student’s writing effort wouldn’t be as impressive. By the way, the column’s theme was that international students put a lot more effort than Miller’s “lazy” American students. At any rate, English ability among international students falls along a spectrum, and the better students generally do have better English skills: that’s how they got through all the books, most of which are written in English. So it’s a strong generalization to say that most int’l students don’t speak good English.
You make a good point: we don’t know anything about the student’s accent and, therefore, speaking ability. In general, speaking ability is much better than writing, because after all English is spoken all over the world, including in Asia where this kid was from.
Oliver Barrett IV wasn't rich and stupid. He was rich and smart. He graduated #3 from Harvard Law School and got the highest-paying Big Law job in his class.Replies: @candid_observer, @Priss Factor
“Oliver Barrett IV wasn’t rich and stupid. He was rich and smart. He graduated #3 from Harvard Law School and got the highest-paying Big Law job in his class.”
That is true, but it may have been fantasy projection on the part of Segal who is Jewish.
—————-
I think, for a while, it was true enough that Jews represented meritocracy, at least in relation to some wasp bluebloods who got into Harvard via legacy.
But over time, Jews developed their form of legacy. But the old Narrative is still invoked so as to suppress any honest discussion of the current reality.
It’s like Jews keep on bringing up the golfocaust when it’s old hat.
And SOCIAL NETWORK is totally phony baloney as Zuckerberg as social victim of Nazi Wasp clone twins.
The Narrative is important for it gives moral justification to power. Without the control of Narrative, power and wealth are just power and wealth. They become noticed, often with envy, resentment, and fear, by those with less wealth and power.
Indeed, imagine Jewish position today without the Narrative. We’d all realize that Jews, who are 2% of the population, own and control so much. We will speak truth to power.
But the Narrative prevents us from doing this because it says Jews ‘rightfully’ and ‘meritocratically’ earned everything through dint of hard work against the ‘racist’ and ‘antisemitic’ discriminatory practices of eeeeeeeeevil Wasps.
And there’s also the Holocaust cult Narrative that goes, “if you notice Jewish power, you’re repeating the ‘old canard’ about Jews being so rich and powerful, therefore you must be a crypto-Nazi who wants to kill Jews, etc.”
When Jews had less power, they needed the Narrative to gain more power. Now that they have the power, they need the Narrative to prevent others from noticing and speaking truth to their power.
As Jews don’t have the numbers–demographic power–to back up their elite power, they have to use the power of the Narrative to cower the majority population.
Of course, power can be held without control of the Narrative, but it’s much more risky and the power will be seen as unjustified.
Batista and Shah of Iran had the money and the power(with military backing), but they had no control of Narrative. Without protection from the Narrative, they were seen as too rich and too powerful for their true worth. So, their days were numbered.
The Narrative in America says Jewish power is warranted because it righteously took power from the unrighteous power of Wasps. Without it, we’d just see a lot of Jews who are too rich and too powerful for what they’re worth.
The GREs when I took them in 1963 had verbal tops of 800 verbal and 800 quantitative. However, the area exam, say chemistry or biology, was scored and reported with one’s actual score with the actual highest score possible. For example one student who never studied but who was extremely successful received the score 800 verbal, 800 quantitative and 960/970. Graduate school admissions departments did not ignore him.
Why are not the SATs scored the same way with the actual raw score given on the subject exam?
Dan Kurt
One thing that’s just weird about that photo is how many of the women are East Asian, while the number of East Asian men is, by my quick inspection, just two.
Is this maybe how the math deficiency in women at HBS is dealt with? Get a bunch of East Asian women? Of course, the men are likely mathematically talented plenty enough, so they go for “leadership qualities” there, and I guess relatively not so many East Asian men bring those to the table.
They need more women with math ability? Get a bunch of East Asians. And they solve the need to have enough East Asians at the same time.
Only racists and sexists will notice the actual breakdown.
The Winklevoss twins seems like Pinker’s proverbial privileged pets. Ever since Facebook’s founding, they have been in lawsuits with Wayne Chang and Zuckerberg over their stake in the company–but did little actual work in building the site or technology. It’s the nerds–Chang, Zuckerberg, and Zuck’s first employee, Victor Gao, who did the actual work especially in the beginning.
It was? I suspect it was lost in translation. (hyuk)
"for going on about universities admitting Chinese kids who supposedly don’t speak English "
This is a fact. Happens all time, even sometimes as the Ivies. But mostly at mid-tier public schools like Ohio State University. Certainly at the UCs. Many of them are simply stuck in remedial hell while the schools collect their tuition.
"it’s also that using ‘Chinese’ as a noun is not proper English, just as using ‘human’ is not good English"
Idiom. While you're looking it up, check out "pedantic". Then find a mirror.Replies: @BlaisePascal, @BlaisePascal
Yup. I know the meaning the ‘pedantic’, and it does not refer to someone pointing out the irony of picking on students’ English skills–while not using the best English oneself. It’s clear you still don’t understand irony–I could care less about the use of ‘Chinese’–and that is why you think I am pedantic. That’s a bit thick, but I don’t hold it against you.
If you scroll through the comments, there is far worse English being used; if I were pedantic, I would have pointed it out in my other posts. I didn’t, because other posters don’t happen to be harping about the poor English of nameless college kids. And, once again, I did credit you with having layered opinions on the admissions issue; it’s frankly disappointing that your response is simply a put-down.
He'll also get personal and try to disparage you, instead of arguing the merits of the case at hand.
I don't know him (or her). All I know of him is what little I read. Maybe in real life he is not as he appears on the web and maybe he may even be a dedicated teacher, who knows? (Though he appears to have a questionable command of the English language as well as poor reading comprehension and statistical skills.)
And from that little bit of the online persona, I get the impression of a teacher with sour grapes who seems very resentful of students who worked harder than he did amounting to more than what he did.
Aside from the leftist indoctrination, running into a personality like this is another reason why I home school my children. It's hard enough to inculcate the love of learning and Aristotelian virtue in today's educational environment. They don't need to deal with added issue of teachers with chips on their shoulders who are full of envy toward the high-achieving (because they "had a life" as students while others studied much harder).Replies: @The most deplorable one
LOL. Yellows love to tug the faux-universalism lever growing out of sucker whites’ backs. Yeah, sure, all the Chinese coming here and competing on our turf for our resources, while blocking white access to their resources in China is “fair.” Get bent.
Yellows’ psychological makeup would seem to make them immune to universalist pleading; conversely, the concept is so alien to them that they’re seldom able to employ it usefully.
How have mainstream contemporary writers, movie makers, TV ever benefited native born Americans. This stuff is mostly poison.
Are they good for Americans? No.Replies: @Priss Factor
“How have mainstream contemporary writers, movie makers, TV ever benefited native born Americans. This stuff is mostly poison. Are they good for Americans? No.”
I still like a lot of movies, but so many areas of creativity have become so PC, putrid, tired, and inane.
Most of theatre is just ‘gay’ propaganda.
Most of Art is hype and tripe. I stopped going to contemp art galleries long time ago. I mean enough already.
Most of social/culture criticism is PC talking points to the Zzzzzzzzzzzzz power.
Besides, look at the great American film-makers of the 20th century: Griffith, Welles, Ford, Hawks, Peckinpah, Spielberg, Kubrick, and etc. They didn’t go to no Ivy league school. Welles could have but didn’t.
Creatocracy works different from strict meritocracy, even if such existed. Meritocracy can be judged by testing, but creatocracy cannot be known unless the talent is demonstrated through the doing. Meritocracy allows people to predict and pre-measure talent, but creatocracy can only be judged by the final product.
Consider that the Beatles and Hendrix couldn’t even read music–though McCartney eventually learned how(though he didn’t get any better). Beatles weren’t even all that great as musicians. So, they would have failed meritocratic testing on music. But they were very creative, indeed in ways that most Ivy League credentialed music majors were not and could never be.
——————
The question of meritocracy vs non-meritocracy is probably the wrong one to ask when it comes to the Ivies.
It’s all about relative meritocracy.
To some extent, everyone at Harvard got in through some measure of meritocracy. Even a bottom-feeder like Michelle Obama did better than most blacks students in America.
And even not-the-most-intelligent Jews at Harvard who were accepted for something other than SAT scores are surely smarter than most Americans. Kevin MacDonald rags on about Elena Kagan, and though he’s probably right that she was favored for her Jewishness(and lesbianness), she seems like the type who did her homework.
If you’re a total dumbass, you don’t get into Harvard.
And this goes for the old days of Wasp rule too. Though some dimbulbs might have gotten in through legacy or big donations, I’m thinking most of them were smarter than most other wasps.
I mean Harvard and Yale could not have held their mystique for so long if it just took in a mostly dumb rich people. No way. Same for Oxford and Cambridge. (In the novel THE CALL by John Hersey, the two sons go to Yale. I wonder if sons of Christian missionaries were favored in some way back then.)
So, it was always about meritocracy but relative than perfect meritocracy.
It was like with sports. Though old sports culture discriminated against blacks, it still looked for the best white athletes.
Harvard was never about pure meritocracy, especially since it got into the habit of selling its credentials to rich people. As Harvard became associated with excellence, superrich folks wanted their kids to go there. So, Harvard make exceptions to the principle of meritocracy to accept such students in exchange for huge donations. It’s really corruption and bribery but justified on grounds that the money would be well spent. A sort of paradoxical arrangement: Harvard is the best because it takes only the best and won’t tolerate the non-best, but its ‘best’ brand is up for sale to the highest bidders whose children are far from the best, but then, the money will be used to further the best-ness of Harvard.
To expand on my point, it looks like what HBS is doing is solving one “stereotype” problem by indulging another.
They need more women with math ability? Get a bunch of East Asians. And they solve the need to have enough East Asians at the same time.
Only racists and sexists will notice the actual breakdown.
I love that they can never hide their hatred and contempt for whites, even as they’ve got their begging bowls extended.
“The current SAT is set up to give elite colleges excuses for not admitting the very smartest students.” Sailor is right on: the SAT has been revised several times since the early 90s, reportedly to make the questions more “relevant” to future college work. In reality, the ETS simply made the test easier by removing g-loaded question types like analogies and quantitative comparisons. For good measure, they changed the name to Scholastic Assessment Test which is simply redundant. While the old test had decent resolution at the top, the current version simply confuses the top 10% with the top 1%.
Granted, it’s a knock on frat kids, but not whites–have you been to a California school? The Greek system isn’t so homogeneous anymore, yet the culture of endless partying, three day weekends and spurning classes remains. My post was a response to another comment that referred to Chinese who “don’t speak English”. A lot of international students do speak good English, and to the extent that their writing skills are deficient, generally show more effort than their native-born counterparts. It’s hardly ‘malicious’ to caricature frat kids–there are any number of popular movies that do just that: Revenge of the Nerds and Old School are just two flicks that revisit this time-honored theme.
If I were a betting man, for sure I’d bet that the founders of the US would find the idea that a dozen universities effectively vet the governing class repugnant. Likewise, the idea that the governing class of the US would be selected by a Chinese mandarin style of hierarchical test-based meritocracy.
It might be small consolation and not help the modern US, but in the long run I’d bet the founders will be proven right (again) and the commisars of the mandarin pyramids wrong (again).
Well, there's nothing wrong with a test-based meritocracy per se. It's only when they're used to game admissions at schools like Harvard that they end up doing exactly what the Founders didn't want. Then they get corrupted. In fact, the test-based system allowed for less well-off kids (and their families) to rise to the top--there were no universities to be gotten into in Mandarin times. You passed the exam and were then appointed to a well-paid post.
IQ is important, but it's worth not getting carried away. There's an old engineering saying (in some types of engineering) that "intelligence is vastly overrated". This _doesn't_ mean intelligence is unimportant. It means some areas need a lot of background knowledge, experience, intuition, and common horse sense about the area. Maybe even a particular personality type.
Does a higher IQ help you get all these things? Sure, probably. But that doesn't mean that, in practice, just because someone has a high IQ that they invest the time to acquire all these things in a given area and perform better than someone with a lower IQ that knows the area well (even if they potentially could perform better).
Maybe Feynman's reported IQ score was correct, but he just loved math and had worked with it for a long time, considerably longer than most of the students he was competing against. It wasn't as if his reported IQ was low.
Math seems to be one of those areas where you need both a minimal IQ that is reasonably high and a lot of background exposure to the subject. It doesn't help to have a high IQ if you are wondering "what does that squiggle mean?". It's like learning a new human language with a lot of idioms. Someone who knows the language well, "fluent as a native", and who also knows all the idioms might well do better than someone who was potentially smarter. Smart doesn't make up for simply not knowing.Replies: @BlaisePascal
Yes, many on this site tend to focus on IQ, which is why they get all hung-up when they learn that Feynman had a score of “only” 125. Even IQ hardliners like Jensen noted that IQ or even g is not the only factor in explaining genius or high-level ability. (At any rate, the test used at Feynman’s school had a low ceiling.) This isn’t the same as saying intelligence does not matter; it could mean that there are other salient mental and psychological factors which may not lend themselves to measurement. As someone here noted, Feynman did ace his Putnam exam, and I think Steve Hsu said elsewhere that he scored very well on his graduate school entrance exams. One would think that these subject-specific assessments more fairly appraised his ability than the rudimentary SAT and intelligence tests of the 1920s.
The other thing is that while people tend to focus on Feynman, they leave out Julian Schwinger, whose example is especially relevant to this discussion on college admissions. Schwinger, who shared the Nobel with Tomonaga and Feynman, sometimes figures into discussions on college admissions because he was allegedly a victim of Harvard’s anti-Jewish quotas (Feynman, however, did get in) though he was a top student from NY’s science high school system. People also tend to forget about Tomonaga, who enjoyed none of the resources that Feynman or Schwinger had. While Feynman was surrounded by world-class talent at Caltech, Tomonaga toiled away in isolation during wartime Japan–yet was the first of the three to publish papers on the work that would earn all of them the coveted medal. So, who needs Harvard? Examples like this help put the heated admissions issue in perspective.
So, mediocre English. I think you have proven Education Realist's point.
(Of course, the fact that the grammar of Chinese is so different from that of English, despite the fact that they are both analytic languages, probably has a lot to do with her mistakes. However, what we are not told in that snippet is anything about her accent. Does she have problems pronouncing words ending with 'm' for example, because 'm' finals have been lost in Mandarin and I have heard native Mandarin speakers pronounce system very much like cistern.)Replies: @BlaisePascal, @BlaisePascal
I should clarify by noting that the original commenter wrote about Chinese students who “don’t speak English”. From my own experience–and I have been at several colleges–the English speaking ability is fine. One cannot know a student’s writing ability until one sees a sample, however, and writing skills were what the Babson prof was concerned with. The point was that all of her students (I suspect this was a remedial class) had relatively writing skills, but it was only her international students who made an effort to improve them. In fact, the column was entitled ‘My Lazy American students’. Of course, she generalizes about American students–I am one too! But, point well taken: we need to put in more effort.
The more people laugh at the Ivies, and at those people who take them hyper-seriously, the better off we’ll all be.
I agree. As a Canadian I find the whole concept of an Ivy League reprehensible. Why is this handful of schools trying to be the gatekeepers of who gets to join America’s elite. WTF? That’s for the free market & the people to decide.
Would you Americans please, please tell these schools to buzz off & for God’s sake stop giving them, their grads & their professors any attentional at all.
I don’t want them to make their admission process more fair & meritocratic. I just want them to GO AWAY!
w/ regard to the appellate judiciary and the legal professoriate, that might just be true. In the business world, chief executives in consulting, finance, and media as often as not received at least one degree from such an institution. In other lines of business, it's much less characteristic (one in six, perhaps?).
It was? I suspect it was lost in translation. (hyuk)
"for going on about universities admitting Chinese kids who supposedly don’t speak English "
This is a fact. Happens all time, even sometimes as the Ivies. But mostly at mid-tier public schools like Ohio State University. Certainly at the UCs. Many of them are simply stuck in remedial hell while the schools collect their tuition.
"it’s also that using ‘Chinese’ as a noun is not proper English, just as using ‘human’ is not good English"
Idiom. While you're looking it up, check out "pedantic". Then find a mirror.Replies: @BlaisePascal, @BlaisePascal
Well, of course it was hyperbole because I said literally that they don’t accept Chinese kids, when of course they do–I have been at these schools. That’s like another commenter saying that there are no Americans at these schools–they’re just exaggerating. It’s strange that that you seem to understand idiom, but not hyperbole or especially irony. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and just say you’re being petulant–if you don’t understand that, just look in the mirror. 🙂
“grey enlightenment says:
The 126 figure for Feynman seems right. He was a genius in his field, but not precocious like many super-high IQ people. He still had to take all the k-12 grades etc.”
Not true. One can name any number of physics Nobelists who went through a more-or-less normal course of secondary education: Feynman, Einstein, Heisenberg. I’m sure there are many others.
If the 120s IQ figure is right (and I don’t think it is) it would likely be due to the verbal portion of any such test skewing the results. Feynman talked in a rather strange way, almost as if he had learned his own kind of grammar which suited him well enough that he didn’t bother quite learning the standard kind.
Even while at Los Alamos, before he had created his theory of QED, he was recognized as being a very rare genius by both Oppenheimer and Bethe, who both tried to hire him after the war.
I agree with all these comments. What gives these selfish haters any right to put down all the good work Yale-et-al. are doing and have been doing for 4-5 centuries? Will no one speak up for Harvard? Oh, America, when your mighty monuments have joined the Bicholim Conflict and the empire of Khan Noonien Singh in the ash-bin of the recycle bin of history, you will be able to date the downfall to this day, when you chose to heap obloquy on Stanford, Columbia, etc. etc. and refused to continue electing their baccalaureate elect — certainly the finest minds ever in the annals of Western, Eastern, or Southern Civilization — for leaders of your (by now forgotten) republic. Save the Ivies before it’s too late; if you can read this poster, thank an Old Princetonian
What about the problem of demeritocracy?
Ideally, we would like to think meritocracy is about smart/talented people winning fair and square whereas cheatocracy is about untalented/ privileged people ‘winning’ unfair and crooked.
But what happens when those with genuine talent not only win fair and squared but use their wits, influence, connections, and/or connivance to win even more than they should?
Consider WOLF OF WALL STREET. Belfort was no dummy. He had real smarts but used it to cheat everyone.
Look at Larry Summers. Smart guy, no doubt. But look at his role in Wall Street and Russia.
Look at Netanhayu. Smart guy but a total crook.
Being smart means you can win fair and square, but it also means you got superior wits to play it loose and hoodwink the competition.
Yes--the smart and well-educated set up the rules and manipulate them, so they can "win fair and square." That's because 'smart' and 'clever' are not synonymous with intelligence. True intelligence sees the big picture, not narrow self-interest. We all know what happened to the Wolf, Madoff, etc. Even our best economic minds didn't foresee 2008 or, if they did, raise alarms--likely because it was in their interest not to rock the boat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_McClellan
The Ivy League had guys like this who were serious and dedicated scholars before the great so-called merito-transformation.
His translations of Kokoro and Dark Night’s Passing read really well.
I agree. As a Canadian I find the whole concept of an Ivy League reprehensible. Why is this handful of schools trying to be the gatekeepers of who gets to join America's elite. WTF? That's for the free market & the people to decide.
Would you Americans please, please tell these schools to buzz off & for God's sake stop giving them, their grads & their professors any attentional at all.
I don't want them to make their admission process more fair & meritocratic. I just want them to GO AWAY!Replies: @Art Deco
Why is this handful of schools trying to be the gatekeepers of who gets to join America’s elite.
w/ regard to the appellate judiciary and the legal professoriate, that might just be true. In the business world, chief executives in consulting, finance, and media as often as not received at least one degree from such an institution. In other lines of business, it’s much less characteristic (one in six, perhaps?).
But what causes the condition (that I’ve witnessed, repeatedly) where the person who collects enough online college degrees from mail-order quality schools comes to consider themselves the equal of the Harvard grad? Does Dunning-Kruger explain this, or is there something else at work? Your overly typical Education PhD from crappy schools comes to mind.
SAT Critical Reading: 700 / 800
SAT Math: 710 / 800
SAT Writing: 710 / 800
So sure, Harvard isn't JUST looking at intelligence, but it is certainly only selecting from the pool of highly intelligent.
And even with all the affirmative action, athletic recruiting, rural state preference (which still exists!) and catering to the rich and famous, even the bottom of the class is extremely smart.
Looking at the admissions of the college, HBS, and HLS is also interesting.
The B school is less selective for IQ than the college, the law school more so. If you can get a 175 or more on the LSAT (top 0.3% of a pool limited to college graduates who want to be lawyers, probably around 1 in 3000 of the general US population), then your chance of being admitted to HLS is above 70%. By contrast, while HBS certainly welcomes students with perfect GMAT scores, it won't even get you to 50%.
Similarly, because IQ is especially important for high end lawyers, the LSAT discriminates in extreme detail between the top 1% of scorers. In fact, of the 60 possible LSAT scores, 8 are devoted to ranking the top 1% of test takers.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Curle
“In fact, of the 60 possible LSAT scores, 8 are devoted to ranking the top 1% of test takers.” ————-
This is news to me. Could someone expand on how this works. For starters, I had no idea there were only 60 possible LSAT scores. Is this new or has it always been the case?
Automatic right of appeal for low grades? Wow.Replies: @Curle
“It’s all so different from UK academia, it’s like reading about a different universe. My impression is that the French ENArque system has some similarities as a sort of public-sector Harvard for the well connected political elite, but otherwise the US system seems unique in the West. ” ——————————-
I thought the big complaint in the UK was that the public schools perform the function attributed to Harvard in the the article Pinker responded to, producing leaders from the well connected smart or not. Isn’t David Cameron mocked as one such person (rightfully or not)?
The 126 figure for Feynman seems right. He was a genius in his field, but not precocious like many super-high IQ people. He still had to take all the k-12 grades etc."
Not true. One can name any number of physics Nobelists who went through a more-or-less normal course of secondary education: Feynman, Einstein, Heisenberg. I'm sure there are many others.
If the 120s IQ figure is right (and I don't think it is) it would likely be due to the verbal portion of any such test skewing the results. Feynman talked in a rather strange way, almost as if he had learned his own kind of grammar which suited him well enough that he didn't bother quite learning the standard kind.
Even while at Los Alamos, before he had created his theory of QED, he was recognized as being a very rare genius by both Oppenheimer and Bethe, who both tried to hire him after the war.Replies: @grey enlightenment
Yeah, ‘verbal loaded test’. I read that argument a zillion times. You’re moving goal posts. Well, by that argument Feynman had an IQ of 300 on a calculus loaded test. That’s not how IQ works. You can’t just pick the part of the test the person does the best at and use it to measure the IQ.
this is what an IQ >160 looks like
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/09/04/15-year-old-skips-past-high-school-and-right-into-junior-year-at-cal-uc-berkeley-college-university-sage-ryan/
Feynman was smart, but not that smart. 125 is pretty good though. That’s nothing to sneeze at
If the 120s IQ figure is right (and I don’t think it is) it would likely be due to the verbal portion of any such test skewing the results. Feynman talked in a rather strange way, almost as if he had learned his own kind of grammar which suited him well enough that he didn’t bother quite learning the standard kind.
Yeah, ‘verbal loaded test’. I read that argument a zillion times. You’re moving goal posts. Well, by that argument Feynman has an IQ of 300 on a calculus loaded test. That’s not how IQ works. You can’t just pick the part of the test the person does the best at and say it’s his IQ.
this is what an IQ >160 looks like
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/09/04/15-year-old-skips-past-high-school-and-right-into-junior-year-at-cal-uc-berkeley-college-university-sage-ryan/
Feynman was smart, but not that smart. 125 is pretty good though. That’s nothing to sneeze at
In short, life in America is increasingly becoming a stark proposition of “Yale or fail.”
Ideally, we would like to think meritocracy is about smart/talented people winning fair and square whereas cheatocracy is about untalented/ privileged people 'winning' unfair and crooked.
But what happens when those with genuine talent not only win fair and squared but use their wits, influence, connections, and/or connivance to win even more than they should?
Consider WOLF OF WALL STREET. Belfort was no dummy. He had real smarts but used it to cheat everyone.
Look at Larry Summers. Smart guy, no doubt. But look at his role in Wall Street and Russia.
Look at Netanhayu. Smart guy but a total crook.
Being smart means you can win fair and square, but it also means you got superior wits to play it loose and hoodwink the competition.Replies: @BlaisePascal
“Being smart means you can win fair and square.”
Yes–the smart and well-educated set up the rules and manipulate them, so they can “win fair and square.” That’s because ‘smart’ and ‘clever’ are not synonymous with intelligence. True intelligence sees the big picture, not narrow self-interest. We all know what happened to the Wolf, Madoff, etc. Even our best economic minds didn’t foresee 2008 or, if they did, raise alarms–likely because it was in their interest not to rock the boat.
What is your Guy Q.
What is your Lie Q.
You’ll have to excuse Udolpho. He’s one of those people who failed at life but did very well at school, hence his hysterical and confused remarks about all things academic.
Yeah, ‘verbal loaded test’. I read that argument a zillion times. You’re moving goal posts. Well, by that argument Feynman has an IQ of 300 on a calculus loaded test. That’s not how IQ works. You can’t just pick the part of the test the person does the best at and say it's his IQ.
this is what an IQ >160 looks like
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/09/04/15-year-old-skips-past-high-school-and-right-into-junior-year-at-cal-uc-berkeley-college-university-sage-ryan/
Feynman was smart, but not that smart. 125 is pretty good though. That’s nothing to sneeze atReplies: @BlaisePascal
Yep, saw that video, it was posted on Yahoo a few days back. Aptly named ‘Sage’–Sage Ryan. Maybe he has an IQ>160 like you say, maybe not. However, his gaming the system to skip out on high school was an intelligence test in and of itself. Super bright kid–reminds me of a guy called Adragon (don’t remember his last name, but the first name sticks for obvious reasons!) who also went to a UC. He graduated with a degree in comp sci at age 12 or something…but then burned out. Let’s hope Sage ends up more like a Tao or Ellenberg, who were also so-called prodigies. Ellenberg and Tao are not only successful mathematicians, but are well-known for their thoughtful writings on education generally.
Yes, for most of those “4-5 centuries” (a bit less than that, but no matter) the Harvards and Yales were about having your “finest minds”–among the College students as well as aging dons. I think this is what Steve Pinker is arguing for–admitting the very brightest, even if they only care about math or Romance Philology, rather than kids who pad their resumes with endless volunteering jobs and internships. ‘Pizza with Hot Pepper’ says the Ivies used to have “serious and dedicated scholars.” These guys want the old Harvard back.
It might be small consolation and not help the modern US, but in the long run I'd bet the founders will be proven right (again) and the commisars of the mandarin pyramids wrong (again).Replies: @Anonymous
“Likewise, the idea that the governing class of the US would be selected by a Chinese mandarin style of hierarchical test-based meritocracy.”
Well, there’s nothing wrong with a test-based meritocracy per se. It’s only when they’re used to game admissions at schools like Harvard that they end up doing exactly what the Founders didn’t want. Then they get corrupted. In fact, the test-based system allowed for less well-off kids (and their families) to rise to the top–there were no universities to be gotten into in Mandarin times. You passed the exam and were then appointed to a well-paid post.
The 126 figure for Feynman seems right.
No, it is wrong, and absurdly so. It is one of those dumb anecdotes that anti-hereditarian, anti-IQ people bring up ad nauseam. He didn’t take the test seriously, like many boys would be expected to do.
If you read his books and speeches, you’ll see his verbal IQ was very high. Writing clearly about physics for an intelligent layman audience is one of the most challenging tasks requiring high verbal IQ one can think of.
Feynman knew that the result of this particular IQ test was BS, and he brought it up because it jibed with his faux-humble, irreverent sense of humor.
Another reason you can dismiss the 126 figure is that different intelligences are all highly correlated with one another. Idiot savants are the exception, not the rule. To get an average IQ of 126 with someone with the non-verbal intelligence to be a leading physicist would mean a verbal IQ of ~100. That type of extreme gap is not only exceedingly rare, but would also mean the he lacked the ability to write a book.
Go to a community college if you want to see what the writing of someone with a 100 IQ looks like. There will be run-on sentences galore and a complete lack of wit or humor.
The top ivies send a higher percentage of their graduates into academia than 99% of other undergraduate institutions. You can see the figures here for PhDs, a close proxy for a scholarly career:
http://www.thecollegesolution.com/the-colleges-where-phds-get-their-start/
They are only exceeded by MIT, CalTech, Chicago, and a handful of liberal arts colleges like Reed, Oberlin, and Swathmore.
Harvard is #6 in Math/Statistics, #10 in Anthropology, #9 in Physics, and #6 in Social Sciences. That is out of 5000+ places you can get an undergraduate degree.
I wanted to go into academia actually, but as an undergraduate mingling with grad students, I realized that meant being poor for 10 years, with a substantial risk of being poor forever, and that most people who put up with that come from rich families.
John Adams said “I am a revolutionary so my son can be a farmer so his son can be a poet.” My family is still in the farmer stage.
This is surely true of many fields, but Harold Bloom says English Department has been taken over by PC tards who have no real interest in scholarship.
However, when I transitioned to the private sector, the advanced skills I picked up as an elite graduate student came in very handy and exceptionally profitable. Within several years, I made up for the pauper lifestyle I led in the beginning and then some.
A close friend of mine was a Harvard grad and Stanford Ph.D. He, too, led a very modest lifestyle until he left academia and went private. Now he is exceptionally, embarrassingly rich. His former colleagues were wide-eyed and could not contain their shock and envy the first time he invited them to his new house.
However, as with many aspects of American life, this is a winner takes all game. Most graduate students and Ph.D.'s have limited marketable skills, and it is only the top layer that is employable lucratively in the private sector.
Still, the life of a middling academic is a comfortable one. That is, once one has tenure. There is a persistent and constant pressure to do research and publish, yes, but otherwise life can be relaxed, sometimes rewarding, and many universities provide numerous benefits that ease life. Not a life of hyper luxury, to be sure, but a respectable and comfortable upper middle class life. It can be very rewarding for those who are not materially-oriented and seek intellectual stimulation, as well as the kind of respect that goes with it in some circles.
No, it is wrong, and absurdly so. It is one of those dumb anecdotes that anti-hereditarian, anti-IQ people bring up ad nauseam. He didn't take the test seriously, like many boys would be expected to do.
If you read his books and speeches, you'll see his verbal IQ was very high. Writing clearly about physics for an intelligent layman audience is one of the most challenging tasks requiring high verbal IQ one can think of.
Feynman knew that the result of this particular IQ test was BS, and he brought it up because it jibed with his faux-humble, irreverent sense of humor.
Another reason you can dismiss the 126 figure is that different intelligences are all highly correlated with one another. Idiot savants are the exception, not the rule. To get an average IQ of 126 with someone with the non-verbal intelligence to be a leading physicist would mean a verbal IQ of ~100. That type of extreme gap is not only exceedingly rare, but would also mean the he lacked the ability to write a book.
Go to a community college if you want to see what the writing of someone with a 100 IQ looks like. There will be run-on sentences galore and a complete lack of wit or humor.Replies: @Ron Unz, @grey enlightenment
Exactly correct. I find it *extraordinarily* unlikely that a reliable IQ test would have produced a score of 126 for Feynman.
As others have already mentioned on this thread, there’s pretty good evidence that Feynman may have had the highest math ability of any American student of his own age throughout his teens and twenties. His verbal ability may not have been as astonishing, but as an adult he was certainly a very witty fellow and a good writer. Perhaps the low ceiling of the crude IQ test he took together with his eccentricity may be responsible for the score in question. Also, don’t forget that Feynman was a notorious prankster and loved to puncture pomposity, so he may have just been pulling the leg of his biographer, Geist, whose total ignorance of IQ ranges would have led him to take the joke at face value. Or perhaps the number somehow got garbled, and the true figure was a more plausible 216 or 261.
Don’t forget that the upper end of the IQ curve isn’t remotely Gaussian, and the historical data from pre-1995 SAT tests and conversion estimates seem to indicate that at any given time there are probably a couple of hundred Americans with IQs in the 200+ range. Given these statistics, it’s just silly to believe that Feynman’s IQ was down around 126.
http://www.thecollegesolution.com/the-colleges-where-phds-get-their-start/
They are only exceeded by MIT, CalTech, Chicago, and a handful of liberal arts colleges like Reed, Oberlin, and Swathmore.
Harvard is #6 in Math/Statistics, #10 in Anthropology, #9 in Physics, and #6 in Social Sciences. That is out of 5000+ places you can get an undergraduate degree.
I wanted to go into academia actually, but as an undergraduate mingling with grad students, I realized that meant being poor for 10 years, with a substantial risk of being poor forever, and that most people who put up with that come from rich families.
John Adams said "I am a revolutionary so my son can be a farmer so his son can be a poet." My family is still in the farmer stage.Replies: @Priss Factor, @Twinkie
“The top ivies send a higher percentage of their graduates into academia than 99% of other undergraduate institutions. You can see the figures here for PhDs, a close proxy for a scholarly career.”
This is surely true of many fields, but Harold Bloom says English Department has been taken over by PC tards who have no real interest in scholarship.
Back to these international students: they generally speak good English, at least compared to the drunks in frat row who rarely speak in sentences even when they're not pasted. Secondly, they try twice as hard as native-born kids, especially in English, according to Babson professor Kara Miller. So, given that their English skills leave something to be desired, they try mightily to overcome this deficit, just as they try mightily to get a Diels-Alder reaction to work in lab or find a marker for melanoma. That is the kind of grit we need, according to Miller:
"My “C,’’ “D,’’ and “F’’ students this semester are almost exclusively American, while my students from India, China, and Latin America have - despite language barriers - generally written solid papers, excelled on exams, and become valuable class participants.
"One girl from Shanghai became a fixture at office hours, embraced our college writing center, and incessantly e-mailed me questions about her evolving papers. Her English is still mediocre: she frequently puts “the’’ everywhere (as in “the leader supported the feminism and the environmentalism’’) and confuses “his’’ and “her.’’ But that didn’t stop her from doing rewrite after rewrite, tirelessly trying to improve both structure and grammar."
"Chinese undergraduates have consistently impressed me with their work ethic, though I have seen similar habits in students from India, Thailand, Brazil, and Venezuela. ---Kara Miller, English Professor, writing in the Boston Gloobe
This corroborates my own experience as a TA in college. I was a reader, not a professor, but was forced to grade essays, many of them written by international students or FOB's. And often, even if they spoke good English, their writing skills were poor. Trust me, it's frustrating. However, what made my experience tolerable is that these are the kids who came back and said "Why can't you say it like that?" "Why should I use 'will' and not 'would'" They wanted to improve their English skills; it's not like they sail through college, expecting to party like Pinker's proverbial spoiled kids.
Finally, of course I know that colleges are still admitting Chinese kids--that was clearly hyperbole. Again, how did you miss this? You're setting up a straw men or, again, are humorless. Hyperbole just illustrates the point that these schools just want to put a cap on Chinese American kids, no matter their English ability.
If I am passionate about this topic, it is because of this: my English speaking ability is often judged even before I open my mouth, and the 'poor English' charge is often leveled as code for other insults. Once, I was in a cheering section of a basketball game, and a member of the opposing crowd shouted 'Say it in English' when, in fact, I was cheering in English. That's the way it is.Replies: @The most deplorable one, @Anonymous
Fucken’ great but last time I checked this is still America . So all those Chinese ( people*) can have china nurture their academic growth . The United States is for and by Americans . What don’t you understand about that?
* apparently you’re no able to grasp context
I’ll concede on a better-designed test he could have scored up to 140. That is 1/400 and an extra standard deviation. Just like being good at chess, being good at math is not always indicative of profoundly high intelligence . He was a prankster…so what. By reading his bio and comparing him with prodigies who do have verifiable scores of > 160, I am confidence in my assessment.
No, it is wrong, and absurdly so. It is one of those dumb anecdotes that anti-hereditarian, anti-IQ people bring up ad nauseam. He didn't take the test seriously, like many boys would be expected to do.
If you read his books and speeches, you'll see his verbal IQ was very high. Writing clearly about physics for an intelligent layman audience is one of the most challenging tasks requiring high verbal IQ one can think of.
Feynman knew that the result of this particular IQ test was BS, and he brought it up because it jibed with his faux-humble, irreverent sense of humor.
Another reason you can dismiss the 126 figure is that different intelligences are all highly correlated with one another. Idiot savants are the exception, not the rule. To get an average IQ of 126 with someone with the non-verbal intelligence to be a leading physicist would mean a verbal IQ of ~100. That type of extreme gap is not only exceedingly rare, but would also mean the he lacked the ability to write a book.
Go to a community college if you want to see what the writing of someone with a 100 IQ looks like. There will be run-on sentences galore and a complete lack of wit or humor.Replies: @Ron Unz, @grey enlightenment
lot, the community college kid probably is probably unenthusiastic about the assignment, has a strict time limit, and, most importantly, doesn’t have a professional editor.
While I agree that Feynman’s IQ must have been much higher than 126, I was not aware that any test was valid beyond about 160.
As it happens, while researching the basis for my big Meritocracy article I discovered that an appendix of Klitgaard's book mentioned a mid-1960s research study published by the head of the ETS providing an estimated relationship between pre-1995 SAT scores and tested IQ, with a perfect 1600 roughly corresponding to an IQ=200. Since over the decades, there were usually 5-15 perfect 1600s among HS seniors each year (prior to the massively inflationary SAT renorming of 1995), this would imply a couple of hundred 200+ IQ individuals in the entire country. I certainly can't vouch for the details of the ETS study and I'm sure the error-bars are enormous, so the true totals could easily be off by a factor of two or more. But the central point is that very high IQs just aren't nearly as rare as foolish people seem to assume they are. I think I mentioned these findings in a couple of the columns I wrote in my Meritocracy series, but obviously no one bothered to read them.
As for Feynman, he was considered remarkably brilliant by all the remarkably brilliant people around him, and quite possibly ranked as the world's greatest theoretical physicist of the second half of the twentieth century. He was also an enormously versatile individual, quickly and easily acquiring skills in all sorts of other areas.
Furthermore, his math testing performance as a teen or college student was quite extraordinary as well---getting the top score nationwide on the Putnam is a very big deal. Since he was surely competing against dozens or hundreds of very smart students with IQs in the 150s or 160s or 170s and crushed them, I strongly suspect his true IQ was far, far north of that. On the other hand, being a "child prodigy" means relatively little, and performance in H.S. or college is far more indicative of ability, just like the strongest five-year-old may not necessarily grow up to be the best adult athlete.
I think the commenters here are missing an important point. The only reason people take IQ tests seriously is because they strongly correlate with what smart people consider direct evidence of high intelligence. If someone who had Feynman's extraordinary intellect---and had won the Putman---actually possessed an honest-to-goodness 126 IQ, the entire established framework of psychometrics would suffer a significant body-blow. That's very different from noting that a "boxing genius" such as Muhammad Ali apparently had an IQ of 78 or whatever.
Anyway, I'm too swamped with my software work to get involved in these threads, but I'd say the notion of Feynman having an IQ of 126 is about as ridiculous as that big corporate CEO who claimed to have an IQ of 300, with Forbes and all the business publications falling for such absurd nonsense and matter-of-factly reporting it.
Don’t forget that the upper end of the IQ curve isn’t remotely Gaussian, and the historical data from pre-1995 SAT tests and conversion estimates seem to indicate that at any given time there are probably a couple of hundred Americans with IQs in the 200+ range.
One dimensional abilities (i.e. reaction time, working memory) are quite Gaussian. The reason there used to be a lot if IQ’s above 200 (on the old mental age ratio scale no longer used) is largely because the standard deviation was large at some ages & there’s some non-linear cognitive growth spurts among the highly gifted.
Actually the true distribution of intelligence is anything but Gauusian. It’s more like the distribution of wealth. The human mind operates in parallel so intelligence may double every 5 IQ points:
http://brainsize.wordpress.com/2014/07/16/forget-iq-scores-a-shocking-new-scale-for-measuring-intelligence/
As others have already mentioned on this thread, there’s pretty good evidence that Feynman may have had the highest math ability of any American student of his own age throughout his teens and twenties.
Does anyone know how many Americans were Feynman’s age back then? Being the best math talent your age would put you at the one in 4 million level, I think, today. Back then, there was much less competition, though obviously still a huge amount.
There’s also a difference between math skill & math ability. Malcolm Gladwell would say he practiced for far more than 10,000 hours.
There’s also a difference between math ability & IQ.
I’m not saying he wasn’t incredibly brilliant; I don’t know enough about him to have an opinion. But it is possible to be a Genius without a stratospheric IQ. Gary Kasparov was world chess genius with an IQ of 135. JD Salinger was a literary genius with an IQ of 104. Muhammad Ali was a fighting genius with an IQ of 78.
IQ correlates well with a lot of achievements, but in any imperfect correlation, there are always those outliers in the scatterplot who are way below the line of best fit. We should try to understand anomalies rather than just rationalizing them away because explaining the unexpected is how science leaps forward.
There doesn’t seem to be any way to stop people from arguing about someone else’s IQ based on supposition and prejudice. One of many tics that gives HBDers their reputation as obsessive shut-ins.
IQspotting.
http://www.thecollegesolution.com/the-colleges-where-phds-get-their-start/
They are only exceeded by MIT, CalTech, Chicago, and a handful of liberal arts colleges like Reed, Oberlin, and Swathmore.
Harvard is #6 in Math/Statistics, #10 in Anthropology, #9 in Physics, and #6 in Social Sciences. That is out of 5000+ places you can get an undergraduate degree.
I wanted to go into academia actually, but as an undergraduate mingling with grad students, I realized that meant being poor for 10 years, with a substantial risk of being poor forever, and that most people who put up with that come from rich families.
John Adams said "I am a revolutionary so my son can be a farmer so his son can be a poet." My family is still in the farmer stage.Replies: @Priss Factor, @Twinkie
I did go into academia during the early part of my working adult life and, indeed, I was perpetually short of money. My family certainly helped, but it was a very Spartan existence with minimal comforts of life.
However, when I transitioned to the private sector, the advanced skills I picked up as an elite graduate student came in very handy and exceptionally profitable. Within several years, I made up for the pauper lifestyle I led in the beginning and then some.
A close friend of mine was a Harvard grad and Stanford Ph.D. He, too, led a very modest lifestyle until he left academia and went private. Now he is exceptionally, embarrassingly rich. His former colleagues were wide-eyed and could not contain their shock and envy the first time he invited them to his new house.
However, as with many aspects of American life, this is a winner takes all game. Most graduate students and Ph.D.’s have limited marketable skills, and it is only the top layer that is employable lucratively in the private sector.
Still, the life of a middling academic is a comfortable one. That is, once one has tenure. There is a persistent and constant pressure to do research and publish, yes, but otherwise life can be relaxed, sometimes rewarding, and many universities provide numerous benefits that ease life. Not a life of hyper luxury, to be sure, but a respectable and comfortable upper middle class life. It can be very rewarding for those who are not materially-oriented and seek intellectual stimulation, as well as the kind of respect that goes with it in some circles.
You compare yourself with Ron Unz? Setting aside the transparent and obvious intellectual differences between the two of you, Unz exhaustively documents his evidences and puts forth a compelling argument. He then engages his critics fully and discusses even the minutiae of his thesis, both pro and con. He seems to understand the basic scientific notion of falsifiability.
You are some random cram school teacher who likes to throw wild, unsupported assertions and “observations” and then disappear when challenged with logic and evidences to the contrary, whose main claim to a very minor note on the web seems to be giving ammunition to white supremacists who can’t, just can’t, accept that whites may not be the best at everything (“What? East Asians might have a small average IQ advantage and higher test scores over whites? That’s just due to Asian cheating! This person on the web says so because he teaches them! Everyone knows Asians just study for tests and are not interested in the substance of knowledge!”).
Given this, is it really that surprising that people have heard of, and read, Unz’s work and not your ramblings on the web? I can’t tell if your problem is misplaced hubris or insecurity. Certainly there seems to be a bit of delusion at minimum.
You will ignore this, but let me share my experiences again because I actually went to a top ten Ph.D. program and worked in academia at the university level.
At most Ivy League universities and other elite institutions, you will find that most international students speak excellent English, often better than native-born American students (because they learned it properly with correspondingly less influence of awful colloquialism). Setting aside the non-Asian students for the moment, even the Asian international students often have lengthy residential experiences in the United States (some even England) or they attended “international schools” in their native countries all their lives where English is spoken in total immersion.
At the graduate level, you will start finding foreign students who have more “normal” backgrounds in that they attended foreign universities where English is not the language of instruction and many of them do fare badly in rapid *spoken* English settings. However, especially in STEM fields, many such graduate students have extremely high levels of achievement in their chosen fields so that they are sought after rather keenly by American universities despite their limited English speaking abilities.
I have a distant relative who fits this stereotypical profile. He graduated from the top university in his country in Asia. He came to the United States to attend a Ph.D. program in electrical engineering. His spoken English was rather poor, but he was absolutely, by far, the top engineering graduate student at his American university. After obtaining his Ph.D., he briefly worked at Bell Labs (where he proceeded to invent several new processes and related products), after which he returned to his country and is now the department chair of the top university there, his alma mater. He holds numerous patents both in the United States and in Asia.
His English did improve dramatically once he lived in the United States for several years, but he never spoke it comfortably. It always seemed a bit strained. But he could read and write just fine, certainly well enough to convey the extremely technical nature of his work.
Obviously he was at the top of his food chain, but it is not unusual to find stories like this at notable graduate programs, again, especially in the STEM fields. In fact, a number of well-known Ph.D. programs maintain semi-permanent recruitment channels at top East Asian universities. Many Ph.D. advisors (i.e. guild masters of their lore and craft) find the students from these universities brilliant and hardworking despite their halting English speaking; it’s actually something of a dirty little secret that the advisors coopt much of their students’ work and ideas for their own publications. If the graduate student is lucky and the advisor is benevolent, he gets to be published as a co-author and share a bit of the glory. If not, he gets to toil and produce new ideas with nary a recognition until he gets his membership card in the guild punched. But that’s the nature of the apprentice system under which Ph.D. programs work.
I was very fortunate. My advisors included me as a junior co-author on everything we did together, and I was usually given credit for my ideas and work and also was introduced to other notable figures in the field even from the first days of my graduate program. But many others were not so fortunate.
IQspotting.Replies: @Twinkie
Seems to be about as popular as Jewish ancestry spotting around these parts.
If you scroll through the comments, there is far worse English being used; if I were pedantic, I would have pointed it out in my other posts. I didn't, because other posters don't happen to be harping about the poor English of nameless college kids. And, once again, I did credit you with having layered opinions on the admissions issue; it's frankly disappointing that your response is simply a put-down.Replies: @Twinkie
Don’t bother arguing too much with “Educational Realist.” To argue with him is to play “whack-a-mole.” Even if you present him with evidences that disprove his claims, he’ll just disappear and reappear elsewhere with the same tired arguments.
He’ll also get personal and try to disparage you, instead of arguing the merits of the case at hand.
I don’t know him (or her). All I know of him is what little I read. Maybe in real life he is not as he appears on the web and maybe he may even be a dedicated teacher, who knows? (Though he appears to have a questionable command of the English language as well as poor reading comprehension and statistical skills.)
And from that little bit of the online persona, I get the impression of a teacher with sour grapes who seems very resentful of students who worked harder than he did amounting to more than what he did.
Aside from the leftist indoctrination, running into a personality like this is another reason why I home school my children. It’s hard enough to inculcate the love of learning and Aristotelian virtue in today’s educational environment. They don’t need to deal with added issue of teachers with chips on their shoulders who are full of envy toward the high-achieving (because they “had a life” as students while others studied much harder).
Well, I’m hardly an expert in psychometrics, except perhaps compared to some of the very silly commenters on this thread.
As it happens, while researching the basis for my big Meritocracy article I discovered that an appendix of Klitgaard’s book mentioned a mid-1960s research study published by the head of the ETS providing an estimated relationship between pre-1995 SAT scores and tested IQ, with a perfect 1600 roughly corresponding to an IQ=200. Since over the decades, there were usually 5-15 perfect 1600s among HS seniors each year (prior to the massively inflationary SAT renorming of 1995), this would imply a couple of hundred 200+ IQ individuals in the entire country. I certainly can’t vouch for the details of the ETS study and I’m sure the error-bars are enormous, so the true totals could easily be off by a factor of two or more. But the central point is that very high IQs just aren’t nearly as rare as foolish people seem to assume they are. I think I mentioned these findings in a couple of the columns I wrote in my Meritocracy series, but obviously no one bothered to read them.
As for Feynman, he was considered remarkably brilliant by all the remarkably brilliant people around him, and quite possibly ranked as the world’s greatest theoretical physicist of the second half of the twentieth century. He was also an enormously versatile individual, quickly and easily acquiring skills in all sorts of other areas.
Furthermore, his math testing performance as a teen or college student was quite extraordinary as well—getting the top score nationwide on the Putnam is a very big deal. Since he was surely competing against dozens or hundreds of very smart students with IQs in the 150s or 160s or 170s and crushed them, I strongly suspect his true IQ was far, far north of that. On the other hand, being a “child prodigy” means relatively little, and performance in H.S. or college is far more indicative of ability, just like the strongest five-year-old may not necessarily grow up to be the best adult athlete.
I think the commenters here are missing an important point. The only reason people take IQ tests seriously is because they strongly correlate with what smart people consider direct evidence of high intelligence. If someone who had Feynman’s extraordinary intellect—and had won the Putman—actually possessed an honest-to-goodness 126 IQ, the entire established framework of psychometrics would suffer a significant body-blow. That’s very different from noting that a “boxing genius” such as Muhammad Ali apparently had an IQ of 78 or whatever.
Anyway, I’m too swamped with my software work to get involved in these threads, but I’d say the notion of Feynman having an IQ of 126 is about as ridiculous as that big corporate CEO who claimed to have an IQ of 300, with Forbes and all the business publications falling for such absurd nonsense and matter-of-factly reporting it.
More standardized testing may or may not be a good small step in rectifying some of the problems in higher education today. But I would argue that is not the main issue at hand. It seems to be what ails our society today is the near complete disappearance of virtue (in the Aristotelian sense) in the public realm.
Once, elite secondary and tertiary institutions in the West strongly emphasized virtue, including honor, chastity, and gallantry (“playing fields of Eton” and all that). In that cultural atmosphere, inculcating leadership did not mean acquiring trappings of lording over others, but teaching young men of privilege to charge out of trenches first, with pistols in hand and whistles in their mouths.
Leadership was not “leading from behind,” but “men, follow me!” Noblesse oblige.
I think the main problem with elite education today (including at Ivy League institution) is the utter disappearance of virtue inculcation. Words like honor is almost never invoked, except perhaps in irony or as a term of cultural derision and contempt (e.g. honor killings).
Of course, virtue inculcation requires common subscription to an agreed-to monoculture, which is obviously sorely lacking in today’s America. Ours has now become a highly judgmental “non-judgmental” culture, in which all views are allegedly welcome when in reality only certain circumscribed ones are, and those who violate these “nod-and-wink” norms are savagely “outed” and exiled from the public realm.
Indeed our elite institutions produce technically competent men and women who are highly utilitarian philosophically and mostly self-serving even and lack any awareness of the communitarian project of the dead, the living, and the yet to be born (to paraphrase Burke) that is this country. So in the end, these young elites become exploiters rather than leaders of their people (however we define the latter).
I think until this moral compass is restored, minor technical solutions regarding standardized testing is proverbially akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, and we will continue to experience a widening chasm between the rulers and the ruled.
Don’t kid yourself. The latter is mostly the annoyed observation of certain not very subtle tics and cliches that come from a certain type of commenter. The former is the all-consuming preoccupation with figuring out the D&D cognitive stats of themselves, their co-workers, politicians, writers, figures of note, etc. The argument over Feynman’s purported IQ (even though he apparently told it to people) is an example of how over-the-top these arguments get. This also bleeds into the view that as long as you import millions of purportedly high IQ groups there will be no downside–never mind that there’s some pretty convincing social science (as well as common sense) that refutes this. It’s IQ, IQ, IQ all the way with these people.
The best part of Asia is Hong Kong and Singapore, which have the most high-IQ immigrants in Asia. (The Japanese, the smartest ethnic group with pop>20 million, admittedly have a very nice country without them)
The best part of the Arab world is Dubai, which has the most high-IQ immigrants in that region.Replies: @Udolpho
Better angels and moral progress
The problem with moral progress, even if genuine, is that it may become TOO moralistic, especially in a paralytic guilt-ridden way; and then, the forces of barbarism or savagery(especially if they happen to be objects of ‘historical guilt’) may run amok and tear civilization apart, but civilization will be TOO MORAL to do anything about it out of fear that noticing and confronting the truth may be ‘racist’ or ‘xenophobic’.
The Rotherdam case is a case of society paralyzed by excessive morality. Authorities didn’t want to be ‘racist’, so they turned a blind eye to evil. Paradoxically, it was because UK became more a nation of ‘better angels’ that the demonic forces, as objects of ‘historical guilt’, were able to run loose. And then, remember the London riot.
Sometimes, you have to put the ‘better angels’ aside and use ruthless force to deal with problems. But the West is too moralistic to do anything about problems of racial violence, immigration, the homo lobby, and etc.
Israel survives because it isn’t very moralistic in dealing with the enemies that it identifies and attacks with clarity of survivalism.
Morality is necessary as a brake against our dangerous impulses, but it can also be a brake on our survival instinct, as well as an accelerator on our suicidal ‘atoning’ instinct.
So, what I fear most is that Pinker may be too right about ‘moral progress’. Whites in the West may be turning more ‘better angel’-like in an ‘end of history’ way.
But will such a people have the warrior instincts to unite, fight, and survive?
Whites in South Africa chose ‘better angels’, and look what happened to them. So many whites have been raped and/or murdered, but the ‘better angeled’ whites in the West think themselves so goody because they worship Mandela who was only a Trojan Horse.
‘Moral progress’ is esp dangerous since people like Pinker, Sunstein, and Gesson decide what is moral. To them, Pussy Riot is more moral than Christian revival and family values in Russia.
Highest form of morality is a matter of individual conscience, but what passes for morality for the great majority is a matter of mass propaganda and fashionableness.
No wonder so many affluent people are Liberal. Their material vanity goes hand-in-hand with their moral vanity. They want fashionable shoes and fashionable causes to make themselves look good.
Whites need battle angels than better angels. And whites should choose their own enemies and their own fights than have another group choose for them.
I mean, what threat does Iran pose to the US?
All Americans and Brits of all backgrounds would be better off with rational immigration policies.
Kristof's problem is lazy use of data, not excessive morality. His lazy use of data creates immoral effects, like diminishing African-American employment prospects by importing tens of millions of competing laborers.
I subscribe to Aristotelian virtue ethics (which is compatible with my Catholic faith). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelian_ethics (in particular, this section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelian_ethics#Moral_virtue).
Being moral is not simply being "goody two-shoes." What you describe is a pseudo-morality of a very superficial sort.
We are now a nation in which men lack honor and women lack chastity. We are not suffering from "excessive" morality, but from the lack of it.
The white ruling class in South Africa realized that the most likely end game to the war was another version of the end of Rhodesia or, worse, Portuguese Mozambique. So they chose the other option, which was a negotiated surrender.
I happen to have Afrikaner émigré friends. I am extremely sympathetic to the plight of their friends and relatives back home. I know all about the utter barbarization of the once First World city of Jo-Burg.
The conclusion to many discussions about the end of white-ruled South Africa I have had with them over the years comes down to this: ruling over the vastly different "others" who outnumber you eight-to-one is like riding the back of a tiger (or a lion in Africa, I guess). You can't get off, but you can't stay on either. It ends in bloody tragedy either way.Replies: @Southfarthing
Steve, I’m wondering if you’ve noticed the $350 million gift to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Public Health from the Chan Family of Hong Kong.
It is probably bad for your average upper middle class Asian American family. The smartest people from this group are losing out to the 2nd Red China prince-lings, many of whom achieved their fortunes by having the good luck to be related to Mao and his closest generals and cronies.Replies: @Twinkie
“You compare yourself with Ron Unz?”
No.
I wasn’t disagreeing with Unz’s data.
You were asked by another commenter whether you read the provocative and widely circulated piece penned by Ron Unz (because your comments seemed to betray ignorance of it). To which you replied and asked whether the said commenter had read what *you* wrote on the topic in response to the Unz piece, as if your writings were similarly noteworthy or well-known.
My statement was not about whether you agreed or disagreed with Unz's data.
Ron, I think your suggestion that there is a fat right IQ tail is wrong given the way IQ is used academically.
IQ as mental / physical age was the initial definition, but it was fairly soon that it was replaced with a standard normal bell curve with sd = 15 or 16 and mean = 100. For transnational IQ studies published in English, 100 = US/UK Caucasian mean. The choice of 15 or 16 as the SD was simply an arbitrary one that most closely conformed with the old mental age /physical age.
For this reason, by definition, IQ tails are neither fat nor thin.
Secondly, the question is what does a “raw ability” score curve look like next to the nice and neat IQ curve. It would be easy if someone had a table of SAT scores by raw score (i.e., 86 right, 5 wrong, 10 underscored, raw score of 85).
For sure, the old metal/physical age would have a fat right tail. 7 year olds who have mathematical or language abilities equal to the average 14 year old are of course rare, but not 7SD rare.
It is interesting that the Chinese-American super rich have shifted slowly from people who made their money in the US and Taiwan to mainland China and post-takeover HK.
It is probably bad for your average upper middle class Asian American family. The smartest people from this group are losing out to the 2nd Red China prince-lings, many of whom achieved their fortunes by having the good luck to be related to Mao and his closest generals and cronies.
Some people like intellectual history and intellectual competition, just like you like Holocaust jokes. There’s really no accounting for taste, is there?
The places that have the highest standards of living in the world are Switzerland and Luxembourg, who also have the most high-IQ immigrants in the world.
The best part of Asia is Hong Kong and Singapore, which have the most high-IQ immigrants in Asia. (The Japanese, the smartest ethnic group with pop>20 million, admittedly have a very nice country without them)
The best part of the Arab world is Dubai, which has the most high-IQ immigrants in that region.
Anyway, haven't you committed heresy by claiming Dubai and not Israel as the best part of the Arab world?
Whites in South Africa chose 'better angels', and look what happened to them. So many whites have been raped and/or murdered, but the 'better angeled' whites in the West think themselves so goody because they worship Mandela who was only a Trojan Horse. 'Moral progress' is esp dangerous since people like Pinker, Sunstein, and Gesson decide what is moral. To them, Pussy Riot is more moral than Christian revival and family values in Russia.
Highest form of morality is a matter of individual conscience, but what passes for morality for the great majority is a matter of mass propaganda and fashionableness.
No wonder so many affluent people are Liberal. Their material vanity goes hand-in-hand with their moral vanity. They want fashionable shoes and fashionable causes to make themselves look good.Whites need battle angels than better angels. And whites should choose their own enemies and their own fights than have another group choose for them. I mean, what threat does Iran pose to the US?Replies: @Southfarthing, @Twinkie, @Twinkie
Sailer and his readers are the ones being moral.
All Americans and Brits of all backgrounds would be better off with rational immigration policies.
Kristof’s problem is lazy use of data, not excessive morality. His lazy use of data creates immoral effects, like diminishing African-American employment prospects by importing tens of millions of competing laborers.
Of course the goal is to reduce drastically any immigration. But the lesser of the evils is having high IQ immigration rather than a low IQ one, you know, as in Canada or Singapore.
Whites in South Africa chose 'better angels', and look what happened to them. So many whites have been raped and/or murdered, but the 'better angeled' whites in the West think themselves so goody because they worship Mandela who was only a Trojan Horse. 'Moral progress' is esp dangerous since people like Pinker, Sunstein, and Gesson decide what is moral. To them, Pussy Riot is more moral than Christian revival and family values in Russia.
Highest form of morality is a matter of individual conscience, but what passes for morality for the great majority is a matter of mass propaganda and fashionableness.
No wonder so many affluent people are Liberal. Their material vanity goes hand-in-hand with their moral vanity. They want fashionable shoes and fashionable causes to make themselves look good.Whites need battle angels than better angels. And whites should choose their own enemies and their own fights than have another group choose for them. I mean, what threat does Iran pose to the US?Replies: @Southfarthing, @Twinkie, @Twinkie
You misunderstand me.
I subscribe to Aristotelian virtue ethics (which is compatible with my Catholic faith). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelian_ethics (in particular, this section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelian_ethics#Moral_virtue).
Being moral is not simply being “goody two-shoes.” What you describe is a pseudo-morality of a very superficial sort.
We are now a nation in which men lack honor and women lack chastity. We are not suffering from “excessive” morality, but from the lack of it.
No.
I wasn't disagreeing with Unz's data.Replies: @Twinkie
I can’t tell if you suffer from a basic reading comprehension problem or are being purposefully obtuse.
You were asked by another commenter whether you read the provocative and widely circulated piece penned by Ron Unz (because your comments seemed to betray ignorance of it). To which you replied and asked whether the said commenter had read what *you* wrote on the topic in response to the Unz piece, as if your writings were similarly noteworthy or well-known.
My statement was not about whether you agreed or disagreed with Unz’s data.
He'll also get personal and try to disparage you, instead of arguing the merits of the case at hand.
I don't know him (or her). All I know of him is what little I read. Maybe in real life he is not as he appears on the web and maybe he may even be a dedicated teacher, who knows? (Though he appears to have a questionable command of the English language as well as poor reading comprehension and statistical skills.)
And from that little bit of the online persona, I get the impression of a teacher with sour grapes who seems very resentful of students who worked harder than he did amounting to more than what he did.
Aside from the leftist indoctrination, running into a personality like this is another reason why I home school my children. It's hard enough to inculcate the love of learning and Aristotelian virtue in today's educational environment. They don't need to deal with added issue of teachers with chips on their shoulders who are full of envy toward the high-achieving (because they "had a life" as students while others studied much harder).Replies: @The most deplorable one
As far as I can tell, Education Realist has a 44-XX karyotype.
Whites in South Africa chose 'better angels', and look what happened to them. So many whites have been raped and/or murdered, but the 'better angeled' whites in the West think themselves so goody because they worship Mandela who was only a Trojan Horse. 'Moral progress' is esp dangerous since people like Pinker, Sunstein, and Gesson decide what is moral. To them, Pussy Riot is more moral than Christian revival and family values in Russia.
Highest form of morality is a matter of individual conscience, but what passes for morality for the great majority is a matter of mass propaganda and fashionableness.
No wonder so many affluent people are Liberal. Their material vanity goes hand-in-hand with their moral vanity. They want fashionable shoes and fashionable causes to make themselves look good.Whites need battle angels than better angels. And whites should choose their own enemies and their own fights than have another group choose for them. I mean, what threat does Iran pose to the US?Replies: @Southfarthing, @Twinkie, @Twinkie
Whites in South Africa did not choose to be “better angels” as you put it. It wasn’t some sort of a goody two-shoes decision.
The white ruling class in South Africa realized that the most likely end game to the war was another version of the end of Rhodesia or, worse, Portuguese Mozambique. So they chose the other option, which was a negotiated surrender.
I happen to have Afrikaner émigré friends. I am extremely sympathetic to the plight of their friends and relatives back home. I know all about the utter barbarization of the once First World city of Jo-Burg.
The conclusion to many discussions about the end of white-ruled South Africa I have had with them over the years comes down to this: ruling over the vastly different “others” who outnumber you eight-to-one is like riding the back of a tiger (or a lion in Africa, I guess). You can’t get off, but you can’t stay on either. It ends in bloody tragedy either way.
It is probably bad for your average upper middle class Asian American family. The smartest people from this group are losing out to the 2nd Red China prince-lings, many of whom achieved their fortunes by having the good luck to be related to Mao and his closest generals and cronies.Replies: @Twinkie
Denationalized globalist elites are the same everywhere. “Your average upper middle class” family, whether Asian or white, will be hard-pressed and squeezed down by such types. They will drive themselves mad by an ever increasing, frenetic educational arms race to outcompete their fellow upper middle class folks in a desperate attempt to be accepted into the globalist elite status, you know, to get invitations to Davos and such.
The best part of Asia is Hong Kong and Singapore, which have the most high-IQ immigrants in Asia. (The Japanese, the smartest ethnic group with pop>20 million, admittedly have a very nice country without them)
The best part of the Arab world is Dubai, which has the most high-IQ immigrants in that region.Replies: @Udolpho
Setting aside your clueless baiting, you can keep Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, and every other libertarian paradise that is on your list but that you curiously have chosen not to live in. The vast majority of the Earth’s population wishes to live among its own kind, not hopscotch like transients through Thomas Friedman’s favorite world cities. We wish to live where we have roots, where we recognize each other–as opposed to transacting as isolates, living only for hedonism, or in your case probably something pathetic like fantastic video games.
Anyway, haven’t you committed heresy by claiming Dubai and not Israel as the best part of the Arab world?
None of the cited places is libertarian.
Forget asking for a concealed carry handgun permit, try asking for a permit to own an over-and-under for trap shooting.
I personally prefer to be a gun-toting, Christ-worshipping, retrograde American (albeit with a yellow neck). Generally, I just want to be left alone (especially by the heavy hand of the state).
But Singapore is a lovely place to visit. Clean, advanced, safe, and inexpensive, with very delicious cuisine to boot. Unless you are blessed by God to be a free (though increasingly less so) American, a man can do a lot worse than living in Singapore. If there ever was an argument for a benevolent, paternalistic (mild) dictatorship, Singapore is it.
The unfortunate (for you) truth is that most people do not want to be left alone. They want to form connections with others, they want to live among those who share their values, not tiptoe through a landmine of vibrant cultural mores. Singapore may well be a clean, well-lighted city-state, but who cares? I for one do not wish to live thousands of miles away from families and friends so that I can enjoy fiber-optic Internet and plush restaurants or whatever ridiculously shallow convenience recommends it to you. Do you have any concept at all of heritage or community? Does life for you boil down to some sort of beep-boop sensory activation?
It's a rhetorical question--I know the answer is "yes". It's autism produced by mass society.Replies: @Twinkie
Forget asking for a concealed carry handgun permit, try asking for a permit to own an over-and-under for trap shooting.
I personally prefer to be a gun-toting, Christ-worshipping, retrograde American (albeit with a yellow neck). Generally, I just want to be left alone (especially by the heavy hand of the state).
But Singapore is a lovely place to visit. Clean, advanced, safe, and inexpensive, with very delicious cuisine to boot. Unless you are blessed by God to be a free (though increasingly less so) American, a man can do a lot worse than living in Singapore. If there ever was an argument for a benevolent, paternalistic (mild) dictatorship, Singapore is it.Replies: @Udolpho
To be clear, I wasn’t calling these places libertarian, rather noting that they are typical subjects of libertarian hosannas.
The unfortunate (for you) truth is that most people do not want to be left alone. They want to form connections with others, they want to live among those who share their values, not tiptoe through a landmine of vibrant cultural mores. Singapore may well be a clean, well-lighted city-state, but who cares? I for one do not wish to live thousands of miles away from families and friends so that I can enjoy fiber-optic Internet and plush restaurants or whatever ridiculously shallow convenience recommends it to you. Do you have any concept at all of heritage or community? Does life for you boil down to some sort of beep-boop sensory activation?
It’s a rhetorical question–I know the answer is “yes”. It’s autism produced by mass society.
I am a communitarian conservative. My ideal existence is the small town Southern life where I have both space and a close-knit community. My family, friends, and neighbors matter the most to me on this earth (though God comes first, thankfully He has not asked me to forsake them for Him, and I hope He never shall).Maybe you should get to know just a wee bit more about another commenter and what concepts he understands or prizes before engaging in philosophical umbrage of a stranger.As I wrote before, it's a lovely place to VISIT (capitalization added for the reading comprehension challenged). I did not suggest that you or anyone else, who are not Singaporean, fly over there this minute to live forever.
As for "who cares," just because you don't care doesn't mean it doesn't offer some lessons for the rest of us. Well-run, clean, prosperous, and egalitarian societies always have something interesting to learn for outsiders. It is also something of an object lesson in comparative state-building and other related cerebral pursuits with real life consequences.
For someone who alleges to care about "community" and "heritage" (and thus, presumably, tradition), you seem to lack basic manners about conducting a conversation, even on this blighted, anonymous Internet.Replies: @JJ, @Udolpho
The white ruling class in South Africa realized that the most likely end game to the war was another version of the end of Rhodesia or, worse, Portuguese Mozambique. So they chose the other option, which was a negotiated surrender.
I happen to have Afrikaner émigré friends. I am extremely sympathetic to the plight of their friends and relatives back home. I know all about the utter barbarization of the once First World city of Jo-Burg.
The conclusion to many discussions about the end of white-ruled South Africa I have had with them over the years comes down to this: ruling over the vastly different "others" who outnumber you eight-to-one is like riding the back of a tiger (or a lion in Africa, I guess). You can't get off, but you can't stay on either. It ends in bloody tragedy either way.Replies: @Southfarthing
I just looked up Portuguese Mozambique:
“During the ensuing war of independence, [the force fighting the Portuguese] received support from China, the Soviet Union, the Scandinavian countries, and some non-governmental organisations in the West.”
That’s a good summary of the ideology that caused the current state of affairs to come into being.
But, even without them, could you have seen other viable alternatives in Mozambique, Rhodesia or RSA? In the long run, the rule of a few Herrenvolk over the much more numerous Helots is not sustainable... which is why I think the leftist elite whites in America who support the mass importation of their Vandal-Gothic cannon fodder from the South is a mistake in the long run, even for them.
The unfortunate (for you) truth is that most people do not want to be left alone. They want to form connections with others, they want to live among those who share their values, not tiptoe through a landmine of vibrant cultural mores. Singapore may well be a clean, well-lighted city-state, but who cares? I for one do not wish to live thousands of miles away from families and friends so that I can enjoy fiber-optic Internet and plush restaurants or whatever ridiculously shallow convenience recommends it to you. Do you have any concept at all of heritage or community? Does life for you boil down to some sort of beep-boop sensory activation?
It's a rhetorical question--I know the answer is "yes". It's autism produced by mass society.Replies: @Twinkie
I meant left alone by the ever-pervasive state, powered by the I-know-better-than-thou-how-thou-shalt-live leftist urban elites.
I am a communitarian conservative. My ideal existence is the small town Southern life where I have both space and a close-knit community. My family, friends, and neighbors matter the most to me on this earth (though God comes first, thankfully He has not asked me to forsake them for Him, and I hope He never shall).
Maybe you should get to know just a wee bit more about another commenter and what concepts he understands or prizes before engaging in philosophical umbrage of a stranger.
As I wrote before, it’s a lovely place to VISIT (capitalization added for the reading comprehension challenged). I did not suggest that you or anyone else, who are not Singaporean, fly over there this minute to live forever.
As for “who cares,” just because you don’t care doesn’t mean it doesn’t offer some lessons for the rest of us. Well-run, clean, prosperous, and egalitarian societies always have something interesting to learn for outsiders. It is also something of an object lesson in comparative state-building and other related cerebral pursuits with real life consequences.
For someone who alleges to care about “community” and “heritage” (and thus, presumably, tradition), you seem to lack basic manners about conducting a conversation, even on this blighted, anonymous Internet.
The fact that a handful of cosmopolitan entrepot cities have enjoyed financial success has no implications for how to properly govern a sprawling, geographically diverse, culturally balkanized mess like the modern USA. The differences in size, history, and complexity are insurmountable. If this isn't blindingly obvious to you then you may not be as conservative as you imagine. You also don't help your case with comments like "of course we'd rather not have any immigration, but if we HAVE to open the floodgates then we might as well give preference to high IQ Asians and Jews", which is both wrong (I'd take white Europeans over Chinese any day, they're much closer culturally and genetically to the core US population) and seems to eagerly invite the interpretation that this is what you actually want to happen.Replies: @Twinkie
I am a communitarian conservative. My ideal existence is the small town Southern life where I have both space and a close-knit community. My family, friends, and neighbors matter the most to me on this earth (though God comes first, thankfully He has not asked me to forsake them for Him, and I hope He never shall).Maybe you should get to know just a wee bit more about another commenter and what concepts he understands or prizes before engaging in philosophical umbrage of a stranger.As I wrote before, it's a lovely place to VISIT (capitalization added for the reading comprehension challenged). I did not suggest that you or anyone else, who are not Singaporean, fly over there this minute to live forever.
As for "who cares," just because you don't care doesn't mean it doesn't offer some lessons for the rest of us. Well-run, clean, prosperous, and egalitarian societies always have something interesting to learn for outsiders. It is also something of an object lesson in comparative state-building and other related cerebral pursuits with real life consequences.
For someone who alleges to care about "community" and "heritage" (and thus, presumably, tradition), you seem to lack basic manners about conducting a conversation, even on this blighted, anonymous Internet.Replies: @JJ, @Udolpho
Lol at this triangulating clown:
For a “communitarian conservative” you sure do wax rhapsodic about dat exotic cuisine and the cleanliness of foreign sidewalks. Here I thought it was a pons asinorum of conservatism to be unimpressed with mere commercial success or superficial orderliness (degenerate Hollywood can achieve the former, draconian Pyongyang the latter). Do Singaporeans have deep roots, a traditional culture, and a strong sense of local identity? That would impress me, but you’re conspicuously silent on the subject (apparently it’s less important than how their food tastes). Or is it really just a shiny, sterile playground where transnational elites can enjoy their bottle service and top-shelf prostitutes?
The fact that a handful of cosmopolitan entrepot cities have enjoyed financial success has no implications for how to properly govern a sprawling, geographically diverse, culturally balkanized mess like the modern USA. The differences in size, history, and complexity are insurmountable. If this isn’t blindingly obvious to you then you may not be as conservative as you imagine. You also don’t help your case with comments like “of course we’d rather not have any immigration, but if we HAVE to open the floodgates then we might as well give preference to high IQ Asians and Jews”, which is both wrong (I’d take white Europeans over Chinese any day, they’re much closer culturally and genetically to the core US population) and seems to eagerly invite the interpretation that this is what you actually want to happen.
Yes, there were (and continue to be) a lot of useful idiots in the West.
But, even without them, could you have seen other viable alternatives in Mozambique, Rhodesia or RSA? In the long run, the rule of a few Herrenvolk over the much more numerous Helots is not sustainable… which is why I think the leftist elite whites in America who support the mass importation of their Vandal-Gothic cannon fodder from the South is a mistake in the long run, even for them.
I am a communitarian conservative. My ideal existence is the small town Southern life where I have both space and a close-knit community. My family, friends, and neighbors matter the most to me on this earth (though God comes first, thankfully He has not asked me to forsake them for Him, and I hope He never shall).Maybe you should get to know just a wee bit more about another commenter and what concepts he understands or prizes before engaging in philosophical umbrage of a stranger.As I wrote before, it's a lovely place to VISIT (capitalization added for the reading comprehension challenged). I did not suggest that you or anyone else, who are not Singaporean, fly over there this minute to live forever.
As for "who cares," just because you don't care doesn't mean it doesn't offer some lessons for the rest of us. Well-run, clean, prosperous, and egalitarian societies always have something interesting to learn for outsiders. It is also something of an object lesson in comparative state-building and other related cerebral pursuits with real life consequences.
For someone who alleges to care about "community" and "heritage" (and thus, presumably, tradition), you seem to lack basic manners about conducting a conversation, even on this blighted, anonymous Internet.Replies: @JJ, @Udolpho
lol no. You are an Internet-produced pseudo-con who thinks high speed Internet and a Sharper Image catalogue are the summit of human civilization. In your current state of ignorance you should do less talking and more listening, but isn’t it always the way that people like you do the opposite?
The fact that a handful of cosmopolitan entrepot cities have enjoyed financial success has no implications for how to properly govern a sprawling, geographically diverse, culturally balkanized mess like the modern USA. The differences in size, history, and complexity are insurmountable. If this isn't blindingly obvious to you then you may not be as conservative as you imagine. You also don't help your case with comments like "of course we'd rather not have any immigration, but if we HAVE to open the floodgates then we might as well give preference to high IQ Asians and Jews", which is both wrong (I'd take white Europeans over Chinese any day, they're much closer culturally and genetically to the core US population) and seems to eagerly invite the interpretation that this is what you actually want to happen.Replies: @Twinkie
Not only is this ad hominem needless, discourteous, and cowardly, it is also indicative of a weak argument and a feeble mind.
For a traveler and a visitor, good food and clean streets as well as the lowest level of criminality in the world are a welcome change from the banditry and chaos found in many other parts of the world.
Furthermore, comparing Singapore’s advanced technological successes (they actually produce things) with a parasitic Hollywood and an inordinately murderous and tyrannical Pyongyang betrays both utter ignorance of facts and logic.
Singapore is a relatively recent, multi-ethnic creation. Compared to many of its contemporaries, it has done a wonderful job of forging a highly educated, law-abiding, egalitarian, and exceptionally civilized people.
There are plenty of countries in the world with “deep roots, traditional cultures and strong senses of local identity” that are absolutely hellish places on earth. I’ve been to quite a few. While, as a communitarian conservative I do value those things strongly, I do not in exclusion to all else. Freedom and affluence do matter, because otherwise life can be oppressive and brutish. These factors have to exist in balance – having all the traditions and local identities in the world isn’t going to make a group of people happy and productive if they are mired in repressive poverty.
Have you been there?
Singapore is extremely egalitarian with a very low Gini coefficient. Singapore’s leaders take great care to keep costs of living low and standards of living high. Imported liquor and wines are extremely expensive and prostitution is virtually non-existent. Maybe you were thinking Macau or perhaps Hong Kong. I know them Chink cities all sound the same.
Yes, it IS blindingly obvious, thank you. You suffer from a serious case of unwarranted self-regard, if you think you are the only one who understands that lessons of city-states cannot be translated easily (if at all) to large nations such as ours. Obviously.
Still, as a multi-ethnic creation that has done very well in the past several decades, there ARE lessons to be learnt. To think that it offers nothing is not to being conservative, it’s being ignorant and obtuse.
In any case, for all that, I would not live in Singapore. Like I said, I am a gun-toting, Christ-worshipping Southerner. I will not live under repression, even a mild, benevolent one. But for the vast majority of people in the world, who care more about security and being able to eat everyday, people can and generally do FAR FAR worse than Singapore, which is utopia compared to much of the world outside Western Europe, North America, and East Asia.
My case? Am I on trial here? Are you my judge? What gives with the immediate assumption of social and intellectual superiority?
For the record, I never wrote EVER “we might as well give preference to high IQ Asians and Jews,” so perhaps you can kindly stop making up things in your mind that you wish I had said like a good straw man.
For the record, I prefer highly reduced immigration, legal or otherwise. As a lesser of the evils, IF and only IF there were to be large immigration, I’d prefer that we selected for high skills and IQ as Canada and Singapore do (for example) over our current policy of importing low skill, low IQ folks. That doesn’t mean I prefer “Asians and Jews.” Hardly. If we can get a bunch of conservative Englishmen to come over here in droves, I’m all for it. Alas, that’s not on the offer in real life.
Now, it’s clear from the “white European over Chinese any day” remark, you care about race and nothing else. So you’d inflict on your neighbors immigrants who are Albanian or Russian criminals over a Chinese engineers? I have no love for Chinese immigrants personally, but I think most rational white Americans would pick the latter as their neighbors than the former.
Now, if by “white,” you mean “wogs begin at Calais,” then of course that’s a different conversation.
“Now, it’s clear from the “white European over Chinese any day” remark, you care about race and nothing else. So you’d inflict on your neighbors immigrants who are Albanian or Russian criminals over a Chinese engineers? I have no love for Chinese immigrants personally, but I think most rational white Americans would pick the latter as their neighbors than the former.
Now, if by “white,” you mean “wogs begin at Calais,” then of course that’s a different conversation.”
Albanians are not seen as White on Stormfront and neither are Chechens and Bosnians.