On the other hand, Harvard has traditionally functioned as the Smart Money when it comes to college admissions methods, so it’s not crazy to think that Harvard had crunched some numbers that suggested to them that making admissions tests optional would not lower alumni giving in a generation.

How could it not lead to lower levels of alumni giving? Just diversifying the student body alone does that, as non whites give at much lower rates than whites. Maybe they have determined they have so much money in the endowment now they don’t need to maintain alumni giving at the current boomer rates it has been at for the past couple of decades.

Yes, that’s it! By all means, become parodyable mediocrities! People: do *not* interrupt the bad guys if they are determined to kill themselves.

America’s in for a number of hard years no matter what we do at this point. It’s a question now of how quickly we can bounce back… and be stronger than ever. Putting our current elite out of power may not be sufficient to do everything. But it is necessary to get anything going, perhaps more than any other single factor.

In a world where DIE is a gold rush, Harvard has gotten itself into the business of cranking out the shovels, picks, and denim to sell to to the sucker prospectors known as corporate America

On the other hand, Harvard has traditionally functioned as the Smart Money when it comes to college admissions methods, so it’s not crazy to think that Harvard had crunched some numbers that suggested to them that making admissions tests optional would not lower alumni giving in a generation.

Yes but over time those deep-pocketed donors will become fewer and fewer as the genuine, not perceived, quality of a Harvard education declines toward meaningless.

They must be thinking they’ll just have to fail a lot of students who aren’t up to the work. It’ll be messy, but some few will prove able enough for a soft track education (which Harvard and other biggies will consequently have to broaden to accommodate them), and that will be that.

But they’ve made their bed, and so course grades will have to go soon enough–I wonder if they considered how the disparity in achievement between blacks and others is sure to widen? Do they think this will be ignored, or the source of more demagogy?

No, I don’t think this is thought-out at all. When we see “smart” people doing stupid things it’s either because 1) they are controlled or 2) they aren’t using their intelligence because they’re not allowed.
I say 1 and 2 are both applicable.

Harvard is flying by the seat of its pants.

I think Freddie DeBoer has this right;(his bias against ‘corn-fed Wyoming boys’ notwithstanding) https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-the-fuck-do-you-trust-harvard

Hahvad is going to do what Hahvad thinks is in its best interest. They were never constrained by testing. It’s a long con, as usual with academia in general and the Charles River University in particular.Anyone who thinks they’re going the CUNY open admissions route is deluded.

Moreover, while there are surely some administrators who keep an eye peeled toward alumni contributions decades in the future, in the Current Year they may well be outnumbered by those seeking to Do The Right Thing.

And of course a very big part of that is to be seen Doing the Right Thing. Maybe even all of it.

Pretty smooth move. No more grousing Asians or articles called The Myth of Meritocracy.

This is an interesting perspective, but I’m not sure if it is true. Big institutions often do things for dumb reasons these days. In some ways, wealth generation these days seems more related to coding, crypto, and other cognition-intensive functions than ever before.

I say:

Wealth generation? Don’t talk about wealth generation! Wealth generation? — are you kidding me?

ASSET BUBBLES!

Central banker shysterism and monetary policy extremism have once again inflated asset bubbles and Ivy League arseholes at Harvard and Dartmouth and Columbia and Princeton etc. and other “big institutions” are just benefiting from the asset bubbles created by the sleazy dirtbags at the Federal Reserve Bank.

Apologies to Jim Mora. Mora was at Stanford in 1967 coaching linebackers. Stanford has about 38 billion dollars in their endowment loot pile.

The Mormon money-grubber Mammonites have a 100 billion dollar loot pile courtesy of the monetary policy extremism of the Fed.

QUANTITATIVE TIGHTENING NOW!

IMPLODE THE ASSET BUBBLES NOW!

The author of this email received a 1511 score out of 1600 on the SAT, maintained a strong high-school GPA, had extracurriculars (played basketball, etc.) and was the son of a prosperous Harvard grad. And I emphatically didn’t require scholarship \$\$. I wasn’t accepted.

In fact, the large majority of Harvard legacies – over 65% — are rejected. Of course that’s a smaller number of rejects that are seen in the larger pool, but still a hefty number.

Thus I’m highly skeptical of the idea that most, or even many, legacies are spoiled half wits. Rather, I suspect (as should the heredity advocates who populate the Unz Review board!) that more children of Harvard alums have a high shot of G-loaded IQ and a bunch more inherited cultural capital to boot. Overall, even allowing for the occasional dummies, they’re gonna be a bright group.

Call Harvard’s move what it is. Admitting blacks without poisoning the overall SAT score of a class is THE reason for this stunt. (Harvard’s really not too interested in Hispanics, but some of those kids might get a boost too.)

Ironically, the yammering about “legacies,” and the edge they have in admissions, has always been the preferred comeback of blacks who are sensitive about the unfair edge admissions offices give THEM. (“What about those rich white layabouts whose daddies went there?”) Oh, and imagining the advantages of Harvard sons in the admissions process plays to the populism of the envious generally.

Other colleges have different motivations, that aren’t exclusively designed to mask black test scores. Once-prestigious, now fading schools — like Seven Sister colleges that lost their brightest applicants when the all-male Ivies went co-ed — can’t attract as many high-SAT applicants as they used to, and don’t want mediocre published SAT averages to further detract from their fading brand.

But race is the core fixation of the Regime cadres who run these places. These days, it always is.

Big institutions often do things for dumb reasons these days.

Recently I read in the New Yorker a profile of Internet Food Celebrity Alison Roman. This woman was seemingly on her way to being the next Ina Garten or Nigella Lawson (who are both getting old). She had a popular recipe column in the NY Times, etc.

Then, she was being interviewed by some other blog and in the interview she blurted out that two other domestic bloggers had, in her opinion, sold out. They were pushing dreck with their names on it just to make money. Maybe this was a fair criticism, maybe not.

BUT, this was the problem – both of the people she criticized were Asian women. Big mistake. Never punch UP on the diversity totem pole, only punch DOWN. Roman is a white woman. She could have criticized white men all she wanted, maybe even white women to some extent. Martha Stewart is getting old and is a legitmate target for punching. Wolfang Puck is a sellout who puts his name on frozen pizza and inferior Chinese made small appliances sold on QVC. Bourdain used to make jokes about stuff like this before he killed himself. Criticize away! But criticize sacred cows? NEVER.

Anyway, the next morning she woke up to find that she had been CANCELED by the internet. Her NYTimes column – CANCELED. POCs are our majeste and lese majeste is a serious crime.

Roman will never quite get back to where she was before, but she still has a following of people who like her recipes and are not insane like the overaged excitable teenagers now running the NY Times. She has set up some sort of subscription program and is now making more off of her direct subscriptions than she was before writing for the Times. It really doesn’t take much. If you have 5,000 subscribers willing to pay \$50/yr, that’s more than you’d be making at the Times and 5,000 subscribers is nothing. 50,000 subscribers and now you are making serious bucks.

What I mean is: elite colleges want to recruit tomorrow’s powerful, and they don’t think the smart kids from humble backgrounds who rely on the SAT are going to be it. They might be wrong but it does feel like the “cognitive elite” has been getting a bit less cognitive recently

“Cognitive elite”. Do you mean “People who make non-refusable offers”?

If every single student got covid, likely not a single student would die—fatality rate is low in college age students, and we are all vaccinated, and will soon be boostered. Last year, 3 freshmen (in a class of about 1100) killed themselves. The science is irrelevant to them

— Marc Novicoff (@MarcNovicoff) December 18, 2021

Plus, everybody while have had omicron, the hybrid cold/sarscov coronavirus, by mid-February. Cannot be avoided.

South Africa has already gone through its omicron wave which is now subsiding. Practically nobody died.

NYT isn’t about money, it’s about influence.

I am happy she did OK though.

I think it was Malcolm Gladwell who presented two organizations: 1) the Elite Modeling Agency, whose models had to be gorgeous walking in the door; 2) the US Marine Corps, which took any recruit meeting acceptance standards and built him into an elite warfighter. Gladwell’s contention was that the Ivies sold themselves as the USMC of universities, but in fact operated as the EMA of universities. In other words, parents were sold on the notion that the Ivy would indispensibly prep their students for Mahogany Row, whereas studies found that students _admitted_ to Ivies were just as likely to be successful if they graduated from non-Ivies. This was 15-20 years ago. Wokeism and the Web have further altered (if not smashed) the paradigm. Hard to see the concept of the elite university lasting late into the 21st century.

Steve seems to think that “Institutions” still make decisions based on, at least some level of logical-reasoning.

I think Steve is dead wrong.

I think it implies that they are either, malicious, high on Wokeness, or both.
I’ll go with both.

So Harvard is the “anti-Hogwarts” and getting rid of the SAT will not allow BIPOC Harry Potters to accede to their morally rightful role in the pantheon of mad skills & great wisdom, instead it will just allow Harvard to select BIPOC Bush Junior into the club of the self-styled masters of the Technicist Society when it damned feels like it. For a fee.

Sounds about right.

I would have liked to bang a chick in the clubhouse too.

Mother Harvard will still target children of the fabulously wealthy. It only takes a few whales, as the casinos call them, to carry their endowment.

It may simply come out to the fact that the size of classes at Harvard have remained static while the population of the United States has more than doubled over the same time, and so there are more children of more elites applying for the same number of spots. With a standardized test which yields a numeric score, it’s more difficult to hide what you’re really up to in the admissions office. This is more the case if you’re getting bombarded with applications from Asian grinders with good standardized test scores, and you don’t want a student body consisting mostly of Asian grinders with good standardized test scores. They used to say that the hardest part of Harvard was getting in, and now the hardest part of Harvard may be being born into the right family since getting in isn’t that hard in such a case.

OT:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_J._Daley#Death_and_funeral

Forty-five years and about forty-five minutes ago, Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago was pronounced dead at his doctor’s office, after suffering a major heart attack while on his way to lunch. I already was well past my twentieth birthday– and he had been mayor for nearly a year and a half, before I even was born. Growing up in ‘The Region’ (a.k.a. Northwest Indiana), he was virtually a daily television and radio presence, in my young life.

Jews, who love to donate money and tend to make lots of it, are being outcompeted by leaps and bounds by Asians on tests. Tests also “discriminate” against blacks, and the “let’s hand the blacks an extra 400 points” or whatever strategy is getting too obvious. Hence, let’s get rid of tests.

In any case, do you really need people all that smart to be the English, Psych, Anthropology, etc. majors at Harvard? No, you don’t, because those fields like so many others are woke wastelands where clever AI can turn out term papers of equal quality with that woke Jewish kid from Brookline.

Smarts just don’t matter anymore in many academic areas. Only fealty to the narrative matters.

According to this, there are 92 majors at Harvard. For a whole lot of them you don’t have to be especially smart.

https://www.collegevine.com/schools/harvard-university/majors

Do any of these Harvard history majors strike you are especially above average in intelligence? Two Jewish males, a black(ish) female and a Chinese female. It’s from 8 years ago, but still used on the Harvard website. My guess is the quality level is considerably reduced now even from then.

Making the SAT optional allows Harvard to hide the massive SAT disparities between the East Asian grinds that it doesn’t want to admit, and the lower SAT groups it would prefer. Namely: (a) white jocks; (b) legacies; (c) children of VIPs and the super-wealthy; and (d) Blacks and Hispanics generally.

As a bonus, it inflates the “average” SAT score of admits, because only the highest scorers will submit their scores.

Harvard: “Meritocracy is dead. Long live Nepotocracy!”

or is it

Harvard: “Meritocracy is dead. Long live Wokocracy!”

“I think Freddie DeBoer has this right;(his bias against ‘corn-fed Wyoming boys’ notwithstanding) https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-the-fuck-do-you-trust-harvard”

If I’m getting the gist of Freddie’s argument, it’s almost like a Noam Chomsky analysis of college admissions always working to serve the institution’s financial interests?

Yeah, while that may have been explicit in the mind of a 2005 MBA serving Harvard’s fiscal interests, then, I think that’s wrong, now. Nobody can admit HBD, Murray and Steve are right (Jews/Nobel Prizes/Income the true clincher, since their upbringings in 20th Century sometimes infamously culturally worthless and squalid–certainly not worth 15 points,) and people/institutions clearly being driven insane. No new evidence supports their position. They just see relentless data and outcomes showing Murray and Sailer (and Fred Reed on Jews, Sailer doesn’t want to alienate some of his core constituency!) are right. Which is a crime to think, which they themselves would probably almost be willing to put in writing, in those exact words, with low-to-little self-awareness. They’re being driven insane and the grotesque contortions to be expected, I ‘spose?

so course grades will have to go soon enough

Grades have already gone years ago. Harvard is the home of the rubber-stamp A. The median mark is A-.

In other words, almost every Harvard grad can claim to be a “straight-A Harvard grad”.

The elites want to protect their legacy admissions (get their mediocre kids in) while at the same time assuage their guilt regarding people of color. Win-win! As an added bonus, lots of unqualified people of color to compete with those dumb legacy admits.

It means Asians will be greatly disadvantaged, because Harvard will no longer be needing them to prop up their median test scores. Since only those with high scores will continue to send in their scores, their median SAT will be even higher than before, keeping their ranking up. Meanwhile, getting rid of the SAT requirement this past year led to a huge increase in applications, dropping Harvard’s admission rate to 3.43%, lower than Stanford’s for the first time in almost a decade. Lastly, this helps to obscure the already massive preferences for blacks, Hispanics and whites over Asians.

Three birds one stone, what’s not to like?

I think SAT/ACT will be completely gone in 5 years, even for international students, especially since there’s so much cheating going on in their overseas’ test sites. Extracurricular activities, GPA, recommendations and AP exams will become much more important.

1600* and murdered by stupid, greedy people. I can’t resist a good metaphor.

* And that was before the 1995 SAT “recentering,” which gave everyone 80 points to mask the fact that students were getting stupider. Thus, a true 1600.

Smart white guys should go to trade school and avoid this nonsense. The smarter of those can start their own business down the line. The Ivy League needs to die so something new can be born to replace it .

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/grading-on-the-harvard-curve

They have \$53B in assets, tax-exempt status, and lots of inertia still left in the brand. Like the Episcopal bishops sitting on top of a pile of bequests and deeds of trust, they don’t give a shit because they don’t have to. Consequences are so far in the future there is zero reason for any current stakeholders to modify their behavior.

Kind of describes, well, every prominent public and private institution in present-day America.

Whatever happened to the Asian lawsuit against Harvard? I believe it is in front of the SC now. Making the SAT test optional might give them more options to continue discriminating if they lose the case.

Harvard’s prestige derives from being a pipeline to managerial elite positions, not from maximizing alumni donations. For example, regularly funneling grads to the Supreme Court and major positions in the judiciary garners more prestige than having a tech billionaire grad.

As a pipeline to the managerial elite, Harvard has influence over the makeup of it by the types of students it admits and promotes, but not total influence or control. It also has to respond to wider society and trends in the composition of the managerial elite. If, for example, there is a strong push from wider society to promote more blacks into the managerial elite, then in order to maintain its status as the pipeline, Harvard has to in turn itself promote black students.

Ultimately, this is why Harvard has to discriminate in favor of some types of students against other types. The composition of the managerial elite is in large part determined by political and social concerns. Asians are a small minority concentrated on the West Coast and parts of the northeast. Asians being significantly overrepresented in managerial elite positions, not just mid-level or more ordinary white-collar work, would cause social and political discontent from wider society and groups that don’t feel adequately represented. And blacks significantly punch above their weight in terms of political and social influence and power. Harvard would not be able to maintain its elite pipeline status by admitting more Asians and fewer blacks if there are external influences and pressures that push the managerial elite into a different composition.

In other words, almost every Harvard grad can claim to be a “straight-A Harvard grad”.

I’d wager that not too many years from now, they’ll all claim they are LGBTQIAPP+ Harvard grads.

The author of this email received a 1511 score out of 1600 on the SAT, maintained a strong high-school GPA, had extracurriculars (played basketball, etc.) and was the son of a prosperous Harvard grad. And I emphatically didn’t require scholarship \$\$. I wasn’t accepted.

Perhaps Harvard accurately pre-discerned your inability to differentiate between an “email” and a blog comment, and decided accordingly 😝. [Sorry; couldn’t resist.]

Your points regarding legacies vs race in the Ivy League are strong.

Seems fairly obvious to me- Harvard sees itself as the gateway to the American Elite.

And in the future, that doesn’t include you or anyone like you. Get used to it.

Roman will never quite get back to where she was before, but she still has a following of people who like her recipes and are not insane like the overaged excitable teenagers now running the NY Times.

Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
Why’d they close the Au Bon Pain ???

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/1/16/au-bon-pain-closes/

America’s in for a number of hard years no matter what we do at this point. It’s a question now of how quickly we can bounce back… and be stronger than ever.

Bounce back? LOL.

We’re going to have to kill and expel millions upon millions of people–parasitic elites and lumpen proles–to even begin to return to the sort of human and cultural capital and capability we had when i was a kid.

Yes, there’s a lot of ruin in a Harvard, and they’re burning through it just like the nation as a whole.
I’m willing to bet their vague reassurance that consequences are safely in the long future will be thwarted, when they find the progress of decline is not linear but sudden, when a critical mass is reached–happening slowly and then quickly, as they say.

Factor in the immense effort they expend to hide consequences, which means the extent of decay will always be much greater than we are told. They’ve spent so much energy and effort promoting their worldview they’ve become considerably self-deluded. I suspect the fall of Harvard will come with shocking rapidity.

A lot of us old boomers are out here clinging to respectability. We’re also clinging to the related notion that institutions haven’t fundamentally changed, and the people running them still both know what they’re doing and are limited by morality.

It’s like the game where you win by being the last guy to let go of the pole. People of a certain age will cling to the respectability pole while being doused with the cold water and pricked with the needles of outrageous truth for a long time. As we see.

Faith can be fatal.

I agree, but with this proviso:

It’s like the game where you win by being the last guy to let go of the pole. People of a certain age will cling to the respectability pole while being doused with the cold water and pricked with the needles of outrageous truth for a long time. As we see.

Faith can be fatal.

I do not have faith. I do have standards.

We’re going to have to kill and expel millions upon millions of people–parasitic elites and lumpen proles

“Tell me what is on your mind” 😉 …

Seems to me that Harvard obviously believes no one can take market share from their graduates in the key areas it dominates by actually insisting on a much higher correlation of XZY graduate implies very smart than Harvard’s correlation as it degrades over time. Sadly they may well be correct in that–assuming that they can use the state to squash any competitors that focus on only having very smart students and a rigorous level of education and thereby certifying to employers—these guys are smart and will get things done. Those ideas are racist, don’t you know?

The University of Tokyo is the Harvard of Japan. You know they are not degrading themselves this way. Same for the top universities in most other Western nations.

Depends what you mean by “isn’t hard”. Now relative to the general population they have an advantage, but something like 3 out of 4 legacy applicants still get rejected. I would call that pretty hard.

I don’t think that they are doing this for legacies – the number of legacies is fairly constant (even declining because legacies have fewer and fewer kids). They are doing this to #1 undercut future lawsuits from Asian grinders, just as you say, and #2, give the admissions office more flexibility to admit their favorite NAM pets, SJWs, etc. If there are no test standards, then it’s harder to prove racial discrimination against Asians. You, Mr. Kim, just don’t have that je ne sais quoi that Harvard is looking for. Your SAT’s are 1600? We don’t care. SATs mean nothing to us.

My uneducated guess is that this is about keeping Asians out rather than about letting blacks in, but I don’t have an Ivy League education, so what do I know?

It’s a political bet. Elites are kind of transracial in their own concept of themselves, since they see themselves as a breed apart from same-race non-elites.

They think that in order to remain masters of institutional power in the USA they have to favor those they believe will constitute the next dominant political group, i.e. “people of color,” and then through social assimilation and intermarriage they will capture that group’s elites, thereby ensuring that they and their descendants keep hold of the reins. It’s dynastic strategy.

It’s easy enough to breed a new cognitive elite even with relatively meager founding stock (e.g. Mormons, who recruited largely from the lower classes of England), but it is getting harder and harder to get into the elite in the first place, so it’s better to assure one’s place in it in the first place

I kind of doubt it will work in the long run, but that’s for reasons other than their transracial efforts, which are only a symptom of the deeper flaw in their philosophical outlook.

Namely: (a) white jocks; (b) legacies; (c) children of VIPs and the super-wealthy; and (d) Blacks and Hispanics generally.

(a) jocks of any color
(b) legacies – nothing has changed here that would increase the need to eliminate the SAT. Legacies get some weight but not overwhelming weight.
(c) yes, if they make a “suitable” donation in the case of the wealthy. Nowadays in the millions. And a VIP has to be pretty VIP – being the son of some minor actor or politician isn’t going to do it.
(d) yes, especially blacks because unless you ignore SATs it’s hard to get enough blacks. Up until now they have been filling in with Obama type blacks with white mothers, Caribbean and Nigerian blacks, etc. but they would really like to have more authentic ADOS blacks like Moochelle and the only way they can do that is by discarding the SAT.

Remember that 80s movie Class? Andrew McCarthy plays a poor kid from Pittsburgh who gets into an elite all boys prep school. While there, he admits to his dorm roommate (Rob Lowe) that he cheated on the SATs by buying a copy of the test with all the answers. Then he has an affair with an older woman, who he later finds out is Rob Lowe’s mom. He swears to never see her again but she begs him to see him one more time just to talk, but they end up in bed anyway. Rob Lowe follows him as a prank to surprise him, but discovers the truth and is enraged. Then there is an investigation into possible cheaters on the SATs. Rob Lowe could, in his rage, rat out Andrew McCarthy but doesn’t. They both make up after an awkward physical altercation. All is forgiven by Lowe. In spite of cheating, McCarthy still graduates first in the class and Lowe is second. Everything ends in a very lighthearted manner. They are both going to Harvard! Hurray! No consequences. I’m not sure exactly what the message is here. Is it a criticism of the SAT system? Is it about the importance of gaining loyalty to one’s contacts, even beyond their family loyalty, to get away with cheating? A strange movie but I couldn’t help be reminded of it when hearing about the new Harvard policy. McCarthy’s character probably didn’t need to cheat because he is a smart guy. Lowe’s character is incredibly rich and wouldn’t necessarily need to go to Harvard.

Robert Plomin’s research in the UK came to similar conclusions about the value of elite schools like Eton and Harrow. Basically they don’t have any extra value over other schools. Genetics is far more important in determining success than all other factors combined.

You, Mr. Kim, just don’t have that je ne sais quoi that Harvard is looking for.

The already do this on an individual level but test scores provide one final tiny piece of objectivity that can be challenged in the aggregate.

You are 100% correct that this is an attempt to get rid of that and make the process 100% subjective overall.

Yes, that’s the point of the deBoer essay I cited above. The more impenetrable and opaque the process, the happier Harvard is. That allows them to do whatever they want -which they were doing anyway,of course- without pesky lawsuits and suchlike.

wealth generation these days seems more related to coding, crypto, and other cognition-intensive functions than ever before.

How much of that is related to IQ and how much to traits like conscientiousness? Obviously IQ is important but good coders seem to be able to sit and focus for extreme periods of time on things it would drive the rest of us crazy.

They might be wrong but it does feel like the “cognitive elite” has been getting a bit less cognitive recently…

Not to mention noticeably less élite.

…students aren’t going to spend an extended winter break in social isolation no matter what the college policy is.

Hey, it worked for these guys:

The Annus Mirabilis of Sir Isaac Newton

Albert Einstein’s Year of Miracles

Jimmy Webb had a similarly meteoric period, but wasn’t in quarantine or exile, just in L.A.

I can’t pretend I have a good insight into what’s happening there; whether it’s an MBA’s optimization for return on ? or that in the future picking out the (economically?) elite won’t involve intelligence i.e. like there will be a rich aristocracy and they can hire disposable brain power from stinking india or chyna like they’re doing now and merely rely on family lines and social relationships. I would tend to think it’s more mundane. If admission is not contingent on anything measurable then it’s like using a magical incantation to pick the students and there is nothing a wronged unaccepted kid or journalists or politicians can do to complain. Like the orientals etc are complaining now that they have higher scores on tests but aren’t accepted. I personally believe that no asians etc be accepted into our universities only real Americans.

It’s very not reassuring to hear you say that.

The author of this email received a 1511 score out of 1600 on the SAT, maintained a strong high-school GPA, had extracurriculars (played basketball, etc.) and was the son of a prosperous Harvard grad. And I emphatically didn’t require scholarship \$\$. I wasn’t accepted.

Are you sure about that “1511” SAT score? I’ve only ever seen scores in nice round ten point increments. And this is a comments section, not a collection of emails. Yours is a really strange post

SATs are bullshit anyways: https://highschool.latimes.com/port-of-la-high-school/we-all-sat-down-for-nothing-why-the-sat-is-useless-for-college-admissions/
http://pepperdine-graphic.com/standardized-tests-dont-measure-intelligence-or-ability/
https://www.africaresource.com/sci-tech-a-business/genetics/528-race-intelligence-and-iq-are-blacks-smarter-than-whites

How could it not lead to lower levels of alumni giving?

Maybe government money is now the big deal, and big foundations. The latter are obsessed with DIE. These give mega-gifts, not a few thou here and a few thou there.

One of my fellow law alumni, Stan Barer (’63), died a week ago, a few months after winning the 2021 Gates Volunteer Service Award (named after You-Know-Who’s father, also a U.W. School of Law alumnus):

https://www.washington.edu/giving/recognition/gates-volunteer-service-award/

You’re right in your assessment of DeBoer’s rant. He’s pretty much on-target, except for that absurd crack about the Wyoming flyover boy.

Harvard certainly doesn’t need to recruit Wyoming boy. Even small-population states have at least a smattering of acceptable minorities who can easily be sourced in order to fulfill the ‘students from every state!’ brochure claim.

To wit: my brother has a friend who hails from a West African country. He’s a medical doctor, and practices in a hospital in a small city in South Dakota that’s just across the Missouri River from Sioux City, IA. He’s got two kids: one’s at Harvard, the other’s at Northwestern.

Well that’s one of more hopeful pronouncements I’ve heard in a while.

I wait with breath bated for the jumping off phase. Though what might replace them does give pause.

I wish I could find some way to bet on the proposition that within 5-10 years, firms that rely more on hiring from elite colleges will underperform those that hire more broadly, other factors held constant.

Lucy Kellaway has a clue:

Seventeen of Britain’s 100 biggest companies are sensible enough to have no values at all – or at least none they care to disclose on their websites. Maitland suggests these companies are laggards and that they should get in line. Values, the report says portentously, are the “next frontier”.

Absolute nonsense, and I have facts to prove it. I asked a man in our statistics department to crunch some numbers and compare an index made up of the 17 values refuseniks with one made of 83 who are toeing the line. He has come back with data so conclusive that I hope it will stop all windy talk of value statements forever.

Over the past 10 years the 17 valueless companies have outperformed the others in the FTSE 100 Index by about 70 per cent.

No real worth in all those corporate value statements

In other developments, rather than compete, Minnesota and Wisconsin have teamed up with Iowa to generate iSteve content together. Look out for residents of the Kwik Trip states being Vic Morrowed:

77,000+ Ceiling Fans in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin Recalled Due to Blades Flying Off

One of the “Asian” women she criticized (mildly) is Marie Kondo, who is Japanese. That’s not even Asian-American. Kondo is a citizen of a powerful country. The idea that Kondo is in any way part of an oppressed minority is nuts. Not even the woke think of the Japanese that way.

Wokism is sheer insanity. But I repeat myself.

Faster, please.

When I see the behavior of America’s ruling elites, I think of someone on LSD, dancing high on a rooftop, shouting “I can fly! I can fly!” and then jumping off…

To a chorus of Unzers below shouting, “Do it! Do it!”

Something missing from that list.
Can anyone (else) help me out?

I stopped reading at “corn fed Wyoming boys”. Guy just showed what a clueless idiot he is.

Wyoming is an arid ranching state. Those boys are eating beef, antleope, buffalo, or elk.

Japan is a thorn in the side of the Woke.
Fortunately we have very few Japanese.
So the Woke can ignore the dilemma.

The Japanese do everything the Woke despise, and are (not incidentally) civilized and successful. But they are nominally POC, hence unassailable.

img : dailystruggle.jpg

There’s a good joke about the LSD-flying connection. It goes something like this:

How high was he? Did he share the elevator to the top floor with a flock of pigeons? Birds don’t go to the roof to fly. Maybe, try taking off from the ground first and see how it goes.

Anyways, LSD is a good time. It might be a government psy-op as well. Not sure. Happy holidays.

Great post, Dennis; thanks.

It suggests we’re headed back to the pre-war days when the slots were filled by legacies and other children of the wealthy, only with a layer of conspicuous “diversity” this time around.

Moreover, while there are surely some administrators who keep an eye peeled tow y those seeking to Do The Right Thing.

The biggest threat to Harvard will be Asians replacing ”’whites”’. Most of the many Asians I have known all expect to get their kids into school based on grades. Some are Google types but the vast majority are doctors and other highly educated professionals that can easily pay the tuition who are quite aware that their children need to get test scores hundred’s of points higher than the black kid’s to get into the top schools. Once they set their sights on Jews, they will be replaced just like what Jews are did to real whites. The threat to Harvard won’t be the buildings or it’s legacy, it will be to the current ‘elites’ that inhabited it for about 50 years or just long enough to fuck it up for the people who founded it.

To wit: my brother has a friend who hails from a West African country. He’s a medical doctor, and practices in a hospital in a small city in South Dakota that’s just across the Missouri River from Sioux City, IA. He’s got two kids: one’s at Harvard, the other’s at Northwestern.

It’s always like that. After all the bleating about disadvantaged & under-served minorities that’s designed to put you in mind of ghetto and barrio kids, the bait-and-switch turns out to have the vital characteristic of clubbability.

Crushing it.

Yes, there’s a lot of ruin in a Harvard, and they’re burning through it just like the nation as a whole.

I had an idea recently when I was working out in the rural part of my county.

You know the biblical verse about “storing up your treasures in heaven”?

It’s as though the American people did a lot of that, and while these treasures can’t be stolen or corrupted, they can certainly be squandered, and that’s what is happening now.

Don’t worry. Rich kids who go to Harvard are dumb. The stereotype fits like a glove. Don’t let anybody try to sell you that contrarian oh they’re geniuses because they’re rich bill o’ goods. They are dumb as dishwater. Riches make you that way. (Not to mention your trust-fund Dad marrying the dumb blond. Sheesh, it’s a wonder you can tie your shoes.)

I went to one of the super-elite schools, and even in STEM (which I did), it is definitely the EMA not USMC model.

But here’s the thing, if you want to make money, the access these schools give you is incredible. And it’s not some nebulous “networking” either. McKinsey, Goldman, the high-po pipeline jobs at FAMGA etc. did multiple presentations every year at my school. They recruited you through the guys they had hired the year ahead of you. They send guys to do talks at your clubs. They all interviewed huge numbers of people, every year. They hired numerous interns for the summer before senior year, which are essentially guarantees of a full-time job unless you commit a felony that summer. And on and on.

Is it possible to get a partner-track or equivalent job at one of these places coming out of The University of Nebraska? Nothing’s impossible, but it’s extraordinarily unlikely even with a 4.0 in physics and 1600 on your SATs.

All the people scratching and clawing to get into the highest-ranked university they can are not idiots who somehow don’t understand that it’s materially worthless.

I don’t like the fact that the America of 2021 works this way, but it does.

Our worst possible outcome is not our system’s collapse, but its perpetuation, that this decline has no bottom.

Actually, in Japan, high school is the hard part, where they work themselves till their eyes bleed. Once they get themselves into college, it’s a breeze vacation.

Test-optional means very little. Colleges still tell you that they want applicants to have a set of completed high school courses consisting of things like Algebra, Geometry, and Trig, along with Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. All with passing grades, of course.

A decent grade in the math and science courses are a proxy IQ test.

These requirements automatically rule out most blacks and many Hispanics. You can get rid of the SAT, but as long as you leave the science and math course requirements intact, the firewall against dummies is still standing.

No one is getting into Harvard without taking and passing these courses. Get rid of SATs is just an attempt on the part of colleges to pass the buck and make high schools responsible for keeping minorities out of colleges, not college themselves. Getting rid of the SAT is the act of gutless, swinish, college administrators.

AnotherDad broken record here, but whenever the whole college admissions topic comes up, it’s important to remember that
the most important “what is to be done” is not “fixing” it somehow or another but working around it–breaking the college grift/stranglehold on America’s middle class.

Open up the learning/credentialing/capability-signaling system with competency exams, from basic literacy/numeracy through all sorts of subject matter.

The wins are huge:
— save middle class families lots of money
— removing a check/block on their fertility
— less b.s. around crafting college resume; improved family life
— removing the college debt anchor around young people
— earlier eligibility for normal adult life–housing/marriage/family
— higher fertility
— providing a “roll your own” path visible for kids from an early age
— engages HS students who want to “get on with it”
— autonomy and empowerment–people “own” their future directly; not dependent on institutional hoop jumping
— limits/contains/rolls-back leftist indoctrination in universities, especially corruption of impressionable young women
— higher/more eugenic fertility
— better marriages, quality of life for all
— contains/breaks/diminishes a huge reservoir of minoritarian institutional power
— with limit/competition potentially better, more accurate academic product (though not holding my breath on this one)
— constrains/limits/rolls-back growing number of parasites in the “higher ed biz”
— turfs out leftist parasites … some might even get real jobs and become more based

College is no longer required to “learn stuff”. Most academic learning is by reading–and no longer even requires access to a college library. And college is certainly not needed to learn the skills required for general white collar employment.

The wins from breaking this system are huge. It’s well past time, “conservatives” actually start taking on the left and making life better for their “marriage with children” constituency–i.e. the nation.

Speaking of Harvard, how did the Asian discrimination lawsuit go? Also, years ago, Ron Unz was ragging Harvard to stop charging tuition, it was only 3 percent of revenue, while causing undue hardship to many students. There was an alumnus vote, over 380,000 still-living grads were to be offered the opportunity to vote, binding or not. Anyone know what happened with THAT? The rest? Who cares? Harvard admissions have nothing to do with any of us.

Unless they’re going to drag us down with them.

Yes, there’s a lot of ruin in a Harvard, and they’re burning through it just like the nation as a whole.
I’m willing to bet their vague reassurance that consequences are safely in the long future will be thwarted, when they find the progress of decline is not linear but sudden, when a critical mass is reached–happening slowly and then quickly, as they say.

Factor in the immense effort they expend to hide consequences, which means the extent of decay will always be much greater than we are told. They’ve spent so much energy and effort promoting their worldview they’ve become considerably self-deluded. I suspect the fall of Harvard will come with shocking rapidity.

I expect you are right. However, Harvard’s huge endowment provides a safety net. If it is academically ruined, but still has most of its \$53 billion, it will have the chance to rebuild.

OT: “Orthodox rabbis call on US universities to suspend diversity programs.”

“A coalition that represents more than 2,000 Orthodox rabbis on American public policy issues is demanding that American universities abandon their “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) efforts in the wake of a report showing that DEI leaders often promote antisemitism.”

https://www.foxnews.com/us/rabbis-us-universities-suspend-diversity

I’m curious to see who’s going to win this one.

This will backfire. Increasingly, the White male cognitive elite have the ability to bypass traditional gatekeepers.

Savvy right-wing gamers regularly get more views than CNN, even with blatant censorship. Cryptocurrency will undermine both the Globohomo financial system and the US dollar.

Harvard is accelerating this trend. Honestly, I hope more schools follow suit. It will destabilize the whole system.

Professor Scott Aaronson favors standardized testing, getting this anonymous comment saying that it is racist, and citing Steve Sailer as the proof!

It is a good example of the illogical argument of anti-testing.

It’s true that the colleges like to tout their geographic reach. And for sure, you have a better chance applying from Wyoming than you do from CT with the same credentials – there is a lot more competition coming from CT. But they get like one person from Wyoming (never mind that Wyoming has as many people as certain neighborhoods in NYC) so it doesn’t hurt the chances of anyone from CT.

Harvard, Yale, etc. are basically sitting on so much money in their endowments that reality does not matter any more. Same holds true for most of the Silicon Valley monopolies. They have embraced insane ideologies because market competition no long exists. Democrats in California have embraced utterly insane policies because there is zero political competition. The Pentagon has not faced a real military threat in 30 years and is increasingly sounding like the human resources department of Google.

Institutions that face no competition will self destruct by embracing increasingly insane and impractical policies. The United States likely cannot correct its course because the elites operate in an insane echo chamber. Even a challenge from China is likely not enough to cause the elites to revise their ways.

Merely a “Strong” GPA caught my eagle eye as an uh-oh; too cagey by half. I myself use cagey language when I am characterizng my record of having dated Fredericks of Hollywood lingerie models. But count your blessings that Harvard rejected you, and thanks for a fine post.

But having tech billionaire dropouts like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg — now that’s prestige!

It’s like a bonus for Harvard on top that cements its status.

The Google guys are in that upper level of tech wealth, and their tech product was better than Microsoft and Facebook. They did their undergrad at Michigan and Maryland. Even if Gates and Zuckerberg weren’t associated with Harvard, the success of the Google guys wouldn’t have raised Michigan and Maryland’s prestige towards that of Harvard because of Harvard’s dominant position in supplying graduates to high level positions in major institutions.

They are doing this so they can take more Jews? I don’t think so – they’ve got enough already and their SATs are pretty good and not in need of being round filed.

Freddie deBoer, progressive Marxist hereditarian/race realist, said this on SubStack:

Some cornfed doofus from Wyoming with a so-so application gets in over a far more qualified kid from Connecticut because the marketing department gets to say they have students from 44 states in the incoming class instead of 43 that way, because admissions serves the institution. How do you people look at this world and conclude that the problem is the SAT?….

You think Harvard gives a single merciful fuck about poor Black teenagers? Are you out of your goddamned minds?

It was in their best interest to use the SAT before, so they used it. Now it’s in their best interest to have even more leeway to select the bumbling doofus children of the affluent, and you’re applauding them for it in the name of “equity.” Brilliant….

“Equality”?!? Harvard only lets in 2000 kids a year! You really think carving out space for 50 more Black kids among them, if that actually even happens, is going to result in some sort of quantum leap forward for the average Black American?…

To the extent that any Black students are added to the mix by these policies, it’s going to be the Jaden and Willow Smiths of the world. If you think Harvard has any actual, genuine desire to fill its campus with more poor American-born descendants of African slaves you are out of your fucking mind….

… getting rid of the SATs is just another way for them to consolidate total and unfettered privilege to choose whoever is going to make their pockets even heavier, and that they are and will always be in the business of nominating an aristocracy that will deepen inequality and intensify exploitation no matter what kind of faces they happen to have….

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-the-fuck-do-you-trust-harvard

It implies that their endowment has been taken from them (hahhahahhaaaaaa) and, that they just gotta get bodies to enroll, even if said bodies, must wear masks and be “socially” distant from other 18 yr olds!!! – 18 year olds with raging hormones raised by f*cking Karens and Johns who voted for FJB Biden! pffhhhhh! WTF! Who is ever going to go to f*cking Commie (especially rich white kids) dickless Harvard?, 1619 Project stooge and haters of whipped-ass, white privileged folk?….Harvard, ever again, when it is no longer cool, no longer relevant!!!!!!!!! To go to fucking CCP of Harvard. Don’t go to College-it’s all shit. All elite Universities are corrupt and beholden to CCP and Child Trafficking – yah, you read it here first.

I said a lot, duh, but, I have been angry for decades over the myopia of so-called, smart people – get over yourself.

It’s funny, even the people flying coach believe that somehow the people in first class will escape death if the plane crashes into a mountain. This American plane is going down with no survivors.

It’s like that ‘Poison Gulch’ short story /play by Fuller; “I’ll say it’s tough,they kicked us sissies out last night.”

The Overpriced University (OPU) world has a longstanding reputation for admitting mediocre alumni and faculty brats. Add to this, the ever increasing admissions of blacks and hispanics who are radically unqualified and morally unfit—which according to Steven Farron, began already in the 1950s—and you have an ongoing disaster. It’s a complete politicization of credentials and hiring based on them, an anti-meritocracy.

Back in the late 1980s, I got a job in a boiler-room operation at Columbia. Our job was to call up alumni for donations who had graduated years before—in some cases over 50 years before—but who had never donated a dime, and beg them for money.

We did surprisingly well. I was their second-best fundraiser. Number one was a very nice, dirt-poor, Christian black kid who was just out of high school. He sounded borderline retarded, but the alumni showered him with money. (He raised several times as much in do-dough than me.) But no matter how many thousands of dollars you brought in during a shift, you still got only the same \$6 an hour….

It’s funny, even the people flying coach believe that somehow the people in first class will escape death if the plane crashes into a mountain. This American plane is going down with no survivors.

The Chinese could unleash a plague that wipes out white people–or if they screw up, everybody.

But the general trajectory of the US is not “crash into mountain” it is slumping toward Brazil. And the rich people in Brazil live well.

II. I quit when they fired the Polish (lapsed) Catholic I’d befriended, who had sought to give us as many hours as possible, and replaced him with a smarmy, Jewish, Columbia MBA who sought to cheat us on our hours. (E.g., if you didn’t reach anyone before 8 P.M., he said you’d have to go home. Since a “full” shift only ran from 6-9:45 P.M, and nobody was home or picked up the phone before 8, that forced us to lie on our records.) Mark looked like a somewhat restrained version of a Nazi caricature.

Well, I met a cute little, blue-eyed, blonde, Columbia coed, a junior transfer from the U of Wisconsin, and fell in love. (A Nice Jewish Girl.) And she loved me, too, after her fashion. Apparently, I’d complained that Columbia students were overrated, because once, while we were walking on campus, she ran into a girlfriend and said, among other things, “I always know when I’m talking to an alumni brat, because”—flashing me a dirty look—“they’re so dumb.”

Because of Griggs, employers can’t give interviewees an IQ test. Will they simply accept hiring OPU incompetents as the cost of doing business in a world of pervasive discrimination against high-IQ Whites? Who will they have to rely on to get the work done competently?

It can–and will–be both.

I find it underwhelming when people drop f-bombs, under the delusion that it makes them sound more eloquent.

You’re assuming that Harvard’s goal is to maximize alumni donations, and I’m not sure that’s right. Income from the endowment is dwarfed by tuition, which is driven by the access a Harvard degree gives you to the halls of power. And such access will only become more crucial as our system becomes more corrupt.

Income from the endowment is dwarfed by tuition

Other way round, no?

OT – Government Education Department favors segregating refugees, doesn’t want them mixing with local children:

“Such integration may harm the cultural and family roots of the students and create a unification of cultures in a manner that would erase and blur the identity and the community from which they come.”

Oh…………….this is in Israel? Never mind.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-education-ministry-issues-opinion-against-mixing-refugee-and-israeli-students-1.10477367

‘…On the other hand, Harvard has traditionally functioned as the Smart Money when it comes to college admissions methods, so it’s not crazy to think that Harvard had crunched some numbers that suggested to them that making admissions tests optional would not lower alumni giving in a generation…’

On the other, other hand, is Harvard run by the same people it once was?

If not, it doesn’t follow that merely because it made intelligent choices in the past it’s making intelligent choices now. The inhabitants of inner city Detroit may well have once been productive, honest factory workers who could be counted on to walk through the factory gate on time, every morning. That doesn’t mean that you could count on the current residents to behave similarly.

It’s funny, even the people flying coach believe that somehow the people in first class will escape death if the plane crashes into a mountain. This American plane is going down with no survivors.

I don’t know. Throughout history, the rich generally skate during bad times. How many truly rich people ever fall victim to the mob? Other than a few monarchs, I can’t name any.

Her death, like the others on Challenger, was a tragedy, but she’d have made an even greater contribution to the world if she’d had four high-IQ babies.

Two hypothetical sisters. One very bright cookie becomes a doctor, works right up to retirement – no children. One maybe not quite at that level, nurse, marries, becomes a stay at home mum and raises four children – two doctors, one academic, another nurse. Who contributes most?

This. Spot on.

It implies the test was already nothing more than an empty formality, but it was getting too obvious that they were ignoring it, so they came up with some BS about why ignoring it is good.

I’ve been to Eton…the value is that it’s Eton

Eton is the difference between Modern Architecture and Classical Architecture…Both are buildings but one is just BETTER

If they’re so incompetent, you’re welcome to single-handedly defeat them at any time. Instead, they seem to be defeating you. Are you even more drugged up?

In Reality those aren’t elites, and half the time they aren’t jumping off the rooftop. (Wokist are.) They’re telling you they’re jumping precisely because it makes you underestimate them. They’re telling you they’re elite to disguise the movements of the real elite.

The biggest threat to Harvard will be Asians replacing ”’whites”’.

I think it’s really that simple. Asians have been able to totally dominate in any system that either puts a premium on test scores (e.g Caltech) or that used test scores without (at least openly and explicitly) putting a heavy thumb on the scale for race (e.g UC system). And we just had the big Asians v. Harvard lawsuit to force them to start admitting Asians at rates like Caltech and the UC’s. This is just a way to keep Asians out by removing the most objective evidence that they are being discriminated against, using the political cover that it will help the Blacks! and browns.

SATs are bullshit anyways

First of all, welcome. The comments do not have enough diversity, and a new African American participant will help to broaden our horizons.

Secondly, you didn’t too very well on the SAT, did you? It’s still eating at you?

Thirdly, from one of your links …

… African born blacks residing in western countries as a group possess IQs that are between 5 points and a full standard deviation (15 IQ points) above that of whites living in these countries. So the median IQ for African blacks residing in the west should be about 110 …

… Thank you for bringing this research to our attention, and I see that, despite your reservations about the SAT, you nevertheless accept IQ as a real thing. We need to get these new, unbiased tests on the market as quickly as possible. The UC system alone has \$100 million burning a hole in its pocket that will go to the first provider of non-biased tests that they can use for admissions.

I find it underwhelming when people drop f-bombs, under the delusion that it makes them sound more eloquent.

True, but the guy is really good. He’a a progressive Ph.D. who’s read all the IQ literature and reluctantly accepts that blacks are dumb and that all attempts at remediation haven’t worked. He’s sort of like Paige Harden, but more radical in that he thinks that a society-wide Marxist revolution is the the only solution.

Another good thing about the guy is that, as a sort of race realist from the far left, he really infuriates the left.

Here are the titles of some of his Substack posts:

— Your anger at the SATs is actually anger at broader social conditions which the SATs reveal

— None of the arguments against the SAT are correct, or even internally coherent

— Essays, too, are income stratified – because affluent kids actually are better prepared

— Grades (and all other educational data) are race and income stratified too, because those gaps in preparedness are real, so what the fuck are we even talking about here

— Educational testing is in fact remarkably valid, reliable, and predictive

— Why eventually ability reigns

AnotherDad wrote:

broken record here, but whenever the whole college admissions topic comes up, it’s important to remember that
the most important “what is to be done” is not “fixing” it somehow or another but working around it–breaking the college grift/stranglehold on America’s middle class.

You should read McWhorter’s current Woke Racism. He has a threefold plan to save Black America:

1) Legalize drugs (mainly to take the profits, and gang violence, out of the drug trade)

2) Teach all children phonics

3) Break the obsession with college as the route to a good life

This would of course help non-Blacks as well.

AD also wrote:

College is no longer required to “learn stuff”. Most academic learning is by reading–and no longer even requires access to a college library.

The colleges have implicitly conceded the point with their “remote learning” during the lockdown.

By the way, the Ivies are already moving towards a new lockdown because of omicron — on the face of it absurd, given the low lethality of omicron.

A personal note: I have a PhD in elementary-particle physics from Stanford. And then I needed a job. I ended up working on error-correction systems for satellite communications and hard-disk applications and am co-inventor on various patents in that field.

The important thing is that nothing I studied in college — undergrad or grad school — had any particular relevance to the field I ended up working in and earning patents in.

Bizarrely, I had actually taught myself some of the relevant math in high school (Galois fields) out of curiosity (and, of course, from library books).

Yeah, between the Internet and a decent university library you can teach yourself pretty much anything that does not require physical, hands-on practice (i.e., not surgery and not flying an airplane).

McKinsey, Goldman, the high-po pipeline jobs at FAMGA etc. did multiple presentations every year at my school. They recruited you through the guys they had hired the year ahead of you. They send guys to do talks at your clubs. They all interviewed huge numbers of people, every year. They hired numerous interns for the summer before senior year, which are essentially guarantees of a full-time job unless you commit a felony that summer. And on and on.

That’s a key aspect beyond the EMA vs USMC aspect, which itself is just binary. Thank you!

Hmm, maybe so. Back-of-the-envelope gives me just a couple hundred million tuition and the endowment is some \$50 billion, which should yield several billion a year on average.

But maybe we’re comparing apples to oranges here. Tuition income is a flow where the endowment is a stock that’s built up over many years. How much in contributions comes in each year is the question.

and replaced him with a smarmy, Jewish, Columbia MBA who sought to cheat us on our hours.

Can you find the manager on Linkedin? What did he end up doing?

Lol, it’s always the prissy academics who need to show their daring and their powerful street credentials. There are exactly two words approved for this usage: the f-bomb and the s-bomb.

Please don’t use the c-bomb and whatever else you do, never the n-bomb.

DeBoer is a self-described Maxist who’s in the middle of being red pilled. A few prejudices remain.

I think Freddie DeBoer has this right;(his bias against ‘corn-fed Wyoming boys’ notwithstanding)

Most of the sensible things DeBoer says about education were said by Charles Murray in Real Education, as in: People vary widely in cognitive ability, and America’s educational system insanely pretends that everybody can learn at a high level, and so is a terrible fit for the actual American population.

You can read Real Education for free here:

https://emilkirkegaard.dk//en/wp-content/uploads/Charles-Murray-Real-Education.pdf

In his The Cult of Smart book, DeBoer does not mention that Murray had pointed out the same things that DeBoer was pointing out.

Murray had sensible recommendations for reforms, along the lines of what Another Dad says here. DeBoer has crazy suggestions.

DeBoer also stressed that, while cognitive variation is obviously largely genetic, he is absolutely sure that BLACKS ARE NOT GENETICALLY MORE STUPID THAN WHITES, NO!, NO!, NO! (I have a vague impression that he isn’t doing this so much anymore.)

I don’t like the fact that the America of 2021 works this way, but it does.

Are you emphasizing that America should have changed by now or that you have never liked such a system even before the present time?

Because what you so accurately describe is the way the system has always worked.

Even if the latter raises two carpenters, an engineer, and a welder she has contributed a vast amount more . But your point is spot on.

Please don’t use the c-bomb and whatever else you do, never the n-bomb.

OT. My local FLAGSHIP STATE UNIVERSITY has at least two copies of this book, one of them in the Black Diversity Nook:

Any non-black assistant professor who says the title out loud, no matter the context, will probably be canned in short order and will certainly never get tenure.

Tenured faculty might be able to hold on to their jobs, if the university can’t find a pretext to fire them.

Imo people are really freaking out about colleges dropping SATs because it’s a very public bet, made by people whose whole business is ensuring proximity to power, that raw intelligence is going to count for less than it did in the 20th century’s aspirational meritocracy.

It’s not a bet. It’s a declaration.

Correct. This isn’t about changing their current objective admissions practices, this is about making it easier to hide their current subjective admissions practices.

Harvard doesn’t need a low-ceiling IQ test to identify geniuses. There are other much more reliable signals for genius at all levels of genius e.g. doing well at the International Math Olympiad for extreme genius, doing well regionally on the debate team for lawyer-level intelligence. Harvard will be able to accurately identify the exact number of geniuses it wants to matriculate.

What going test optional does is hide the lack of genius of its BIPOC alumni. If you view Harvard’s admissions decisions through the lens of “trying to create the greatest number of most wealthy and powerful alumni,” hiding the intellectual mediocrity of Harvard’s Black product helps that end.

2) Teach all children phonics

Going totally off the rails here but I’ve never understood the reasoning not to do this. Arguments to the contrary have always struck me more as an attempt for the proponent to make himself sound smart and clever than actually advocating a method of education.

For crying out loud, I taught myself to read when I was 4 years old precisely because I had been taught the sounds of the words and one day a light bulb went off in my head and I realized that stringing the sounds of the letters together creates words. I can still remember than moment vividly. The word was ‘CAT’ and I was sitting in a little red school desk in my bedroom playing with plastic letter shaped magnets.

Any exceptions – ie “Cough” etc – I learned individually, but most words in English (and other non-eastern languages) are phonetic. Why does any educator anywhere think otherwise?

Exactly what I think. Harvard is a research university and there is no basic research without grants, and that means US Military grants. I knew a brain researcher at Columbia, basic research, and the entire lab was funded by the US Army, including the super-automatic Espresso machine.

I’ll bet Harvard is number one in government grants for research, the the rest of the ivy’s in close follow.

Have we all forgotten…future orientation is ‘White supremecy”!! (My response when finding this out…remember the Smithsonian exhibit…was…”okay…explains a lot”)

While there may still be people who consider future giving from alumni, they are being slowly but surely pushed out. The DIE crew is displacing competency at all levels of administration. Remember the Oberlin disaster? There wasn’t a single member of that administration that wasn’t at the left tail of the curve.

And the DIE crew looks at the endowments as a lottery winner looks at a big payout…who cares about the future…it will never run out.

DeBoer’s Marxist critique of the Left’s racial insanity is like a 18th century doctor saying, “You’re never going to cure that patient’s fever with witchcraft. Let’s bleed him instead. We have to do what the science tells us!

It’s a bet but they intend to fix the horserace so that they are sure to win it.

They simply understand that objective scores, measures and benchmarks are now increasingly seen as carrying the unpleasant taint of racism or some other ism, take your pick.

“You can’t make Harvard “fair!”
(Fred de Boer)

Ya think?

A Harvard grad (Stanford…Yale…Princeton etc.) pissing and moaning about societal inequality is a demonstration of cognitive dissonance on stilts.

Harvard’s just trying to get ahead of the Supreme Court-mandated end of affirmative action in 2028. It’s a race against the clock. The Supreme Court decided Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, and Justice O’Connor’s majority opinion gave a 25 year time period for narrowly tailored affirmative action in university admissions to remain constitutionally permissible. In 2028, it will have been 25 years since Grutter, and 50 years since its predecessor, the Bakke decision.

The majority opinion in Grutter states: “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” This timeline was approved by the five-justice majority, but also joined by Justices Thomas and Scalia, who otherwise dissented. In other words, the holding in Grutter, that affirmative action in university admissions will end in 2028, was approved 7-2.

Harvard’s administrators know this, and presumably want to get ahead of it by moving to a more vague admissions approach now, so they aren’t accused of “reacting” to what will be characterized by the mainstream media as the “sudden” end of AA in 2028.

The inevitable outcome is that private universities are going to be able to select whoever they want to. It’s impossible to craft a working admissions policy that satisfies anybody and so DOJ is going to throw up their hands and say “Just select whoever you want to.”

I don’t know how long ago you applied, but (until recently) the average Harvard SAT was 1520. And keep in mind that in order to take all the blacks and jocks and special admits (donors and celebs), etc. that they want and still keep the average at 1520 (in order to protect their US News ranking), they had to keep the rest of the class (white people and esp. Asians), even including legacies, well ABOVE 1520. The 75th percentile score for Harvard was 1600. If you were to look at the dot graph (SAT vs GPA) of admits/rejects for whites with no hook other than legacy, you would have seen that it was unsurprising that you didn’t get in.

I think part of what is going on here is that they got sick of the tyranny of having to take so many boring cookie cutter Asians with 1600s in order to keep up the 1520 average and still satisfy their appetite for blax. Now they can have it both ways – take all the blax that they want AND take all the “interesting” SJWs that they want too. Not you, of course, but say some white or Asian girl who has done some politically active things but “only” has a 1510.

On the other hand, Harvard has traditionally functioned as the Smart Money when it comes to college admissions methods, so it’s not crazy to think that Harvard had crunched some numbers that suggested to them that making admissions tests optional would not lower alumni giving in a generation.

Seems like a pretty clear case of pulling up the ladder behind you so no one can challenge your offspring’s position at the top.

You should look up the Gates Foundation funded pamphlet about eliminating “white supremacy” from math courses. I don’t think math courses will be a filter.

One of Harvard’s first graduates in the first graduation was a George Downing. He migrated to England and became Oliver Cromwell’s chaplain during the English Civil War. The Prime Minister lives at Number 10 Downing Street. Cambridge has a College funded by George Downing’s estate. Downing College Downing masterminded the English invasion of New Amsterdam and the renaming of it as New York after his patron Prince James Duke of York. He also was behind the Royal Navy attacking Dutch slave forts in Africa in order to take over the trade.

Depends what you mean by “isn’t hard”. Now relative to the general population they have an advantage, but something like 3 out of 4 legacy applicants still get rejected. I would call that pretty hard.

Perhaps 3 of 4 legacy applicants get rejected, but a 25% rate of admission to Harvard for any otherwise random population is way above average. In any event, it has been estimated that over 1/3 of any class in recent years are legacies, so these two facts are going to attract more and more marginal to below average legacy applicants on a “what the hell, why not try and see?” basis which further obscures the legacy applicant success rate. (There are no doubt proportionately more applicants with poor credentials who apply as legacies than there are in the general applicant pool). So, in other words, “not hard relative to any other identifiable population,” which is another way of saying it “isn’t hard.”

I don’t think that they are doing this for legacies – the number of legacies is fairly constant (even declining because legacies have fewer and fewer kids).

My guess is that even if the traditional WASP populations which populated Harvard in years gone by have declined in terms of children per family, Harvard has added more potential legacies through a generation and a half of race conscious admissions. We may in fact be seeing a double whammy of applicants who are both legacies and non-Asian minorities, which are probably irresistible to the Harvard admissions office if they have a pulse and can write their names in pencil within a half hour.

They are doing this to #1 undercut future lawsuits from Asian grinders, just as you say, and #2, give the admissions office more flexibility to admit their favorite NAM pets, SJWs, etc. If there are no test standards, then it’s harder to prove racial discrimination against Asians. You, Mr. Kim, just don’t have that je ne sais quoi that Harvard is looking for. Your SAT’s are 1600? We don’t care. SATs mean nothing to us.

I think there is a difference between a true wholistic admissions process, and one in which students two deviations below the mean are nevertheless admitted. Admitting applicant X who is non-Asian over applicant Y who is Asian even though applicant Y has a 20 point SAT advantage over applicant X is one thing (where applicant X excels in other quantifiable measures). Admitting NAM applicant Z who scored 200 points below X, and 220 points below Y is a different thing entirely.

Harvard and the rest are stuck between a Scylla and Charybdis of Asians and blacks. If the SAT reverted to the pre-recentering mid 1990s test which is more objective and therefore harder to “hack” with preparation, Asians wouldn’t have such a score premium, but the pool of high (high enough) scoring blacks would simultaneously shrink. (although Asians had a premium, Steve posted a graph that their scores really started diverging from whites around the time that the test became less of a proxy IQ test when it was recentered) They’d be able to justify admitting fewer Asians, but not justify accepting more blacks or as many blacks as they really want to accept (the future Obamas).

The question is For Whom is the SAT option Al at Harvard. If you’re an unconnected white guy from the Midwest, you’re going to want to consider it required. If you’re an Asian kid who isn’t the child of an oligarch, you’re going to need a 1600. Are you the child of a sitting senator or oligarch? Not required. Are you the charismatic valedictorian of an underprivileged charter school with somewhat disappointing SAT scores? Optional. Are you a white kid who excels at rowing or squash, who’s parents both went to Harvard and are partners at McKinsey, with impressive but not exceptional SATs? Optional.

I gave you a 6-year headstart Stephen. I told you it was coming, you had the opportunity to be #1 journalist internationally with this blockbuster story…

It’s too late now.

https://www.rt.com/news/543748-claims-macron-wife-transgender/

Maybe Harvard is at the forefront of the movement to get Western education back to its’ Socratic roots. Anybody is welcome as long as they’re rich enough to hang around the gymnasium bullsh**ing all day, and like being buggered.

I don’t know how long ago you applied, but (until recently) the average Harvard SAT was 1520. And keep in mind that in order to take all the blacks and jocks and special admits (donors and celebs), etc. that they want and still keep the average at 1520 (in order to protect their US News ranking), they had to keep the rest of the class (white people and esp. Asians), even including legacies, well ABOVE 1520. The 75th percentile score for Harvard was 1600. If you were to look at the dot graph (SAT vs GPA) of admits/rejects for whites with no hook other than legacy, you would have seen that it was unsurprising that you didn’t get in.

Any test with essay components cannot be said to be truly “standardized.” The test used to be a pure IQ test (i.e., a test of scholastic aptitude rather than scholastic achievement or preparation for the test). Go back to filling out bubbles with a #2 pencil to answer analogy questions and let the chips fall where the chips fall.

deBoer grew up in Middletown, Connecticut, the son of a professor at Wesleyan. The kid from Connecticut is him. DeBoer’s family situation was unusual in that he had lost both his mother and father by the time he was 16. His father re-married when deBoer was 14, to a divorcee with three minor children. Shortly thereafter, the man fell ill with cancer and on his death his widow put the four deBoer kids out on the curb. I think deBoer and his younger brother were taken in by friends.

Thanks. That was an interesting comment. This gives a flavor.

As an aside, I’m getting to the point where I’ve seen this line of thinking from Ashkenazim intellectuals so much that I now go on a “okay is this person a secret racist” safari every time I encounter a new one.

From the same commenter further down the thread.

I do not feel any more obligation to listen to the racial claims of HBD enthusiasts than I feel obligated to listen to the physics claims of the Time Cube guy.

I’m thinking a good response would be something like: “If you really want to be transgressive then how about using the n-word?” Any thoughts?

P.S. Seems to me “transgressive” is a word with much potential for creative usage in The Current Year.

The whole comment was tl:dr but there was no need after I read the intro sentence:

as someone who *used* to be all about classical liberalism, open debate, marketplace of ideas, insert other idea here – I’ve totally abandoned that entire way of thinking.

In other words, forget that whole Enligthenment, rationality, scientific thinking thing. Salvation is by Faith Alone. The only difference is that it’s not that Old Time Religion. Our new faith is Social Justice. If something advances Social Justice then it is good and must be accepted even if it is plainly false. If it does not advance Social Justice it must be rejected even if it is provably true. Don’t bother confusing me with the facts – my mind is already made up. Only racists are interest in unpleasant truths.

I would say the respective stock and flow variables are.

Harvard as a university.
Stock – facilities, reputation, staff
Flow – tuition, salaries, expenses

Harvard as a hedge fund (endowment).
Stock – endowment assets
Flow – endowment annual gains, contributions, endowment expenses

I think by that accounting the endowment dwarfs the university in both stock and flow (a key aspect of that is the expenses relative to income of both).

P.S. Any additions or corrections to that decomposition?

P.P.S. Any idea how much Harvard’s real estate assets are worth? Are they generally lumped into the endowment numbers? This page discusses the real estate assets of elite universities, but AFAICT does not answer either question.
https://www.reonomy.com/blog/post/ivy-league-universities-or-real-estate-kings

Interesting story but I’m not sure how that trauma led to his becoming a Marxist and anyway I’m sick of our society being led down blind alleys by impassioned trauma sufferers and people with borderline personalities.

As Yeats said:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

We need some sort of adult in the room to tell these people, “we are very sorry that you have had a rough life but we are not going to remake society just to make you feel better about yourself.”

Not sure what effect his family situation had on his social viewpoint. He grew up in a liberal household of a roughly conventional variety (both parents on the Town Democratic committee at one point, both congregationalists).

He’s actually the odd member of the left who has a fixed viewpoint, rather than a set of improvisations meant to justify the latest smash and grab, and that makes him worth reading. I merely note that he’s the kid from Connecticut to whom he’s referring (or perhaps his brother is). He has a research degree in what subject I cannot recall and from what school I cannot remember. His undergraduate schooling was at the quondam state teacher’s college located in the next town.

I’ve been running into him online for about 15 years now, starting from when he was in graduate school. He used to be a regular in Megan McArdle’s comboxes when she was at The Atlantic. Last I heard, he had an administrative position at a school in Illinois.

The colleges have implicitly conceded the point with their “remote learning” during the lockdown.

I don’t know how they can put the genie back in the bottle now. For a number of years now, you have been able to take courses online that were videotaped lectures from the best professors from Harvard, MIT, etc. No need to listen to some 3rd rate guy at your local community college with an impenetrable Chinese accent. No need to show up at a certain time in a certain place. In some cases, these courses even had online teaching assistants, graded papers and tests, etc. The cost was considerably less than for an in person course (or in some cases, just to listen to the lectures, free) . But they still wouldn’t give you ” Harvard college credit” or a ” Harvard degree” at the end.

They said, no, no, no, being online is not the same thing. You have to be on campus to get the full experience and interaction and deserve the degree. If the tests were online, it would be possible to cheat. Etc.

But now they are telling EVERYONE to be online and take their tests online. So what is their excuse now for not giving everyone a Harvard degree? Now they have to operate on the Veblen good/ Rolex business model – our product is valuable because it is rare (sold in relatively low numbers) and sought after as a status symbol and not because it keeps better time than a \$10 Timex quartz watch.

Now Rolex is still a big and profitable company (although note that there were dozens of Swiss watch companies that went out of business when cheap quartz watches became available) so Harvard will be OK too. But for the person who just wants to know the time (acquire learning) and not acquire an expensive bauble (a Harvard degree), there will be no going back.

The next step, as Another Dad has indicated, would be some sort of recognized and accepted testing program so that you could prove to employers that you, having sat thru the same colleges courses online, have the same level of knowledge as the “enrolled” students who sat thru the same online courses but paid the very expensive tuition.

i had a comment posted here that was taken down because steve is a lying jew.

funny looking at harvard class of … yearbook. all these pushy losers with so many details about themselves. my dad’s entry just has an address, which is false. harvard is so prole.

Who contributes most?

Of course the stay at home mum contributes most. In fact I would debate whether the stay at home mum is dimmer than the bright sister. The stay at home mum grasps what is most important in life.

My friend’s son took chemistry at the local HS and did as little as humanly possible to stay just above the A line. The teacher was fully aware of what he and other students were doing, and would provide the extra credit work necessary to keep them there. The truly failing students? No. But if you have any brains at all, you can get the A’s in all those hard classes without really understanding the material.

Bottom line: don’t trust the HS’s to do any practical sorting with their grading. The AP tests will have to rise in importance now. If you skated in Chemistry and Physics, those tests will reveal it.

F. dB is a stoner. Stoners cuss. F. dB cusses.

Don’t condescend. He’s acting according to his nurture and probably nature.

I find it underwhelming when people drop f-bombs, under the delusion that it makes them sound more eloquent.

My reaction exactly.

On the advice of a couple commenters i read the essay. (Thought some parts directly on target, some the guy himself not really grasping full spectrum of motivations at Harvard either.)

But mostly, because of the f-this, f-that, i thought “twit” and “pathetic”.

If you have an argument–make it. If you have some passion, you get one or two lines to pile on some adjectives of disgust or contempt (or even love and appreciation). But your argument is what needs to be compelling.

I find Steve Kirsch more interesting than Steve Sailer these days!

https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/ok-i-admit-i-was-wrong-about-the

I don’t know how they can put the genie back in the bottle now. …

Excellent comment Jack.

The Faucidemic has introduced to millions of people the capability for exactly the sort super-high scaling/efficiency in the edu-biz as we’ve seen in other industries. Why get 1-to-30 efficiency when you can get 1-30,000 efficiency? … And just hit “replay” next year? Or anytime?

Clearly what the schools want is “pandemic over”, return to normal. Working in their favor is, of course … kids. They would rather be in “school” … not the school part so much as being on campus with other boys and girls. Sex and even just beer and bullshitting are very compelling! (I’m sure your best memories of college, aren’t in the classroom.) We are a social species.

But a lot of people do not have the \$\$\$, to piss away on \$150k professors or even just adjuncts and the giant overweening administrative blob with 200 salaried “diversity professionals” … if there’s an alternative. A six pack at Safeway and Tinder or Hinge can cover the other part.

I don’t have the forecasting chops to “see” how this is going to work out.

Once again, everyone should remember that the entire Ivy League has the same number of undergraduates as the University of Central Florida. Changing how a few people are admitted to Harvard will have no effect on the vast majority of Americans.

The big issue is why does everyone assume that the dumbest person at Harvard is smarter than the smartest person at Georgetown and that the dumbest person at Georgetown is smarter than the smartest person at the University of Maryland.

Actually, female docs have more kids than the female average, something like 2.3 vs. 1.7, so it’s not really fair to posit a childless female doc as your hypothetical. Regarding the path taken by the kids of high-achieving parents, high achievement tends to alternate generations. But the essay and my post were not about fertility and contributions to mankind.

Somewhere in the universe there is a planet where white criminals outnumber black criminals!

The future big donors aren’t the people with the highest SAT scores anyway. The brilliant science and math students don’t become rich, they become professors. Sure, there have been exceptions such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. But the future billionaires are by and large the guys with charisma and “leader” personalities — qualities that, now and ever, could be recognized only through labor-intensive “holistic” assessment.

Taking the SAT may be optional but taking the mRNA vaccines is mandatory to attend Harvard. Yet despite a vaccination rate of 99% for faculty and students they have shuttered the school until February due to COVID

Further proof that getting 99% vaxxed will not stop the spread and will not get us back to normal. They will continue to mandate masks and vaccines despite the failures of masks and vaccines to stop the spread. Harvard has already mandated that students must get the Booster to attend school in 2022

….The next step, as Another Dad has indicated, would be some sort of recognized and accepted testing program so that you could prove to employers that you, having sat thru the same colleges courses online, have the same level of knowledge as the “enrolled” students who sat thru the same online courses but paid the very expensive tuition.….

This was the university system until circa 1880

I get deBoer’s criticism, but what I don’t understand is why Harvard is even concerned about donations at this point – its endowment in 2021 is \$53 Billion. I don’t think as an institution it is principally motivated by additional cash donations so much as being a kingmaker in government and industry.

Shitvard and Friends are relying on name brand prestige. I have never heard anywhere that the instructors at these esteemed prostitutions are exceptional and worth so much more than the proffs at a community college.

It’s easier to feel loyalty to your Alma Mater when the graduating class of the current year looks like you, and you are white. But it’s clear Harvard has bet the farm on admitting ethnic groups that are notoriously ungenerous. What I would like to know is what percentage of Harvard’s endowment is direct donation and what percentage derives from insider trading for Harvard by Harvard alums. I’ll bet the split is 20/80.

Interesting how little interest the Bernie/BBB 1.0 free college idea retained after it was watered down into free community college. No one ever much wanted to go to community college. And there was extensive evidence from prior tries (and the 15 or so states that have it now) that it won’t change much.
But free online education, hell yes. First we almost have it now. It just needs to be built out and semi institutionalized. It’s cheap enough to allow duplication/competition.
And with Covid, they can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. So hell yes.

Elite colleges’ days are numbered. Google is now granting 6 month certificates via Coursera in fields such as IT support, Data Analytics, Project Management, UX Design, Android development. The cost is a mere \$39/month. They expect 10 hours of study time per week. They said they will treat these certificates as the equivalent of a 4 year degree in their hiring, and have 150 companies lined up to do the same, including Deloitte, Target, Infosys, Snap, Verizon:

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/google-enters-higher-ed-big-way

The demise of elite colleges can’t come soon enough. The country will be better off for it. Education is not a competition. Kids should go to college to satisfy their curiosity for knowledge, not to join a country club, party for 4 years, learn nothing other than wokeness and propaganda then get a cushy job through their country club of alumni network.

I think the classical liberals got themselves in a jam when the US got so large that the limited government and self-ruling ideals became impossible. A government that takes in several trillion dollars in tax revenue a year, has nuclear weapons, and rules an entire continent is not going to be limited, and it doesn’t matter what you write into the Constitution. Over half the US population are net tax consumers, and when we need more money we just print it. From the perspective of the left half of the IQ distribution, whose votes are as scrupulously counted as yours, it’s just about divvying up the loot so we can get our neck tattoos.

It’s not sustainable, but that’s the way it is.

The other problem is the lack of a national religion/ethos. The Episcopalians and the Unitarians are long gone, our elites are downright irreligious if not atheist, and Wokeism is available and appealing. It’s easy to believe the human condition is infinitely improvable and equality of inputs yields equality of outcomes when you can just print all the money you need.

There has to be some limit to how far we can keep kicking the can down the road. I’ve known people that live way above what their income justifies by piling on debt and it works great for a while until one day the whole Jenga tower collapses and the repo man takes it all away. We as a society are like those people and one day the repo man is gonna come and tow that BMW away.

I don’t have the forecasting chops to “see” how this is going to work out.

Whoever can make this work has untold riches awaiting them. If you can take a \$200K college degree and turn it into something is just as acceptable to employers as a credential but that costs \$20K to deliver, you could sell that for \$40K or \$50K and people would be glad to pay it.

This is going to be more and more appealing to employers as the actual degrees are increasingly worthless as endorsements that you are actually smart. If anything, they are becoming negatives – hiring a LGBTY BIPOC with a studies degree is just asking to be sued or for them to attempt to form a union or present you with a list of “demands”, etc. Wouldn’t you rather hire some white or Asian male who has a substantive (online) degree in a real subject and tested (online) proven skills who is going to do the work and not cause you grief? And to the extent that big corporations are themselves becoming wokefests, they are only asking to be overtaken by lean, mean competitors.

Harvard wants to drop the Asian grinds so they can admit more geniuses like this guy:
https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/22/us/rapper-harvard-thesis-trnd/index.html

Obasi Shaw, son of two Harvard alums, submitted a rap album as his senior thesis, received an A-, and graduated summa with a degree in “English”.

What’s the subject of the rap album? If you think it’s Shakespeare, think again:

The album, entitled “Liminal Minds,” explores topics like race, religion and black identity. Drawing from his experience, Shaw focuses on the racial climate in America and how black people have to cope with their lives in his album.

He’s now working at Google. I wonder what he does?

The Affirmative Action to Grievance Studies to DEI gravy train now goes straight from HYPS to Silicon Valley.

Unless they’re going to drag us down with them.

We’re already at the bottom.

Using Harvard as a synecdoche for colleges, or even “fancy colleges,” tends to lead to very unrealistic conclusions.

Super-elite universities are probably the longest-lived brands in the Western world. They tend to outlast even nation-states by centuries. No insurgent brand is going to unseat Harvard, or likely the top 20 US universities. They’re just in an entirely different market than State U, never mind State College, never mind X Community College. Barring the full-on collapse of the American empire and Year Zero of the Revolution (which is, of course, not impossible), they will likely outlast the current constitutional regime.

Business model innovation usually starts at the lower end of the market and works it way up. It’s very likely that the majority of current American colleges will be transformed into something very different than they are today. In Cambridge, they will still be wearing fancy robes for graduation every May.

More concisely: people of privilege.

deBoer grew up in Middletown, Connecticut, the son of a professor at Wesleyan. The kid from Connecticut is him. DeBoer’s family situation was unusual

You got it right the second time. If a name begins with a lower-case letter, that should be capitalized at the beginning of a sentence, just as with common nouns. IMac is no exception. ISteve is neither.

…in that he had lost both his mother and father by the time he was 16.

Frans Johansson, the Thinking Man’s Gladwell, cites research that losing a parent when still young has a significant correlation with success. Lennon and McCartney “feel like a motherless child” because both were. Harrison was not. According to his sister, their father was a trade union man who lived long enough to come to the belief that the unions had gone too far.

In other words, a neoconservative!

People truly believe that liberal use of the F-word makes them seem edgy.

Which might have been true when Mailer and Kerouac (Joyce and Lawrence?) were trying to do it, but which now just makes them seem like overwrought girls on Reddit.

The University of Tokyo is the Harvard of Japan. You know they are not degrading themselves this way. Same for the top universities in most other Western nations.

Actually, in Japan, high school is the hard part, where they work themselves till their eyes bleed. Once they get themselves into college, it’s a breeze vacation.

For the highly select, that is.

It’s said that Ivy-baby Cornell* is the easiest of the eight to get into, but the hardest to get out of. With a degree, that is. (With a police record, sure.)

*Cornell U. was founded in 1865, several years after Cornell College in Iowa.

Slightly off topic: Giving is down significantly at Oberlin, a writer for the student newspaper stumbles onto the reason why, no one who goes to Oberlin goes on to make big money.

One thing this metric fails to take into account is the opportunity for different types of non-monetary success. Many Obies make significantly less money than graduates of our peer institutions, typically opting to go into academia or public service over higher-paying jobs in the private sector.

Students appear to favor raiding the endowment in order to get everything they think they deserve out of Oberlin. This is a long term problem for the school. Are they capable of moderating their image in order to attract sane students with earnings potential? Could they possibly attract corporate donations?

https://oberlinreview.org/25701/opinions/colleges-financial-struggles-exacerbated-by-lack-of-alumni-donations/

Any test with essay components cannot be said to be truly “standardized.”

The essay section was optional and scored separately and is now being discontinued. That being said, they have made efforts to make the 1600 point test less g loaded but not because of the essay.

I don’t disagree. I said that they still make Rolex watches even though a \$10 Casio quartz keeps better time. However, there were dozens of lesser Swiss brands that got swept away when cheap quartz watches became available. Same thing will happen with colleges. Yes the Ivies are safe but is a Boston College degree worth a quarter of a million? A Pepperdine degree? An Azusa Pacific degree? The low hanging fruit will be picked first.

There’s something I hadn’t considered too.

If the previously unthinkable happens and they manage to degrade Harvard to mediocrity while still sitting on a massive endowment (if the prestige spends faster than the money) things will get interesting. The institution might then enter a phase where it’s just passing that money out to the various black and lefty grifts. I know if I was a Bolshevik getting control of Harvard’s endowment would be like the Holy Grail.
That is, the worst case re Harvard is it becomes an Ivy League Tides Foundation.
Crazier stuff has happened.

Harvard closed the school after forcing all students and staff to get vaccinated and wear masks to protect their students from a virus with a fatality rate of 0.004% for college age students. The school is run by morons.

Meanwhile, BioNtech CEO says current vaxxes are ineffective against Omicron, Yet Harvard is mandating boosters against a variant which is no longer spreading. We call them vaccines. But it is clear after a year of use that the mRNA shots do not produce a robust long-term B- or T-cell immune response. What they do is drive up antibodies to the spike protein and those antibodies are extremely narrowly focused. But those antibodies don’t work against Omicron….Its spike shape is too different. They can’t attach properly, thus most of the Omicron cases are in the fully vaccinated and boosted.

also, regarding that tweet:
they don’t think the smart kids from humble backgrounds who rely on the SAT are going to be it.
How long has it been since they’ve thought that? Have they ever? It used to be they took it as both noblesse oblige and common sense to take advantage of the talent that was out there in the working class and provide for upward mobility. But it’s never been central, and it’s positively discredited under the new dispensation, because it still involves mostly white farm kids and the like, not blessed urban blacks.
By the way, for a time in the sixties civil rights crusaders worked up as a theme the great waste of racism was leaving all that black talent undeveloped and impoverishing the nation. They even had a phrase for this supposed misfortune, I forget what (not “a mind is a terrible thing to waste”).

Eton is the difference between Modern Architecture and Classical Architecture…Both are buildings but one is just BETTER

RIP Richard Rogers.

RIP Notre-Dame de Paris.

OT Biden polling worse than Carter, doing terrible among everyone but college-brainwashed whites, botching the Democrats’ Plan Latino through his sheer unlikeability and reliable incompetence, called “worst president ever:”
The funny thing about the “worst presidents” is that they’re normally highly qualified, morally good people overwhelmed by unique circumstamces or given a bad rap. Cavin Coolidge was a downright excellent president. Herbert Hoover was an orphan who taught himself engineering and solved several major problems including the repatriation of displaced persons after WWI. Richard Nixon was actually a fantastic president misremembered because of a lyingpress campaign and a deep state op. Jimmy Carter was a nuclear submarine captain.
Joseph Robinette Biden is not worthy of their company. Whereas they actually did things with their lives and then screwed up or angered the media, Biden has never accomplished anything. He’s a dirty little used car salesman who won elections, probably by cheating, and then used political office to receive bribe money from our nation’s enemies.

Happy belated birthday!

Brain fart this year– I’m usually the first with cheers. To make up for it (as well as St Stephen’s Day coming up on the 26th), that pic of Notre-Dame led to information about her late elder sister, the Cathedral of Saint Stephen, which I offer here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Saint_%C3%89tienne,_Paris

Cathedral of Saint Étienne

Somehow Dennis bumped Stephen as the top (male) Saint in Paris. This Cathedral was demolished in the 12th century as Notre-Dame was built next door. But Stephen was honored again in the 15th:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-%C3%89tienne-du-Mont

Paroisse Saint-Étienne-du-Mont

lab was funded by the US Army, including the super-automatic Espresso machine.

Was it the US Army or the Department of Defense? I know of a bunch of places that get DoD funding which have nothing to do with anything remotely defense-related.

That’s a lotta Keurigs.

Did you ever see that amazing Orson Welles monologue at the end of F for Fake?

The album, entitled “Liminal Minds,” explores topics like race, religion and black identity.

Oh, that’s nice. He includes religion.

And here I thought his album would be blackety, black, black.

Harvard: “Meritocracy is dead. Long live Nepotocracy!”

Back in when Harvard really was an engonotocracy, the Classics department would have had your κεφαλή on a πλατεῖα for corrupting Greek with the Italic upstart.

Pepperdine will survive due to its location on Pacific Coast Highway and Malibu Canyon.

Not at \$50,000/yr, most likely.

Remember that a young person can take online courses, but get an apartment near Pepperdine and still party there.

Pepperdine may have to return to 1980s costs (adjusted for inflation).

I always felt that Caltech should have been acquired by Pepperdine, and relocated to that campus. That would have juiced up Pepperdine’s ranking somewhat.

https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Dicta

Some kids are just stupid and will struggle with reading no matter what teaching method you use. However there is great reluctance to acknowledge this. Instead people blame the teaching method and lobby for it to be changed.

Similar issues in mathematics.

and the entire lab was funded by the US Army, including the super-automatic Espresso machine.

And who do you think pays for the hundreds (yes hundreds) of Diversity Coordinators. Whenever a lab gets a grant, the university charges “overhead” against the grant. So out of the \$10M grant, the lab sees maybe \$3M and the University steals the rest and uses it to pay the every growing number of administrators.

Our whole corrupt society is kept going by an endless dousing of Federal money. Once that money ends, it all goes up in flames – city governments, mass transit, the welfare system, universities, defense contractors, the health care system, car makers, everything, it all goes up in flames. BBB just adds to the list of things that require endless Federal \$.

No. Not at Harvard.

It’s not an email it’s a comment.

I sincerely hope you are 75 + years old, otherwise you’re helping support the notion that legacies are dim.

Another kid with access to a gun kills someone. Where’s all the outrage at this kid’s parents?

https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/philly-pizza-shop-employee-shoots-would-be-robber/3074114/

It makes it easier to admit dumbshit children of rich people slipping the college a check? Essays can be contracted out. Grades at prep school can similarly be bought.

Can we go further?
Harvard is not an educational institution. It exists to justify the tax breaks on the Harvard endowment, which I’m told are absolute. It pays no taxes at all, to the extent that it can pass this tax immunity down one level under certain conditions. It deliberately gives its tax advantages to folk who are likely to use the extra money to fund e.g. BLM. Presumably the teachers’ unions are involved somewhere as well.

Even if Harvard lost every incoming applicant, it would be nothing more than embarrassing, rather than critical to operations. In any case they could demand a cartwheel and a literal clown routine and it still wouldn’t run out of so-called, alleged students.

That’s right. You want to break the current elite, you need a Dissolution of the Monasteries. Vast re-distribution of wealth (for real, not the tiny tax increases the Gay Old Pedophiles get their panties in a twist about) is the absolute minimum imaginable solution to our problems.

Page and Brin, the Google billionaires, graduated from Michigan and UMD.

To some extent. However, my wife does this for a living. She says that the biggest mistake you can make is the “one size fits all” dogmatic approach: “Only teach phonics”, “Never teach phonics”. Etc.

People say “I was taught with phonics and it worked like a dream for me.” The problem is that every brain is different. Some kids learn to read no problem. Any approach you use would work. Hell, they would teach themselves to read.

For the kids with problems, it’s like a puzzle – what is the route into this kid’s brain? It’s like throwing a winning game in the MLB – you can’t just keep throwing fastballs. You’ve got to mix up your pitches. Cater them to each batter. You’ve got to figure it out – that’s hard work, like solving a puzzle.

The teachers would rather just teach whatever canned program (by program I don’t necessarily mean software) that is in fashion this week and that is provided by the school district. It’s a lot easier and doesn’t require any thought or brains (which is good because a lot of these teachers are lacking brains). Fastballs all day, every day if that’s what the Bd. of Ed tells you. Or maybe this year it’s all curveballs. In a few years curveballs go out of style and now they throw all changeups until that fails.

For certain kids, this just doesn’t work. You’ve got to keep changing the approaches and mixing them up until you hit upon the exact combination that works for that particular kid’s brain. The average schoolteacher, supported by the average administrative staff – no way do they have the skills needed or the time needed to do this so Devonte never learns how to read.

Yes the Ivies are safe but is a Boston College degree worth a quarter of a million?

Yes, but UC Berkeley is 25% the cost of an Ivy, and Forbes now says they are #1.

He has a research degree in what subject I cannot recall and from what school I can’t remember

Purdue/philosophy

Only difference is that endowment is 53 Billion in place of 30 billion. The intervening years have been kind to them, go figure.

Did you ever see that amazing Orson Welles monologue at the end of F for Fake?

No, but is it all here on Wikiquote?

https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/F_for_Fake

Was it ad-libbed, like the “cuckoo clock” bit in The Third Man?

Houdin was the greatest magician who ever lived.

Erich Weisz thought so adapted and adopted his name. Then turned on him.

Houdini moved to Wisconsin as a child, Welles moved out. He was born in Kenosha.

Someone should do Citizen Kyle. With Gaige Grosskreutz as the third man.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/moderna-says-covid-booster-effective-omicron-will-still-develop-new-sh-rcna9322

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/pfizer-says-booster-dose-vaccine-protects-omicron-variant-rcna7970

Maybe they are lying. Maybe you are lying. The best that can be said is that the picture is not completely clear, not that the vaccines don’t work against Omicron.

What is clear is that being unvaccinated is worse. Most deaths and hospitalizations are in the unvaccinated.

https://blockclubchicago.org/2021/12/21/vaccines-offer-some-protection-against-omicron-with-most-deaths-hospitalizations-in-unvaccinated-officials-say/

Even Trump got boosted.

He has a research degree in what subject I cannot recall and from what school I can’t remember

Purdue/philosophy

The Boilerplate school of philosophy?

Income from the endowment is dwarfed by tuition…

Is that true?

No. Not at Harvard.

Whether or not, it would be by tuition fees, not tuition itself, which is what one is (ostensibly) paying for. It’s highly telling how this word has become so corrupted in this country, in a mercenary sense.

why are you using caps?

seriously?

what’s the point?

it’s gay. it’s…steve.

…you have seen the skill of a true ninja…

Indeed. Thank you. Have those ideas gotten much traction in the wider world?

Do you know of any estimates of Harvard’s real estate holdings or whether those are included in the endowment figure?

If enough of the information is public it would be interesting to make a stab at a quantitative analysis of the respective total stock and flow magnitudes. The article you linked more picked some illustrative statistics (e.g. Arts and Sciences Division salaries vs. top five fund managers).

As one example, the growth of the endowment from \$30M in 2012 to \$53M in 2021 implies an annualized ROI of 6.5%. Is it meaningful to calculate overall asset values and ROI for the university side? Are contributions large enough to require being backed out of the calculated ROI?

Exactly. And I don’t see any charisma or a sense of humor. Amazing he’s gotten this far. An embarrassment to the country.

Thanks, but you’re answering the wrong commenter. Jack, Steve, and I.J. were discussing the money itself.

My point was about the misuse of a word meaning “instruction” to mean “money”. What looks like a trivial point is the tip of a nasty semantic iceberg. At the very least it points to moral corruption.

What Does Harvard-Going Test-Optional Imply?

The implementation of the ultimate social-credit system, wherein entrance exams are waived if the prospective student can provide proof of at least one parent’s donor status with Democratic candidate(s) and/or the DNC; and, of course, a photostat of validated Bar/Bas Mitzvah document is included.

African-American applicants should include a candid photo taken with at least one of the Obamas or similar magic Negro. Debate-team champions may apply provided they never perform any of their, um, debating until after they have been accepted, and are flunking every subject without the phrase “of color” in the course title.

The refusal to use phonics is one of the greatest malpractices in the history of education. But it’s far from new. Word-recognition-based teaching of reading (as opposed to making use of one the great inventions in human history, i.e. the phonetic alphabet) dates back to the 19th century, and really got going in the early 20th century; it has competed (often very successfully) with phonics ever since. It was huge in the 1970s-80s under the banner of ‘whole language’ learning.

The idea is that children should learn to read ‘naturally’, just as they learn to speak. Anything that impinges on their natural joyful blossoming into joyful natural readers (like being subjected to bad boring phonics) is not just counterproductive, it’s evil.

Whole language is just one manifestation of progressive educational theory, but it’s arguably the most pernicious.

Mr Unz, about how long until we get to the bit where they jump?
Modification: the true elite hypnotize the glorified bobblehead-collecting managers, tell them they can fly, and then send them off.

I clicked agree, but kicking them out is unrealistic. No nation wants them. Mexico (meaning the wealthy whites) did not want the Latinx — that’s why they’re here. The lesser Mexican, Guatemalans and Nicaraguans, and such? Malthus’ argument applies. The fruit pickers multiply geometrically, but the orchards do not. Once there are enough fruit pickers, more of them require more upkeep — fewer resources for the wealthy. These are countries that used to have death squads to control the agricultural workforce spilling into cities. They don’t want the ones who moved coming back.

India? India might be an exception. I would prefer American companies had hired Americans, but the Indian diaspora Is black on the balance sheet. Though perhaps not in the black on a holistic balance sheet.

Blacks? No one wants American blacks. No nation would take them. They are no more part of any African ethnicity than you are a European ethnicity, or than I am. Most American whites are mutts. What European country would you go to? Do you think any would be obligated to take you back? Blacks are super-mutts. Most of African culture is gone. They are Africans genetically, and blood will tell. Would Liberia take them? If we get to the point where we can expel them, we probably won’t be able to force even African “nations” to take them.

Reservations are much more realistic. They can even be argued for in woke terms. Blacks deserve to live according to their own culture. There is nowhere in the country that blacks can live without whites being in control. Mexicans have Mexico. Puerto Ricans have Puerto Rico. Indian tribes have reservations, but blacks do not have anywhere to live without the white boot on their neck. There are white cops in every ‘hood.

It could br coupled with reparations. No reparations without reservations! Once blacks have money, or a likely trust fund managed by fancy blacks, they can finally have places to thrive.

DC, non-state territories, and Indian Reservations, perhaps combined with slum clearance give us a solution to the lumpenprole problem. Simply draw a line (not in red, around black areas of cities. As welfare recipients are occasionally shown, people living in government housing with no marketable skills can be put wherever the government likes. Those black areas are now Federal Districts. They are no longer part of the state. The people who live there would still be citizens, but they don’t live in a state, so they do not have representatives or a vote in Presidential elections. The district residents would not be residents of the surrounding state, so they could not vote in state elections. Like DC of olde thymes, they would not elect their local government, which would be appointed by a federal department or bureau. Slum clearance gives precedent to eventually relocate all the ghetto populations to one walled in location.

These Federal Districts are inspired by the Welfare Islands of Jerry Pournelle’s CoDominium. Considering that the US is fast becoming the US of that sci-fi alternate history future, minus the faster than light travel, I heartily recommend books set in that universe. The CoDo America and our US are far too similar. Similar to the extent that they have borloi, a drug similar to heroin, to pacify the lower classes to match our fentanyl.

Some cornfed doofus from Wyoming with a so-so application gets in over a far more qualified kid from Connecticut because the marketing department gets to say they have students from 44 states in the incoming class instead of 43 that way, because admissions serves the institution.

DeBoer is full of shit. Cornfed doofi from Wyoming aren’t getting into Harvard at all. DeBoer pretends to be a realist but he isn’t. He isn’t realistic about low black mean IQ.

And yeah, I think this is one way to add some ADOS blacks, and other blacks*, into the mix. So I guess I’m out of my mind in De Boer world.

*Other blacks: Ogbu, I think, proved that children of black college graduates have lower IQs than children of white high school dropouts.

PS I do find his name “DeBoer” quite funny. How do you spell it when it’s the first word in a sentence?

Winters in West Lafayette, it pays to be philosophical, believe me!

https://www.jconline.com/story/news/history/2015/02/01/jc-archives-1978-blizzard/22422675/

Ad libbed? I don’t know.

The quote isn’t on that page. It’s here. The soliloquy starts at 1:09.

2012…S&P=1400-Harvard Endowment \$30B
2021…S&P=4500-Harvard Endowment \$53B

Harvard did about 1/2 as well as S&P. Maybe they spent some of it. Not much of a hedgevfund.

He didn’t kill anyone. He shot the robber’s jaw off.

Thank God.

PS I do find his name “DeBoer” quite funny. How do you spell it when it’s the first word in a sentence?

Old joke: An Italian woman from the Bronx, eight months pregnant, goes into a six month coma. When she finally awakes in the hospital she is informed by the nurse that while she was in her coma she delivered twins, a girl and a boy. The babies are healthy and her brother, also from the Bronx, named them. “My brother is such an idiot, what could he have named them? What is my daughter’s name?”

When the nurse answered Denise the woman thought that is quite nice and perhaps her brother wasn’t quite the idiot she feared. “And what is my son’s name?”, she inquired. The nurse answered “Denephew”.

Nu, you don’t make 78 million managing Harvard’s endowment by acting like John Bogle. You have to invest in second growth timberland CDOs to justify your compensation.

Ok, sure. 1600 was the 75th percentile SAT score at Harvard, but the SAT has changed a lot since you took it. From killing analogies (because studying doesn’t help!) to replacing quantitative reasoning (I think that’s what it was called) with cookie-cutter trig, the SAT is no longer an intelligence test. Mensa does not accept it. Pretty sure the correlation with IQ tests is well below the 0.7 or 0.8 that it was when I took it.

Not to mention, the scoring is way more lenient. Once upon a time, almost no one scored 1600. IIRC, the New York Times had a feature on the two-three perfect scorers every year. Roughly 300/year get 1600 today. I don’t have numbers (it’s frigging 4 am!) but the scores are not as spread out on the high end. Roughly 2% of takers get 780-800 on the math section. The EBRW (hmm! Sounds a lot like Hebrew! Clearly micro-aggression over Jewish verbal ability) or evidence-based reading and writing is at least 99+ for the same range. I remember seeing more people in that score range the last time I googled. Maybe those numbers were cumulative for people who took it multiple times? Oh yeah, now you can take it over and over until your parents realize you are not all that good at the SAT. Ten years ago, I would have said not all that smart. The fact that single 800 scores are s much more common than double-barreled 800 suggests a lower IQ correlation. Very smart people with today’s scoring would have received 1600 more frequently because of the g factor.

Fewer choices (A-D) instead of A-E coupled with no penalty for wrong compared to blank responses mean more false positives. False positives mean some blacks do well! Coupled with many bites at the apple mean SAT is not one stressful Saturday. It is a stressful year. combine those changes with all the changes making it easy to study for and game mean Asian kids spend thirty hours a week kindergarten through high school filling in bubbles and learning test-taking skills. Kills the value of a test, though.

An aside. My girlfriend took a psych class. They got however-many chances to take some online IQ tests. I took a Weschler (ish) test sleep-deprived and scored 113. A few days later, I took a Ravens (advanced progressive?) matrices test and scored 134. Later, I took the GRE practice test very tired. Then took the GRE well-rested. Scored almost exactly a standard deviation higher on both subtests there, too. so I know my IQ drops fifteen points when I’m tired. Kinda gives a reason so many smarty-pants careers have a period where you are expected to work sleep-deprived for weeks-months. The job might be mostly doable with a 115 (say) IQ, but they want 130 IQ folk, so they make you work sleep-deprived on things that take a 115 IQ to weed out people with 115 IQ.

‘De Boer’ is a common Dutch name. It means ‘the farmer’, so Freddie’s likely the genetic product of plenty of corn-fed doofuses up the ancestry ladder.

But unfortunately the coup failed.

To what do you attribute the failure? The campaign seems to have been just, popular and well-staffed. Are there lessons to be learned for other such campaigns in the future?

Most hedge funds badly trail the S&P. So even hedge funds aren’t “hedge funds” anymore.

I would guess (but I’m not gonna look it up) that Harvard’s endowment’s performance is about average for a hedge fund nowadays, after accounting for the fact that they have to spend a bit of it on the … what is it called again? … oh yeah, University.

You want to break the current elite, you need a Dissolution of the Monasteries.

Agree.

But since, as Jack D points out, the modern Monasteries are all funded by Federal largesse, this really means the Dissolution of the Dollar.

Vast re-distribution of wealth (for real, not the tiny tax increases the Gay Old Pedophiles get their panties in a twist about) is the absolute minimum imaginable solution to our problems.

Ironically (not really, if you understand how things work), the growth of the vast redistribution machinery has been coincident with the growth of economic inequality. In other words, the former is not a solution for the latter, but rather a cause or at least a co-effect.

The vast redistribution of wealth is already done, primarily by printing more of it. But this does not spread it out equally. Quite the contrary, it concentrates it the hands of the central government. Who in turn hands it out to their favorite oligarchs, aka the “current elite”. So no, the “vast redistribution” you desire is not going to break the current elite: it is actually what sustains them and their power in the first place. So you in your calls for “redistribution” are unwittingly their footsoldier.

The vast redistribution that might actually break the current elite is the Dissolution of the Dollar, which will break the current system and the false economy that goes with it. Then there is a chance for power to go back to those who are actually productive, though it will be painful even for those who ultimately benefit.

Huh, so “Marxist” now means “conjugates the F-word every fourth sentence”.

Who knew?

JR Ewing wrote to me:

[Dave] 2) Teach all children phonics

[JR] Going totally off the rails here but I’ve never understood the reasoning not to do this. Arguments to the contrary have always struck me more as an attempt for the proponent to make himself sound smart and clever than actually advocating a method of education.

As far as I can tell, what has happened is that discoveries in modern science and math are difficult to understand and counter-intuitive and often over-threw previous ways of thinking — this is certainly true, for example, of relativity and quantum mechanics.

And so, lots of people in “soft” areas came to the conclusion that they would show how brilliant and progressive they were by doing the same thing — i.e., coming up with novel ideas that are difficult to understand and counter-intuitive and often over-threw previous ways of thinking.

There are numerous examples of this, from the Keynesian claim that we can spend ourselves into prosperity to the claim that intelligence has nothing to do with heredity to the rejection of phonics.

The problem is that the novel and difficult ideas in science came about in areas way beyond ordinary human experience — for example, special relativity has to do with objects moving near the speed of light, far faster than ordinary material objects in everyday human experience. The new scientific ideas were required to accommodate new empirical evidence.

But of course there were no novel empirical observations requiring Keynesianism or the rejection of heredity or the attack on phonics.

But most people, especially highly-schooled people in non-STEM subjects, understand nothing about science.

And so the scams worked, despite being obviously idiotic. Indeed, especially because they were idiotic. They must be true precisely because they violate common sense, just as the theory of relativity violates common sense.

The majority of scientists are too wrapped up in their scientific work to point out how insane this is. The parasitic verbalist overclass finds that the obfuscation increases their power. And ordinary people are intimidated into keeping their mouths shut.

After all, if you would not dispute Einstein on relativity, how dare you dispute the “experts” on monetary policy or heredity or methods of teaching reading?

Might Moderna and Pfizer (payor of the largest False Claims settlement in pharmaceutical history) have a wee bit of conflict of interest in assessing their own injections’ efficacy?

Odd to see a normally skeptical barrister suddenly accepting corporate press releases at face value.

What is clear is that being unvaccinated is worse.

Is it?

Most deaths and hospitalizations are in the unvaccinated.

That’s not what the data from more reliable (i.e., not CDC-Pharma-converged) jurisdictions says:

Yeah think I’m gonna pass on the mandatory injection plan. Thanks but no thanks. pic.twitter.com/qJAH5jGFmG

— Echo Chamber (@echo_chamberz) November 20, 2021

England death rates higher for vaccinated.

Trump was always pro-vax, so you can’t say “even” about him.

Below the fold: despite near universal vaccination, cases surging in … just about everywhere …

I was just going to hit the “LOL” button (did you mean “endonotocracy”?), but then it occurred to me that there is actually a significant point in this.

Back when Harvard was just a finishing school for gentry sons, mixing Latin and Greek really did clang on their ears. Now I bet 99% of Harvardians don’t even notice.

What’s funny to me is that the SA Dutch have adopted the word as an endonym (“die Boere”), and he’s an American Marxist.

Funny to me, I stress, YMMV.

If phonics doesn’t work, then why have letters with specific sounds at all?

No nation wants them. Mexico (meaning the wealthy whites) did not want the Latinx — that’s why they’re here. The lesser Mexican, Guatemalans and Nicaraguans, and such? Malthus’ argument applies. The fruit pickers multiply geometrically, but the orchards do not. Once there are enough fruit pickers, more of them require more upkeep — fewer resources for the wealthy. These are countries that used to have death squads to control the agricultural workforce spilling into cities. They don’t want the ones who moved coming back.

Good points. Still, Israel successfully sends thousands of deportees to Rwanda and Uganda with \$3500 cash (and probably a like amount to officials on the other end). It would still be worth it at 10× the price, though.

And if you look at Liberian history, colonization societies just started sending freedmen back to West African trade entrepots. Those settlers went on to form Liberia on their own. They didn’t ask anyone’s permission. There are still many lightly-settled parts of the earth’s surface.

I would prefer American companies had hired Americans, but the Indian diaspora Is black on the balance sheet.

I wonder about this. Whenever they appear in large numbers in established corporations, it often seems to herald impending collapse. And many of the smaller private businesses they’re in were done just as well by others before them (motels, convenience stores), when they are not outright scams (software scams, tax fraud). Even the prominent Sudnar Pichai types seem to owe their position more to being the safely colored faces for white—or (((white)))—executives who prefer to avoid the spotlight and run things from behind the scenes, rather than with any innate merit of their own. (Pichai is the literal son of a stenographer, lol.)

That said, I do know Indians who are normal, responsible employees, but I wonder how representative my personal sample is against the billion-odd pool of aspiring immigrants who haven’t done very much for their native land.

Though perhaps not in the black on a holistic balance sheet.

That’s always a question.

It’s not dicta. Scalia and Thomas “joined” the 25 year timeline in their separate opinions – justices don’t “join” dicta.

The next step, as Another Dad has indicated, would be some sort of recognized and accepted testing program so that you could prove to employers that you, having sat thru the same colleges courses online, have the same level of knowledge as the “enrolled” students who sat thru the same online courses but paid the very expensive tuition.

A next step variant has been in place for years at numerous employers. For many positions they want to confirm that the applicant can do the work. Put the person in a room with a pad and pencil, or maybe some access to a coding platform, or other job-applicable process, and see what is produced within a defined time. That might get the aspirant in the door, or at least to the next step.

I’m going through this in my mind and it’s rough. Though if I think hard the thought might come to me.

Aside from the fact that English is not really spelled phonetically, people don’t actually read phonetically either, even in the case of words that follow the general rules. As an early reader, phonics are certainly helpful but ultimately fluent readers read by word recognition and not by actually sounding out each word letter by letter. It would take you all day to read a text if you had to sound it out with phonics every time. In addition, the English writing system doesn’t use accents or diacritics so even if you can do phonics you have no idea whether the emPHAsis is on the wrong sylLAble. Wrtng rlly offrs jst a clu as to wht u r tryng 2 say nd nt rlly a cmplt dscrptn – ur mnd flls in th rst. We do this unconsciously (once we become fluent readers) so you don’t even realize how much missing information your mind is filling in that is not on the page.

Ultimately reading is actually a very complex process. Even if you can read the words perfectly and with fluency (which as I said before, you can’t, using just phonics) you have to connect those sounds in your mind to the object that the sounds represent and then string the objects together to gain meaning. A failure at any point in the process means that you don’t really comprehend what you are reading.

Phonics should definitely be taught but it’s not the complete answer by a long shot.

Whenever they appear in large numbers in established corporations, it often seems to herald impending collapse.

Can you name some established corporations that have collapsed due to an excess of Indian employees?

I don’t think they signal collapse at all. What they signal is that the corporation has completed its most innovative phase and shifted more to a maintenance mode. This maintenance mode can be very profitable and last for many decades. Microsoft in innovative mode took over the desktop operating system business and the word processing and spreadsheet business. Microsoft in maintence mode will keep these markets for many decades to come.

It happens inevitably anyway, but it’s good that corporations cannot remain in innovative mode forever. Imagine that Microsoft had remained innovative – not only would it still own the desktop OS market but it would also own the phone OS market and the web browser market, etc. and would have tremendous monopoly power. But trees cannot grow to the sky.

I’m a little late to the discussion, but as someone who attended an elite school for both undergrad and MBA I agree with @Recently Based. The caveat, though–and something I’m taking into account when advising my children–is that the elite graduate lifestyle is overrated. You work hard and get into the “best” school only to find that everybody and their mother ends up going into finance or management consulting. And mind you, only a relatively small number of people are temperamentally suited to going into those fields. Sure, there are some pre-meds and computer nerds there too but a lot of each graduating class gets funneled into a small number of elite career tracks. You make a lot of money, work long hours, have to live in a big city, get prescriptions for anxiety / depression, and have no more than two kids.

That’s one option. The other option for smart kids: go to a non-elite school. Maybe a small liberal arts place, or maybe a big state school. You won’t have the same career as your peers at the elite schools, but based on what I’ve seen I regard that as a positive. There are lots of ways to do well and have a wonderful life outside of McKinsey or Goldman. I realize that sounds like loser talk, and maybe it is, but with the elites being so fucked up these days I’ve come to the conclusion that the elite track is to be avoided.

Can you name some established corporations that have collapsed due to an excess of Indian employees?

Not without doxxing myself.

But even if it just signals a switch from “innovative phase” to “maintenance mode” (i.e., from value creation to monopoly rent extraction), that’s hardly a ringing endorsement.

I think of someone on LSD, dancing high on a rooftop, shouting “I can fly! I can fly!” and then jumping off…

Did this ever really happen or is this some kind of urban legend?

I think something like this happens in the 1936 anti-marijuana film “Reefer Madness”. Somebody takes a few puffs on a joint and gets it into his head that he can fly and jumps out the window.

I’m pretty sure that never happened. As regards LSD, I suspect the same, but I’m not sure.

By the way, the story that you can boil a frog alive by putting it in a saucepan with tepid water and very very gradually increasing the temperature, that seems to be nonsense. The mass suicide of lemmings running off a cliff is also a hoax, apparently…

“And I would have gotten away with it too, were it not for you pesky kids!”

Or you know, that’s all a total fantasy and your proposal was astonishingly disingenuous, akin to selling tax cuts for the top 10% as actually tax cuts for the poorest, which is why the more publicity it received, the more people opposed it.

I was just going to hit the “LOL” button (did you mean “endonotocracy”?)

No, my word was based on the (old) Greek for “grandson”. Perhaps pappotocracy, rule by grandfathers, is more to the point. Adelphideism would be nepotism via old Greek, anipsiodism via modern. However, Google Translate assures us today’s Greek prefers the Roman term, νεποτισμός.

Why are all the Ancient Greek-English dictionaries one-way? Anybody know of any, paper or pixel, that go both? Boustrophedonic, as it were. If I want an ancient root, I have to use a modern Greek dictionary and hope it’s close to Langenscheidt. It usually is; the roots themselves haven’t changed much. Nepotismós is an exception.

Donald J Borror’s glossary of ancient word roots comes in handy. The bioacoustics lab at Ohio State is named for him.

Museum of Biological Diversity: Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics

As Wikipedia explains, “Bioacoustics is a cross-disciplinary science that combines biology and acoustics. Usually it refers to the investigation of sound production, dispersion and reception in animals (including humans).”

Human biodiversity! Otherwise it would be zo(ö)äcoustics.

I’m going through this in my mind and it’s rough. Though if I think hard the thought might come to me.

Rudolph Flesch pointed out that 90% of words in English are spelled phonetically. You don’t teach kids quadratic equations. You teach them numbers and order of operations. Same with reading. Or violin. Or anything.

You gave examples with exceptions (and they’re called exceptions for a reason), but even the examples you gave match the letters they are composed of, consonant blends and irregular endings, notwithstanding.

Kids should be taught simple one-syllable words, phonetically, then the exceptions. You pointed out the exceptions and think you proved something. You proved nothing.

Reading in any alphabet consists of matching a sound with a letter or (or blend)

A relative of mine taught in the worst of the Brooklyn public schools back in the 70s. She was allowed her way because she was the last stop. She taught phonics, phonics, phonics. She brought the kids up to grade level that way. Most likely the kids she taught didn’t go on to great academic careers. I don’t know what happened to them. But they did learn to read.

Ultimately reading is actually a very complex process.

You could say that about anything. You could say that about math. What on earth goes on in the brain when I learn 2+2 = 4. I bet it’s quite complex. But I learned it.

At the end of the day, all reading is a form of phonics.

As for vaccinated adults under 60 (BTW,why this cutoff? Because if you choose all ages it doesn’t look as good?) having a higher death rate from all causes, this makes sense because the people who seek vaccination are those in poorest health while the unvaccinated tend to be people who say, “I am athletic and not overweight and not diabetic so I don’t feel as if I am in need of vaccination.” Even now with Covid rampant it is only the 3rd ranking cause of death behind heart disease and cancer. This is a self-selected group, not some drug trial where you randomly put half the study population into a control group.

As for all of those graphs that show Covid going up along with the % of the population that is vaccinated, this doesn’t change the fact that the people getting Covid (ESPECIALLY the people who are becoming seriously ill or dying) are largely concentrated in the unvaccinated (while the tripled vaxxed rarely get seriously sick). You can present 100 of those graphs and they are all a dishonest presentation of the data.

Here is what an honest preesentation looks like, which is based on RATE and which shows the vaccinated and unvaxxed on the same scale. Any time you have a graph with two different axes plotted on the same graph you should smell a trick.

Harvard’s endowment grew by 33% last year, which sounds like a lot but is actually the second lowest among the top 10. But the total endowment is still a whopping \$53B.

For fiscal 2021, Yale’s endowment grew by 40.2% to \$42.3B.

Stanford’s grew 40.1% to \$37.8B.

Princeton’s grew 46.5% to \$37.7B.

MIT’s grew 55.5% to \$27.4B.

Penn’s grew 41.1% to \$14.9B.

Columbia’s grew 32.3% to \$14.3B.

Cornell’s grew 42% to \$10B.

Dartmouth’s grew 46.5% to \$8.5B.

Brown’s grew 51.5% to \$6.9B.

Duke’s grew 56% to \$12.7B.

UChicago’s grew 37.6% to \$11.6B.

All of these schools could go tuition free and still do just fine.

‘De Boer’ is a common Dutch name.

17th- or 19th-century? My west Michigander grandmother had a Dutch maiden name, and I always assumed she came from the latter wave. But it turned out her line went back to 1658. The surname had also morphed into numerous variations by her day.

When did this guy’s de Boers come here?

It means ‘the farmer’, so Freddie’s likely the genetic product of plenty of corn-fed doofuses up the ancestry ladder.

As are those with the common German Bauer, and with English names such as Farmer, Planter, Mather(s), Hay, Hayward, Gardiner, Cropper, Ackerman, any ending in -field, and these:

A herd looked after animals as in Calvert (calves), Cowherd or Coward (cows), Goddard (goats), Neatherd (oxen), Shepherd (sheep), Stoddard (stud of horses), and Swinnart (swine) and the generic Heard, Herd, and Hird.

https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/England_Surnames_Derived_from_Occupations,_Ranks_(National_Institute)

Non-patronymic Scandinavian surnames, especially those from Norway, are often taken from the estate on which an ancestor was enserfed. My sister-in-law’s is one of those. It’s related to Fosse, which means “falls”.

We’re all just a few generations off the farm. The Darwins, maybe not.

We’re all just a few generations off the farm. The Darwins, maybe not.

For most Jews, it’s been more than a few. The Jews have been non-farmers for longer than the Darwins have been non-farmers.

If Harvard let in 20,000 students a year, instead of 2,000, it would do more for equality than any single other policy they could pursue, by far. And education.

It would be more surprising if Trump did not get boosted. He was instrumental in getting the vaccines approved and boasts about the vaccines every chance he gets. One of the few things he accomplished in his last year as President was operation warp speed to get the vaccines approved in record time. He has embraced the vaccines from day one and continues to promote the vaccines every chance he gets.

Rudolph Flesch pointed out that 90% of words in English are spelled phonetically.

I assumed this included ambiguous cases such as -igh-, -ate, and -ation, which are not strictly phonetic but are still regular and predictable. Even highly regular languages such as Spanish (ch, ll), German (sch, eu), and phonetic champion Finnish (ng) include di-, tri-, and tetragraphs which are not the sum of their parts.

Fun fact: the shch in Khrushchev is one letter in Russian (щ), two in Czech (šč) and Hebrew (שצ), three in Hungarian (scs) and Greek (στσ), four in English and Polish (szcz), five in French (chtch) and Dutch (sjtsj), and seven in German (schtsch).

Anyone know of a language that uses six? Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, and hangul are above my pay grade.

Look, you think your argument is good, but basically every Harvard Grad disagrees. This is why your slate got crushed in a vote by what is perhaps the best informed and most intelligent electorate in the world. You had plenty of publicity and your message was received by every single voter. Sorry, the only person you really persuaded was yourself.

Your main argument, that potential Harvard students are too retarded to work out how much money they will have to pay, is particularly comical. What do you think? Only big brain Ron Unz can figure it out?

You losing an argument, and being unable to accept that the other side had a point, isn’t evidence of a conspiracy against you. It is evidence of something rather more mundane and commonplace.

Yes they do this but it only establishes a certain level of competence. My daughter just went thru this process for an SV internship. She said that it was well known what they would be testing you on, so she went out and bought a book to brush up on the skills that would be needed:

Which is the #1 Best seller in Business & Finance books according to Amazon’s classification system.

She said that the actual problems she thought were at the level of the homework for a sophomore year coding course, not even at the level of questions for the final exam. Now my daughter is wicked smaat (as they say in Cambridge) so that what is difficult for most people is not difficult for her, but she was not impressed by the level of intellectual challenge that tests represented.

Memorizing a finite (albeit fairly large) set of questions and answers is right in the Asian wheelhouse. Just put your nose to the grindstone and memorize away! So there is an element of kabuki theater there – they ask you the expected canned questions and you give them the expected canned answers. It’s an IQ test of sorts in that you have to be savvy enough to know that there’s a script and to memorize it.

But maybe as you say, it at least establishes some minimum level of competence and gives them perhaps a legally defensible explanation for why they have so few blax.

but I’ve always wondered about that myself.

Well, that’s good. At least there you’re showing some healthy skepticism.

“It’s not dicta. Scalia and Thomas ‘joined’ the 25 year timeline in their separate opinions – justices don’t ‘join’ dicta.”

They obviously did, in this case, to make a rhetorical point. A Justice’s stating what her own current expectation of future conditions to be is not the same as her stating that said future date is itself an incorporated condition of her holding– i.e., an automatic cutoff date for the holding to remain in force.

***

Issue and Holding:

Is a public university’s goal of “student diversity” sufficiently compelling to justify a narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions? Yes.

***

https://legaldictionary.net/grutter-v-bollinger/

N.B. You may read this case summary from top to bottom; yet, you would see no mention whatsoever of the supposed 25-year time limit.

I assumed this included ambiguous cases such as -igh-, -ate, and -ation, which are not strictly phonetic but are still regular and predictable.

I don’t know but yes, the exceptions are mostly regular and predictable and can be taught and do not violate the essence of phonics.

My point simply is that the “you can’t wedge an eccentric language like English into Latin letters” is mostly BS. There are thousands of one syllable possibilities in English.

https://www.jefftk.com/p/possible-one-syllable-words

Once kids get the hang of that, the rest follows. My auntie was surprised at how a lot of pieces fell into place after that stage. Getting there was rough but she was tough and didn’t put up with stuff or guff and didn’t allow fluff.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2018/05/19/why-johnny-still-cant-read-and-what-to-do-about-it/?sh=5a10f8502e22

Supreme Court rulings are not statutes – they don’t have automatic time limits that expire.

What would have to happen is that there would have to be a new test case and in that case the majority would agree to overrule Grutter on the basis that it hasn’t met their expectations. They would be justified in doing so (not that they need any justification) but they would not be obligated to do so. Ultimately this is going to be a political decision by the justices. Sure the justices are conservative when it comes to Catholic type stuff like abortion but on race, I’m not so sure.

I don’t think they signal collapse at all. What they signal is that the corporation has completed its most innovative phase and shifted more to a maintenance mode. This maintenance mode can be very profitable and last for many decades. Microsoft in innovative mode took over the desktop operating system business and the word processing and spreadsheet business. Microsoft in maintence mode will keep these markets for many decades to come.

My simple-minded take? The thing they have in common is basically data center outsourcing, which is currently migrating to the cloud – a fancy way of saying that the old data center systems are now being run out of Amazon, Microsoft and Google servers, to name the big 3. IBM is struggling because its high-margin big iron room-sized computers are being replaced by cheapo white box rack servers running Intel (and increasingly AMD) chips and Linux. So what does IBM do? It hires, like Google and Microsoft, an Indian IIT grad to get IBM back, in terms of both revenues and market ranking, into the current generation data center biz, i.e. the cloud.

In theory, there is little preventing Indian oufits like Cognisant, Wipro, et al from eventually eating the big 3’s lunch. In practice, they have stalled out, whereas the big 3 are growing in leaps and bounds. My guess? The brain drain from India, and everywhere else, is making it difficult for the Indian outfits to reach critical mass. Why would anyone work for an Indian sweatshop when he can work for the big 3, with their gold-plated benefits and very-nice-to-employees work environments?

This is why big US tech is so bent on keeping those H-1B visa counts up. It’s not so much that every Indian FOB hire is a Satya Nadella, as it takes a lot of digging to unearth a Hope Diamond. The fear is that one of these talents goes to work for an Indian outfit, and makes it a serious contender.

Just a few questions that I can’t easily find a definitive answer for:

1. How closely do IQ and SAT scores correlate?

2. How closely do either correlate to real-world achievement in intelligence-dependent fields?

3. Are Ivy League graduates frequently represented in these fields?

Look, this is really not my field but it is my wife’s. She’s a respected professional in her field. The kids’ grandmas come to her office and they weep when little Ethan reads them a story because they were beginning to think that Ethan was never going to learn how to read. I joke that she is going to teach our dog how to read. She taught our kids how to read before they were three years old (they were really bright kids but still). So when she say that phonics is a good tool but is is not the complete answer I believe her more than I believe your Aunt Rose.

If you think phonics is it, take a text in an unfamiliar language (better yet an unfamiliar alphabet – Hangul or Georgian, etc.) and try reading it out loud to a native speaker and see how close you get. Better yet, try actually understanding what you are reading.

And you are not someone with a learning disability that is disrupting some of the normal learing pathways so that someone has to figure out the particular detour that will work in your case.

Remeber even before you get to phonics you have to learn to recogize all these funny squiggles. And maybe to you it’s obvious that b and d are two different letters but some people see them as the same or in reverse. And then you have to associate a sound (or even worse, multiple sounds – sometimes g is like great and sometimes its like George and btw g and G are the same letter) with that letter and only THEN do you get to phonics.

Taken together, I’d say that Harvard and the Ivies constitute one of the world’s greatest reservoirs of soft power, and tens of thousands of their students and families would owe us billions in financial savings, giving us substantial control over all that soft power, which we could then deploy for all sorts of other useful national and international projects.

A Star Wars metaphor had always been in the back of my mind: a five-man commando team sneaks into the Death Star and seizes its control room, then uses the Death Star to subdue the entire Galactic Empire…

Honestly, this sounds like a fairly dumb plan, as the Ivies have nowhere near the influence you think they do. I think you’ve probably done much better in the years since with the direction you’ve taken this site and the audience you now have, and would have far greater success with new internet ventures rather than trying to take over old castles that nobody with a brain cares about anymore.

Again, wrong. I’m not sure you know how to read Supreme Court opinions. The case summary you refer to is from some unofficial write-up – perhaps useful, but not authoritative. One must look at the actual decision, i.e., the official record. It makes clear, in the majority opinion, that AA _must_ have an end point in order to be found constitutionally permissible.

We are mindful, however, that “[a] core purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to do away with all governmentally imposed discrimination based on race.” Palmore v. Sidoti, 466 U. S. 429, 432 (1984). Accordingly, race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time. This requirement reflects that racial classifications, however compelling their goals, are potentially so dangerous that they may be employed no more broadly than the interest demands. Enshrining a permanent justification for racial preferences would offend this fundamental equal protection principle. We see no reason to exempt race-conscious admissions programs from the requirement that all governmental use of race must have a logical end point.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/539/306

That end point, per the holding of Grutter, is in 2028.

Need more? This is from Thomas’s dissent in Grutter:

I agree with the Court’s holding that racial discrimination in higher education admissions will be illegal in 25 years.

NB: “the Court’s holding.”

A Harvard with 20,000 in a class wouln’t be Harvard. But they certainly could have managed to grow more than they have. They obviously feel that it is in their interest NOT to grow much.

Harvard receives 20 applications for every person that it admits. Now some of those people are unqualified but they could surely take 2 or 3 out of every 20 instead of 1 without affecting the quality of the students. Most businesses would not be happy turning away 19 out of ever 20 customers. Harvard obviously likes it that way.

Statutes rarely have expiration dates so your attempted distinction is odd. But yes, Grutter requires an end point – the majority’s holding was that AA can only be approved if it has an expiration date. If you read the opinion (not a summary or write-up, but the actual opinion, which I will link below), you will see this.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/539/306

Example, from the majority opinion:

Accordingly, race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time. This requirement reflects that racial classifications, however compelling their goals, are potentially so dangerous that they may be employed no more broadly than the interest demands. Enshrining a permanent justification for racial preferences would offend this fundamental equal protection principle. We see no reason to exempt race-conscious admissions programs from the requirement that all governmental use of race must have a logical end point. The Law School, too, concedes that all “race-conscious programs must have reasonable durational limits.” Brief for Respondent Bollinger et al. 32.

As for vaccinated adults under 60 … having a higher death rate from all causes, this makes sense because the people who seek vaccination are those in poorest health while the unvaccinated tend to be people who say, “I am athletic and not overweight and not diabetic so I don’t feel as if I am in need of vaccination.”

I too thought this might be the explanation at first, but

1) the vaxxed death rate started out lower (about half) for the vaxxed, but then became higher (about double) after May. Since the older population was prioritized first, the vaxxed death rate curve should have started higher then gotten lower with time as the vaccine reached younger and younger population. Instead the curve went the exact opposite way. So this is not consistent with an “age of vaccinated” explanation, but is consistent with a “vaccine confers initial benefit but long term liability”. See, e.g., Marek’s Disease, for example.

2) One could just as easily make the converse argument to yours, i.e., that people who take care of themselves more also get vaxxed more, while those who care of themselves less get vaxxed less, ergo higher death rate among unvaxxed is just another symptom of the underclass.

This is a self-selected group, not some drug trial where you randomly put half the study population into a control group.

Agreed. Strangely, the pharma companies have made sure that there are no covidvax studies with proper control groups. Wonder why.

under 60 (BTW,why this cutoff?

Dunno. Ask the UK Office of National Statistics.

Because if you choose all ages it doesn’t look as good?)

Unlikely, the UK govt is strongly pro-vax.

As for all of those graphs that show Covid going up along with the % of the population that is vaccinated, this doesn’t change the fact that the people getting Covid (ESPECIALLY the people who are becoming seriously ill or dying) are largely concentrated in the unvaccinated (while the tripled vaxxed rarely get seriously sick).

The previous graph says otherwise. Note that the ONS subsequently issued a revised set of tables where the embarrassingly high vaccinated death rates were obscured behind a table that claimed that all those extra vaccinated dead people may indeed have died but at least they didn’t die of covid, so the vaccine works dammit! Of course, anyone who stops to think about this might notice that trading a covid death for even more (supposedly) non-covid deaths still leaves the victims just as dead, and it implicates vaccine side effects to boot.

I don’t know which King county your graph is from, but the of covid vs. with covid trick is a simple way to hide inconvenient deaths, along with the newer mysterious-spike-in-excess-mortality-among-vaxxed-but-definitely-not-from-covid-or-vax trick. As far as I can tell, European and Israeli data are basically honest, but they can work pretty hard to hide the relevant aspects in the presentation. I gave up following the US covid statistics because there were so many changes, restatements, and outright redefinitions that happened to accord with a pre-existing narrative, that I had to conclude they were too corrupt to rely on. Some states are better than others, but sorting them out was too much trouble, and the CDC polluted everything it touched. The UK is certainly probing the limits of honesty with these little games. Their new statistics still do say the same thing as the old statistics, but in a new format and in an obscurantist way.

Not one thing you’ve said disproves the validity of phonics. As usual, you boast, you bring in irrelevant topics, but you have not demonstrated that matching a letter to its sound is NOT the fundamental method of learning to read.

(It’s comparable to reading music. Reading notes isn’t making music, but it’s a necessary skill in the classical field.)

Respected professional

Credentialism, like patriotism, is the refuge of a scoundrel. Respected professionals have led this country into the shitter.

If you think phonics is it, take a text in an unfamiliar language (better yet an unfamiliar alphabet – Hangul or Georgian, etc.)

Irrelevant. We’re discussing specifically the supposed disconnect between the English language and the Latin alphabet and the supposedly unique problems of teaching it. Mysteriously, they don’t have this problem in France. Or Germany.

That said, I have taught myself two foreign alphabets; I do pretty well with them. Because phonics.

And you are not someone with a learning disability that is disrupting some of the normal learing pathways so that someone has to figure out the particular detour that will work in your case.

Everybody’s got a learning disability to the educrats. My aunt taught kids that were throwaways. They learned.

Anyway, I’m not talking about myself. Why do you assume I am? Because you are always talking about yourself? Try to look outside your own experience.

There is no reason to complicate things. Most kids do not have a learning disability. Those who do, find another way. For the normal, teach them letters and the sounds that match the letter, start with simple words, drill. That’s the time-honored method that worked pretty well until the educrats like your respected professional wife took control and ruined the system.

Wow, thanks for pointing out that little-known fact.

what is perhaps the best informed and most intelligent electorate in the world.

For a non-American, you sure have a lot of faith in an institution we associate mostly with self-important blowhards and Epstein Island frequent fliers.

potential Harvard students are too retarded to work out how much money they will have to pay, is particularly comical.

OK, now I have to defend Harvard students. If you’ve ever filled out an American tax return or financial aid form, you’d know that you don’t have to be retarded to be baffled by them. Nowadays, they’re mostly filled out by specialized professionals and/or vast software programs maintained by small armies of developers.

It is interesting to observe the issues where you have a strong opinion. And also how different the tone of your responses can be.

The kids who really want to know compete to get into the best universities because they want the best teachers and libraries, and because you can’t study astrophysics or cuneiform just anywhere.

1. How closely do IQ and SAT scores correlate?

Less closely than they did pre-1995. This link says ‘the correlation coefficient (“r”) is 0.86 for scores prior to re-centering and 0.72 after re-centering.’ which I think is in the ballpark. Don’t have time to dig right now, but have you tried searching James Thompson’s blog here?
https://www.quora.com/Are-IQ-estimations-based-on-SAT-results-accurate-Has-anyone-verified-these-results-with-actual-results-from-multiple-tests

From the comments the numbers were from Frey and Detterman 2004.
https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2004-frey.pdf
Note that the 0.72 was 0.483 before correction for restricted range!

2. How closely do either correlate to real-world achievement in intelligence-dependent fields?

Take a look at Linda Gottfredson’s work. Here is a starting point (in particular the udel link).
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/st-petersburg-calling-gottfredson-bell/

3. Are Ivy League graduates frequently represented in these fields?

I would say yes, but don’t have good numbers at hand.

How do you know he’s a stoner?

It’s not the complete answer, but does your wife has an opinion on which of these worlds would be better?

1. Phonics only approach taught in the classroom.
2. Phonics not taught at all in the classroom.

If you think phonics is it, take a text in an unfamiliar language (better yet an unfamiliar alphabet – Hangul or Georgian, etc.) and try reading it out loud to a native speaker and see how close you get. Better yet, try actually understanding what you are reading.

You shouldn’t be reading it until you can speak it. The whole Pimsleur method is built around this; the child-oriented Little Pim offshoot adds pictures, but not letters.

I studied Russian, and was surprised to find that it wasn’t individual letters I was picking up, nor whole words, but syllables. Every language has its pet syllables which you see over and over. They are the building blocks.

Why are all the Ancient Greek-English dictionaries one-way? Because it is cheating to look a word up.

1) the vaxxed death rate started out lower (about half) for the vaxxed, but then became higher (about double) after May. Since the older population was prioritized first, the vaxxed death rate curve should have started higher then gotten lower with time as the vaccine reached younger and younger population. Instead the curve went the exact opposite way. So this is not consistent with an “age of vaccinated” explanation, but is consistent with a “vaccine confers initial benefit but long term liability”. See, e.g., Marek’s Disease, for example.

Is the spread of the delta variant a possible explanation here? I have been avoiding the Covidiocy talk lately because it is just too hard to get straight answers.

When Thomas called it a “holding” in his dissent, he was being cute – he was trying to hold the (future) Court’s feet to fire (and he really wanted to abolish it now, not in 25 years).

Ginsburg in her concurrence tries to do the opposite. She says:

From today’s vantage point, one may hope, but not firmly forecast, that over the next generation’s span, progress toward nondiscrimination and genuinely equal opportunity will make it safe to sunset affirmative action.

See 25 years was only a “hope”. 25 years from now, Lucy will yank the football away again.

From the majority opinion:

The Court takes the Law School at its word that it would like nothing better than to find a race-neutral admissions formula and will terminate its use of racial preferences as soon as practicable.

They’re being cute. They know that the Law School wants affirmative action now, affirmative action tomorrow, affirmative action forever. “Take it at its word” means that they have no way to enforce this.

The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.

“Expects” – as Ginberg says, “expects” means “hopes” not “requires”. The court simply has no mechanism to sunset its rulings in this way.

As I said before, the only way that it sunsets in 25 years is if there is another case and the political balance at the time is such that they overrule. A few more Biden nominees and they will throw the 25 year promise in the trash. And if the Court is inclined to overrule, they didn’t need the 25 year clock to begin with, although it is a useful marker.

For what it’s worth, through, rough, though, and thought were once pronounced the way they are spelled. Middle and Old English would have pronounced the “ough” similarly to the German back “ch” sound.
When English dropped this guttural sound these “ough” words were left hanging and over time we’ve come up with 8 or 9 variations of how to pronounce “ough” depending on the consonants preceding and following it.

Thanks for the eloquent summary.

“The kids who really want to know compete to get into the best universities because they want the best teachers and libraries…”

Best libraries, sure, but the notion that Overpriced Private Universities (OPUs) have the best teachers is pure fantasy. One of my best friends at SUNY Stony Brook transferred to Columbia, for which she took out a huge loan, but came back after one semester, so disappointed was she in the quality of the profs.

A few years later, while making my annual visit to Boston, I sat in on the first class of the fall semester in a Ph.D. seminar given by the sociologist Peter Berger. I was already familiar with every single word Berger said, including “and” and “the,” from his books.

You remind me of a Frenchman I went to school with in Germany. He said that the French almost never attend foreign universities, because they know they have the best system.

The only thing that a smart woman can do better than any man is bear smart children.

“I’m not sure you know how to read Supreme Court opinions.”

I learned how to read and analyze appellate-court opinions when I was a law student, nearly forty years ago. (Granted, I only scored at the 97th percentile on the L.S.A.T., due to a lack of preparation and exigent circumstances; so, I failed to get into the most-elite law schools to which I had applied.) How about you?

“One must look at the actual decision, i.e., the official record. It makes clear, in the majority opinion, that AA _must_ have an end point in order to be found constitutionally permissible.”

The fact that, as a matter of principle, such a government action must have “an end point” does not mean that the Justice’s personal expectation of the policy’s being no longer necessary, after twenty-five more years, marks that point, as a matter of constitutional law.

Whites are discriminated against as much as Orientals, I thought our host Mr Unz proved this.

Is the spread of the delta variant a possible explanation here?

It could be. But if so, it nullifies the arguments for vaccines since the new variants they evidently don’t protect against are more deadly that the existing variants they do protect against.

Vaccine efficacy is overstated because healthy people are more likely to get vaccinated, this is a well established principle.

https://dailysceptic.org/2021/12/12/is-vaccine-effectiveness-against-death-mostly-a-statistical-illusion/

Admission for their children to the likes of Harvard is one of the most effective recruitment tools for foreign agents the US intelligence services have.

To repeat: Harvard and the Ivies represent one of the world’s greatest concentrations of soft power. Controlling them would provide a substantial fraction of control over the entire U.S., operating through its ruling elites.

Perhaps this was once true a century ago, when someone like TR was a cosseted Harvard man, but do you really think Yale had much of an influence on W.’s administration? While the Ivies still have some influence in that they educate the future bureaucrats in their early 20’s, nobody else thinks they have much of an impact on the world today, as you’re recounting the echoes of past glories.

Have you noticed that virtually no prominent public figure—U.S. Senator, Silicon Valley titan, media tycoon, or Hollywood star—is willing to challenge them. Have you asked yourself “Why”?

The question of challenging them has never even come up anywhere that I see, it would be as irrelevant as asking, “Why does nobody challenge the WNBA?” Nobody even thinks of the WNBA.

I thought your Harvard plan was for your publicly stated reasons: eliminating the unneeded fees, removing the unfair quotas, and generally setting them on a better tack. I considered even that quixotic and sentimental, as I don’t expect any of the Ivies to exist as educational institutions by 2050.

I realize it stings to hear this about your big plan but I’ve often found in my life that when a door shut on me, it was for the best, as I’d have missed other, much better opportunities if I had got in that door. I’m suggesting the same for you, that this site gives you far more influence than the Ivies ever could and that in this Internet era we’re moving into, you’re much better off creating new online ventures than trying to take over old institutions that will soon be dead.

I doubt it. I only recall his first name, Mark.

Thanks.

I’ve been doing some research (OK, googling) about just how many exceptions in the English language there are. Accounts vary from a low of 4% to a high of 25% – but the high includes lots of words that are just off by one letter. And yes, some of them are common words such as the ones you cited, but even those follow patterns.

This can be taught (taut), and it can be learned. It’s amazing how millions of non-English speakers manage to do it but only in America is there an industry made up of educrats that profits off of this.

The data in the chart is from August when the efficacy for the vaccines had not yet faded below 50%

Pfizer realized the efficacy falls below 50% after 6 months which is the reason they promoted boosters and now we need a fourth dose to protect against Omicron.

The vaccines have not been a complete failure but they failed to stop the spread. If they worked as we expected there would have been less COVID deaths in 2021 than 2020 before we had vaccines. Yet COVID deaths were twice as high in September 2021 than 2020. COVID deaths will be significantly higher this year than last year, excess deaths are also higher in 2021 than 2020.

So despite 80% of adults being vaccinated by September we experienced more deaths and we continue with mask mandates. an 80% vaccination rate failed to reduce deaths among American Adults and a 90% vaccination rate in Maine and Vermont failed to reduce deaths this fall.

Neither, she favors an eclectic approach in which phonics is one of many tools.

Please pardon my saying so, but it’s a dumb question because in real life you don’t have to tie your own hands in this way. Would you prefer a mechanic who doesn’t own a screwdriver or one who owns ONLY a screwdriver? I wouldn’t take my car to either one because neither one has the tools needed to do a complete job. I suppose if pushed I would choose the guy who owns the screwdriver because he might be able to do SOME common repairs.

I learned how to read and analyze appellate-court opinions when I was a law student, nearly forty years ago. (Granted, I only scored at the 97th percentile on the L.S.A.T., due to a lack of preparation and exigent circumstances; so, I failed to get into the most-elite law schools to which I had applied.) How about you?

Me? Ivy League J.D., about 25 years ago. Satisfied?

The fact that, as a matter of principle, such a government action must have “an end point” does not mean that the Justice’s personal expectation of the policy’s being no longer necessary, after twenty-five more years, marks that point, as a matter of constitutional law.

It’s not the Justice’s “personal expectation” – it’s the expectation of the Court, because it’s a fundamental part of the majority’s reasoning in reaching its conclusion.

AA turns into a pumpkin by 2028. Of course someone has to bring a case to make that happen, since the Court is limited to “cases or controversies” – that’s self-evident to anyone who has ever read the Constitution. Once such a case is before the Court, just watch – pumpkin. It could happen earlier than 2028. The point of this thread is to figure out why Harvard is changing its admissions policies. I submit that the imminent pumpkinization of AA is a primary reason, and that they are trying to get ahead of it.

Well not syllables as much as letter patterns – for example, in English, – at, -ed, etc. Learning “bat” will get you thru some English words but learning -at will get you through a lot of them.

But then you have -on: con, Don, Jon, …., Hon, ton, won. Uh oh.

McGuffey’s Readers (“the cat is on the mat”) have been in the public domain now for a century. There’s very little money to be made (none in the internet age) off of reprinting public domain materials.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14640/14640-pdf.pdf

The way you make money is by coming up with new approaches so that the school district has to buy all new materials and education professors can get paid for developing new programs. Whether these approaches work as well as the old ones is really not relevant. It’s better that they don’t work well because then in a few years you can sell them yet another new “improved” program. In the new program you have lots and lots of pictures of the latest fashionable minorities. In version 2, you have pictures of not just black kids but of black girls wearing hijabs, etc. In version 3, some of the kids look Central American and some of them have two mommies. In version 4, they have 2 daddies, one of whom is the birth daddy. It’s very important that the kids “see themselves” depicted in the book. If my name is Jaquan and I see a picture of Tom and his dog and Tom is white and the dog is not a pit bull then I might never learn to read due to the racisness of the illustrations.

Since reading is being taught by not very smart or motivated black women to even dumber black kids, a lot of them are never going to read well regardless of what this year’s reading program consists of.

Neither, she favors an eclectic approach in which phonics is one of many tools.

Of course. Come on, Jack, don’t you realize by now I am not an idiot? The purpose of that comment was twofold.

1. To establish a baseline. To be precise, is or is not phonics the best single approach for the majority of children? From what I know the answer to that is it is. Which I think is an important starting point. For example, it might be sensible to start off with the approach most likely to succeed and then have specialists like your wife work with the people who have problems.

2. Because many of the people in this world ARE idiots the policy choice often seems to come down to the dumb false dichotomy I posited.

Regarding your screwdriver analogy, do you think screwdriver compared to all tools is even roughly comparable in proportion to phonics compared to all methods of learning to read in terms of UTILITY? I’m excluding all of the cool variants of teaching reading which someone has dreamed up, but no one ever uses. I assume you have seen a mechanics tool chest and know how many tools there are which are commonly used. To make this concrete, how about you estimate the proportion of students who can successfully be taught to read using phonics only vs. the proportion of non-trivial mechanical projects which can be completed with only a screwdriver (hopefully you are allowing for a selection of bit types and sizes ; ).

To make this conversation more constructive, could you outline the process your wife thinks would be good in terms of these?

1. What approach should be taken in a normal classroom? Remember that we have to deal with the limitations of time, students, and the average teacher as well.

2. How much of 1. is/can be specially tailored to individual student’s needs?

3. How to identify students who need special help? How large a proportion of students might this include typically?

4. What are the top three methods other than phonics? What is the relative utility (e.g. success rate overall or just for students who failed with phonics) of each?

It is worth considering that the approach favored by specialists teaching reading to the troublesome cases might not be optimal (especially in a cost effectiveness sense) for the broad majority of the population. Consider the case of physicians where there are reasons to see a GP before seeing a specialist.

Prestige more than fame–more people probably know your name if you’re a top youtube personality than if you’re an NYT columnist, but NYT, like Harvard, has a lot of prestige, so you get some bragging rights.

You won’t get it. You’re too “akshually.” My strong opinion in this comment is on Ron Unz and his wellbeing. He needs this reality check and he needs it hard.

In general, it is my perception of the person that I am messaging and what they need that determines my tone.

What’s interesting about you is how you do the same but in a much more hackneyed manner. This is probably because your comments are partly determined by the same thing, but you’re too oblivious to realise it and so are entirely without relevance. It is nice that you care, and you do, but, until you understand your own patterns, you’ll continually mistake your own reflection for other people. Go back, read your comment and then independently go through your history with it in mind. You deserve such kind and loving attention.

Take your approach to me on my supposed awful misreading of JFK Jr’s book, but your total cowardice in doing the same for our host, even when I pointed out that I was merely repeating him.

Because you have a problem with understanding your own emotions and attach them to women, you will always find the energy to try to correct women and try to make them as blindly repressed as you. But you really don’t have a clue what you’re doing, which makes you very sweet, rather than offensive. Like a little child.
repeating him.

The right method is whatever works for that particular kid. “Phonics” BTW is not just one thing. This page gives a summary of various methods:

https://thereadingadvicehub.com/teach-your-child-to-read/alternative-approaches/

No one (at least not in their right minds) teaches a strictly phonetic approach because that’s not how humans actually read. If I give you a novel word : formather then you are going to approach it phonetically the first time you see it. (Is it form-a-ther or for-mather? Can’t tell.) But after you see it a few times you are going to recognize it as a whole word and are going to remember which pronunciation is the correct one.

It’s not that phonics is bad or that “whole word” is better, it’s that any exclusive method is not optimal (perhaps if you had to pick one it would be phonics but there’s no reason why you have to pick one and only one). Even in the context of a large class with non-specialist teachers (BTW most schools nowadays have a “reading specialist” for the hard cases) teaching ONLY phonics is not going to be the best approach compared to an eclectic approach. It just doesn’t have to be only one thing. Not just in the major leagues but at every level of baseball pitchers throw more than 1 kind of pitch and not only hardballs.

The real name of McGuffey’s Readers BTW was the “Eclectic Reader” .

A Russian lady pointed out a great way to read those loonnnnggg Russian words.

Start with the final syllable.

Work your way to the front of the word.

It worked!

You should read McWhorter’s current Woke Racism. He has a threefold plan to save Black America:

1) Legalize drugs (mainly to take the profits, and gang violence, out of the drug trade)

2) Teach all children phonics

3) Break the obsession with college as the route to a good life

This would of course help non-Blacks as well.

Glad to see that a distinguished linguist agrees with my Aunt Sophie on phonics! She taught phonics to black ghetto kids & got good results.

Going totally off the rails here but I’ve never understood the reasoning not to do this. Arguments to the contrary have always struck me more as an attempt for the proponent to make himself sound smart and clever than actually advocating a method of education.

I don’t understand the whole story myself, but from what I gather, it was a fad based on half-baked post WW2 educrat ideas about learning styles. And surely you know that the US is the country of quack schemes and fads, as long as they make a buck for someone.

See my other comments about my aunt, who used phonics to good effect.

Since reading is being taught by not very smart or motivated black women to even dumber black kids, a lot of them are never going to read well regardless of what this year’s reading program consists of.

This is literally the most harmful aspect of racial quotas – the consignment of great swathes of black children to illiteracy and dysfunction, courtesy of low-functioning black teachers in role model occupations who are lazy by inclination and mentally under-equipped to do the hard work of imparting useful knowledge to their charges.