There have been a couple of think pieces lately noticing that Diversity and Equality are not the same thing. Here's Jim Sleeper on Why Diversity At Elite Schools Deepens Inequality.
And Alexander Stille writes in the NYT:
IT’S a puzzle: one dispossessed group after another — blacks, women, Hispanics and gays — has been gradually accepted in the United States, granted equal rights and brought into the mainstream.
At the same time, in economic terms, the United States has gone from being a comparatively egalitarian society to one of the most unequal democracies in the world.
The two shifts are each huge and hugely important: one shows a steady march toward democratic inclusion, the other toward a tolerance of economic stratification that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
The United States prides itself on the belief that “anyone can be president,” and what better example than Barack Obama, son of a black Kenyan immigrant and a white American mother — neither of them rich.
And yet more than half the presidents over the past 110 years attended Harvard, Yale or Princeton and graduates of Harvard and Yale have had a lock on the White House for the last 23 years, across four presidencies. Thus we have become both more inclusive and more elitist.
It’s a surprising contradiction. Is the confluence of these two movements a mere historical accident? Or are the two trends related?
Back in 2005, I wrote in The American Conservative about the fundamental reason then-Harvard president Larry Summers had got himself in so much trouble at Harvard for mentioning a few facts about intelligence out loud:
Summers' job is partly to enhance, but mostly to protect, one of the world's most valuable brand names. "Harvard" stands for "intelligence," extreme far right edge of the IQ Bell Curve smarts. America is increasingly stratified by IQ, and the resulting class war that the clever are waging upon the clueless means that having Harvard's endorsement of your brainpower is ever more desirable. Thus, applications and SAT scores have skyrocketed over the last half century.
Yet, Harvard's IQ elitism sharply contradicts its professed egalitarianism. The typical Harvard professor or student considers himself superior to ordinary folks for two conflicting reasons: first, he constantly proclaims his belief in human equality, but they don't; and second, he has a high IQ, but they don't.
Further, he believes his brains weren't the luck of his genes. No, he earned them. Which in turn means he feels that dumb people deserve to be dumb.
Ivy League presidents aren't much worried that the left half of the Bell Curve will get themselves well enough organized to challenge the hegemony of the IQ overclass. No, what they fear is opposition to their use of IQ sorting mechanisms, such as the politically incorrect but crucial SAT, from those identity politics pressure groups who perform below average in a pure meritocracy, such as women, blacks, and Hispanics. But, they each boast enough high IQ activists, like Nancy Hopkins, to make trouble for prestige universities.
So, Harvard, like virtually all famous universities, buys off females and minorities with "a commitment to diversity" -- in other words, quotas. By boosting less competent women, blacks and Hispanics at the expense of the more marginal men, whites, and Asians, Harvard preserves most of its freedom to continue to discriminate ruthlessly on IQ.
What is obviously in the best interest of Harvard, and of the IQ aristocracy in general, is for everybody just to shut up about group differences in intelligence. Stifling arguments allows the IQ upper class to quietly push its interests at the expense of everyone else.
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58 comments:
Steve, You're catching on. Multiculti is ultimately class warefare, as a glance at increasing economic stratification and upper-class insulation shows. The left-wing Jews and other intellectuals, on which you lavish much attention, are useful idiots. The real power behind the whole process is coming from big business and big government, as with most things in American (and Western) politics. Is cheap labour cheap in the long-run? Probably not. But the elites don't care, because few think behind the next economic quarter or election cycle.
Here's a remarkable case from Canada's smallest province, in which the ruling Liberal party implemented an immigration scheme (scam), replete with a much vaunted diversity enrichment campaign as humanitarian cover, to line the pockets of Prince Edward Island's pure-bread cracker bigwigs:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-calls-for-probe-of-pei-immigration-program/article2166833/
It doesn't get more revealing than that.
My intuitive estimation of elite schools puts MIT 1st in IQ of applicants; Yale 2nd though most prestigious; Harvard 3rd with tons of legacies not quite up to snuff; Princeton 4th with almost nothing but not necessarily high IQ legacies. I think of the rest of the elite universities as being populated by those who attended the best private prep schools but who are not likely to have an IQ above 140.
I'm getting curiouser and curiouser about universities across the pond and not just in the UK. I sincerely doubt we have the best of the best here though I'm sure we advertise more than the others would.
OT: Looking at the iSteve archives at this time of year made me realize that Sailer would look pretty spiffy dressed up as Santa.
I defy anyone to make any sense of that Sleeper piece. Example:
The older, more venerable racial and sexual counter-cultures of endurance, defiance, and memory, tempered with love, have been transformed into over-the-counter cultures that distract those who consume.
This guy is trying to please everyone simultaneously. It's no wonder he's never broken out of the journalistic margins.
The "GAP" controversy still continues.I don't know about your area but around the Chicago area our elites are still clueless.I suspect they really know about the ideas in "The Bell Curve" but to say anything would cost them their jobs.
"OPRF board clashes over test score gap
By BILL DWYER wdwyer@pioneerlocal.com September 16, 2011 1:10PM
Reprints
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Updated: October 28, 2011 3:38PM
OPRF High School board members had a heated exchange Thursday night over the continued gap between white and black students’ test scores.
Oak Park-River Forest High School did not meet federal AYP, Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind.
The overall composite AYP score was 72.8 percent who met or exceeded standards in reading and 68.8 percent for math. With the AYP minimum standard rising to 95 percent in 2012 and 100 percent in 2013, it’s unlikely any subgroup, including whites, will meet AYP in future testing.
However, School District 200 board members expressed concern over the gaps between white and black students.
Of the white students who took the Prairie State Achievement Examination, 87.4 percent met or exceeded standards in both reading and mathematics. The next highest percentage was Hispanic students, at 70 percent and 61 percent respectively. Blacks met or exceeded standards only 39.7 percent in reading and 40.7 percent in math.
Sharon Patchek-Layman said she “was astonished” that after eight years of AYP, there had been little or no change in the disparity between black and white test scores at OPRF.
“We started at 40 percent eight years ago,” she said.
Amy Hill, director of assessment and research who presented the report, termed the test results both familiar and “unsettling.”
http://riverforest.suntimes.com/7694327-417/oprf-board-clashes-over-test-score-gap.html
the more diversity, the more disparity.
"Harvard" stands for "intelligence," extreme far right edge of the IQ Bell Curve smarts.
HAHAHA, LOL!!!
Not it doesn't. Harvard stands for privileged birth, silver spoons and family connections. MIT, Caltech and the rest of the STEM schools are what stand for intelligence.
You're turning into Half Sigma who thinks a Georgia Tech grad is less intelligent than yet another feminist yenta crapped out by Hahvahds literature department. Don't fall into the Ivy worshiping trap that's associated with a certain religious minority.
It‘s often not conscious; this is an example of something similar about entry to the profession of medicine in the UK. The money quote:
“In medicine we could have had quotas for women, south Asians, and countless other groups who were minorities in the past. But those calls were resisted, with the unpredictable result that many of the former minorities are now satisfyingly over-represented as a result of their own merits and nothing more.
So it is galling to hear repeated cries to combat elitism by introducing quotas to increase the numbers of the last minority in medicine: those who have underperformed academically. For the grim reality is that a meritocracy is just as elitist, by its very definition, as any other form of selection.”
And then, someone who didn’t quite understand the article—yet someone well-informed and generally intelligent enough to work as a sub-editor at the BMJ—titles it ‘Positive discrimination is still elitist,’ where ‘positive discrimination‘ is exactly what hasn’t been implemented. The whole thrust of the article has been lost on that sub-editor, someone part of the wider system described.
This is a no-brainer. A most equal society would be one where everyone is a clone of one another. Suppose all men in a society are clones of Bruce Willis. Everyone would have same IQ, same talents, same personality. Soem Willises would rise higher, but all the other Willises would have same talents to succeed too. It would be competition of equal.
Suppose we make it more diverse. We add clones of Beavis(of Beavis and Butthead), which makes the society more diverse. Now, we got Willises and Beavises. Willises are gonna do better than Beavises. And then suppose we add clones of Steve Jobs. Jobses, being smarter and more ambitious, are gonna do better than Willises and Beavises.
So adding diversity makes for greater inequality.
Just look at breeds of dogs. If you have a race among greyhounds, they're comparable in speed. But suppose we add bulldogs, dachunds, beagles, and etc to the race. With greater diversity, there's gonna be more inequality in speed.
"Harvard stands for privileged birth, silver spoons and family connections."
Harvard does have its share of students who were accepted via legacy, money(legalized bribery), affirmative action, and bogus majors(like women's studies and black studies and theology.)
But the majority are surely quite bright.
Since Harvard is a breeding ground for political, cultural, and social elites, it does not and cannot stand for absolute meritocracy. Power needs a degree of continuity(legacy), wealth(bribery), and representation(affirmative action).
Nowadays, you should probably go with !=
Anonymous at 11/1/11 2:12 PM is right.
Harvard doesn't have to be the absolute best and brightest. They need a mix of people in order to maintain their brand, some of which are the best and brightest and some of which bring other things to the table.
Well, first, this nonsense about "most unequal nation in the world" is just pure Marxist hogwash. This is just a bit of agit--prop based on a willful mis-characterization of statistcal artifacts of economic reporting statistics, and cherry picking of very dubious statistics about wealth creation and income. Moverover, it creates it falsely conflates income with 'equality", and wholly side steps the notion of polltical liberty and economic oppurtunity as the true measure of equality. It is most profoundly untrue statement, and is untrue in myriad ways.
Secondly, the division of people into "victim groups" based on sex and color, and then plottig their "liberation in history" is also just more cant, propaganda and rhetorical legerdemain. Wealthy women,for example, were much more "accepted in the mainstream" in the 18th century, they had substantial control inn high society, than where poor white men. As a whole, it is debatable whether or not "black society" has advanced or not since the early days of the civil rights movement, given the morally dysfunction we see today, a dysfunction caused by decades of dependance on government.
As usual, the mythology of the left completely breaks down when subjected to critical and informed analysis.
Leftist always attack those they would loot and destroy, and they valorize the groups they use as a front for this pilferage and ruin.
The left are nihilists and barbarians. It is the great monstrosity of the last century that they achieved such power.
The hate this civilization. They hate the very notion of civilization. They hate this nation.
The only countries of the West that will survive, let alone prosper, will be those that reject "diversity" and multi-cuturalism.
America is increasingly stratified by IQ, and the resulting class war that the clever are waging upon the clueless means that having Harvard's endorsement of your brainpower is ever more desirable. Thus, applications and SAT scores have skyrocketed over the last half century.
Yeah. The thing is, you'd be hard pressed to argue that America is better off today under it's super-duper high IQ ruling class than it was sixty years ago.
The thing about a meritocracy is that there are an awful lot of things which we can say are meritorious. Back in the pre-IQ meritocracy, it was considered meritorious to possess things like honesty and integrity. Even patriotism was considered meritorious, as shocking as that sounds now. Bankers, doctors, lawyers and other people in the respected professions were expected to actually be respectable and to live up to a high standard of conduct in both their personal and professional lives. Having a college degree meant that you were a gentleman, and had all the duties and reponsibilites which accompanied that status. But that's all ancient hisory now.
The one minimum requirement of a ruling class is that it have the best interests of the country it rules at heart. The IQ-based meritocracy fails that test, and fails it badly.
This IQ sifting is all well and good, but how stable is it? This board is alwAys talking about tribalism and ruthless importance of IQ. Those two things seem to be in tension with each other. With regression to the mean, will we not very quicklyend up with an untalented overclass as those now rising buy influence and do what it takes to keep their family and people in control? IQ is interesting now, but it just may be that in the long term what will matter is what has always mattered, who your family is.
Per Bradshaw College Consulting, for the Harvard Class of 2015:
20.0% Foreign
17.8% Asian-American
12.1% Latino American
11.8% African-American
1.9% Native American
0.2% Pacific Islander American
That leaves just 36.2% for all White Americans. However, Hillel indicates that over 30% of Harvard is Jewish, even though only one to two percent of the US population is Jewish. Assuming exactly 30.0% and no more are White American Jewish in the Class of 2015, that leaves just 6.2% of Harvard as non-Jewish, non-Hispanic White.
Roughly 62% of the nation was non-Jewish, non-Hispanic White by the 2010 Census, so while African-Americans, Latino Americans, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders are all fairly represented at Harvard, non-Jewish whites are underepresented by roughly 90%.
I really doubt that the drive to maximize IQ at Harvard is as strong as the drive to maximize opportunities for certain ethnic and/or religious groups.
Harvard" stands for "intelligence," extreme far right edge of the IQ Bell Curve smarts.
like Elanor Kagan
"You're turning into Half Sigma who thinks a Georgia Tech grad is less intelligent than yet another feminist yenta crapped out by Hahvahds literature department. Don't fall into the Ivy worshiping trap that's associated with a certain religious minority."
I tried reading Half Sigma for a could of months, and gave up. He's just too parochial East Coast in his outlook. He's probably "smart", but in a very narrow way. Whatever one thinks of Sailer, he covers a much wider turf than HS does. HS also has a pretty juvenile writing style.
They need a mix of people in order to maintain their brand,
that 'mix' at one point had a student body that was 25% jewish.
less than 10% white christian male. If you are poor and white, forget it, even with high grades, especially if you put '4h club' on application.
I have posted about this before, but the jews were given access to power - by wasps who voluntarily shared it- and Jews betrayed their trust and now practice far worse and far more destructive ethnic nepotism.
"Not it doesn't. Harvard stands for privileged birth, silver spoons and family connections. MIT, Caltech and the rest of the STEM schools are what stand for intelligence."
Rejection letter still stings, huh?
"class war that the clever are waging upon the clueless"
This bears more frequent repeating, especially with prominent and not so prominent Republicans calling Obama's tax the millionaires plan class warfare. The rich have already brought war against the middle class. Real wages have been stagnant at best to slightly dropping for 30 years. Return on capital has doubled in the same time frame. There is a war going on, but the Middle Class seems too proud, or too scared (as if nothing stands between it and Hitlerism) to admit it.
It was largely Harvard and Yale's leadership that gave us: a Vietnam loss, the Gulf War (basically a loss), the 1973 Oil Embargo, the 1979 Hostage Crisis, Iran-Contra, the rise of AQ, 9/11, the Iraq War, Afghanistan, Libya, and the 2007-9 Financial Meltdown, and that is off the top of my head.
Smart the elites are not. Smug yes, but not smart. You have politically connected non-Whites (Obama, not smart), some women like Hillary (not smart), ambitious climbers like Clinton (smart, if smarmy), and legacies like Bush (dumb). That's it.
"class war that the clever are waging upon the clueless"
More by result than by design.
"Since Harvard is a breeding ground for political, cultural, and social elites, it does not and cannot stand for absolute meritocracy. Power needs a degree of continuity(legacy), wealth(bribery), and representation(affirmative action)."
This sums it up pretty well, I think. But I think there's yet another reason fro Harvard to avoid admissions based purely on merit - the fact that focusing on "the whole person" gives them ample opportunity to exclude those with political inclinations they;d prefer not to admit. A study done during the last year, for example, showed that, all else equal, Harvard applicants who had participated in JROTC units were less likely to be admitted than those who had not.
"Per Bradshaw College Consulting, for the Harvard Class of 2015:
20.0% Foreign, 17.8% Asian-American, 12.1% Latino American, 11.8% African-American, 1.9% Native American, 0.2% Pacific Islander American"
These numbers seem highyl unlikely. I doubt that either blacks or Hispanics are represented to that degree, unless applicants have lied about their racial/ethnic backgrounds.
"but the jews were given access to power - by wasps who voluntarily shared it- and Jews betrayed their trust and now practice far worse and far more destructive ethnic nepotism."
One of the most frequent examples Jews cite of American "anti-Semitism" is that they were "barred" from Harvard - which really just means there were quotas on how many Jews coould attend. Nevermind that Harvard was a private sectarian institution founded by WASP Congregationalists that can discriminate against whoever the hell it wants. And nevermind that liberal Jews are all in favor of quotas being placed on non-Jewish whites.
"class war that the clever are waging upon the clueless". More by result than by design.
Oh, no. It's defintiely by design.
I always find it odd that the more often I hear the word "diversity," the whiter the crowd is.
Of course, many of those who hope to become part of the globalized jet-set elite, ivy worshipers and 99%ers included, honestly do hold the doublethought of egalitarian diversity. They just never seem to reach the logical consequences of their beliefs.
I always liked how Mr. Gladwell put it, in a contemporaneous column about Ye Olde Ivies: "treatment effect" groups (USMC) vs. "selection effect" groups (fashion modeling agencies).
Many right-thinking Americans enjoy pretending that Harvard is a tonier version of the Marines Corps, and HYP is happy to abet that. But in reality it's more like getting hired by Ford or Elite. Mark Zuckerberg grasped this dynamic, Aaron Sorkin didn't; both of them got rich anyway.
The old saw is that Cornell is the easiest of the Ivies to get into, and the hardest to get out of. They make you work, rather than network.
On that basis alone I'd prefer an élite drawn from Ithaca over one from Cambridge or New Haven.
Especially those with the fortitude to climb those hills.
An Administration staffed with Ann Coulters and Dinesh D'Souzas would be entertaining, if not particularly effective.
I've known a few MIT alumni. I was impressed by the intellect of exactly one of them, an electrical engineer. A couple of others seemed like grinds at best. Harvard alumni I have known have been more well-rounded and impressive -- not just grinds. But not all geniuses either.
Captain Jack Aubrey said:
"Per Bradshaw College Consulting, for the Harvard Class of 2015:
20.0% Foreign, 17.8% Asian-American, 12.1% Latino American, 11.8% African-American, 1.9% Native American, 0.2% Pacific Islander American"
These numbers seem highyl (sic) unlikely.
They seem about right to me. Things changed with the Class of 2014. The Obama Administration had made some loud noises regarding adequacy of minority admissions at the University of Texas, and suddenly the percent admissions of "Students of Color" climbed to 42-45% across the Ivy League. These stats show admissions for American "Students of Color" at 43.8%, including Asians, for Harvard.
"Per Bradshaw College Consulting, for the Harvard Class of 2015:
20.0% Foreign, 17.8% Asian-American, 12.1% Latino American, 11.8% African-American, 1.9% Native American, 0.2% Pacific Islander American"
According to this link, Harvard is 10% black and 10% Hispanic:
http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/09/the-twenty-first-century-student
Most of the blacks are probably foreign elites.
Most of the Hispanics are probably very Euro-looking, rather than the short, squat Mestizo type.
@Jimbob:
"Regression to the mean" refers to individuals; the children of two parents who are far off the mean for the population they belong to will be, on average, closer to the mean than their parents. But for the population as a whole, the standard deviation doesn't change much, because there are many more average than non-average parents, and the tails of their children's bell curve will roughly replace the children of the non-average parents who fall closer to the mean.
Q, is it really the case that the traditional meritocracy has transitioned to one based strictly on IQ, with the intellectual cream rising to the top? Says smart guy Christopher Langan:
"You know, I've always celebrated the presence of so many brilliant people out there. But at the same time, I've been dismayed by the fact that they're not usually the ones who are running things or doing most of the talking. Those tend to be moral imbeciles with (at best) danger-zone intelligence. Those in charge of society tend to be smarter than average, but not quite smart enough to recognize their own intellectual limitations and deflate their egos and job descriptions to scale. They tend to have other important qualifications like narcissism, ruthlessness, greed, deceptiveness, innate disregard for truth, limitless self-entitlement, and the burning desire to become 'high achievers' (e.g., successful thieves and despots). It's really quite a waste.
"But the smart ones are out there in force. Even if one isn't lucky enough to bump into them every day, the world is positively brimming with their more worthwhile productions, and the pages of intellectual history are replete with their inspirational examples. Nobody who understands this can deny the intelligence of mankind, even though much of it has been self-cancelling and subject to diversion, prostitution, or enslavement."
As far as the importance of other traits like honesty, integrity, loyalty, patriotism and general respectability is concerned, I'm with you. But intelligence is up there, too, and there is a conspicuous lack of it among the supposedly high-IQ managerial class.
Wouldn't it be interesting to live in a society that truly valued its brightest thinkers? (For the record, my intelligence probably falls into Langan's "danger zone", or worse, so this may not be the best idea...)
America is increasingly stratified by IQ, and the resulting class war that the clever are waging upon the clueless means that having Harvard's endorsement of your brainpower is ever more desirable. Thus, applications and SAT scores have skyrocketed over the last half century.
America is not that stratified by IQ. The average IQ at harvard is "only" 128 when given a neutral IQ test like the WAIS, not the SAT which they were selected on, and thus biases their IQ upwards. And it's often the dumber harvard
students who get power because they have so many
family connections that they didn't need brains to get into harvard.
And I don't believe the average SAT score at harvard has skyrocketed as Charles Murray claims. Yes harvard students now score much higher than the average college student, but 50 years ago the average college student was more elite.
Says smart guy Christopher Langan
"You know, I've always celebrated the presence of so many brilliant people out there. But at the same time, I've been dismayed by the fact that they're not usually the ones who are running things or doing most of the talking. Those tend to be moral imbeciles with (at best) danger-zone intelligence.
Sounds a lot like "The problem with communism is that it's never been tried".
And I think the operative phrase there is "moral imbeciles". The moral imbeciles in question - people like Madoff and Ken Lay, Peter Jennings and Ezra Klein, Barney Frank and Franklin Raines - almost certainly possess higher IQs than their predecessors of sixty years ago. Frank and Raines are both graduates of Harvard and Harvard Law School. These people are not intellectual imbeciles. On the contrary, they are exactly the sort of people who rise to the top in an IQ-based system.
As far as the importance of other traits like honesty, integrity, loyalty, patriotism and general respectability is concerned, I'm with you. But intelligence is up there, too, and there is a conspicuous lack of it among the supposedly high-IQ managerial class.
I'd like to see you offer some data in support of that contention. The managerial class, which is genuinely high-IQ, does an excellent job - of looking after themselves.
Having a high IQ is a lot like having big biceps. You can use those big biceps for the good of all or for the good of yourself, for construction or for destruction, for good or for ill. There's nothing wonderful about it in and of itself.
For the record, my intelligence probably falls into Langan's "danger zone"
For the record, my IQ is 2.5 SD's above the mean. But you should not listen to me on that account.
Wouldn't it be interesting to live in a society that truly valued its brightest thinkers?
Yeah, "interesting".
The Simpsons did a good episode on this, where Lisa and the other big brains in Springfield took over the town.
What you are arguing for is socialism of the sort proposed by the comte de Saint-Simon in which things are run by a technocratic elite. Because, clearly, those with an IQ of 100 should not be allowed to make decisions for themselves. They'll just screw it up.
And I think the operative phrase there is "moral imbeciles". The moral imbeciles in question - people like Madoff and Ken Lay, Peter Jennings and Ezra Klein, Barney Frank and Franklin Raines - almost certainly possess higher IQs than their predecessors of sixty years ago
Well they posses higher intelligence than their predecessors because better nutrition has increased brain size and development over the 20th (flynn effect) but they might not have higher IQs since IQ measures your rank within your generation. The elites of old had IQs arguably as high or higher than elites today. Look at the founding fathers. They seem to tower intellectually over modern presidents, despite living in an America that was over 1 SD dumber. So their intellectual rank relative to their era(IQ) were perhaps in the stratosphere
Having a high IQ is a lot like having big biceps. You can use those big biceps for the good of all or for the good of yourself, for construction or for destruction, for good or for ill. There's nothing wonderful about it in and of itself.
Well there is some evidence that high IQ people are inherently more moral and law abiding, supposedly because solving ethical dilemmas requires high IQ, plus they think more about long term consequences, and because they're smart enough to win the game of life without needing to cheat.
Another reason I propose is that if the intellectual part of your brain works well, chances are the moral and emotional parts work well too, since the whole nervous system is related. Same reason high IQ people tend to have good physical coordination.
I suspect all these white collar harvard criminals do have high IQ's,but not as high as equally rich people who made their wealth without cheating.
Well there is some evidence that high IQ people are inherently more moral and law abiding, supposedly because solving ethical dilemmas requires high IQ, plus they think more about long term consequences, and because they're smart enough to win the game of life without needing to cheat.
I think there is a lot more evidence that high IQ criminals and immoral people are better at evading the consequences of their actions. That is, they cheat better.
Same reason high IQ people tend to have good physical coordination.
Heh. I guess that's why Jews are famous for their good physical coordination and blacks are notorious for tripping over their own feet.
Look at the founding fathers. They seem to tower intellectually over modern presidents, despite living in an America that was over 1 SD dumber. So their intellectual rank relative to their era(IQ) were perhaps in the stratosphere
There's no evidence that they did "tower intellectually over modern presidents", in the sense of having a higher IQ.
All IQ measures is the clock speed of the CPU. If the software is garbage then processing it at 500 Gigahertz just means you're moving more garbage around more quickly.
I think the founders did "tower intellectually over modern presidents", but that was because they were operating off of superior operating instructions.
The modern high IQ elite does not embrace the "diversity is good" mantra because they lack IQ. They embrace it because it is good - for them. And they don't care about anyone else. That's where they differ from the founders, who saw themselves as part of and representing an entity called "the American people".
It's hard to make a credible argument that the modern high IQ elite is stupid. They are making out like bandits. People say that they are stupid because their actions are so destructive to the rest of us, but in doing so are implicitly assuming that the high IQ elite is remotely interested in the general welfare.
If you work from the premise that their actions are aimed at their maximizing their own wealth, power, and security then their actions look like pure genius.
"Per Bradshaw College Consulting, for the Harvard Class of 2015:
20.0% Foreign, 17.8% Asian-American, 12.1% Latino American, 11.8% African-American, 1.9% Native American, 0.2% Pacific Islander American"
According to this link, Harvard is 10% black and 10% Hispanic:
http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/09/the-twenty-first-century-student
Most of the blacks are probably foreign elites.
Most of the Hispanics are probably very Euro-looking, rather than the short, squat Mestizo type.
http://www.bradshawcollegeconsulting.com/college_acceptance_rate.html
Very few African-Americans are foreign elites...that would make them African (or European, etc.), not African-American.
Harvard Magazine is describing the demographics of those who accepted the offer of admission, while Bradford is describing demographics of those offered admission regardless of decision. But the point remains: the opportunities for African-Americans and Hispanics exceed those of non-Jewish white Americans by roughly an order of magnitude base ten.
why Jews are famous for their good physical coordination
one area they seem to excel is swimming (jason liezak, dana torres, and of course mark spitz)
Harvard comes closest to acceptees and enrollees being the same people.
re: admissions yield - Back in the go-go '90s H had an image of "they never offer you a job, you go in and take it"--like Salomon Bros in Liar's Poker. But every year there's some wonder kid in the news for turning them down (cuz of better scholarship $ elsewhere, just so we're all clear!)
"A Flood of Crimson Ink" (2005)
@ 11/2/11 12:25 PM
"And I don't believe the average SAT score at harvard has skyrocketed as Charles Murray claims. Yes harvard students now score much higher than the average college student, but 50 years ago the average college student was more elite."
Well then you should do your homework. SAT scores have most certainly have skyrocketed at Harvard -- and not just at Harvard, at all elite schools. The reason is that the SATs have been dumbed down to the point of uselessness for their original purpose (a way for elite schools to find those "diamonds in the rough" they no longer care about). Times change, elite schools now want ways to claim diversity without acknowledging any drop in ability. A test that can't discriminate between, say, 2.5 sigma and 4 sigma is exactly what they need for that purpose. And it's what they have.
In the 1960s National Merit Finalist meant roughly top half percent. A pair of 700's on the SAT (they only had math and verbal then) and a B+ GPA pretty well guaranteed you were one.
Harvard now annually receives around 500 applications with double 800 SAT scores (verbal /math) and rejected about half of them. Last year alone Harvard rejected about as many double 800s as there were in the entire country between 1950 and 1980. And only about a quarter of last year's double 800s even applied to Harvard.
Today Harvard has the most National Merit Scholars (top 1/2 percent, same as Finalist in 60's although the criteria are different) in the country. And the number of National Merit Scholars at Harvard is about the same as the number of double 800s there.
Harvard has become diverse? That depends on how you count. If you count noses its a mono-culture: they're all brown.
OT: Steve, two links you might find interesting, no need to publish this.
a recurring obsession with Wired's pc drone Spencer Ackerman--then again, the FBI seems not being so smart here:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/fbi-west-point-training
FBI Calls In The Army To Fix Its Counterterrorism Training
RSS summary:
"In order to fix its anti-Muslim counterterrorism training, the FBI is bringing in the cavalry: the Army's Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, the acknowledged experts on Islamic extremism. But it's had an uneasy partnership with the FBI for years, and the bureau still hasn't given a clear indication of how thoroughly West Point will get to clean house. "
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-10/amazing-databases-okcupids-oktrends
Many of the findings are posted on the OkTrends blog, and some should make us uncomfortable: Black women reply to messages more frequently than any other demographic, but they receive the fewest responses from members of every race, including other black people. In contrast, white men receive more responses than members of any other group, yet they respond to women 20 percent less often than non-white men do.
keep up the good work
within the same race, higher IQ people tend to be slightly more coordinated
I've never seen any evidence that this is so. Can you cite any studies showing that e.g. whites with 140 IQ have better physical coordination than whites with IQ of 100?
Q, Jensen cites a study correlating IQ with physical coordination on pg 303 of "The g Factor". I don't know for a fact if IQ 140 folks are more coordinated than IQ 100 people, but that should be the default assumption.
Q: "within the same race, higher IQ people tend to be slightly more coordinated"
Why compare 140 to 100 for whites? Why not 120 to 80 or 110 to 90? I've seen no sign of a negative correlation.
Anything that degrades neural function (be it genetic or environment) is likely to degrade both intelligence and coordination.
There's far more to intelligence than neurons, but they are a necessary component.
I would expect that good eyesight and coordination also correlate, and perhaps more strongly than either with intelligence.
Have you ever seen anyone's coordination improve as result of brain injury or damage?
Q: "within the same race, higher IQ people tend to be slightly more coordinated"
I didn't say that, Catperson did.
Why compare 140 to 100 for whites? Why not 120 to 80 or 110 to 90?
No reason. I did say "for example". But 120 vs 80 would work just as well.
Q: Well, for whites, if you compare coordination of IQ 80 people to IQ 120 people there's pretty clearly a difference. Remember that 80 was considered mentally retarded until it became Politically Incorrect to label half the black population retarded.
Comparing these two groups for coordination is almost cruel; its about like putting an all-white Harvard intramural sports team in the Special Olympics.
Well, for whites, if you compare coordination of IQ 80 people to IQ 120 people there's pretty clearly a difference. Remember that 80 was considered mentally retarded until it became Politically Incorrect to label half the black population retarded.
As I already mentioned, black people are not exactly known for their remarkable lack of physical coordination, in spite of their "retardation". Which would seem to undermine this whole "IQ is positively correlated with physical coordination, physical beauty, empathy, musical ability, niceness, shiny hair, and all other good things" line of argument.
And as for whites, I need you to do something a little more than to say "for whites, if you compare coordination of IQ 80 people to IQ 120 people there's pretty clearly a difference". I need you to actually demonstrate that this is so.
Have you ever seen anyone's coordination improve as result of brain injury or damage?
You don't come across as a particularly intelligent person. I've noticed that this is a common occurrence among people who extol the virtues of high IQ as some sort of magic pixie dust.
I certainly would not expect brain damage to improve anyone's coordination. On the other hand, it is perfectly plausible that a person might suffer brain damage which would have a negative impact on their ability to engage in high level abstract thinking while at the same time leaving their physical coordination completely unaffected.
In spite of what you seem to believe, the brain is not an undifferentiated mass which all works at an equal level of efficiency. People can, and very frequently do, have above average function in one area of the brain alongside below average function in another part.
To use your brain damage example, Stephen Hawking has ALS, a disease which damages the motor cortex of the brain stem. This has had a negative impact on his physical coordination - he's paralyzed from the neck down. He's still a brilliant physicist though, because the other parts of his brain which perform other tasks are unaffected.
Today Harvard has the most National Merit Scholars (top 1/2 percent, same as Finalist in 60's although the criteria are different) in the country.
Not true for this year. If one checks the Annual Report of the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, one finds that the University of Chicago enrolled 268 National Merit Scholars, while Harvard enrolled only 261. Furthermore, Harvard has a larger class than those found at several other elite schools; Cal Tech has, almost every year, a greater percent of its class being National Merit Scholars.
Using SREB stats, every year from 1996 to 2004 Harvard enrolled between 340 and 396 National Merit Scholars, with a median of 373 in each class. Only 312 national Merit Scholars entered Harvard in 2005. That was the last year over 300 were enrolled in a single class.
Harvard still aims to enroll more National Merit Scholars than any other school each year, but obviously they are enrolling fewer than they once did. I perceive that the general public - and even the readers of this blog, a universally well-informed group - do not understand how Harvard has changed its focus in admissions to favor things other than academic excellence.
Since one of my comments seems to have ended up on the cutting room floor ...
It is not the case that the brain is composed of an undifferentiated mass of neurons, which all operate at an equally high (or equally low in the case of low IQ people) level of efficiency.
Different regions of the brain perform different tasks. Person A may have a brain which is exceptionally good at physical coordination and athletic tasks. Person B might have a brain which is unusually good at languages, or at mathematics. Ability at these various tasks is determined by different regions within the brain. We colloquially refer to people like A as "jocks" and to the people like B as "nerds", in recognition of the fact that most people fall into one of the two camps but usually not both at the same time.
Further evidence for specialization within the brain can be seen among people who have suffered brain damage. Depending on the part of the brain which was injured, speech, motion, smell, eyesight, memory, or reasoning may be impaired, without affecting any other faculty.
The part of the brain dealing with emotions, the amygdala, is distinct from the part of the brain associated with intellect. A person can possess an exceptionally high IQ and also be emotionally stunted due to differences in the development of these two parts of the brain. This particular combination of traits - high IQ and low "emotional intelligence"- is not uncommon.
So-called Emotional intelligence is simply emotions x intelligence. If you are impaired emotionally or intellectually, you will not handle emotional challenges successfully.
So-called Emotional intelligence is simply emotions x intelligence
No, it is not. So-called Emotional intelligence measures the functioning of one, and only one, part of the brain. I already told you which part.
If you are impaired emotionally or intellectually, you will not handle emotional challenges successfully.
You say some peculiar things. Obviously if you are "impaired emotionally" you will not "handle emotional challenges successfully". Just as a person who is impaired intellectually will not handle intellectual challenges successfully. Just as a person who is impaired visually will not master visual challenges well.
But a persons ability to handle emotional challenges has nothing to do with their intellectual ability.
Your basic premise - that the brain either all works very well or all works poorly - is wrong. It's incorrect. It's factually false. The brain is actually composed of different regions dealing with different tasks, and these different regions perform these different tasks with a varying degree of competency.
But please, don't take my word for it. Do a little research yourself.
"As I already mentioned, black people are not exactly known for their remarkable lack of physical coordination, in spite of their "retardation". Which would seem to undermine this whole "IQ is positively correlated with physical coordination, physical beauty, empathy, musical ability, niceness, shiny hair, and all other good things" line of argument."
Have you ever read any of the research or are you just coming here with assumptions? The fact that blacks do not appear "retarded" with an IQ of 80, or even 70, while whites do, is one of the cornerstones of this whole reality. Intelligence in that level is normal for blacks. Whites with IQs below 80 almost all are obviously retarded and most have some sort of congential defects.
Blacks, otoh, do appear normal physically, and tend to interact with others in a way that we see as "normal." I put that in quotes because I don't think people realize the inner adjustments of expectations that we make when we observe or interact with other races. Blacks talk and act in ways that seem perfectly normal for them, but if whites were behaving that way you'd think they were seriously retarded, low class or crazy. Just ride the bus in Baltimore or Detroit.
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