Little Green Footballs parts ways with the Right.

Thanx to Pandagon.

18:21 I cut up the WHOLE 10 yard piece of purple cotton/lycra today. So sad... Tomorrow, the black. #

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/01/AR2009120103663.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns

Dear Miss Manners

Michele Bachmann says that we lived in Libertarian Heaven last year.

Thanx to Fragano Ledgister on Facebook.

http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2009/12/pinker-round-two-.html

 

In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, Stephen Pinker responds to my description of him as occupying the  “lonely ice floe of IQ fundamentalism”:

What Malcolm Gladwell calls a “lonely ice floe” is what psychologists call “the mainstream.” In a 1997 editorial in the journal Intelligence, 52 signatories wrote, “I.Q. is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic and social outcomes.” Similar conclusions were affirmed in a unanimous blue-ribbon report by the American Psychological Association. . .

A few things here are worth mentioning:

 

First, the editorial in question made a number of other arguments that, I think, most observers would agree fall on one end of the nature-nurture continuum: that all IQ tests measure the same thing, that heredity is more important that environment in determining it, that group differences are relatively unaffected by schooling or socioeconomic factors. It also said that the IQs of different races cluster at different points, with the average IQ of blacks falling about a standard deviation lower than that of whites, and that these differences show no sign of converging over time.

 

Second, two thirds of the editorial board of the journal Intelligence declined to sign the statement.

 

Third, the statement originally appeared on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal in 1994, explicitly in defense of “The Bell Curve,” a book whose supporters are typically quite happy to call one of the most controversial books of the past 25 years.

 

Fourth, fifteen of 52 signatories to the Wall Street Journal statement have had their research supported by the Pioneer Fund. For those who have not heard about the Pioneer Fund, here is a brief description of its history from “The Pioneer Fund: Bankrolling the Professors of Hate,” by the historian Adam Miller:

 

In 1937 the Pioneer Fund was founded by Wiclife Draper, whose New England textile fortune started the fund's endowment and helps finance it today. Harry Laughlin, the first president of the fun, was a well-known eugenicist who in 1924 was instrumental in pushing through legislation blocking U.S. Entry to Jews fleeing pograms in Russia. Before Congress he testified that IQ data proved that 83 percent of Jewish immigrants were born feeble-minded and therefore were a threat to the nation's economy and genetic makeup. Laughlin subsequently lobbied to keep those barriers in place, successfully cutting off sanctuary for Jews seeking refuge from the Third Reich.

    In 1922, Laughlin also wrote the Model Eugenical Sterilization Law which was adopted in one form or another by 30 states and resulted in the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of people in the United States.

 

    Among the fifteen Pioneer Fund-sponsored signatories were Arthur R. Jensen (who has cited the heritability of IQ to argue against interventions to boost academic performance of minorities), J. Philippe Rushton (who, since 2002, has been the president of the Pioneer Fund, and who has argued that the size of what he terms the “Negroid brain” is inversely related to that of the Negroid penis); Rushton's colleague Douglas Jackson (best known for arguing that men are significantly more intelligent than woman), and Seymour Itzkoff (a eugenicist who holds that blacks and whites have such distinct evolutionary histories as to belong to different subspecies).

 

Fifth, the APA’s own report on the subject,“Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns,” which Pinker suggests is in sympathy with his position, was largely directed against IQ fundamentalism.  For example, it noted that IQ results correlated well with total years of education—in part because high scorers receive encouragement, and are placed in "college preparatory" classes where their peers provide encouragement, too. The amount of education someone receives then itself has an effect on social status. ("In summary, intelligence test scores predict a wide range of social outcomes with varying degrees of success. Correlations are highest for educational achievement, where they account for about a quarter of the variance.") The paper points out that one reason intelligence scores predict occupational level is that "admission to many professions depends on test scores in the first place," and also explores the evidence that "workplaces may affect the intelligence of those who work in them." It delves into the Flynn effect, and the various possible explanations for it; and suggests that what little evidence is available "fails to support the genetic hypothesis" for the black/white differential in psychometric scores.

 

I don’t mean to suggest that Professor Pinker agrees with the more eccentric positions of the some of the 52 signatories. (Though the Pioneer Fund website does describe one of his books as a “must read”; the New Yorker, where I work, was less generous). The fact that ideas are sometimes supported by people with unsavory connections does not make them invalid. An ice floe is not necessarily a bad place to be. It’s just that if you are plainly floating on one, it doesn’t make much sense to insist that you are standing on solid ground.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An excellent baseball player from my childhood, and he made astute comments on the nostalgia TV shows about those days.

I just had to find this online after posting a comment in crystalpyramid 's blog about my good ol' TRS Model 1.

Thanks to a billboard by the academy, in Manhattan, I have discovered there is a brand of outdoor wear called Marmot. I assume their slogan is, "Our clothes are full of fleas that will give you the plague."

And a diagnostics lab that has a pick-up box in my shrink's hallway is Enigma, Inc. I see their intention, but it seems to me to have the opposite effect: Use us, and your problem remains an Enigma.

Mood: puckish

The Republicans go undead

Thanx to jblaque

Reading Farthing, which is actually the book to which Ha'penny is the sequel. Murder mystery in a post-WWII alternate-reality England where they're gassing Jews on the Continent but merely being hypocritical and snobby at home. And then I read this Times article and it suddenly sounded a lot less farfetched.

( Random unrelated poll questions... )

For their holiday concert, the middle-school students are rehearsing the (Michael Jackson) song "We Are the World". Since the concert's in like a week and a half, they get pulled out of class for it, and their regular-class teachers get to come down to the gym to watch and listen, try to help the overextended music teacher keep the kids under control.

We are the world,
We are the children,
We are the ones who make a brighter day...

So yesterday I was supervising this, unsure how I feel about the shameless presentationality of the music curriculum here, skipping class time to rehearse for concerts so we can impress the parents, taking away time for real music instruction with these rehearsals. Having tweens who're uncomfortable with being children still singing songs where the whole political message is about being children. But it's not my job, not my problem, and are other middle schools really any better? I sure can't remember a single thing I learned in middle-school music class that I didn't already know.

And it suddenly struck me how much this is no longer our song to sing. I spent my whole liberal-educated childhood singing songs like this. I was in a choir called "Peace Child" that did fundraiser concerts, and the children's choir at Hochstein had a couple of concerts at protests. I went to an elementary school where we did yoga for gym, where music class involved sitting on the floor listening to a bearded guy played folksongs on his guitar. Good people, but people who use children's voices to deliver the kinds of messages that children's voices are best at delivering. As children we were never cynical enough to think about that part.

But we are no longer the children. We are no longer the hope of the future. This is no longer the world we will inherit. This is the world we've got, and it's no longer someone else's fault if it's a disaster. We're the ones who're supposed to hold all together, we're the ones who are holding it all together, or trying to. Even if it's more than we can fix. The clock's started and this is our now. This is our one chance for whatever it was we were going to do.

Happy adulthood, everyone. How are you all holding up?

Then it will be trash night. JoyOjoy.

Has anyone seen my brain?

INwatch: Core Rules: 438, Lilith: 379, Eli: 355, Liber Umbrarum: 223, Litheroy: 217, Asmodeus: 189, Infernal Player's Guide: 117, GURPS In Nomine: 80, Zadkiel: 55 (yay!).
Adventures: City On Fire: 116, Strange Bedfellows: 93, Feast of Blades: 92, The Rats' Revenge: 86.
Free Adventures: A Very Nybbas Christmas: 4127, The Sorcerer's Impediments: 2688.
Not IN: Sahudese Fire Drill: 77, GURPS IOU: 62, GURPS Classic All-Star Jam 2004: 60 (about to fall off the bottom, eek!). Not IN or mine: Vorkosigan Saga Sourcebook and RPG: 220.


( Dragons under fold )

An undercover operation of the South Korean CIA, posing as an American newspaper, ran an ad saying that President Obama isn't American enough.

Thanx to Fragano Ledgister on Facebook.

hope it's an excellent day!

Last night I dreamed that womzilla and I were at a small gathering in a big house, an informal convention, kind of like GoldenCon (decades-ago gatherings of members of The Golden Apa, for people fond of ILLUMINATUS! and like interests; Bob Shea went to the one in the Chicago area & we visited Bob Wilson during the Los Angeles one) but attended by Alan Moore and his friends.

Mostly we just hung out together, but one afternoon Moore and some friends from England put on a play he had written. In it, the government was doing & trying to hide evil things--small surprise. However, perhaps because of a 1984 approach to technology, broadcast was the default; the governmental people involved had a machine that covered or blocked the broadcast. The climax of the play was that a rat chewed through some vital cord or line of that machine, and the evil doings were broadcast everywhere.

When I told Womzilla this, he said, R for Ratatouille!

Yes, we agreed: "People should not fear rats. The government should fear people and rats."

Oh, and the actor who played the rat cuddled up with me and did a GREAT job of bruxing, but I couldn't figure out if he was flirting with me or just being nice.

Mood: waking up, entertained by my inner theater

'Tis the Santa hat season. Thanx again, bohemiancoast

When I was growing up, they told me one of the horrible things about communism was that you were expected to snitch on your friends. (The prep school that told me that tried to institute an honor system, but that's another story.) The Soviet Union is one with Nineveh and Tyre, but Uganda, perhaps harking back to the proud traditions of Idi Amin, wants to set up a similar mandatory snitching system to defend against the Lavender Menace.

Thanx to Shakesville