From the NYT:
The 2012 Sidney Awards I
By DAVID BROOKS
At the start of the 1980s, about 5 percent of Harvard students were Asian-American. But the number of qualified Asian-American applicants rose so that by 1993 roughly 20 percent of Harvard students had Asian heritage.
But, according to Ron Unz, a funny thing then happened. The number of qualified Asian-Americans continued to rise, but the number of Asian-Americans admitted to Harvard fell so that the student body was about 16 percent Asian. Between 1995 and 2011, Harvard’s Asian-American population has varied by less than a percentage point around that 16.5 percent average. Not only that, the percentage of Asian-Americans at other Ivy League schools has also settled at a remarkably stable 16 percent, year after year.
- Read All Comments (152) »
This smells like a quota system, or at least that was the implication left by Unz’s searing, sprawling, frustrating and highly debatable piece, “The Myth of the American Meritocracy,” in The American Conservative. It wins the first of the 2012 Sidney Awards, which go to the best magazine essays of the year.
You’re going to want to argue with Unz’s article all the way along, especially for its narrow, math-test-driven view of merit. But it’s potentially ground-shifting. Unz’s other big point is that Jews are vastly overrepresented at elite universities and that Jewish achievement has collapsed. In the 1970s, for example, 40 percent of top scorers in the Math Olympiad had Jewish names. Now 2.5 percent do. The fanatical generations of immigrant strivers have been replaced by a more comfortable generation of preprofessionals, he implies.
It was moderately brave of Brooks to devote a paragraph to the other aspect of Unz's article, the Jewish side.
He's been wanting to go there for some time. (Here are a couple of columns I wrote in 2010 in response to a Brooks: column on "The Power Elite: First and second, in which I elaborate the concept of noblesse oblige.) As I pointed out earlier this year in response to a Brooks column contrasting the behavior of current "meritocratic" elites with old WASP elites:
Now, you know and I know that what he's trying to do here, under the guise of talking about "meritocrats," is to get through to his fellow American Jews that they need to stop conceptualizing themselves so overwhelmingly as History's Greatest Victims and start developing a sense of noblesse oblige about this country in which they have become predominant, in which they dominate the worldview of the educated classes. ...
In career terms, obviously, Brooks' euphemistic approach is better than my plain-spoken one. And it would be easy to argue that my frankness is too abrasive, that Brooks' vague euphemisms are better for getting our mutual message out.
But, here's the rub: What evidence is there that Brooks' readers grasp what he's talking about at all? I've read through a fair fraction of the 527 comments on his column, and I don't see many (if any) examples suggesting that Brooks' readers comprehend his underlying message.
What goes unsaid eventually goes unthought.
Unz is right. University admissions offices are run by bigots who think the Civil Rights Acts do not apply to them. They aren't even embarrassed about it; it isn't a matter of a sub rosa thumb on the scale. It is official announced policy at almost every university in the country to engage in racial discrimination among applicants (and job candidates). There are offices and staff whose proclaimed purpose is to ensure that bigotry pervades every decision that is made.
Jonathan Katz
Professor of Physics
Washington University
St. Louis, Mo. 63130
As you may recall, back when the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was the biggest story of all time, the Obama administration put together a team of superbright scientists to advise, but Katz was quickly discovered to hold politically incorrect views about, among much else, what caused the spread of AIDS in America in the 1980s (he did not blame Ronald Reagan!). The Party of Science and Reality immediately fired him.
Posts
48 comments:
"It was moderately brave of Brooks to devote a paragraph to the other aspect of Unz's article, the Jewish side."
Yes, well done Brooks. That took some guts.
But as long as Asians and white gentiles don't organize, sue, and bitch about it, nothing will change.
Is it just me or is the standard of the readers' commentary at the New York Times website abysmally low- dreary and addicted to partisan point scoring?
That article describes Katz as a "virulent homophobe". Right - HIV is not virulent, but Professor Katz is.
That hypocritical weasel, Gary Trudeau, was on a big jag after the election about the "reality based community". (And has Doonesbury every reallly been funny - I can only think of one time it made me laugh). These people love to sneer at people in fly-over land, but the amount of ridiculous, unscientific crap they believe in is staggering.
Now if we can only get them to discuss/mention the other third of Unz's piece, the under representation of non-Jewish Whites.
Perhaps a white gentile (assuming there's one left) on the committee or subcommittee in charge of the budget for scientific research, billions of dollars of which go to these private universities, can call the their presidents before his committee and question them on their admissions policies, and ask them point blank to justify why white gentiles are underrepresented. If the answer is something along the lines of "white gentiles are lazier, or dumber, or have bad family values" or some such, he should ask why blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented.
Gordon Gee, while at Vanderbilt University, deliberately made an effort to skew admissions in favor of Jews, and the press barely uttered a peep. Can you imagine a university president announcing he was going to admit more white gentiles and getting away with it?
"Is it just me or is the standard of the readers' commentary at the New York Times website abysmally low- dreary and addicted to partisan point scoring?"
It isn't just you.
Isn't this earlier Brooks essay the one where he allowed that today's "meritocratic" elites *are* "smarter" than the WASP elites of old?
I don't think that's true--in fact, it seems evidently untrue. Harry Truman read Cicero in Latin. Does any Democrat today (or Republican, or anybody on Wall Street, or any undergrad at Harvard, or any Harvard humanities prof outside of Classics) read Cicero in Latin? Or at all? Is "The Economist" magazine really better on most social and political issues than Cicero? More challenging to our prejudices? More humbled by worldly experience and wisdom?
--I'm mixing my Allan Bloom-style preoccupations in, but never mind that. I think Brooks is plainly ethnocentric, and he's a sworn technocratist, so he's not going to get it through his head that the Ivies' model of intellectual achievement is a bill of false goods.
--That swipe at Unz for a "math test" view of education ("Luke, you WILL argue with it! It is your DESTINY!") is hilarious. In light of the present economy, it should be a given that the Ivies are no numeric Parnassus. If Brooks tacitly concedes that the Ivies are not about math, what rationale is left for letting Ivy wordsmiths govern Wall Street or the media, as opposed to some clever Classics minors from State U? Or why can't a Supreme Court Justice come out of Washington & Lee?
You credit this cocktail swiller with more scruples than he is master of.
There is one problem with this discussion about Asians and race, the Ivy League is about class not race. The most important thing about any entering Ivy League class is the social class they represent , not their potential to be excellent chemists. Why else would the smart Asian kids work so hard to get in? Certainly not to be around other future (not extremely well paid) chemists.
The fact that Jews have not dropped in IQ - they still handily outpace both gentiles and Asians - nor, seemingly, in real world achievement, seems to suggest that by focusing on things like the Math Olympiad we would get a hugely misleading impression of where the talent lies in this country.
It would seem that Asians lag behind in figuring out where the real prestige accomplishments lie, and I wonder why this should be so? Asians are usually very good at the practical business of social striving. Just as whites and Jews abandon things like the Math Olympiad and other such contests which are purely about prestige as something not worth striving for, Asians flock to them in droves, failing to grasp that in today's America, it doesn't really matter.
Can we also expect Asians to follow a similar arc of development as Jews, from outsize striving driven by social insecurity to a tapering off such striving as they feel more and more that they have "arrived"?
One is tempted to say yes, but there are good reasons to think otherwise. Jews and intelligent whites are good at real world achievements, so that allows them to dispense with mere prestige credentials, as both groups now have a track record of fantastic real world achievements that cannot be doubted.
Asians on the other hand have proven only really great at getting prestige credentials, but seem to lag - both as countries and as individuals in this country - when it comes to real world achievements.
In other words, as unfair as it sounds, it might be that the distinctive Asian skill likes in passing tests. Indeed, as a culture that stressed passing tests as the preeminent skill for over 2,000 years, they might have simply been selected for that.
But if Asians never catch up to whites and Jews in terms of real world achievement, and it grows more and more apparent that their distinctive skill lies in passing tests and in a kind of capacity for hardship and effort (i.e, the proverbial grind), then Asians might never as a group achieve the real world track record that alone would allow them to feel comfortable enough to transition away from prestige credentials and towards a comfortable position alongside Jews and whites as a group that has "arrived" and no longer has anything to "prove".
If that were so, then Asians would occupy a very peculiar half way house in the intellectual world, clearly much above blacks and Hispanics and in some ways equal to whites and Jews, but in certain crucial ways not, as a group, equal to either whites or Jews.
What an interesting world we live in! The neat and tidy little narrative of smart, less smart, and dumb might be a grotesque simplification that conceals far more about the nature of the world than it reveals. Who could have expected this odd curve-ball that Asians represent? Yet the world is always messier and weirder than our tidy little schemes.
Brooks is not "moderately brave", but "Machiavellianly brilliant." He slipped in Unz' second thesis into the New York Times in the most banal possible language, and made it Discussable. He deserves wild applause for knowing just when and how to mainstream Unz.
"I don't think that's true--in fact, it seems evidently untrue. Harry Truman read Cicero in Latin. Does any Democrat today (or Republican, or anybody on Wall Street, or any undergrad at Harvard, or any Harvard humanities prof outside of Classics) read Cicero in Latin?"
They could if they wasted their time learning Latin. Nothing wrong with doing it as a hobby, but it should probably be low on your list of what you want a leader to know. Elites today have a much better understanding of economics than they did 50 or 60 years ago when many of them thought central planning in the Soviet mold could work. That's much more important than learning Latin. At the sam time, they've gotten stupider on the race and gender stuff that used to be common sense. So it's hard to say whether they know more or less about what's important.
IQ-wise though, no doubt today's elites are smarter. The Bell Curve showed that SAT scores for Ivy League students used to be one SD over the mean. And that was before the Flynn Effect.
I only read the first page of comments and the only ones that reply to the inclusion of Unz are just babbling about anti-Semitism. Has anyone ever asked a Leftist Jew how they can go on and on about white overrepresentation and privilege but at the same time flip out if anyone points to their much greater overrepresentation among the American elite? I've always wanted to but never really had the opportunity. Except with this one professor I had, who was Jewish and center right, and he just laughed.
Has the massive influx of Asians helped the country, or more specifically, the descendants of the whites who founded the country? Seems to me that in many areas, the rate of technological advance is slowing, and maybe even reversing. After all, 30 years ago you could fly from New York to London in 3 hours on the SST -- today that's not an option. Legions of Indian and Chinese engineers in both the US and UK didn't help us there.
I think we were better off in the days of crew cut white guys from Purdue and Georgia Tech, or the shaggy techno-hippies of the Homebrew Computer Club.
The Asians have crowded all that out.
"The fact that Jews have not dropped in IQ - they still handily outpace both gentiles and Asians - nor, seemingly, in real world achievement, seems to suggest that by focusing on things like the Math Olympiad we would get a hugely misleading impression of where the talent lies in this country."
This is surely true. But the fact is even among smart Jews, only a small number do really great things. For most smart people--even very smart people--, the best hope is to win/gain institutionally than do brilliant genius stuff. In other words, get a good job on Wall Street, media, law firms, and etc than be another Einstein or Wittgenstein or Kubrick.
So, when it comes to super geniuses, you are right; Jews do have a real advantage.
But most smart people don't try to change the world. They try to gain power, prestige, and privilege. And most of the stuff they do don't require the kind of genius that Einstein needed.
So, this is really about access to power than doing something worthy of Nobel prize in chemistry.
The fact is doing good in top schools opens the door to high positions in wall street, media, law firms, academia, and etc. And most of those positions don't require genius or individual superduper brilliance. You gotta be very smart, driven, and capable. And lots of smart whites and Asians have those qualities too. THAT is where Jews can lose out.
While the superduper smart Jews cannot be touched by the competition--as they're in a league of their own--, a lot of very smart Jews can be bumped out by very smart whites and Asians. That is the real concern for Jews.
Not a Jew with IQ of 180 being bumped out by white or Asian with the IQ of 140, but Jews with IQ of 140 being bumped out by gentile counterparts with same IQ.
"Can we also expect Asians to follow a similar arc of development as Jews, from outsize striving driven by social insecurity to a tapering off such striving as they feel more and more that they have 'arrived'?"
No, but it's like baseball. The super hard black sluggers are in a world of their own. They face no real competition from the white guys. But very good black ball players face threats from very good white ball players, and there are lots of very good white ball players. So, while the superduper black sluggers are safe in their positions, the very good black players have to work very hard to compete with very good white players. IF very good black ball players slack off--in the mistaken belief that they are so great simply because they're black--, they'll lose out to whites.
Does anyone have any guesses about the causes of what Unz called the collapse in Jewish achievement? Yes, I know that religiosity has gone up among the Jews, and the Hasidim aren't enrolling in any math Olympiads. But I see that as a slow process. That wouldn't bring a collapse all by itself, just a slow fall-off, a few percentage points per generation. Dysgenic trends: almost everyone at the top is subject to them, roughly to the same extent. That wouldn't bring a collapse relative to other groups at the top. What are other possible reasons?
"Can we also expect Asians to follow a similar arc of development as Jews..."
The problems with Asians is they are mentally constipated due to culture and natural personality. Their culture has favored following instructions closely and rote memorization. Sheer effort to 'pack it in and store' than 'process and use'. And their natural personality has made them rather rigid in their outlook. Their cousins, the American Indians have a similar problem. They speak and think in stilted ways: 'How', 'firewater powerful medicine'.
The mind is like a stomach and works like the digestive system. Like stomach takes in food, mind takes in data, stimuli, information. Stomach must break down the food, process it, and digest it. It must take in the nutrients--the essentials--of the foodstuff and excrete the rest of it out. If the mind is diarrheaeac, too much goes out too fast before being properly digested and absorbed. So, the process can't be too hurried. But the foodstuff must be pushed along steadily, and in the end, the body absorbs and takes in the necessary stuff--protein, vitamins, calcium, iron, etc--, and craps out the rest.
The Asian mind-stomach is constipationary. The emphasis on rote memory means trying to hold every bit of the foodstuff inside as long as possible. And since rote memory emphasizes memorizing EVERYTHING without properly processing them, knowledge doesn't get properly digested. The mind-stomach is supposed to inspect and process all the info and data and pick and choose the stuff that is useful and use it to think new thoughts; and it must discard the rest. The mind is not supposed to cram in everything, much of which has little value.
So, even as the Asian mind holds much knowledge in preparation for test-taking, in the end, it lacks the ability to process the material and use it creatively and usefully.
It's like the guy with the photographic memory in PAPER CHASE could retain a lot of stuff but couldn't think them through.
This is why spelling bees are so stupid. I mean who cares if some kid memorized the spelling of a million words? That is not thinking.
It's like a musician memorizing 1000s of sheet music note for note. That is not what music is about.
"Has the massive influx of Asians helped the country, or more specifically, the descendants of the whites who founded the country? Seems to me that in many areas, the rate of technological advance is slowing, and maybe even reversing. After all, 30 years ago you could fly from New York to London in 3 hours on the SST -- today that's not an option. Legions of Indian and Chinese engineers in both the US and UK didn't help us there."
Yahoo!: Co-founded by a guy from Taiwan
Google: Co-founded by a Russian immigrant
According to one article: " first-generation immigrants were on the founding teams of roughly 52% of all tech companies in Silicon Valley."
http://www.inc.com/alex-salkever/why-entrepreneurship-needs-immigrants.html
US society works full time at demoralizing white males and bringing up the confidence of blacks and women. White males have lost the desire to succeed and blacks and women are not going to create wealth no matter how much encouragement they get. So it's been left to immigrants to take advantage of the opportunities this country offers.
Elites are stupider today, reading Cicero and other authors in Latin gives one an understanding of human nature and its problems that are bigger than whatever fad and fashion the female oriented elites are huffing about this week. Truman, having served in the artillery in WWI, briefly, and having had hard times in farming, and known poverty as an ordinary young man, was far closer in understanding of his people in the bubble of the Presidency than today's elites who have nothing but flyover contempt.
That said, the behavior of Jews is a radical step from where they used to be. When Jews faced real exclusion (they don't for now, that's likely to change as Blacks and Hispanics and Muslims gain strength -- none of those groups like Jews much) they went into Science and Math in big ways, also entrepreneurial positions in entertainment, not just movies but Comic books, pulp fiction, etc. that could potentially pay off big (example: the late, lamented Stuart Kaminsky, author of the Toby Peters mysteries).
Now Jews seem to figure, along with their WASPy analogs in the elite society, that there will be little expected value payoff for entrepreneurial stuff, and most money will be in semi-hereditary government sinecures, Half-Sigma's value transference occupations or the Muslim and Chinese and Dirigste French bureaucracies.
That's an ominous sign. When Jews (who are smart) figure its better to be a government functionary than say, the next Thomas Edison, or even Sam Goldwyn, or Stan Lee.
To those guys who say that the Asians might not be serious contenders at the top levels of intellectual achievement, but are a cause for concern at the medium levels, there is some truth to that, but not so much as people think.
Getting into Ivy League schools and doing great at Math Olympiads doesn't really have the kind of relationship to professional success that it used to, and this is becoming increasingly apparent. As we all know, by IQ alone there should be far more whites in the Ivies, yet they simply aren't showing up, and aren't doing the hard work needed to get the top scores. This leaves the field open to Asians, who are doing both. Yet all that white talent doesn't simply vanish - it MUST show up in other sectors of the economy. And indeed it does. And as firms begin to discover that talent is no longer best concentrated in the Ivies, the Ivies will lose much of their cachet.
In the real world, we see that whites continue to be dominant in most professions that are attractive and appealing - i.e where they really want to be - and that intelligent and sophisticated whites are more and more moving into attractive soft cultural fields like culture creation and niche foods, etc. Witness the burgeoning artisan food movement in Brooklyn and other SWPL places and similar things. Comparatively few people WANT to be software engineers or even doctors, but do it anyways because of the prestige.
So the picture that is beginning to emerge is that whites and Jews remain unassailable at the top levels of intellectual and professional achievement, as groups (obviously there are individual exceptions), while there is group-positioning in the mid levels of intellectual achievement such that Asians are doing the dirty, messy, less enviable intellectual work, often requiring lots of boring grind, while whites are moving into the more appealing soft cultural creation sector, except for those who really WANT to be doctors, programmers, etc, and are not forced to do it just as a question of prestige.
As long as the Asians are happy with this arrangement, shouldn't we all be happy? We should thank our lucky stars that the Asians DO seem to be happy doing the less desirable jobs. But hey, if they feel it fits their skill set and temperament, then that's great.
But the fact is that whites just AREN'T SHOWING UP - this is clear from the IQ numbers alone - whites clearly have the smarts, but are just not willing to do the hard work, or even show up, and if this is what they want, what's the problem? Clearly whites feel, after creating the modern world, that they are entitled perhaps to a bit of rest and enjoyment, and that there are finer things in life than sacrificing youth and happiness to grind away at some test. Even if this should mean earning less money, if you have nothing to "prove, who cares?
The new development is that Jews also stopped showing up and stopped doing and doing the hard work in many cases - in short, that Jews have "become white".
The real question is, will Asians FOLLOW? And I think that depends on whether Asians really CAN match whites and Jews in the real world - and all indications so far are that they CANNOT. But if they CAN, then once a track record of solid achievement gets created, Asians will relax. If not, then Asians will never join Jews and whites at the top, and always occupy a curious kind of halfway house - which, I think, is the most likely outcome.
Lucius said...WASP elites of old?
Gibbs was in my book the smartest American ever, including Feynman..
Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Willard_Gibbs
In related news a 40 year old Jewish guy with a Chinese wife has been picked to replace the late Daniel Inouye in the US Senate.
Inouye's choice was Hawaii's congresswoman Colleen Hanabusa, a fourth-generation American of Japanese ancestry.
No such luck. So now the US Senate's Diversity loses an Asian and picks up another Jew/White guy.
And these are the Democrats!!!
It would seem that Asians lag behind in figuring out where the real prestige accomplishments lie, and I wonder why this should be so? Asians are usually very good at the practical business of social striving. Just as whites and Jews abandon things like the Math Olympiad and other such contests which are purely about prestige as something not worth striving for, Asians flock to them in droves, failing to grasp that in today's America, it doesn't really matter.
Some people actually find such things fun. Kind of like whites like sports like the Olympics. Even for no prestige points or even any money, they just like to do it.
Is that so hard to understand?
@HAR: In an earlier world, the children of elites would've surmounted Latin before they got to college. Classical erudition is in no sense a "waste": a statesman unequipped with Plato, Aristotle, or Tacitus is as ridiculous as a comp lit major unequipped with Sappho, Aeschylus, or Virgil.
Forgive me, but with all due indifference to the Gentile's Gentleman's C, this supposed rising tide of Ivy IQ is psychometric cant. If it's brought us to a public debate where David Brooks (the Georgetown Guildenstern) has to "slip in", like some Renaissance atheist pulling a Leo Strauss trick, something so we can all talk now (in whispers) about the deflated bubble of Ivy merit, something in our world is terribly awry.
I find your confidence disturbing. It reminds me of those feminist Professors of English who mourn the lack of educational attainments in the heroines of Austen or their Regency contemporaries, who could only speak French and Italian, play the pianoforte, and digest the behemoth novels of Richardson-- feats entirely beyond the means, as I feel I've probably said here before, of every last one of their damned dear charges. Including most of these gleetards, of whatever ethnic provenance, found in or about the Ivies.
Hey, I know how much you folks are against quotas! Speak up, write a letter to the administration for WIFOAMAH!
(Whiteys in Favor of a Majority Asian Harvard.)
"@HAR: In an earlier world, the children of elites would've surmounted Latin before they got to college. Classical erudition is in no sense a "waste": a statesman unequipped with Plato, Aristotle, or Tacitus is as ridiculous as a comp lit major unequipped with Sappho, Aeschylus, or Virgil."
There's only so many hours in a day, and I believe that most of that time should be spent with sources that can give us the best chance of understanding the world. That means scholars who have had the most access to information and the methods of modern social sciences.
For example, people debated nature versus nurture for millennia. Then people started doing cross adoption studies and actually arrived at an answer.
Aristotle and other ancients may have been very smart, but they had no statistical methods, no empirical research to help form their ideas, much less of a historical record to draw upon, and no peer reviewed journals through which they could rigorously develop their ideas and test them against those of their peers. A 14 year-old with an internet connection can know more than Aristotle about any topic he wishes within five minutes.
Not that modern leaders are necessarily reading good social science, but if I wanted a leader to understand the world it would be nuts to recommend he read anything more than 50-100 years old.
How many kids do the smartest Jewish women have? They weren't just the vector of anti-White, sterilizing feminism. Quite a few infected themselves. It is almost unimaginable that Jewish IQ didn't drop a point or two since, say, 1960.
Katz is highly entertaining. His best and the most precise assay is "Don't Become a Scientist!". Written well over a decade ago, it is now more true than ever. Every smart kid aspiring to go to a grad school in STEM must read it:
http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html
Everyone knocking the Math Olympiad as a waste of time is forgetting that without a serious math background, and I mean a dedicated math eduction, not just senior year AP calculus, a student has no hope of competing in Ivy League math or physics. Students from Eastern Europe and Russia and India that make it to Ivy League math and physics have been doing the equivalent of Math Olympiad since they were kids, and by the time you get to that level there's not much chance of catching up.
And while Goldman Sachs needs the top 0.01% of big swinging sales guys, they also need the quants, and they pay them accordingly with their talent. Anyone at that level with a modicum of social skills has a ticket to the comfortable upper middle classes at minimum. Anyone at that level with a modicum of social responsibility can go to NASA or JPL or CERN and explore the edges of human knowledge.
That level of performance takes dedication. It's not something someone can do between playing video games and drinking beer. So if Unz is right about his statistics, it means that at this point a modern american upbringing has managed to squander even Jewish talents. Not something for anyone to be proud of.
"According to one article: "first-generation immigrants were on the founding teams of roughly 52% of all tech companies in Silicon Valley."
You're not really suggesting guys like Hewlett, Packard, Lockheed, or Martin can't do just fine starting technology companies, are you? Or that guys like these are no longer around?
There's a lot of agit-prop out there, in particular regarding silicon valley. A lot of the investment bankers and VCs funding the latest go-go years very much were of an ethnic background that was often biased against "the existing order". For the investment banks, California IPOs were pretty much a legal way to print money.
The legal valuation of a CA startup (and the amount of money made by the bank) included a formula that contained the number of engineers in the startup. It didn't matter who the engineers were, or if they were any good, just that they had a legal engineering degree from somewhere, anywhere. Many of these startups were always pretty sketchy.
The banks made their big money on the IPO pop. They didn't necessarily care much what happened later. (Something like 75% to 90% of all these companies fail.) The banks definitely didn't have skin in the game for the long haul. They wanted to execute as many IPOs as possible, with the cheapest engineering possible. The result was an immigrant engineering pipeline. So statistics about all this often probably need careful qualification.
Would the world have been a better place if it hadn't all been so crazy? I don't know, maybe so, maybe no, maybe we'd even be further along. For instance, also due to the way the system works, we no longer have real industrial research labs in the US (there are still one or two exceptions, but even they are rapidly declining). That doesn't mean that there aren't people nearly as bright as, say, Claude Shannon, in the US today.
"Not that modern leaders are necessarily reading good social science, but if I wanted a leader to understand the world it would be nuts to recommend he read anything more than 50-100 years old."
Man, it's probably not your fault because you've probably recently been exposed to modern US academia, but this is mind-boggling intellectually arrogant. Yep, nothing anyone alive back before about my lifetime could possible know about humanity! I hope you aren't in charge of anything more important than an automobile for a few years. Maybe watching the world as it is will help. I can only wish you luck.
A few remarks:
- Japan's 21st century Nobel Prizes provide some evidence against the East Asian "halfway house" hypothesis.
- Many of today's top software engineers are whites without an elite college degree.
- The "collapse in Jewish student performance" noted by Unz appears to be concentrated in the Ivy League. Unz's statistics indicate that Caltech and the UCs have been completely unaffected, and this is consistent with my experience.
- The high school Olympiads and (to a lesser degree) the Intel/Westinghouse STS are good at identifying talented kids, but *absence* of success in these contests does not necessarily tell you much. Which is better: spending extra hours training for Olympiad exams, or increasing one's skill at building real-world software (like Mark Zuckerberg)? Bottom line is, I think more data is needed about the extent of any "achievement collapse".
That level of performance takes dedication [re: Math Olympiad]. It's not something someone can do between playing video games and drinking beer.
This can be a useful fiction, but the reality is that these things are half-sport. Some people naturally enjoy them. When this is the case, "dedication" and "[not] playing video games" may not be the predominant drivers of high performance.
All other things being equal, it seems that Chinese and Koreans are especially likely to enjoy this sport. I don't entirely know why.
DoJ, almost all of those Japanese Nobel Laureates worked, lived and/or studied in the US or Europe. In almost all cases, their award winning research happened in the US or Europe. It seems East Asian success is tied to European influence. Japanese can't create those successes in Japan even though the country has enjoyed peace and prosperity for decades.
East and South Asians are flooding American institutions and suffocating white talent in the process. Chinese and Indians account for about 1/3 of the human population. Hypothetically, they could export a fraction of their college age population and fill up every elite Western school.
Public discourse has focused on Jewish overrepresentation and supposed Asian underrepresentation at elite colleges. How many European-Americans are going to read Unz's article and find out white people are vastly underrepresented in these institutions?
DoJ, almost all of those Japanese Nobel Laureates worked, lived and/or studied in the US or Europe. In almost all cases, their award winning research happened in the US or Europe. It seems East Asian success is tied to European influence.
Yes, European influence is obviously a huge deal, and I expect European-influenced East Asians to continue outperforming homegrown ones for a while to come. That's a big reason why I don't want to see Western countries self-destruct (or -degrade), despite being an East Asian.
But it's clear that East Asian individuals are quite capable of making first-class contributions to modern civilization. Their current limitations appear to be mostly social in nature. In the short run, said limitations may be more of a feature than a bug (e.g. if the prevailing intellectual environment creates a positive correlation between openness and support for self-destructive policies...), and in the long run, new technologies may bring us to the point where the only race that matters is "human".
Public discourse has focused on Jewish overrepresentation and supposed Asian underrepresentation at elite colleges. How many European-Americans are going to read Unz's article and find out white people are vastly underrepresented in these institutions?
I don't know, but I'm pretty sure we should all thank Brooks for trying to clear the largest obstacle.
HAR writes: "A 14 year-old with an internet connection can know more than Aristotle about any topic he wishes within five minutes."
--Topics like: logic? epistemology? metaphysics? teleology? aesthetics? rhetoric?
Perhaps a topic like 'how to tutor a 14 year-old to conquer the world?'
Let's see how your little googley Alexanders do. Oh but wait, we know, don't we, because we live in a world of peer-reviewed Positivism.
You alluded before to the magnificent mathematical edifice of contemporary economics, which puts us on so much sounder an economic footing than Mill, Marshall, or Belloc (yes, Belloc) could place us.
We see, too, how eagerly the peers have acquiesced to Steve's just claims to chair Sociology at UC-take your pick. And yet, you would urge us, we must acquiesce to the wonders of "Social Science", that summit of Knowledge.
Good genes, left in the cardboard box of a moral and intellectual sinkhole, still turn out crap-- fluid high-g crap perhaps, but crap all the same.
And I hardly take it as a given that the Age of Pericles wasn't altogether more "fit", naturally speaking, than the WASP and JAP princesses and princlings of the present age, who consume Keynes and crap Krugman, and thus round off all they know.
I'd rather keep "constipated", as another commenter alleges, with the Confucians, than submit to these daintily quantified colonics, so in fashion in Marx Flats. Or, as you will, the "Social Sciences" . . . .
http://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/
http://theamericanscholar.org/why-we-know-so-little-about-high-achievers/
"Anonymous said...
Katz is highly entertaining. His best and the most precise assay is "Don't Become a Scientist!". Written well over a decade ago, it is now more true than ever. Every smart kid aspiring to go to a grad school in STEM must read it:
http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html"
Thanks for posting. As you said, what he wrote is even truer now than it was when he wrote it in 2001. Katz is indeed a thoughtful and entertaining guy.
The bright shining spearhead for liberals is evolution vs creationism. A weapon to be used against Christian conservatives.
And thats it.
Other than that they seem to adhere to a whole range of fantasies.
Their cousins, the American Indians have a similar problem. They speak and think in stilted ways: 'How', 'firewater powerful medicine'.
In movies.
"Man, it's probably not your fault because you've probably recently been exposed to modern US academia, but this is mind-boggling intellectually arrogant. Yep, nothing anyone alive back before about my lifetime could possible know about humanity! I hope you aren't in charge of anything more important than an automobile for a few years. Maybe watching the world as it is will help. I can only wish you luck."
How is it arrogant to believe that Aristotle, who had one-trillionth the access to information that a typical person has today, doesn't have much to tell us about human nature? Aristotle would not have been arrogant enough to believe that he would know more about the world than a smart person with infinitely more access to the writings and research of others.
I've read philosophy from before the 20th century, including a bit of the ancients. It's good for entertainment and gaining a historical perspective, but if your concern is with finding truth and figuring out how the world works, Plato and Aristotle have a lot less to tell you than Pinker, Rushton, Jensen, Lynn, Sailer, Murray, Milton Friedman, etc. It's not the fault of the earlier thinkers, they were the best of their time. But even if they had 200 IQs and +5 sigma workethics, there was no way they'd be as knowledgeable or enlightening as modern scholars.
"Not that modern leaders are necessarily reading good social science, but if I wanted a leader to understand the world it would be nuts to recommend he read anything more than 50-100 years old. "
@HAR - be assured the minimum post Bellum Civil new education standard is burning all social science books.
The mean will be: acadamae et dicit ignis.
50-100 years old. You must be Ezra Klein.
HAR-- I agree with those who are impugning you with youth. That may or may not be, but with all the benevolence I can muster for those of a more Positivistic cast, you descend to pure foolishness when you ask questions like, how could Aristotle know more about "human nature" than the moderns?
"Human nature"? Need I hint to you that this man knew Plato, knew Alexander, and at least by anecdote the affairs of Euripides, Alcibiades, Pericles, Sophocles--or would you rather glean your understanding of the human animal from a comprehensive survey of Apple customers, mall shoppers, schoolchildren, and all our polyglot contemporaries, who are, in aggregate, the ultimate and most illumining expression of what is possible to "man"?
Or need I hint that Aristotle need abide not a dram of cant about the sexes and peoples of his fascinating world?
To say nothing of telos, Natural Law, the mean, the Deity-- but this sort of fusty obfuscation doubtless does not oblige you . . .
Even Steve's many jigglings of the quant Magic 8-ball would be sterile, without a willingness to ask difficult questions or to make neat intuitive leaps (that "India as the future" bit is very nice-- Mira Nair's sentimental multikult schtick in a nutshell).
Even so, Murray, Pinker, Derbyshire, Steve too--valuable philosophes, journalists, public intellectuals.
But no more Platos or Nietzsches than I'm Alexander Pope. Your naive hubris obscures necessary distinctions between the merely brilliant and the capital-G Genius.
The very fact that you let slip something so horrifyingly unquantitative as "human nature" from your lips betrays inconsistency. You must retrain yourself to a more boorishly Behavioristic vocabulary-- or else learn to confess there is more in Heaven and earth than dreamt of in your (admittedly dissident) sociology.
"Just as whites and Jews abandon things like the Math Olympiad"
a study of students age<13 who score above 700 on SAT-M showed that asians were ~52% of females. There wasn't much abandoning going on back in the 90s.
"[I]f I wanted a leader to understand the world it would be nuts to recommend he read anything more than 50-100 years old."
Wow. That may be the dumbest, high-minded-sounding claim I've ever heard. Congratulations.
Mr. anon said it,but Katz is so awesome, I'm repeating what he said:
read his Don't Become a scientist!
http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html
it is brilliant. Katz wrote this a decade ago, and it's more true now.
Perhaps the overrepresented Jews decided a long while ago that sci degrees and math olympiads weren't where the power was, and lawyering and lobbying were...
Katz's bit on diversity is great too.
http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/diversity.html
Post a Comment