October 23, 2012

"How Children Succeed" by Paul Tough

From my book review in Taki's Magazine:
It’s a strange totem of the 21st century that if a brain scan can show us where something would happen inside the skull, we can therefore make it happen in ourselves; and also, hesto presto, we can fix African-American dysfunction by somehow making it happen in their brains. 
We don’t think this way about other organs, though. Consider the stomach. For a century or more, we’ve had a more than adequate knowledge of how the digestive system works. Yet on average we’re fatter than ever. Why? Not because the science of stomach scans hasn’t progressed enough, but because we like eating more than we like exercising.

Read the whole thing there.

64 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Why? Not because the science of stomach scans hasn’t progressed enough, but because we like eating more than we like exercising." - its brains all the way down.

Auntie Analogue said...


"One way that American intellectuals could model good character would be to publicly apologize to Charles Murray for all the terrible things they said about him over the years."

Before that happens you will witness Satan pooping ice cubes.


As with ending illegal immigration, policies aimed at reducing the number of offspring of poor mothers would doom the Democratic party to electoral extinction. Incentivizing is as incentivizing does.

Kyle kopelovich said...

Auntie Analogue said

"As with ending illegal immigration, policies aimed at reducing the number of offspring of poor mothers would doom the Democratic party to electoral extinction. Incentivizing is as incentivizing does."

It would also end our ability to deal with terrorism, have an army, fund social security and medicaid and leave our nation desolate. Immigration is a net plus for America and for our freedoms and even whites benefit massively from immigration.

Anonymous said...

On the steroid front, a long interview with Victor Conte of Balco by Joe Rogan:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azzhD2QJ8B0

Some very interesting stuff, including references to tennis and the Jamaican sprinters.

TGGP said...

"James Heckman, the great University of Chicago statistician who won the quasi-Nobel in Economics in 2000 by more or less giving up trying to disprove The Bell Curve."
Could you elaborate? I skimmed his Nobel lecture, and most if it was over my head, but looking at the dates of his citations I didn't notice a focus on post Bell Curve years. It seemed more like a long-running project which predated it.

Auntie Analogue said...

My dear Kyle kopelovich, if, as you assert, illegal "immigration is a net plus for America and our freedoms and even whites benefit from immigration," then why have Israel's leaders taken swift, sure steps to detain and deport the illegal immigrants who've come to Israel, and why have Israel's leaders not instead announced that "immigration is a net plus for Israel and Israeli freedoms and even Israelis benefit from illegal immigration"? (After all, your screen name hyperlink whisked me to a pro-Israel website.)

If you truly believe illegal immigration is a "net plus" for America and our freedoms," then you should have a long face-to-face chat with each one of the millions of Americans who are unemployed because our spineless rulers hand out 100,000 work permits per month to foreigners and because so-called "American" companies hire so-called "American" lawyers to help them not to hire American applicants and to instead hire cheap foreign labor. What's good for Americans and for Americans' freedoms is an American elect that puts Americans' interests first - before the interests of foreigners and globalist corporations.

Further, if you're keen on the U.S.-Israel alliance, then the last people you should want to see in power in the U.S. are the DREAM Act-by-presidential-fiat Obamacrats who are so in love with the "Arab Spring" that they backed the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak who honored Egypt's peace treaty with Israel and came down hard on the Moslem Brotherhood and Salafists who are now so keen to repudiate that treaty. Not to mention that these same Obamacrats have backed all the other Middle Easts uprisings of the Moslem Brotherhood and Salafists hell bent on wiping Israel from the map.

Anonymous said...

"Kyle kopelovich said...
Auntie Analogue said

"As with ending illegal immigration, policies aimed at reducing the number of offspring of poor mothers would doom the Democratic party to electoral extinction. Incentivizing is as incentivizing does."

It would also end our ability to deal with terrorism, have an army, fund social security and medicaid and leave our nation desolate. Immigration is a net plus for America and for our freedoms and even whites benefit massively from immigration."


Ut oh ...Neo-Con alert ... it looks like Whiskey finally has company on this blog...

Viva Israel and immigration (at least Whiskey only wants us to fight Israel's wars and not have open borders so that we can maintain an army for Israel).

Pray tell .. if immigration is such a boon ...why does your beloved Israel have such a restrctionist immigration policy even tolerating anti-immigration riots and forcible deportations of non-Isreali women and children?

Oh yeah, I forgot the universal rule when talking with the Scots-Irish.

There are two sets of rules one for me and mine (the Joos) and one for you and yours. ...LOL

Just when I thought that Neo-conism was starting to die just like Freudianism and Marxism other throughly debunked ethnocentric Judeo-centric visons of the future (not of course before the former set back the science of psychology by about a hundred years and the latter was responsible for the deaths of about 100 million innocent people, many of whom were Christians, in Eastern Europe, Russia, China, and Cambodia).

This should be amusing..

Nothing like an ignorant, poorly informed, tone deaf, narcissitic Scots-Irishman to remind me what is on the MSM that I, and most of the rest of the great unwashed, have stopped watching years ago (have you seen the MSM ratings... less than a few percent of the poplulation regularly watch them?)

Oy Vey...!

Anonymous said...

"The accident of birth is a principal source of inequality in America today"

the term came up in a gawker article a few days before that:

http://glpiggy.net/2012/09/14/gawker-wants-to-ban-private-schools/

apparently this is where the liberal homonculi ends, destruction of family so that all are raised in the brave new world of equality.
Many of them seem to already have none, expect terms like family-privilege, father-privilege, heterosexual parents privilege, normal-privilege...

on second thoughts, scratch the last one

Lurker said...

Kyle - perhaps you would like to give us a list of those net benefits, it will be most illuminating. Oh and bulljive about 'diversity', 'enrichment' and 'vibrancy' dont count on their own, you have to qualify them, otherwise we will just laugh in your face.

I'll start you off, this one is one the house:

1)Access to foreign cuisine.

Over to you Kyle:

2)...?

map said...

""James Heckman, the great University of Chicago statistician who won the quasi-Nobel in Economics in 2000 by more or less giving up trying to disprove The Bell Curve."
Could you elaborate? I skimmed his Nobel lecture, and most if it was over my head, but looking at the dates of his citations I didn't notice a focus on post Bell Curve years. It seemed more like a long-running project which predated it."

I was a student at the U of C at the time The Bell Curve was written. He was using it in his econometrics classes, reviewing TBC's statistical techniques as he was teaching his students.

Kyle kopelovich said...

Auntie Analogue,

Do you even value your own freedom at all? Do you even understand how many illegal immigrants defend your freedom everyday in the military? If not, you are quite dull or a xenophobic isolationist protectionazi.

Israel gets a little leeway here because they have American weaponry and are our greatest ally in the world and working in concert with us everyday to preserve our freedoms. They are a sovereign nation and for us to force a multicultural and open immigration society upon them would be both unjust and a violation of the concept of the nation-state.

Florida resident said...

Derbyshire had reviewed Paul Tough's 2006 NYT article
in his essay "The Dream Palace of Education Theorists":
http://www.johnderbyshire.com/...
One of my favorite essays by Derbyshire.

Anonymous said...

Spot on Steve, once that second child comes along one cannot maintain anything approaching blank slate opinions on nature vs nurture.

Marlowe said...

Of all the sentimental errors that reign and rage in this incomparable Republic, the worst is that which confuses the function of criticism, whether aesthetic, political or social, with the function of reform. Almost invariably it takes the form of a protest: “The fellow condemns without offering anything better. Why tear down without building up?” So snivel the sweet ones: so wags the national tongue. The messianic delusion becomes a sort of universal murrain. It is impossible to get an audience for an idea that is not "constructive"—i.e., that is not glib, and uplifting, and full of hope, and hence capable of tickling the emotions by leaping the intermediate barrier of intelligence.

In this protest and demand, of course, there is nothing but the babbling of men who mistake their feelings for thoughts. The truth is that criticism, if it were confined to the proposing of alternative schemes, would quickly cease to have any force or utility at all, for in the overwhelming majority of instances no alternative scheme of any intelligibility is imaginable, and the whole object of the critical process is to demonstrate it. The poet, if the victim is a poet, is simply one as bare of gifts as a herring is of fur: no conceivable suggestion will ever make him write actual poetry. And the plan of reform, in politics, sociology or what not, is simply beyond the pale of reason; no change in it or improvement of it will ever make it achieve the impossible. Here, precisely, is what is the matter with most of the notions that go floating about the country, particularly in the field of governmental reform. The trouble with them is not only that they won’t and don’t work; the trouble with them, more importantly, is that the thing they propose to accomplish is intrinsically, or at all events most probably, beyond accomplishment. That is to say, the problem they are ostensibly designed to solve is a problem that is insoluble. To tackle them with a proof of that insolubility, or even with a colorable argument of it, is sound criticism; to tackle them with another solution that is quite as bad, or even worse, is to pick the pocket of one knocked down by an automobile.

Unluckily, it is difficult for the American mind to grasp the concept of insolubility. Thousands of poor dolts keep on trying to square the circle; other thousands keep pegging away at perpetual motion. The number of persons so afflicted is far greater than the records of the Patent Office show, for beyond the circle of frankly insane enterprise there lie circles of more and more plausible enterprise, and finally we come to a circle which embraces the great majority of human beings. These are the optimists and chronic hopers of the world, the believers in men, ideas and things. It is the settled habit of such folk to give ear to whatever is comforting; it is their settled faith that whatever is desirable will come to pass. A caressing confidence—but one, unfortunately, that is not borne out by human experience. The fact is that some of the things that men and women have desired most ardently for thousands of years are not nearer realization today than they were in the time of Rameses, and that there is not the slightest reason for believing that they will lose their coyness on any near tomorrow. Plans for hurrying them on have been tried since the beginning; plans for forcing them overnight are in copious and antagonistic operation today; and yet they continue to hold off and elude us, and the chances are that they will keep on holding off and eluding us until the angels get tired of the show, and the whole earth is set off like a gigantic bomb, or drowned, like a sick cat, between two buckets.
-- H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: Second Series, 1920

Plenty of hope, not much change.

Anonymous said...

Arguing about non-sensical bits of our culture is not very useful. The things all right thinking people seemingly believe in do not exist because they are true or make sense. They are simply badges of entrance to the right circles.

Anonymous said...

"On the steroid front, a long interview with Victor Conte of Balco by Joe Rogan"

That's gold, anony, gold!

April interview where he says Armstrong is as guilty as a $3 bill, and:

Do you believe sports would be boring if there was a true crackdown on performance-enhancing drugs? Less home runs, slower speeds, less world records broken, etc?

VC: I wouldn’t use the word "boring." I would put it in the context that I don’t believe it’s fair to ask today’s athletes to compete with records that are, in my opinion, tainted.

I’ll give you an example: Anabolic steroids have a much more powerful effect on women than they do upon men because a man has 10 times the amount of circulating testosterone than a female, naturally.

When you go back and look, and if you isolate track and field, and you look at the 100, 200, 400 800, 1,500 meters, 100-meter hurdles, 400-meter hurdles, triple jump, the weight event shot-put, heptathlon, my opinion is that 100% of their records are tainted and were achieved by athletes taking steroids. And let’s look at when those records were achieved: in the 1970s and the 1980s. FloJo [Florence Griffith-Joyner] is the most recent in 1988. The 400-meter record was set in 1985, and we’re in 2011, so it’s almost 30 years old. Tracks are faster, there is better nutrition, better training methods, etc. And nobody can touch it.

Read more: http://www.askmen.com/sports/bodybuilding_400/491c_victor-conte-interview.html#ixzz2ADe4GGST


400m relay women's record was broken this year, washingtonpost says,

The U.S. women’s 4x100-meter relay team ended an Olympic medal drought dating from 1996 while shattering a 27-year-old, drug-tainted East German world record with a wild, gold-medal victory. And anchor Carmelita Jeter put the finishing touch on the historic moment with some Usain Bolt-esque showmanship and strutting.

The pic in the article, nobody notices nuthin'!

Simon in London said...

Kyle Kopelovich on the disasters of ending immigration(?):

"It would also end our ability to deal with terrorism"

I'd be really interested to know how that one worked in particular. Were you trying to say that America needs poor people for cannon fodder?

Cail Corishev said...

Steve, you need to look into the red pill on diet. The idea that fat people simply need to eat less and exercise more is about as true as the idea that poor minority students just need more funding and better teachers.

Anonymous said...

"i'm a terror ass kicking man who bleeds the red white and blue. I hate racism, terrorism, liberalism, communism, islamopacifism, nazism, neocons like ron paul and pat buchanan make me wanna jam a rowing oar straight up my ass. It's Funny. As I travel this great free-as-hell nation after the TSA checks all the terrorists and weeds them out of line and throws there asses in GITMO. I have discovered that almost everyone in America is fed up with Ron Paul's crap and they want real Change in Washington!"

so says the yt page of kyle kopelovich' link. what could one add to this, except that such texts are some clever stürmeresque sting job to discredit jews?

if not, it's bad news for whisky. there's a new sheriff in loonyland.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps we should get poor (black) men to do what Obama's father (whoever he was) did: Get some stupid white woman to help him improve the genes of his offspring.

Sadly, for political reasons, Obama has largely undone the good work of his father. We can expect some serious regression to the mean there.

Anonymous said...


It would also end our ability to deal with terrorism, have an army


My god! Where would we be without all those illegal immigrants dying for America overseas.

Anonymous said...

We 'benefit massively" from all this immigration (10:48 pm) ? That's the level of discussion these sorts of people make. Just make an assertion, no matter how unfounded, and repeat over and over again.
These types won't be happy until this country becomes an overpopulated one like India. Then what?

Anonymous said...


Further, if you're keen on the U.S.-Israel alliance, then the last people you should want to see in power in the U.S. are the DREAM Act-by-presidential-fiat Obamacrats who are so in love with the "Arab Spring" that they backed the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak who honored Egypt's peace treaty with Israel and came down hard on the Moslem Brotherhood and Salafists who are now so keen to repudiate that treaty. Not to mention that these same Obamacrats have backed all the other Middle Easts uprisings of the Moslem Brotherhood and Salafists hell bent on wiping Israel from the map.


I thought Israel wants a war because if the crazy islamists start it, then Israel (and US ally) have every right to finish it.

Anonymous said...

"Kind-hearted" seems an odd way to describe Kristof, who used to churn out nasty, anti-Japan hit pieces on a regular basis when he worked as Tokyo bureau chief for the NYT.

David said...

Jewish Involvement in Shaping US Immigration Policy (PDF)

As to Steve's "strange totem," it appears to be a weird combo of pre-scientific thinking ("free will") and pop scientism (brain scans are cool). But that combo is older than the 21st Century. I'm thinking specifically of alchemy. The alchemists made some observations (about materials) that later proved to be useful, while believing in magic.

peterike said...

It would also end our ability to deal with terrorism, have an army, fund social security and medicaid and leave our nation desolate. Immigration is a net plus for America and for our freedoms and even whites benefit massively from immigration.

Wow, benefit "massively" huh? I gotta say, when you spew a line of complete bullcrap you don't hold back on it.

Pat Boyle said...

You are wrong about stomachs. The digestive process is quite mysterious largely because the brain and nervous system are so deeply involved.

When I was a psychology undergraduate I took a class in physiological psychology. It was almost only about hunger. There was a lot stuff about the limbic system. For example there's the hypothalmic-hyperphagic syndrome. You ablate a certain nucleus in the ventro-medial hypothalamus and you get a very fat and very nasty rat. No one knows quite what to make of that even today.

There have been hundreds of studies where they put balloons into stomachs in an attempt to trigger satiety. In general the finding is that the body learns to disregard peripheral satiety signals and focus on more fundamental signals. Your tummy learns. The stomach is part of a very complex system of feed-backs and signals which produce adaptation.

My familiarity with these matters is now half a century out of date but I'm not really surprised that they still are mysterious. Respect the stomach.

Albertosaurus

bluegrass said...

Kyle kopelovich:

You must be most embellished troll I have ever witnessed and quite skilled. I'm glad you're an Alt-Right type who uses caricature of the enemy to further dissident right ideals and I applaud you for it. Your "TheHomelandDefender" youtube channel takes the ridiculousness of Zionist propaganda to its logical, even hilarious visual conclusion.

Your stuff is like The Onion for Steve Sailer readers, keep it up!

MQ said...

Lately, Tough has followed the lead of his social-science mentor James Heckman, the great University of Chicago statistician who won the quasi-Nobel in Economics in 2000 by more or less giving up trying to disprove The Bell Curve.

Heckman is indeed a great scholar, but he (correctly) wrote several devastating critiques of the Bell Curve as pseudo-scientific and misleading. He defended them against charges of racism but demolished the empirical work in the Bell Curve, which was crap. This article , which is politely written but devastating, is a good example.

Paul Mendez said...

It would also end our ability to deal with terrorism...

Kyle is absolutely right.

If we didn't have so many illegal aliens in the US on September 11, 2001, we would not have had to have dealt with terrorism on that terrible day.

peterike said...

For a century or more, we’ve had a more than adequate knowledge of how the digestive system works. Yet on average we’re fatter than ever. Why?

Actually, we've barely had any idea at all about how the digestive system works, and we are learning new things every single day. Hence, the paleo diet.

So why are we so fat? Mostly industrial foods, I think. And possibly the unintended consequences of antibiotics. Oh and cultural changes. And then...

Paul Mendez said...

@ Auntie Analogue:

Don't bother trying to have a rational discussion with Mr. Kopelovich. According to his YouTube page, he thinks Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan are neocons.

Sheila said...

Auntie Analogue, "Kyle Kopelovich" is not in the least concerned about Obamacrats and/or their policies toward Israel. He/it is motivated by anti-White, anti-Christian animus. He/it is so thoroughly marinated in modern leftism that he is unaware that the vast majority of our combat troops (and combat deaths) are White, or that a majority of these troops have at least some college (generally an overly expensive waste of time, but an important statistic to the Kopeloviches of the world). His concern with "terrorism" refers to Christian, fundamentalist terrorism - the bane of all thinking Kopeloviches in America.

I realize you are probably well aware of this, but I just wanted to remind you that your sincere attempt to reason with a Kopelovich and/or reply to his aberrant reality with facts is not slated to be successful.

Ray Sawhill said...

Illegal immigration isn't a net plus for me.

steve-o said...

@ anonymous

"its brains all the way down."

Modern science may prove you right. There is some evidence to suggest that some of the genetically modified wheat and corn has the side-effect of not signaling properly to your brain that you are full. Some experimentation with diets have shown that cutting out wheat, reduces calorie consumption by about 400 cal a day.

So you may be right--it very well might be a function/disfunction with the brain and its receptors.

Whiskey said...

Contraception Steve is cheap enough to be as powerful as it will get without removing female choice from the matter. The reason for births to poor Black (and particularly Hispanic) women/girls is that they WANT a child. They know how to avoid being pregnant, it costs all of $5 or so to do so, they just don't want to avoid pregnancy. Because they are making a judgment that a socially dominant, aggressive a-hole is just what they want for a father. They're making a judgment that all the things that you and I and every other middle class suburban dweller values is worthless -- because of endless government subsidies and ability to just "take" from people.

Look at the murder of the White 12 year old girl in New Jersey. Two Black boys ages 15 and 17 lured her over to "trade" bicycle parts and then strangled her and dumped her body in a dumpster. Now, leaving aside aggression and violence issues, that it is not normal in any terms for boys that age to engage in that sort of thing, most boys with IQs over say, 85, would predict a rapid arrest based on DNA and surveillance evidence.

My prediction: those boys will have ENORMOUS reproductive success, their sentences will be light (as juveniles) and the quality of the women pursuing them (and they will be pursued) will be high.

This leads to two other areas: private justice against low IQ NAMs who kill not able to see any bad consequences, and IQ raising by DNA.

Whiskey said...

Cont'd: already the FT is reporting MICE have had their DNA altered to make them run faster, about 25% faster, after DNA alteration. My guess is that some Chinese or Korean lab will start offering DNA alteration as the new "doping" for athletics and branch out to IQ, knowing that there would be an enormous appetite for say, raising your IQ from 75 to 100. A marginal raise of say 25 points is huge, when you are low. And if guys like Martin Wolf and the rest are right, and we are seeing both resource constraints on growth and the lack of any new technologies promoting it, the "easy money" of government subsidies to NAM poor will be over, pushing NAM poor to get smarter or starve as we reach Greek levels (note too the rise of Golden Dawn there as the State has basically failed to even throw money around).

And secondly, sooner or later private justice will take place. Particularly as people become global. If you are say a native of China, part of your family is slaughtered, you can wreak revenge and then return to your home country without any fear of extradition, banking on Chinese nationalism. Such a case would be hugely sensational, and driven by the Daily Mail type profit centers on the internet, because people are interested. And it like other government failures will promote private alternatives.

This is of course hideously dangerous because its endpoint is something like Germany in ... 1648. Wracked by "private justice" and mercenary armies and mass killings. Once that happens it spirals out of control. If the Twentieth Century was mass governmental killings, my guess is the Twenty First is going to be mass private killings. Being a stable, middle class guy not really suited for trench warfare, that's my view of hell on earth.

Anonymous said...

How does the US actually benefit from an alliance with Israel?

Big Bill said...

I do hope Kopovich was joking.

Even the Democrats have dropped their "Mexicans will pay your Social Security" and "Mexicans are only taking jobs Americans don't want" rhetoric.

The reality is not that Americans need immigration. The reality is that billions of people from corrupt and despotic cultures filled with corrupt and despotic people are desperate to come to America where white people can take care of them.

Severn said...

I'd be really interested to know how that one worked in particular. Were you trying to say that America needs poor people for cannon fodder?


I think he meant that America needs poor brown people for cannon fodder.

CMC said...

Tough: instill morals.

Sailer: more better contraceptives.

Is that a fair reading?

Svigor said...

Trump played his "announcement" the wrong way, but otherwise I actually kinda like this move.

0bama will have to release the records, or admit he'd rather keep them private than give $5 million of Trump's money to starving children.

Svigor said...

How does the US actually benefit from an alliance with Israel?

Well, if Israel goes belly up we'll have 6 million more Jews here in the USA, so there's that.

Svigor said...

They know how to avoid being pregnant, it costs all of $5 or so to do so, they just don't want to avoid pregnancy. Because they are making a judgment that a socially dominant, aggressive a-hole is just what they want for a father. They're making a judgment that all the things that you and I and every other middle class suburban dweller values is worthless -- because of endless government subsidies and ability to just "take" from people.

I love how you segue from "they just don't want to avoid pregnancy" to "they want their children to have aggressive a-hole fathers" with that "because." Almost like you think anyone is stupid enough to think you've explained that they want children by talking about the kind of fathers chosen by the ones that do want children, or fail to notice that you totally changed the subject to your obsession.

Svigor said...

It would also end our ability to deal with terrorism, have an army, fund social security and medicaid and leave our nation desolate. Immigration is a net plus for America and for our freedoms and even whites benefit massively from immigration.

I prefer Israeli policy. We should pin our immigration policy to that of Israel, our greatest ally in the World, beacon of hope and democracy in the Middle East, etc.

Svigor said...

Do you even value your own freedom at all? Do you even understand how many illegal immigrants defend your freedom everyday in the military? If not, you are quite dull or a xenophobic isolationist protectionazi.

Haha, having a bit of fun are we? You cad. He's pulling your leg, folks.

gets a little leeway here because they have American weaponry and are our greatest ally in the world

See? Hand to God, when I referred to Israel as "our greatest ally in the World," I had not yet read Kyle's second post. He's winding y'all up.

and working in concert with us everyday to preserve our freedoms. They are a sovereign nation and for us to force a multicultural and open immigration society upon them would be both unjust and a violation of the concept of the nation-state.

I agree. We should emulate their policy, rather than force yours on them or America.

Svigor said...

Steve, you need to look into the red pill on diet. The idea that fat people simply need to eat less and exercise more is about as true as the idea that poor minority students just need more funding and better teachers.

Funny, I just lost a lot of weight by eating less. I also exercised daily to the tune of roughly 400 calories (i.e., my exercise wasn't very exercised) for a couple months, but slacked off recently, and I'm still losing weight. My conclusion is that diet is paramount.

Svigor said...

I think people are fatter because they're a bunch of gluttons, personally. Get a handle on gluttony and you start losing weight, quickly.

Cail Corishev said...

"Do you even understand how many illegal immigrants defend your freedom everyday in the military?"

While about a fourth of our young men, especially the less intellectually endowed types who used to enter the military as a path to a better life, sit around collecting unemployment. Yeah, that makes all kinds of sense.

FredR said...

@MQ:
The Heckman paper you link on The Bell Curve is a really good read that makes a lot of interesting points, but I don't see what's so devastating about it.

Anonymous said...

"My prediction: those boys will have ENORMOUS reproductive success, their sentences will be light (as juveniles) and the quality of the women pursuing them (and they will be pursued) will be high."

Oh, Whiskey... The quality of the women who pursue murderous thugs can seem high to you only because, at your core, you lean towards the R reproductive strategy. You might be failing at fulfilling it, but that's your true nature. But, you see, men of higher quality than you and your thugs want good genes for their children and can recognize them instinctively in a potential mate. That's right, some men care about what will become of their sons while you just want to fuck. Water finds it's own level. Stupid whores are attracted to thugs, and thugs are attracted to stupid whores. And you are attracted to stupid whores. It's called assortative mating. Well developed men with good genes and high IQ aren't attracted to the types of women who are impressed with murder, rape and robbery.

Anonymous said...

Steve, you need to look into the red pill on diet. The idea that fat people simply need to eat less and exercise more is about as true as the idea that poor minority students just need more funding and better teachers.

Yeah, well, he's in his mid-50s. He's got a couple of outdated ideas he's never going to let go of, especially if those ideas let him indulge in a bit of moral superiority.

smead jolley said...

Kyle, you're right. I remember what it was like in 1964, driving out to the beach and hardly seeing any cars. It felt so lonely, and way too white.

Anonymous said...

Criticism of Bell Curve from Wikipedia:

"In 1995, Chomsky directly criticized the book and its assumptions on IQ. He takes issue with the idea that IQ is 60% heritable saying, the "statement is meaningless" since heritability doesn't have to be genetic. He gives the example of women wearing earrings:

To borrow an example from Ned Block, "some years ago when only women wore earrings, the heritability of having an earring was high because differences in whether a person had an earring was due to a chromosomal difference, XX vs. XY." No one has yet suggested that wearing earrings, or ties, is "in our genes," an inescapable fate that environment cannot influence, "dooming the liberal notion."[22]

He goes on to say there is almost no evidence of a genetic link, and greater evidence that environmental issues are what determine IQ differences."

Clutch cargo cult said...

Can you put quotes around accidental, as in "accidental" child births?

NOTA said...

Very little of what the military does n a given day has anything to do with defending our freedoms. Certainly not anything they're doing in Afghanistan.

TGGP said...

Thanks for linking to the Heckman paper (although I still consider my question about the Nobel unanswered). He devoted a lot of text to the question of whether Spearman was right about a single factor or Sternberg & Gardner are right about it being multiple. But my recollection was that The Bell Curve explicitly brings up Sternberg & Gardner's theories, concluding that it doesn't actually matter that much for their purposes which unproven theory is right (to the extent you can deem one of the not completely incompabitible three traditions "right"). Heckman does provide a service in pointing out how modest the correlation can be and that other factors are significant even after its controlled for (and in the case of education may influence test score). But still, IQ seems to be among the most powerful statistics we have available for these questions.

Anonymous said...

My guess is that some Chinese or Korean lab will start offering DNA alteration as the new "doping" for athletics and branch out to IQ, knowing that there would be an enormous appetite for say, raising your IQ from 75 to 100.

That will take a while. To the extent it is genetically influenced, intelligence is thought to be affected by numerous genes of low individual effect. And almost none of these are currently known. Then there is the issue that genetic manipulation is a bit trickier in humans than in mice. The lab cares, but not overmuch if a few mice die from mishaps during the experimentation process. Human parents won't be so blasé. A study was recently published linking IVF to birth defects. The exact mechanism isn't yet known, but if it turns out that the simple mechanical manipulation of the gametes carries risk, it's bad news for human genetic engineering, which with current methods would largely rely on embryo manipulation (much easier than attempting to modify genes in many more cells of an adult organism).

IVF linked to increased risk of birth defects

Anonymous said...

"
As with ending illegal immigration, policies aimed at reducing the number of offspring of poor mothers would doom the Democratic party to electoral extinction. Incentivizing is as incentivizing does." - Both parties respond to the electorate, the democrats aren't going to up and die without the ethnic spoils lobby. Though the party of that day will look little like the party of today.

Truth said...

"Trump played his "announcement" the wrong way, but otherwise I actually kinda like this move."

Yeah, I kinda like watching that blowhard make a fool of himself too.

Truth said...


"Steve, you need to look into the red pill on diet. The idea that fat people simply need to eat less and exercise more is about as true as the idea that poor minority students just need more funding and better teachers."

As a friend of mine, English John, used to so eloquently say; "'Truth', if it's so hard to lose weight by diet and exercise, how come there were no fat people at Auschwitz?"

Maya said...

" Steve, you need to look into the red pill on diet. The idea that fat people simply need to eat less and exercise more is about as true as the idea that poor minority students just need more funding and better teachers."

Diet and exercise worked for my chubby 11 year old self really well, and it's been working ever since. The trick is that you actually have to do it.

Steve Sailer said...

TGGP:

There should be a comma in my sentence after "2000."

I was definitely not trying to say Heckman won the Nobel for giving up on trying to disprove the Bell Curve.

Horace G. said...

" Svigor said...

Trump played his "announcement" the wrong way, but otherwise I actually kinda like this move.

0bama will have to release the records, or admit he'd rather keep them private than give $5 million of Trump's money to starving children."


It won't matter in the slightest. The MSM definitely won't draw this conclusion about Most Holy and without the MSM to piece it all together for them, most people will drool along in blissful ignorance.