Elsewhere (140)
Charles Murray reflects on his book The Bell Curve, and its reception, twenty years on:
The reaction to The Bell Curve exposed a profound corruption of the social sciences that has prevailed since the 1960s. The Bell Curve is a relentlessly moderate book — both in its use of evidence and in its tone — and yet it was excoriated in remarkably personal and vicious ways, sometimes by eminent academicians who knew very well they were lying. Why? Because the social sciences have been in the grip of a political orthodoxy that has had only the most tenuous connection with empirical reality, and too many social scientists think that threats to the orthodoxy should be suppressed by any means necessary. Corruption is the only word for it.
Russell Nieli on grade inflation:
Another factor furthering grade inflation has been the self-esteem movement and the belief that having a high opinion of oneself is a prerequisite to self-confidence and high achievement. The fact that… feeling good about oneself unconnected with one’s actual striving or achievement is usually a formula for indolence and lethargy — if not actual narcissism — hasn’t diminished the appeal of the movement to many university administrators… It is also a major reason, I believe, why American students, who in international comparisons have the highest self-esteem, lag so far behind those in many Asian countries in becoming top flight engineers and scientists.
When I was a teenager taking A-levels, my class was told – ominously, several times – that the minimum grades for acceptance at university were two ‘A’s and a ‘B’. More recently, in 2011, while listening to Radio 4’s rural soap The Archers, I heard Ambridge’s teen eco-warrior Pip excitedly announce her A-level results – “a ‘B’ and two ‘C’s.” She was therefore, naturally, going to university.
Sarah Knapton on vegetarians and sperm:
Vegetarians and vegans had significantly lower sperm counts compared with meat eaters, 50 million sperm per ml compared with 70 million per ml. They also had lower average sperm motility – the number of sperm which are active. Only one third of sperm were active for vegetarians and vegans compared with nearly 60 per cent for meat eaters.
And Amy Powell relays a tale of stalking gone awry:
A 28-year-old woman rescued from a chimney at a Thousand Oaks home was allegedly trying to break into the home of a man she had met online. Residents reported hearing the sound of a woman crying in the area at about 5:45 am. Deputies found Genoveva Nunez-Figueroa trapped inside the chimney. Ventura County Fire Department and Urban Search and Rescue members had to dismantle the chimney in order to get Nunez-Figueroa out. She was lubricated with dish soap prior to being hoisted out… This is the second time Nunez-Figueroa was found on [the homeowner’s] roof. Two weeks ago, he spotted her and called police, but she disappeared.
As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.
apparently one Marina Abramovic predates most or all of today’s performance artists
Not quite sure how we arrived at Abramovic and performance art …
… but just for you information performance art in the modern avant-garde art world sense dates back to Marinetti and the Futurists, the Cabaret Voltaire and the Dadaists working from about 1912 to the 1920 (give to take a couple of years).
Marinetti even used violence as performance art long before Abramovic.
Still, until I got to 00:32 in that trailer, I had no idea she’d been the inspiration for that knifey-scene in Aliens.
Ms Abramović was mentioned here, briefly, a while ago.
She is considered the doyenne of performance art and appeared at the Serpentine recently. Quite a funny review here:
“Having sat through her messianic press conference, in which Abramovic did not for a moment understate her contribution to world art …”
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/15/marina-abramovic-512-hours-review-serpentine-gallery
Notwithstanding that folks have lived there exclusively for generations by never consuming plant, grain, or fruit, the Arctic isn’t for human habitation either. You have to gut and skin stuff to clothe your naked pinkness.
Adaptation occurs – to the point of mutation, even – but is it necessary and a conscious good choice. Given that we’re so advanced we can’t run a successful collective in hundreds of years and across billions of lives trying, or prevent ourselves one day creating artificial life that will all but certainly exterminate us for the favor, reach isn’t grasp.
“one day creating artificial life that will all but certainly exterminate us for the favor”
Yeah right. It might try but every time it gets together to mount an attack it will lose wifi connection or start to download 28,138 updates, you wait and see.
Reminded me of this nightmarish Hallowe’en pumpkin.
You can’t run a (cashless) collective because they’re not an efficient way of running things.
Currency is the secret to successful and vastly more efficient deferred barter and thus inter-temporal reciprocation which is why capitalism creates wealth, and state extortion of the type needed for collectivism destroys it.
Faint isolated cases where bacon regrows your hair or cream cheese your erection
Who says modern medical science doesn’t give the customer what he wants.
because, on the face it, it seemed so implausible
(probably just a wind-up, however..)
Why implausible? Are you saying you believe that men and women simply never display different behaviours with respect to (for example) reading, socialising, work, and violence?
As we know different patterns in all these areas are established quite early on in a child’s life. What you were perhaps trying to imply (as per usual) is the bog-standard feminist get-out-clause that all this is caused by social forces.
(which is rather less persuasive than the honest scientific endeavour to study the effects of different brain structure, hormones, and neurotransmitter on male & female behaviour)
I think there was a lot in what Nik was saying
Dude.
Eating animal fat won’t make you fat. Eating steak won’t make you fat.
Insulin allocates calories either to fat stores or to muscles and organs. The higher the insulin levels (in reaction to high blood sugar) the more calories get allocated to fat. Genetics tends to inform the efficiency of insulin in doing its job.
Animal flesh and products don’t raise your blood sugar. Non-starchy vegetables also don’t.
Steak and salad. I went on that diet (20 carbs daily) for six weeks and lost 15 lbs that I’ve kept off for about 2 years.
Turns out, fat people are lethargic because too many calories are allocated to fat and not enough to organs and muscles. Bouncy people are getting enough energy in their muscles and organs instead of converting it to fat. Genetics and diet are the culprits, but the causality is the reverse of what we’re used to thinking.
Exercise is good for you; it’s just not the best way to lose weight — keeping your blood sugar low is.
Having fat circulating in the bloodstream allows the system to bypasss sending sugar directly to the brain, dicentra. Vegans depend on a constantly replenishing supply, thereby not having the chance to store fat.
Also contrary to myth, carbs don’t make you fat period. Carbs make you fat when fat is already present. Carbs alone don’t make you fat. Carbs are the best energy source there is, and carbs feed the brain vastly better than fat.
Losing weight on lettuce and steaks? Athletes don’t: You’re starving yourself.
You can exist entirely on meat and fat, for a time, and not gain weight based just on meat and fat. But meat and fat are the system’s facilitators, not its nutrients.
I encourage you to read the medical content in this.
The rest of the argument favoring abolishing the modern western diet is literally too comprehensive to write in twenty long comments, so if you have an interest you’ll find the research. I wish you the best.
Dude isn’t a position, dicentra, it’s a pose…but I still love most of your stuff.
There’s a term I’ve used from time to time that I like to call the Smug Diet: people think their particular dietary practices are more virtuous, and try at least bad to proselytize, and at worse to use the state to impose their dietary ideas on everybody else.
Any time people talk about quality of life, I find that I’d have a much higher quality of life if I didn’t have to deal with a bunch of nannycrats trying to tell me how to live my life.
“Vegetarianism is closely linked to psychosis”
As illustrated by Ten’s diatribe.
Cutting out the carbs and sugar and switching to a diet high in meat and vegetables was the only dietary change I ever made that reduced my weight and my cholesterol level.
Siiiggghhhh.
And Kimberly Guilfoyle now known for Kimberly Guilfoyle young female voters: Fox News host says don’t vote, no wisdom
Minnow @ October 23, 2014 at 11:04:The right policy response may well be to stop educating our children in English and to switch to Mandarin instead.
It might be, if the same result was not found in Japanese and Koreans, who don’t speak or read Mandarin. (Japanese do use Chinese ideographs some of the time, but don’t understand the language.) Nor in Americans of northeast Asian descent, who speak only English.
But it is. Oops.
“Why implausible? Are you saying you believe that men and women simply never display different behaviours with respect to (for example) reading, socialising, work, and violence?”
No, I mean it is implausible on the face of it because men exhibit much more of the sort of behaviour that Nik speculated as female (such as in sports clubs and other associations).
“It might be, if the same result was not found in Japanese and Koreans, who don’t speak or read Mandarin.”
But the languages have significant features in common that could account for the differences. It will be interesting to see if and how the IQ effect endures over generations in the US. I don’t believe that has been tested yet. The data will be distorted, though, by the fact that immigrant families tend to have higher than average IQ.
Sam Duncan – “bloody peacocks”
I know, right? They’re the most bad tempered birds you’ll ever met. And supposedly they look pretty but I think they just try too hard. They look bloody ridiculous.
Hal, Pellegri – just when you think wasps can’t be more horrible, you find out they’re carnivores. Thanks for that.
Minnow – seafood isn’t proper meat. Everyone knows that.
“It might be, if the same result was not found in Japanese and Koreans, who don’t speak or read Mandarin.”
-But the languages have significant features in common that could account for the differences-
I can’t think of any conceivably relevant feature that those three languages have in common. What are you thinking of exactly?
“I can’t think of any conceivably relevant feature that those three languages have in common. What are you thinking of exactly?”
Thety are all transcribed idiomatically.
Pnff. ‘Ideogramatically’.
Hangul is ideograms?
But Korean uses an alphabet, an almost completely phonetic one. It’s no harder to learn to write than Spanish is. Chinese and Japanese are indeed logographic, making them much harder. But research suggests that rather than produce a population that is uniformly better at manipulating visual symbols that (the English, for instance), it tends to produce a fatter distribution from the highly education to the functionally illiterate.
There are much clearer effects of early bilingualism on intelligence. Distinguishing two separate sets of sounds and rules for combination and (coreference) with the world around them), does seem to prepare the brain better for other things.
There is also a broader point that it is the spoken language, not the written form, that matters, bacause by the time you start learning to write the development of the brain is well advanced, and Chinese is morphologically a remarkably simple language.
“But research suggests that rather than produce a population that is uniformly better at manipulating visual symbols that (the English, for instance), it tends to produce a fatter distribution from the highly education to the functionally illiterate.”
Not the evidence that I have seen, I would be glad to see yours.
“because by the time you start learning to write the development of the brain is well advanced”
But this is behind the times. Brain formation does not stop until late teens for women and early twenties for men typically.
Which probably is why IQ is so heavily influenced by environmental and cultural factors, by the way.
But Korean uses an alphabet, an almost completely phonetic one. It’s no harder to learn to write than Spanish is. Chinese and Japanese are indeed logographic, making them much harder.
*Snork* Pwned.
Not the evidence that I have seen, I would be glad to see yours.
No, let’s see yours first.
Also elsewhere . . .
EU makes Britain pay for recovery states The Telegraph.
Um. . . . What was that saying. Um.
Oh, right, something about No taxation without representation!!!
Yes, “dude” is a pose, but your science is still bad.
This is the scientific content that I consumed.
I tried the low-carb diet and it worked as described. Empiricism rules over theory and definitely over ideology, even though the plural of anecdote is not data. I’ll go with what has worked for me, regardless of the external label.
Taubes has no ideology to push (neither vegan nor carnivorous) and is not interested in changing the world or making anything sustainable. He stumbled into his discoveries, and points out merely that the body is a chemist, not a mathematician (calories in minus calories burned is incorrect).
Having fat circulating in the bloodstream allows the system to bypasss sending sugar directly to the brain, dicentra.
Where else is that datum found, aside from vegan literature? You DO know that activists lie more often than not, don’t you?
I feel better after eating red meat. Nothing perks me up physically (aside from amphetamines) like a double bacon cheeseburger. It’s probably the heme iron and protein surge.
Look, I don’t give a rip that you choose to be vegan. Knock yourself out. I also have no interest in making any pronouncements about vegans other than observing that they tend to be even more self-righteous than Mormons about their dietary restrictions.
I say that having been raised in Utah and having abstained from coffee, tea, alcohol, and tobacco my whole life. I’ve heard plenty of my fellows hector non-Mormons for not following the terms of our covenant. It’s stupid and annoying.
For Exhibit A, I present this old thread from AoSHQ, wherein a couple of self-righteous Kiwi vegans stumble into the Moron Horde and suffer the requisite damage. Beginning with comment 29.
As the old joke has it: How do you know someone’s a vegan? Because they’ll tell you. The only diet I have been able to sustain long-term is one high in meat and animal fats and low in simple carbohydrates. Even so, it’s a struggle. Potatoes, bread and pasta taste good. But I am speaking for myself, alone. It’s anecdotal. I’m pretty firmly convinced that most pronouncements on the issue by so-called experts is garbage of the highest order. If nutritionism were to be put on the scientific spectrum, it would lie a lot closer to the tarot cards and crystal healing end than the quantum electrodynamics end. And I’ll be damned if I’ll let myself be lectured by some importunate mung-bean muncher. Wind your damn necks in!
That’s nice, dicentra, but without the mild fallacy, anecdote, and projection, it wants for relevance. (Too, Catskills Ted and Pist314 did that first.)
What amuses me is what I led off with. That lately the right proudly but falsely conflates bacon and BBQ – I read the conservative blogs too, see – with lifestyle evidence of anti-Democrat loyalties and bona fides. (See Ace at your link, maybe. I’m not going to bother because I’ve seen it before and it’s dumb.)
Conversely, if it’s vegan it must be left wing and lunatic.
Sure. Except no. No connection. No relevance. No worth or substance. Like you, bless your heart, I know diet is just a lifestyle choice and not the second coming of Mrs Obama, tear down this lunch program.
You feel great on meat. Of course you do: it’s the momentary highs, even as you surmise, the intense caloric density and reprieve from starvation. You’re losing weight because those highs occur in the desert of starving your system – you’re slowly moderating fat levels downward, as hoped. Blood health improves to a degree, at least until nearly half of Adkins zealots fall off that wagon, which they shall.
Dropping the extra pounds is the whole point and we all know the only way to do that is to intake less than we burn.
But carbo-loaders balance too, and they can eat a ton of food. Viola, weight stability if you want it without either the starvation or the deprivation or the inefficiencies of the step involving fat, which is dumb and inefficient as real nutrition goes.
What upsets things is mixing both. Fat makes you fat when you eat potatoes and macaroni alongside because the fat then naturally stores – it’s what it is, for heaven’s sake – while the latter burns. Carbs make energy because they’re so very good at doing it right now. Carbs themselves don’t make you fat.
You could try what paleo man did for eons before inventing the briquette. He consumed as much plant and fruit and grain bulk as he could possibly find, and when he got really lucky, he didn’t enjoy a gut full of sirloin nearly as often as a gut full of greens, which carry far less caloric density. Stuffed without the stuffing, hence thinner.
Let’s stop idealizing a false paleo condition with our truther myth of Neanderthal fitness so we can extend it to the modern western meat-based diet. It didn’t exist and hunger was a fact of his life.
It’s not a fact of ours, however, and consequences will occur. Of course half the country has to resort to moderating daily Diet Cokes, fries, pizzas, and three squares a day by eventually rationing down to just beef and sprouts. Let’s just not pass it off as a complete, healthy, or historically authentic diet.
And especially not as a revolutionary act aimed at protesting socialism or something because Whole Foods and Occupy deviants.
Folks don’t much care what you eat. I don’t. Now if you care what I care, on the other hand, then maybe Ted and you can ask nicely for your rights not to hear religion…when someone actually does preach it at you.
Sez Ten, “I don’t care what you eat” (lengthy dietribe [sic] follows). It’s the analogue of being buttonholed in the pub by a bloke who won’t shut up about his hobby horse. It is a source of confusion to the monomaniac that not everyone is as interested in his obsession as he is.
My two penn’orth on the whole issue: as long as you don’t eat so much they have to demolish a wall to haul your carcase out when you croak, then the sole dietary criterion is whether you like what you are eating. We are not children, to be told what we ‘should’ and ‘should not’ eat, and hectoring bloody nincompoops who think otherwise should boil their heads (possibly to make delicious nincompoop broth, since they are not otherwise utilising them for anything productive).
I also recognize your right not to hear whatever you can reconfigure and reconstruct after the fact of hearing it, Gillies.
It’s a courtesy I’ve learned by practicing on progressives.
It’s their right to be free from whatever they label religion too, even when it’s plain common sense.
Hickory Wind @ October 24, 2014 at 13:14: Chinese and Japanese are indeed logographic…
Japanese is not logographic. Or more precisely, as I stated, uses Chinese ideographs for some words (kanji), but uses alphabetical characters for others (hiragana and katakana).
So it is partly logographic.
Incidentally, most Chinese immigrants have been from south China, and spoke Cantonese or Fujianese, not Mandarin.
I’m curious as to when these “grades” (A, B, C etc.) were introduced for A levels, and what the real reason was. There may be some justification in “humanities” subjects, in which marking presumably amounts to forming a rough impression of the merit of an essay, but in others (say mathematics, or many foreign languages at school level) there are fairly clear distinctions between correct and incorrect answers. In my day we were just given percentages for everything (if I remember correctly; certainly I still recall my percentages in one or two subjects). One explanation I have heard is that a difference of one percent should not be seen as important–but somewhere or other, in a subject where marking is tolerably precise, the difference between A and B will amount to one percent anyway.
It becomes entirely absurd when people talk of grade point averages, for which the grades (obtained, perhaps with some fiddling, from percentages), are translated back to numbers (according to rules that are often fixed, somewhat arbitrarily, by the institution) so that an average may be taken, and then back again to grades. Why not have numerical marks all the way?
@pedant2007
Interesting point. I studied sciences at A Level in the late 70s (wrong choice) and pursued a medical qualification which I was clearly not suited for.
At A Level, you were expected to “show your workings/reasonings”- some of the problems set were open-ended but obtuse. If you got on the right path, but got the answer wrong you were nevertheless deserving of credit. I think that’s the right approach.
When at university, we were presented with multiple choice questionnaires, with sometimes up to five possible answers; given that you were going to make a decision that would potentially harm a patient if you were incorrect in a real-life clinical scenario, if you ticked “don’t know” you scored a zero; the “correct” answer got you a +1, and a “wrong” answer earned you a -1, so it was possible to come out of an exam with a minus score. “QI”-ish, if you like. Of course, it was in the early days of the hegemony of IT (these were literally “tick-box” exams), but it didn’t half have an effect on your mindset- “I’d better get this right, because otherwise…”.
I quit (because I was useless) and became a lawyer, after a rigorous undergraduate degree at a “redbrick”, which was just as much a test of memory as were A Levels, but which also involved a fair amount of essay-writing and strenuous sessions with forensically astute tutors.
I’m still not sure as to which is the better approach, but both involved plenty of book learning. My more recent academic endeavours at Masters level (as a very mature student) have left me bewildered by the lack of application of more recent graduates (post 1990s) and their lack of general knowledge.
Oh, I acknowledge (and did admit) that letter grades can be appropriate in some situations–as can be tick-boxes. But it seems odd to me that the whole system changed at some point. In A Level Maths, for instance, percentage marks really were potentially more informative, and at worst no more misleading, than letter grades.
As for the world’s going to the dogs, maybe it’s just that our experience, rather long ago, as pupils or as undergraduates was necessarily limited; returning in later life gives one a different perspective. But also, so many more people now take degrees (and higher degrees) that it’s scarcely surprising we find them, on average, less enthusiastic than we were. Not a very original comment, of course.
Hi all. I found this blog a couple of weeks ago and can’t tear myself away. I think I’ve found something suitable that I didn’t see in the search results.
In the useless hand-wringing department, Wellesley College struggles with how to include women who insist they are men – while wanting the female privilege of attending a women’s college because they don’t feel safe or comfortable among men and the LGBTQ privilege of having disproportionate representation and accomodation made to them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/magazine/when-women-become-men-at-wellesley-college.html
I think the only two people who come out with any credit are Prof. Cushman (who seems to be a while male, the patriacal bastard), and the anonymous transmasculine student who said (approx) “If I am a man, why am I taking up space and attention at a women’s college?”
I hope you enjoy it.