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.
She was lubricated with dish soap prior to being hoisted out…
No tar and feathers?
No tar and feathers?
Well, quite a lot of soot.
“Only one third of sperm were active for vegetarians and vegans compared with nearly 60 per cent for meat eaters.”
As Richard Feynman said:” You can fool people but you can’t fool Nature.”
As Richard Feynman said: “You can fool people but you can’t fool Nature.”
To be fair, the same article acknowledges some circumstantial evidence that vegetarianism may help prolong life. Though as the study involves vegetarian Seventh-Day Adventists, there may be other, possibly more important, variables.
“…. there may be other, possibly more important, variables.”
Praise the Lord – and pass the Sprouts!
Vegetarians and vegans had significantly lower sperm counts compared with meat eaters
There’s a joke in there somewhere about not touching eggs.
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.
All through my school years, university was spoken of as the reserve of the very highest achievers. Teachers went above and beyond to coach the best and brightest through their A-levels. Former pupils were wheeled in to speak of the wonders that awaited those of us who could ascend to higher education.
So imagine my dismay when I arrived at the end of the 1990s to find the all-must-have-prizes cultural revolution was in full swing. The whole place was reduced to being a drunken creche for idle teenagers who got in through clearing with their two Ds and and E and subsequently the whole place was dumbed down to their level.
On a less morose note – Behold the genderless, vegan gingerbread man.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-29706778
Grade Inflation is accelerating also because, at least in the U.S., colleges and universities are fighting for an ever decreasing number of students. Higher education has now become primarily a business catering to customers, and to keep customers happy, the customers must be told they are very smart indeed. And so, we’ve become Lake Wobegon, where all the students are above average.
Not sure if this is on topic or not, but I’m beginning to wonder about this as I read through comments and such of many of these stories. It seems to me that the gap between openly stated leftist view points, many of them increasingly mainstream, and the strawman arguments of right wing groups is rapidly closing.
I was accepted at University in 1970 with an A and two Ds. Admittedly I was 21 at the time and had learned quite a bit between 18 and 21, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to get in with something less than two As and a B.
Genuine classical libertarian types will note that among the issues the political right remains in denial over are the nature of money – it’s not really the economy, stupid – the wanton corporatization of power and interest, and the right’s primitive instinct to conflate animal agricultural with political conservativism.
In reality there is copious objective evidence that diets heavy in animal product are, on top of the unnecessary cruelty, unhealthy and wasteful.
Yet, there’s that proud streak of self-styled, rugged individualism the right idealizes that feels that to be free is to hunt and vice versa. Somehow this classist superiority hasn’t been outgrown in an era of $35,000 Ford trucks and $150 outdoor utensil sets where hunting is unnecessary and quite unable to influence lost liberties.
I remember when responsible conservationism and the grace to live humbly and compassionately within your means would have avoided such crass egoism and ruralist commercialism, but then like those lost freedoms, such grace never really stood much of a chance.
Toss a few more $30 racks on the gas grille. That’ll learn the urbanites.
Ten,
Are you on drugs?
If anyone would like to purchase drugs, just ask Big Mary at the bar.
No credit.
I think I get it- hunting was OK when the outdoor utensil sets retailed for less than 150 bucks?
To be fair, David, the proggs, urbanites, academics, counter culture fruits, and the elitists have what’s coming to them – as well as what will likely never come to them, as hell-bent as they are to inflict it on us normals first – but the right’s insatiable compulsion to remain codependent with them in their false premises, paradigms, and platforms is remarkable.
All much of the right has remaining, after a hundred year’s wrangling with the left and losing every skirmish, battle, and war, is that false bravado of the merest vestige of, at least over here in the States, rock-ribbed individuality and independence. The bumper-stickered pickup. The Texas mythos and the BBQ joint. The bass boat and the weekend jaunts first to Cabelas and then Costco. For the Republicanism.
None of that aptly engages, in this particular comparatively minor tributary of thought, the nature of animal agriculture, the selective misuse of research data on diet and health, and the corporate contamination not just of central power, but of markets and with them beliefs about commerce, which brings us back to agriculture.
I get that a thumb in the eye of Michelle’s school lunch program is all the rightly Republican rage; carrots and radishes are right out. But presumptions that slashing millions of heifer throats – while they’re hung from hooks in a meat industry that’s environmentally nonviable and runs at about 4% caloric efficiency – in order to provision enormous drive-up brands because it’s akin to conservative godliness is enough to make one consider half a nod when the next leftist proggtard cartoons the right as unthinking fly-over partisans.
There’s neither cause or reason to run an animal agriculture industry. Faint isolated cases where bacon regrows your hair or cream cheese your erection have become, for this instant in time anyway, foolish rightwing diversions and as such they provision the left’s contempt and rancor as much as they paper over the right’s perpetual wandering in political wildernesses that left has generously prepared for it.
The plant diet is not a quirk of moonbattery, per se. It’s just said to be, which makes the issue below grade where other greater concerns exist.
Where can I buy this bacon and cream cheese of which you speak?
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/22/women-better-at-housework-men-better-at-avoiding-it
Yeah, the Graun never ceases to amaze me just how low it can go. Nevertheless, the comments in the article make it worthwhile! I still have faith in humanity! Sadly, I don’t have as much faith in myself as I keep promising myself to never read anything there and yet, for some strange reason, I keep going back….and I absolutely hate that! Maybe it’s my inner sadomasochist?
“Vegetarians and vegans may be harming their chance of having children”
I thought of this cat:
http://static.funpic.hu/_files/pictures/original/44/34/43444.jpg
Faint isolated cases where bacon regrows your hair or cream cheese your erection
Wait, what? Why wasn’t I told?
cream cheese your erection
But do it carefully, mind.
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.
Of all the statements that you, our Esteemed Host, have made over the years, this one dates you the most :p
Of all the statements that you, our Esteemed Host, have made over the years, this one dates you the most.
The A-levels or The Archers?
The A-levels or The Archers?
The combination is particularly effective 🙂
In entirely unrelated news: http://www.jeremy-duns.com/blog/2014/10/18/owen-jones-and-how-how-he-gets-away-with-it
The Archers is one of the very few things on Radio 4 that I can bear listening to. Best heard in the omnibus podcast version, for a fully immersive experience. Irony not included.
Ten – Vegetarianism is closely linked to psychosis.
Hitler.
Hilary Benn.
Hayley Mills.
All vegetarians. All evil. Coincidence?
Furthermore, vegetarianism is unnatural.
All the good animals eat meat:
* cats
* lions
* dogs
* bears
* sharks
* T-Rexes
While the bad animals are not meat eaters:
* wasps
* monkeys
* peacocks
* minnows
It’s science.
If British public schools tell us anything, it’s that the secret to high achievement is feeling bad about yourself, but not letting it show.
“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’.”
I distinctly remember being told that if we didn’t have at least three “A”s, at A-Level, we might as well forget Oxbridge because we were an independent school. A few Scottish Highers would be enough for state pupils, but we’d be held to higher standards. Then, fifteen years later, Gordon Broon comes along bellyaching about “élitism”. I hope I never meet him face-to-face, ‘cos it’ll be ugly.
Steve 2: Proof positive there, I think. Bloody peacocks.
I get that a thumb in the eye of Michelle’s school lunch program is all the rightly Republican rage; carrots and radishes are right out. But presumptions that slashing millions of heifer throats – while they’re hung from hooks in a meat industry that’s environmentally nonviable
David, are you running an MA in Creative Writing on the side? I think one of your students might have dropped in on the wrong day.
I think one of your students might have dropped in on the wrong day.
Well, it was a bit like stumbling into a room where two people have been arguing for some time, quite heatedly, and one of them has left, and so the remaining person, who still has more to say, carries on the argument with you, even though you haven’t the faintest idea what it is you’re supposed to say, or have said, or be arguing about.
It felt a bit like this.
And, in a political climate where reproductive rights are under constant attack and rape and domestic violence are still at epidemic levels, it can feel a bit trite to bring up the laundry.
Chores a bit trite? Write an article moaning about them anyway! (and get paid for it) The oppression never stops.
And about that epidemic of rape… should I wear a mask and gloves to work?. Can’t be too careful these days.
“In reality there is copious objective evidence that diets heavy in animal product are, on top of the unnecessary cruelty, unhealthy and wasteful.”
But but but, didn’t the Eskimos use to have an all-meat, all-the-time diet? And weren’t they Noble Keepers Of The Land, who were healthy and strong and stuff?
I just get so confused sometimes, trying to keep up with the ever shifting Narrative…
To be fair, David . . . other greater concerns exist.
. . . . This might be a bit premature, but has Minnow spawned a mirror universe twin?
Steve^2: While the bad animals are not meat eaters:
* wasps
Careful there.
I’ve seen samples of recent A-level papers (mainly physics and maths). It’s pretty hard to see how you could get a B and two C’s on them without having suffered some form of catastrophic head injury. Currently, the Cambridge STEP papers are much closer to what A-levels were like 25-30 years ago.
When I was applying to study physics, Cambridge wanted three A’s, but Imperial (where I ended up) was less stringent, as they put much more emphasis on the interview. In terms of the entrants to the two courses and the academic standards required while studying them, I doubt there was a hair’s breadth. A-levels were largely an irrelevance anyway after having performed their gatekeeper function of screening out the manifestly bone-headed. Some of us had done double maths and some had not. The lecturer in our first maths lecture said that was immaterial, as he was going to level the playing field and bring everyone up to double maths standard during the next two lectures, so pay attention. I imagine similarly rude awakenings are experienced by freshers in the first weeks of other courses – at least those that have managed to maintain some vestige of rigour.
It felt a bit like this.
He he he he ; – )
Well see Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve and other books that cover similar topics.
Africans tend to have higher self-esteem. Asians lower self-esteem (than either Africans or Caucasians who are somewhere in the middle).
Northeast Asians also have higher IQ, especially for mathematical areas, than either Caucasians or Africans (meaning sub-Saharan Africans), with Caucasians being somewhere in the middle again.
The fact is; this data—that Asians do well at producing engineering students, for example; is what you would predict just from IQ data vs. population demographics of the respective countries. You can attack the self-esteem movement if you want (and I think it’s rubbish and does hurt academic performance somewhat), but it is unlikely to be the major factor.
where hunting is unnecessary and quite unable to influence lost liberties.
You might want to go visit Ted Nugent on his ranch and run that past him. He’ll bend your ear clean off about all the venison he and his hunting buddies have donated to the poor, among other things, and then he’ll fill your other ear with chapter and verse as to how his “eat off the land” lifestyle is the only By God way to be free.
And then you can ask Cornell about their cervine tubal ligation adventure.
Why have so many people got it in for peacocks?
David, what did you make of ‘The Bell Curve’?
I am sorry to break it you, Steve 2, but wasps are meat eaters. They will even take chunks out of (living) people in their quest for flesh.
David, what did you make of ‘The Bell Curve’?
I haven’t actually read the whole book, just extracts from it, along with various critiques and counter-replies, all of which I read many years ago. So there’s a limit to what I can say about it. At the time, I was more interested in the reactions than the book itself.
If memory serves, one of the authors’ key concerns was that our “educated class” might eventually become isolated, culturally and economically, from the broader society, and that this might not be an entirely good thing. Basically, smart men and women will tend to seek out and marry other smart people and be more likely to produce smarter than average children, who will tend to benefit from both nature and nurture, thereby increasing the divergence, culturally and economically, from those less clever. This point, I think, was aired with a note of caution, not a pumping of fists.
What struck me at the time was the air of scandalised indignation and the insistence on some nefarious racial motive, despite the book’s moderate tone (at least in the extracts I’d seen), its repeated qualifications, and the fact that race is barely mentioned at all. In 1994, one Barack Obama, then a mere civil rights lawyer, dismissed the book as “good old-fashioned racism.”
Obama claimed – based on nothing that Murray and Herrnstein had actually written – that the book was intended to appeal to those who “deeply resent any advantages, real or perceived, that minorities may enjoy.” He added that in order to reduce divergent economic and racial outcomes, “we’re going to have to do more than denounce Mr Murray’s book.” And so, without addressing anything the authors’ had written – anything at all – the book was nevertheless something to be denounced. Because, in Obama’s mind, economic outcomes can have nothing whatsoever to do with “an intellectual deficit,” and one shouldn’t even explore those lines of thought.
And whatever the best evidence on the subject may be at any given time, the reactions of some can make discussion in good faith all but impossible. It seems to me the relationship of intelligence and heredity is one of those subjects that can arouse great passion but much less honesty. And then there are clowns like Dr Nina Power, a Guardian contributor and Marxoid philosophy lecturer, who insists, based on nothing, that “everyone has the potential to understand everything” and that equality of intelligence is “something to be presupposed” because – well, just because – “everyone is equally intelligent.”
[ Edited. ]
“I distinctly remember being told that if we didn’t have at least three “A”s, at A-Level, we might as well forget Oxbridge because we were an independent school. A few Scottish Highers would be enough for state pupils”
Which makes you wonder why the Independent Students don’t just drop down into the state sector for the easy Oxbridge entry and pocket the cash. Seems obvious to me. Perhaps they are just not that bright, after all.
“I am sorry to break it you, Steve 2, but wasps are meat eaters.”
And minnows too are non-vegetarian, although circumstances limit them to seafood.
“Northeast Asians also have higher IQ, especially for mathematical areas, than either Caucasians or Africans (meaning sub-Saharan Africans), with Caucasians being somewhere in the middle again.”
it is very hard to know what to make of this data, though, since IQ is so susceptible to environmental changes. There is good evidence, for example, that prolonged exposure to mathematics in childhood leads to changes in the brain that increase the capacity for mathematical reasoning. It is also quite possible that the nature of oriental language acquisition alters the brain in ways that are conducive to improved performance in symbolic logic. The right policy response may well be to stop educating our children in English and to switch to Mandarin instead.
That Nieli article on grade inflation makes for compelling reading, but I would also like to suggest a further unintended consequence of grade inflation:
Namely, grade inflation undermines any hope for meritocracy, and in so doing creates fertile ground for elitism, cronyism, and the creation of academic fiefdoms. (This is especially true of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences).
Nieli (and others) argue that grade inflation leads to “diminished motivation” – while this is true to some extent, it overlooks the powerful influence the student’s own ego and need for validation exerts on their behavior.
In fact, in a class where 45-60% of students are receiving A-grades and in a culture where self-esteem is prized and therefore fostered, I would say the pressure on young people at university to find some way of distinguishing themselves from their peers is at least as strong, if not even stronger, than was the case under the competitive regime of a more strictly controlled distribution of higher grades.
This situation presents many lecturers – and bear in mind these are people who are not exactly unknown for having fragile egos themselves – with a subset of students in each of their classes who are very keen to be picked out from the crowd and gain recognition from them. If those students are unable to distinguish themselves through excellence in performance (i.e. by getting the rarer top grades because so many other students have them too), what other ways are left to them?
The result is that students are presented with a strong incentive to adopt the lecturer’s own ideas, values and positions as their own, while in their turn, the lecturers are presented with both the temptation and the opportunity to form a cadre of pliant supporters who, if encouraged to go on to postgraduate studies and, who knows, eventually become lecturers themselves, will spread that lecturer’s ideas throughout the wider academic environment. And it will be students from this cadre that they push, not necessarily the highest achievers.
Consequently, there is then not only no motivation at all for a student to try and challenge the ideas proposed by their lecturer – which, by the way, is arguably the key foundation in the development of independent critical acumen and the ability to construct robust argument – but there are also a number of active disincentives for even attempting to do so.*
The stage, then, is surely set for the maintenance and perpetuation of what Horowitz calls the ‘One-Party Classroom’ within the academy and in wider society, for the tendency for more thoughtful debate to be pushed out by the kind of belligerent, doctrinaire barking that we hear, these days, from the likes of Valenti, Penny, Mason, Snow, Perry, Power, Sarkeesian, etc. etc.
*The latter case, incidentally, I think might result in a tendency to favour the feminization of higher education (certainly in AHSS subjects). Young men typically try to distinguish themselves by challenging authority and by trying to demonstrate the ways in which they are different yet equal to those who have superior status to them.
I’m painting in broad brush strokes of course, but young women by contrast tend on the whole to distinguish themselves by rising within a given social group and by trying to demonstrate the ways in which they are an exemplary member of that group. Given that this is so, it is perhaps another reason as to why courses in Gender and Women’s Studies have proliferated so rapidly throughout the whole of the academic environment. Such courses discourage critical thought of the doxa they put forward and so lend themselves to cronyism and groupthink.
“I’m painting in broad brush strokes of course, but young women by contrast tend on the whole to distinguish themselves by rising within a given social group and by trying to demonstrate the ways in which they are an exemplary member of that group.”
Hmm. Do you have any evidence for this? It looks suspicious to me. My first thought is that it it were true we should expect women to show more enthusiasm than men for amateur team sports where status is firmly built on being both an ‘exemplary member’ of the group and deeply conformist to the written and unwritten group rules. But they don’t.
No, it’s just an anecdotal observation – hence, by the way, the use of these words and phrases:
incidentally / I think might result in a tendency to favour / typically / I’m painting in broad brush strokes of course / tend on the whole
I had understood such language to be fairly universally understood as expressing a cautious or tentative attitude to a statement, but perhaps not …
Oh, and of course – good job on going straight to the asterisked footnote while completely ignoring the main point I was making.
Though it’s a free world of course so you are welcome to focus on micro detail if you wish.
I wasn’t accusing you of anything, I was genuinely curious as to whether there was any research to support what you said because, on the face it, it seemed so implausible.
Having come from the same State – and my having spent my entire youth out of doors, well acclimated to hunting, trapping, years in heavy construction, but admittedly less so with stage rock and record deals – I know a fair amount about Nugent and perhaps more about his climate, values, and ethics. He’s welcome to it and the world would be a better place for us independent types where there far more of him and far fewer of the urbanist progressive parasite class and it’s religion.
None of which convinces a thinking mind of the viability of the commercialized meat-centric obese daily lifestyle, the abuse and terror inflicted on animals raised for slaughter and what it must do to the keepers and profiteers, or the sheer waste, environmental harm, and eventual unsustainability of this segment of the corporate western world.
And yes, Nugent makes no argument for any of that – probably he avoids Arbys.
Rather he argues for a lifestyle more resembling that of the native American…which itself serves as no arguable model for modern sustainability because it too is unnecessary. At least until a collapse, at which point survivalism will take on a whole new nightmarish quality.
David, apparently one Marina Abramovic predates most or all of today’s performance artists, or so it seems to be when taking in the breathless documentary “The Artist is Present”, 2012, now on Netflix.
Here’s the trailer, which omits most of the blood, mutilation, and nudity in favor of a convincing subtextual proof of New York having plenty enough rich kooks to appoint The Artist to a lifestyle to which she has – finally after thirty years, she admits – finally become accustomed.
Meat, because canine teeth aren’t for carrots!
Steak it’s LOVELY. I fact I’m going to have some today. While I’m chewing on a dead cows delicious flesh I’ll be thinking how I will be sowing my now abundance of sperm.
“meat-centric obese daily lifestyle”
Don’t blame the meat! Get with the programme. It’s all about the evil sugars now dontcha now. Apparently us peasants can’t be trusted to not shovel soft drinks and sweets into our gobs all day long.
Plus, meat tastes really good.