The Atlantic's Valley mafia on Chua

The back of the book section of the Atlantic Monthly is dominated by a group of writers -- Benjamin and Christina Schwarz, Caitlin Flanagan, and Sandra Tsing-Loh -- who have lived or worked in the San Fernando Valley, and whose worldviews mutually reflect and reinforce their Valley experience. Thus, I find them more perceptive about current trends in America than the vastly more numerous Boston-NY-DC intellectuals. (Here, for example, is Benjamin Schwarz's lovely review of historian Kevin Starr's Golden Dreams: California in the Age of Abundance: 1950-1963.)  

Not surprisingly, the three ladies all have to have their say on Amy Chua.

Sympathy for the Tiger Moms The national convulsion over Amy Chua’s parenting has lead people to hate or fear mothers like me. They should feel sorry for us instead. By Sandra Tsing Loh

The Ivy Delusion The real reason the good mothers are so rattled by Amy Chua By Caitlin Flanagan

Leave Those Kids Alone Childhood isn't a springboard to adulthood, but a well of experience. By Christina Schwarz

Flanagan, who used to be the college admissions counselor at Harvard-Westlake on Coldwater Canyon (where I vaguely recall there being a couple of student suicides a half decade ago), writes:

The good mothers went to Brown, and they read The Drama of the Gifted Child, and they feel things very deeply, and they love their children in a way that is both complicated and primal, and they will make any sacrifice for them. They know that it takes a lot of time to nurture and guide a child—and also that time is fleeting, and that the bliss of having your kids at home is painfully short-lived—and so most of them have cut back on their professional aspirations in significant ways. The good mothers have certain ideas about how success in life is achieved, and these ideas have been sizzled into their brains by popularizers such as Joseph Campbell and Oprah Winfrey, and they boil down to this: everyone has at least one natural talent (the good mothers call it a “passion”), and creativity, effortless success, and beaucoup dinero flow not from banging your head against the closed door of, say, organic chemistry if you’re not that excited by it, but from dwelling deeply and ecstatically inside the thing that gives you the most pleasure. But you shouldn’t necessarily—or under any circumstances, actually—follow your bliss in a way that keeps you out of Yale. Because Yale is important, too! So important. The good mothers believe that their children should be able to follow their passions all the way to New Haven, Connecticut, and this obdurate belief of theirs is the reason so many of them (Obama voters, Rosa Parks diorama co-creators, gay-rights supporters, champions, in every conceivable way, of racial diversity and tolerance) are suddenly ready to demand restoration of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Because Amy Chua has revealed, in so many blunt and horrifying words, why the good mothers are getting spanked, and why it’s only going to get worse. 

The whole thing is quite fair.

 My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Francis Fukuyama explains it all

Francis End of History Fukuyama has a big book coming out intended to compete with Guns, Germs, and Steel in the Big Picture history category. Nicholas Wade writes in the New York Times about Fukuyama's attempts to merge political science and sociobiology:

“We take institutions for granted but in fact have no idea where they come from,” he writes. Institutions are the rules that coordinate social behavior. Just as tribes are based on the deep-seated human instinct of looking out for one’s family and relatives, states depend on the human propensity to create and follow social rules.

Dr. Fukuyama emphasizes the role of China because it was the first state. The Qin dynasty, founded in 221 B.C., prevailed over tribalism, the default condition of large societies, by developing an official class loyal to the state rather than to family and kin. 

What about Egypt 2500 years earlier?

Tribalism did not disappear in Europe until a thousand years later. It yielded first to feudalism, an institution in which peasants bound themselves to a lord’s service in return for his protection. So when kings emerged, they seldom acquired absolute power, as did rulers in China, because they had to share power with feudal lords.

Another impediment to absolute rule in Europe, in Dr. Fukuyama’s telling, was that the concept of the rule of law emerged very early, largely because of the church’s development of canon law in the 11th century. So when strong rulers started to build states, they had to take account of the emerging codes of civil law.

Europeans then developed the unusual idea that it was the law that should be absolute, not the ruler. In pursuit of this principle, the English Parliament executed one king, Charles I, and deposed another, James II. This proved a durable solution to the problem of building a strong state, yet one in which the ruler was held accountable. 

That seems a little backwards. My impression is that the notion of the rule of law grew out of the northern European emphasis that bargains should be upheld on both sides. Medieval Europe was a chaos of overlapping bargains going back to time immemorial. Absolutism in Baroque Europe was largely an attempt to modernize, to rationalize the clutter of legalistic medieval institutions.

Other European countries developed institutions similar to those in England but failed to achieve a sustainable balance of power between the ruler and the elites. In France, the nobility rebuffed the state’s efforts to tax them, so the burden fell increasingly on the peasantry until it became intolerable, leading to the French Revolution. In Hungary, the elites were so powerful that they denied the king the authority to devise an adequate defense. The Hungarian Army was annihilated by the Mongols at the battle of Mohi in 1241 and again by the Ottoman Turks at the battle of Mohacs in 1526.

Of the European powers, only England and Denmark, in Dr. Fukuyama’s view, developed the three essential institutions of a strong state, the rule of law, and mechanisms to hold the ruler accountable. This successful formula then became adopted by other European states, through a kind of natural selection that favored the most successful variation.

I'd probably lean toward Shakespeare's "sceptred isle" theory that "island privilege" gave the English a margin for error and for, well, niceness:

This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war

Paul Johnson argued in The Off-Shore Islanders:

Isolation … is the most consistent single thread running through the tapestry of English history. … It does not preclude contacts, exchanges, cooperation: but it inhibits the systematic involvement with the land-mass which diminishes, and in the end destroys, the island privilege.

Wade continues:

Though institutions are the basis of the modern state, the instinct to favor family never disappears and will reassert itself whenever possible. To create a loyal administrative class, Dr. Fukuyama said, some states took the extreme measure of destroying the family, in a variety of original ways.

The Chinese emperors instituted a special cadre of eunuchs who had no family but the state, and came to be trusted more than the regular administrators. Pope Gregory VII in the 11th century imposed celibacy on Catholic priests, forcing them to choose between the church and the family.

Islamic rulers created a class free of family ties with the remarkable institution of slave soldiers. Young boys would be taken from mostly Christian families, often in the Balkans, raised as Muslims and as slaves, and trained as soldiers. The system, despite its oddity, was highly effective. The Mamluks, one of several versions of these military slaves, defeated the Mongols and ousted the Crusaders. The institution decayed from the very danger it was designed to prevent: weak sultans allowed the soldiers’ sons to succeed their fathers in office, whereupon the soldiers’ loyalty reverted to their families instead of the state.

I don't think this kind of cultural (and perhaps genetic) evolution is quite done with. The Obama Administration, for example, seems rather worried that the U.S. military has become increasingly run by a semi-hereditary caste of officers' families.

Anyway, the book sounds interesting and I look forward to reading it.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Essay tests

The more the conventional wisdom denounces standardized testing, the more money there is to be made in standardized testing. For example, the whole world decided about a decade ago that filling in ovals with a Number 2 pencil couldn't possibly be a good test of Critical Thinking skills, so essays were added to many tests, such as the SAT and GRE. 

This increased the cost (and slowed down the grading) considerably. Today, thousands of people, typically temps, are employed each year grading the essay portion of standardized tests. This article by Jessica Lussenhop of the Minneapolis City Pages takes you behind the scenes of essay grading. It's not a particularly edifying scene (although not all that dismal). 

The take home lesson I get is that you should make sure your first sentence is sterling. Graders don't have time to read your essay carefully, so you want to make a good first impression.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Is there an Egyptian Bonaparte?

Here's something that almost certainly won't happen, but which could make the situation in the Middle East quite interesting if it did.

The rebels in Libya currently control most of the oil fields. But they aren't very good at war, at least not yet. On the other hand, the Libyan Army isn't very strong either, because Kaddafi didn't want to get overthrown by it.

The strongest military in North Africa is that of Egypt, which borders Libya's Eastern rebels. A dynamic young Egyptian general, announcing he was coming to the aid of the Arab Revolution in Libya, could push Kaddafi's army back to Tripoli without much trouble. If he did, would he give up the oil fields? Would he push on to the Atlantic as the liberator of North Africa?

Of course, the concept of a dynamic young Egyptian general is probably something that Hosni Mubarak was at pains to make sure doesn't actually exist. The real Bonaparte emerged from after years of Darwinian struggle set off by the French Revolution.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Basketball stats and teaching stats

Here's an article by Dave Johns in Slate about NBA statistics. A huge amount of intellectual effort has been expended in recent years to bring basketball up to speed statistically with baseball. There has been a lot of progress, but the Holy Grail goal of coming up with a foolproof system for ranking players still has no consensus. 

For example, how good is Kevin Love (the 22-year-old Minnesota center who is an offshoot of the extended clan of Loves and Wilsons famous for the Beach Boys)? For example, Offensive Win Shares rates him as the best offensive player in the league and fifth best overall in total Win Shares.  Offensive Rating sees him as the fifth best offensive player in the league. Player Efficiency Rating says he's the third best player in the league. Other rating systems don't see him in the top ten.

Johns likes to disparage Love to show the problems being dealt with by the sophisticated statistics:

Rebounds also suffer from so-called "diminishing returns"—the idea that players on the same team effectively compete with one another for boards. Often a particular player—say, Minnesota Timberwolves center Kevin Love—serves as his team's designated glass-cleaner, and he scoops up balls that his teammates might well have grabbed anyway.

Okay, but, presumably, coach Kurt Rambis tells his players to let Love grab the easy rebounds (such as missed free throws by the other team) because he has such a good outlet pass, which ought to count for something in an overall ranking, right? Moreover, Love's offensive rebounding statistics are stellar, and there aren't all that many easy offensive rebounds.

The [plus-minus] technique can also examine the impact of top rebounders: Kevin Love consistently rebounds in double digits, but his contribution to his team's total boards is only about two to three per game, according to one analysis.

But the analysis Johns links to shows Love as being the best rebounder in the league by a margin of about 20% over the second best rebounder.

But, old fashioned stats can give a more well-rounded picture of Love than advanced rankings. This year, Love is on track to become the first player since Moses Malone's last MVP season in 1983 to average over 20 points and 15 rebounds per game (He's currently at 20.9 and 15.8). He's making 42.7% of three pointers and 86.2% of free throws, which are outstanding percentages for a center.

On the other hand, Love is under 6'8" in his bare feet and is a white guy who can't jump all that great: he doesn't block shots (only 0.4 per game, which is really low for somebody with so many rebounds).

(By the way, my impression is that rebounding correlates better with being a good all-around basketball player than does shot-blocking. The all-time bjg men like Russell, Chamberlain, Kareem, and Walton tended to be great at both rebounding and shot-blocking, but lots of guys are only good at one or the other. In general, the guys who are only good at shot-blocking are more often the weird Manute Bol-type talents. For example, on the playground, I was a pretty good shot blocker but I was an all-time awful rebounder. Partly it was getting pushed around by less skinny guys, but much of my rebounding deficit was cognitive: I never had the slightest clue where the ball was going to bounce. In contrast, I had a pretty good idea when somebody was going to shoot, so shot-blocking strikes me as pretty obvious while rebounding seems like a Dark Art. Your mileage may vary.)

Moreover, despite his superb hand-eye coordination, Love doesn't create much offensively down low (making only 48.3% of two pointers). His team, the Minnesota Timberwolves, has a very bad won-loss record, 15-50, and gives up a lot of points.

The more I look at it, the more I come around to middlebrow sportswriter Bill Simmons's convenient conclusion that basketball's old-fashioned box score stats are quite useful and Holy Grail one-number ranking statistics haven't yet gotten there. Looking at his non-advanced stats, Love's unusual combination of bulk and touch makes him look like a guy who could be extremely useful on a good team (like, say, Bill Laimbeer on the Detroit Pistons of the late 1980s) but who (at least not yet in his quickly evolving career) can't be expected to carry a bad team the way, say, Kobe Bryant carried an awful Lakers team with Smush Parker at point guard to a winning record a half decade ago.

On the other hand, there's a lot of learning available from advanced stats that don't try to rank everybody, but just try to look at elements of performance, such as a player's shooting percentage from the left or right sides of the court.

Much less intelligence has been devoted to analyzing teacher performance. Much of the recent work has been devoted to, yes, the Holy Grail of ranking teachers on Value Added so that bad teachers can be fired and good teachers rewarded.

The New York Times has an article on a hard-working NYC 7th grade English teacher at a prestigious public school. She has two Ivy League degrees and is much admired by her students, many of whom qualify for Stuyvesant. Yet, she only ranks at the 7th percentile among all NYC teachers. The article shows the complex formula used in the calculation, which appears to baffle most teachers. My guess would be that her students arrive so far above average that there's almost nowhere for them to go but down.

I'm always looking for sports analogies for social science statistics, since Americans think harder about sports. Being a teacher isn't really like being a player, it's more like being a coach. Probably the closest analogy is being a coach in a big high school with separate Freshman, Sophomore, and Varsity football teams. If you are the Sophomore team's coach, you more or less inherit the Freshman team's players (although the best will be sent up to the Varsity). So, if your Sophomore team consistently winds up with a worse record than the same players achieved on the Freshman team, your job will be in trouble.

For example, say the Freshman coach is great and routinely goes 9-0. All you can do as Sophomore coach is match his record or do worse, which might be an analogy for this New York teacher.

Similarly, the search for a super-sophisticated single number ranking system for teachers can overlook the advantages of less ambitious statistics at pointing out particular strengths and weaknesses, which would be of use both to teacher looking to improve and to administrators looking to maximize the usefulness of a teacher's talents.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

David Brooks announces the end of the Age of Sailer

For me, reading my reader David Brooks in the New York Times in recent years has been a rather odd experience. When promoting his upcoming book, Brooks writes as if I were the David Broder/ David Gergen/ David Brooks of the 21st Century, the recognized voice of conventional wisdom, and that he is the intellectual rebel.

For example, in his latest column "The New Humanism," Brooks expounds:

Over the course of my career, I’ve covered a number of policy failures. ..

I’ve come to believe that these failures spring from a single failure: ... We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below. We are really good at talking about material things but bad at talking about emotion.

When we raise our kids, we focus on the traits measured by grades and SAT scores. ... Many of our public policies are proposed by experts who are comfortable only with correlations that can be measured, appropriated and quantified, and ignore everything else.

Yet while we are trapped within this amputated view of human nature, a richer and deeper view is coming back into view. It is being brought to us by researchers across an array of diverse fields: neuroscience, psychology, sociology, behavioral economics and so on.

This growing, dispersed body of research reminds us of a few key insights. ... You pay a bit less attention to individual traits and more to the quality of relationships between people.

You get a different view of, say, human capital. Over the past few decades, we have tended to define human capital in the narrow way, emphasizing I.Q., degrees, and professional skills. 

Personally, I don't see why I shouldn't be the voice of conventional wisdom. I'm a reasonable man, I'm pretty good at understanding why other people feel the way they do, I like to put myself in other people's shoes in order to grasp the incentives they face, I have decent pattern recognition skills, and so forth.

For example, I can see lots of good reasons why Brooks has adopted this shtick of his. Granted, it's objectively wacky for him to imply that every time you turn on your TV, there's Obama or Oprah or Brooks talking about correlations between IQ and social outcomes. But, emotionally, that's what pays. If Brooks is going to become the New Malcolm Gladwell (which I'm highly in favor of, since he would be a big improvement over the Old Malcolm Gladwell), he needs to position himself as being The New Thing. The public doesn't want new ideas, they just want to be told that their old ideas are new ideas that have been discovered by brain scans.

Moreover, reacting to me sharpens Brooks's game considerably. If he just talked back to, say, Frank Rich, he'd be almost as boring as Frank Rich.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Report for Congress on military: "Too many white men dying in combat"

Of course, it doesn't exactly say that ...

Report says too many whites, men leading military
Pauline Jelinek, Associated Press

WASHINGTON – The U.S. military is too white and too male at the top and needs to change recruiting and promotion policies and lift its ban on women in combat, an independent report for Congress said Monday.

Seventy-seven percent of senior officers in the active-duty military are white, while only 8 percent are black, 5 percent are Hispanic and 16 percent are women, the report by an independent panel said, quoting data from September 2008.

Two decades ago, when the military was at the height of its prestige during the first Gulf War, 7% (I believe) of the generals in the U.S. Army were black. The #1 and #3 generals in the Gulf War (Colin Powell and Calvin Waller) were black. 

One barrier that keeps women from the highest ranks is their inability to serve in combat units. Promotion and job opportunities have favored those with battlefield leadership credentials.

The report ordered by Congress in 2009 calls for greater diversity in the military's leadership so it will better reflect the racial, ethnic and gender mix in the armed forces and in American society.

Efforts over the years to develop a more equal opportunity military have increased the number of women and racial and ethnic minorities in the ranks of leadership. But, the report said, "despite undeniable successes ... the armed forces have not yet succeeded in developing a continuing stream of leaders who are as diverse as the nation they serve."

"This problem will only become more acute as the racial, ethnic and cultural makeup of the United States continues to change," said the report from the Military Leadership Diversity Commission ...

Indeed.

Having military brass that better mirrors the nation can inspire future recruits and help create trust among the general population, the commission said.

An interesting question that the press has strenuously not interested itself in is: Who has been dying in recent wars? You used to hear all the times that minorities are more likely to get killed in America's wars, but now you never hear anything about the subject. 

When I checked on the Iraq War in 2007, American whites, relative to their share of the young population, were getting killed in combat at 1.86 times the rate of nonwhites. 

In Afghanistan through 2009, whites were dying at a rate 2.47 times their share of the population of 20-24 year olds.

I asked then:

How could this statistic be spun so it's "appropriate" for the mainstream media? Here's a feasible headline:

Minorities Discriminated Against at VA Cemeteries
Whites Get More Free Burials

The AP article continues:

Because they are technically attached to, but not assigned to, combat units, [women] don't get credit for being in combat arms, something important for promotion to the most senior ranks.

Through 2006, U.S. women had suffered 2% of the fatalities in Iraq.

The most interesting part of the AP article is this exercise in reading between the lines:

Lyles said the commission consulted a panel of enlisted women on the issue. "I didn't hear, `Rah, rah, we want to be in combat,'" Lyles said. "But I also didn't hear, `We don't want to be in combat.' 

In other words, enlisted women don't want to be in combat. The only women who do are the most promotion-crazed female officers, and the enlisted women aren't excited about getting themselves killed to help get these officers promoted.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The fundamental flaw of GOP policies

From my new VDARE.com column:

What passes for policy debate in America has become so stultified that even the fundamental flaw of contemporary Republican policies has gone virtually unnoticed both by their Republican advocates and by their Democratic critics. It’s easy to point out where Republican policies have failed, but the more frightening prospect might be where they’ve succeeded.

Consider the state of Texas, where the GOP’s low-tax, low-wage, low-regulation strategy has worked roughly as intended in recent decades, creating many new jobs.

This drives Democrat economist Paul Krugman nuts. So, he’s constantly on the lookout for evidence of growing dysfunction in Texas. And it’s not hard to find. But if Krugman tried to be honest about the chief reason for this, his head might explode.

Read the whole thing there.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Chin stroking time

From the top story in the LA Times:

Blacks in Libya face beatings by rebels, rights groups say

By David Zucchino

African migrant workers and black Libyans are targeted by fighters who suspect them of being mercenaries hired by Kadafi.

... Across eastern Libya, rebel fighters and their supporters are detaining, intimidating and frequently beating African immigrants and black Libyans, accusing them of fighting as mercenaries on behalf of Kadafi, witnesses and human rights workers say.

  

I noticed that English-language reporters could quite easily grasp the unfairness of the government of Bahrain electing a new people of foreign mercenaries to thwart majority rule -- I guess because both the natives of Bahrain and the immigrants/mercenaries are Arabs or at least Muslims. So, the media's crucial Who?/Whom? sensors don't get tripped in Bahrain. Therefore, they can think about Bahrain in a straightforward, principled manner: You know, it's really not fair for the government to import foreigners to win elections over the native majority. (Not being good at analogies or at self-critical thinking, they don't notice how this line of thought could also apply to the U.S.).

But in Libya, Kaddafi's mercenaries are largely black immigrants, so that snarls everything up for the American press when attempting to do their Who? / Whom? calculations:

Kaddafi: Bad
Rebels: Good

Immigrants: Good
Mercenaries: Bad

Blacks: PlusGood
Being mean to blacks: Double Plus UnGood

Rebels being mean to Kaddafi's immigrant black mercenaries: Does Not Compute!

It's very complicated, isn't it?

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Onion: "Community college overwhelmed by dumb students"

From The Onion:

The City University of New York has long spent much of its energy and resources just teaching new students what they need to begin taking college-level courses. 

But that tide of remedial students has now swelled so large that ... about three-quarters of the 17,500 freshmen at the community colleges this year have needed remedial instruction in reading, writing or math, and nearly a quarter of the freshmen have required such instruction in all three subjects. In the past five years, a subset of students deemed “triple low remedial” — with the most severe deficits in all three subjects — has doubled, to 1,000.

The reasons are familiar but were reinforced last month by startling statistics from state education officials: fewer than half of all New York State students who graduated from high school in 2009 were prepared for college or careers, as measured by state Regents tests in English and math. In New York City, the proportion was 23 percent.

Many of those graduates end up at CUNY, one of the nation’s largest urban higher-education systems, which requires its community colleges to take every applicant with a high school diploma or equivalency degree.

“It takes a lot of our time and energy and money to figure out what to do with all of these students who need remediation,” said Alexandra W. Logue, the university’s executive vice chancellor and provost. “We are doing some really good things, but it’s time that we’re not thinking about our other wonderful students who are very highly prepared. We need to focus on them, too.” ...

“Most students have serious challenges remembering the basic rules of arithmetic,” Dr. Ianni said of his remedial math class. “The course is really a refresher, but they aren’t ready for a refresher. They need to learn how to learn.”

On a recent afternoon, a half-dozen students in that class prepared for a test, called a Compass exam, that would allow those who passed to start studying college-level math. Without college math skills, students cannot graduate. Seventeen others in the class had not even qualified to take the test; they will have to repeat the course until they qualify or they give up, as history shows many have done....

On Monday, the Obama administration began a series of “community college summits” at campuses across the country to gather ideas on how the schools can produce more graduates. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged up to $110 million to improve remedial programs at community colleges. ...

The university’s biggest concern is those students who lag furthest behind in the three subjects. “These students have a really low probability of success, and it’s hard to know how to work with them,” said Dr. Logue, the provost. “There’s no question that the more remediation a student needs, the less likely they are ever to graduate.”

Students are often surprised to learn that they still have hurdles to clear before they can begin college-level work. As a freshman at LaGuardia, Angel Payero, 18, took the necessary assessment tests in August and discovered that he was deficient in reading, writing and math.

“Throughout high school, I was a good math student, and to find out that it was my lowest grade of all three was really surprising,” said Mr. Payero, who graduated from the High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry.

Neither of his parents, who are from the Dominican Republic, attended high school, he said. Yet Mr. Payero yearns for a career in psychology. “I feel like I can really understand people and where they come from,” he said.

Read the whole thing at The Onion.

For more, see here.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Getting cynical in my old age

For the last dozen years, I've listened to Bill Gates explain how to improve education. First, it was small learning communities (which he now says the Gates Foundation wasted $2 billion upon), then it was making everybody pass Algebra II to graduate from high school, then it was something else, now it's giving the best teachers bigger classes (see Gates's latest op-ed: "How Teacher Development Could Revolutionize Our Schools").

The weird thing is that the Way to Fix the Schools has basically never been, according to Gates, about the main way the rest of economy gets more productive -- and also the one thing Bill Gates definitely knows a lot about: information technology. 

And yet, common sense says that information technology offers the main hope of us ever being able to afford on a mass scale the one educational tool that works more often than anything else, especially with math: individualized tutoring. It often doesn't work, but over thousands of years it's tended to work enough that that's what rich people get for their kids. And it's a lot more likely to work than the latest fad.

Unfortunately, assigning one human tutor with patience, insight, and communications skills per student is mind-bogglingly expensive. 

So, the standard Ed School solution is "differentiated instruction:" i.e., the teacher should be every student's personal tutor. The teacher is supposed to walk around the classroom instantly diagnosing why each individual student is screwing up and giving the exact help he or she needs. Thus, the need for Superman.

Yet, assigning one computer per student is getting cheaper all the time. And computers have all the patience in the world. It's easy for a program like Aleks to generate math problems adapted on the fly to the exact level of the student -- if you miss a question, the next one is easier, if you get it right, the next one is harder. That's how big tests like the GRE and the ASVAB work today. 

What's harder is getting the computer to figure out why the student gets wrong a problem at his appropriate level. Yet, that's not an impossible task in math, where there are a finite number of ways to screw up. 

Folks, it's 2011. Way back in 1998, my Palm Pilot could humiliate me in chess. We're not talking about beating Gary Kasparov or Ken Jennings here, we're talking about reminding a kid who thinks that -3 times -3 equals -9 that a negative number times a negative number is a positive number. 

So, what would have happened if instead of investing billions naively chasing social theory fads, Bill Gates had invested billions over the last 12 years in something he knows about: software.

Would that have done more good than investing billions in the Ayres Brothers' small learning communities idea? Maybe not, even probably not. But would it have done less good?

So, why not? 

Sometimes I wonder if all of Gates's interventions in American education aren't a sideshow to distract from Microsoft Windows' unsuitability for integrating into classrooms. Lots of schools have Computer Classrooms where the students file in and do stuff on computers under the eye of the Computer Teacher who comes around and fixes stuff when it breaks.

What hasn't worked well, at least up through Windows Vista (I have no experience with Windows 7) is integrating PCs into regular classroom work. When the solution to hangups it to reboot and wait ten minutes for the PC reload Windows, well, as Glaivester pointed out a few years ago, when he was teaching and the whole school was given laptops, learning dropped precipitously because he spent half his time fixing kids' computer problems.

That's why Steve Jobs' Winston-Smith-loved-Big-Brother approach to limiting what you can do on Apple products (e.g., no Flash) to what Steve thinks you should do may be more promising for classrooms. 

(By the way, here's Ridley Scott's "1984" Apple commercial announcing the Mac during the 1984 Super Bowl broadcast -- talk about irony.)

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Tom Stoppard

There are a couple of bits of Tom Stoppard news this week (an Arcadia revival is in previews on Broadway and Keira Knightley might play Anna Karenina in a film of Stoppard's adaptation), so I used that as an excuse to write about my favorite playwright in my Taki's Magazine column:

Tom Stoppard’s remarkable career stands as a puzzling rebuke to cynicism about show biz. Sure, audience-pandering, trend-surfing, and propagandizing can explain the vast majority of what the entertainment industry sets before us. Yet, how can we account for Stoppard’s endless success? Sir Tom has appealed to everyone’s best instincts for most of the last half-century, and he’s been handsomely rewarded for it.

Read the rest there.

By the way, here's something that caught my eye in Johann Hari's 2003 review of a Stoppard biography in the leftwing Independent:

Did you know that Stoppard came up with the name of his friend Mick Jagger's 1997 tour, "Bridges to Babylon", or that Stoppard, Jagger and the ultra-right-wing journalist Paul Johnson often meet for tea and biscuits? (Oh, to be a fly on the wall of that padded cell...)

That England's leading playwright, rock star, and historian get together privately and, no doubt, exchange heresies ... I mean, they have to be mad to say things like what Johann Hari suspects them of saying at tea parties he doesn't get invited to.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Nostalgia

From an LA Times story about Libyan rebel volunteers:

Among them was Masoud Buaser, 36, who wore a partial uniform and had strung a bandoleer of ammunition around his neck, though he had never served in the army. He also carried a satchel stuffed with TNT, which he said he uses to kill and collect fish.

"Now I'm fishing for Kadafi!" Buaser shouted as his fellow recruits laughed and jeered.

That reminds me ... In 1980 I was walking on a beach in Corfu, Greece, when suddenly there was a huge bang from about 200 feet offshore and water shot high into the air. My first thought was that a WWII mine had gone off. I looked the other way down the beach and there were two guys, similar-looking enough to be brothers. I expected them to be reacting with as much surprise as I was, but they were merely gazing complacently at the site of the explosion with their arms folded. 

Then, stunned fish began floating to the surface. The two locals waded into the water and began putting them into net bags. At that point, I heard shouting from behind me. A scuba diver was standing in the surf, holding his head and cursing at the dynamite fishermen.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Four helicopters

I was walking down the street last night and way to the south there were four helicopters hovering in a rough diamond. I figure there's a car chase down Ventura and they're filming it for the TV news, but the more I watch the more I realize they are a lot farther south, more like over Mulholland Drive at the top of the Hollywood Hills. And, they aren't following somebody driving 90 mph, they're just hovering there. So, I said to myself, "I bet they are hovering over Charlie Sheen's house."

And I was right.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Toyota War

From Wikipedia, about Kaddafi's 1980s invasion of Chad to the south, which led to classic battles between Libyan tanks vs. the impoverished black country's Toyota pickup trucks:

The Toyota War is the name commonly given to the last phase of the Chadian–Libyan conflict, which took place in 1987 in Northern Chad and on the Libyan-Chadian border. It takes its name from the Toyota pickup trucks used as technicals to provide mobility for the Chadian troops as they fought against the Libyans.^[6] 

The War Nerd explains what a "technical" is:

Habre's rebels took it from the Libyans in a battle which might've been the debut of one of the major new weapons systems of the late 20th century, the "technical." If you've read up on Somalia, you know that a "technical" is just a Toyota 4wd pickup with a big machinegun or grenade launcher welded onto the bed. 

Wikipedia goes on:

The 1987 war resulted in a heavy defeat for Libya, which, according to American sources, lost one tenth of its army, with 7,500 troops killed and 1.5 billion dollars worth of military equipment destroyed or captured.^[7] Chadian losses were 1,000 troops killed.^[5]

... Apparently formidable, the Libyan military disposition in Chad was marred by serious flaws. The Libyans were prepared for a war in which they would provide ground and air support to their Chadian allies, act as assault infantry, and provide reconnaissance. However, by 1987, Gaddafi had lost his allies, exposing Libya's inadequate knowledge of the area. Libyan garrisons came to resemble isolated and vulnerable islands in the Chadian Sahara. Also important was the low morale among the troops, who were fighting in a foreign country, and the structural disorganization of the Libyan army, which was in part induced by Gaddafi's fear of a military coup against him. This fear led him to avoid the professionalization of the armed forces.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Invade the world, invite the world (Muslim gratitude edition)

From the New York Times:

Two United States airmen on their way to Afghanistan were killed and two seriously injured on Wednesday when a gunman opened fire on an American military bus at the Frankfurt airport, according to American military officials in Europe and German police....

He was not named by the authorities, but The Associated Press reported that his uncle in Kosovo identified him as Arid Uka, and said he was born and raised in Germany after his parents moved there about 40 years ago. The uncle, Rexhep Uka, told the news agency that the family was Muslim and that Arid Uka worked at the Frankfurt Airport. That could not be immediately confirmed.  ...

The German magazine Der Spiegel reported on its Web site that the suspect was carrying a large amount of ammunition when arrested. The police said they could not confirm that report.

A man whose office is near the site of the shooting, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect his business, said witnesses told him that before opening fire the gunman shouted “God is great” in Arabic. Mr. Füllhardt, the police official, said he could not confirm such reports. 

As you may recall, the U.S. military liberated Muslim Kosovo from its internationally recognized government in Christian Serbia back in 1999.

In other news, there are widespread calls in the U.S. media for the U.S. military to intervene in Libya. After all, the Grand Strategists reason, that would make Muslims love us.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

QQ

In the Washington Post, sportswriter Sally Jenkins * writes:

[Indianopolis Colt's executive Bill] Polian made one of the great all time decisions in 1998 when he drafted Peyton Manning over Ryan Leaf. It's a no brainer now but it was an agonizing choice back then. Leaf was bigger and more overtly athletic, but to Polian, Manning seemed to have more emotional maturity and ability to deal with adversity. It was exactly the right assessment; Leaf turned out to have buried temperament problems and caused the San Diego Chargers nothing but grief. 

It wasn't the first time Polian was correct: he also brought Jim Kelly to the Buffalo Bills from the USFL. If Polian has a secret, it's that he tries not to overrate the physical in favor of the mental and emotional aspects of the game. Just because a guy has an arm doesn't make him a quarterback. Rather than pure strength, he puts a premium on accuracy and poise, and a particular kind of processing intelligence that he calls "fast eyes," the ability to assess complex situations quickly.

"Intelligence is awfully important," Polian says. "It's a complex game and they have to be able to comprehend and process lots of information. It's not rocket science but it's pretty close, it's like financial engineering, or the things that pilots do."

Frank Ryan of the 1960s Cleveland Browns earned a Ph.D. in math from Rice U.. (See here for the title of his dissertation.) Yet, he wasn't known as a smart quarterback on the field. His coach had to simplify plays for him to be able to make the right decisions in real time. (What he was known for to his teammates was being brave.)

It would seem as if the NFL, with all its resources, could develop some kind of video game test of "fast eyes" that would be more relevant than the standard Wonderlic IQ test. 

For example, I played a fair amount of touch football growing up and, having a decent arm, I was an okay sandlot quarterback in 2 on 2 games where I had only two mental tasks: focus on my one receiver and avoid the pass rusher. In 6 on 6 games, however, I was cognitively overwhelmed. I have "slow eyes."

You'll notice that my blogging style isn't that different. Instead of putting up a lot of posts, each one making one single point, I tend to start off with a short post, but it keeps growing as I follow out the implications to who knows where. I don't shift focus adroitly to the latest topic of interest in the news. I'd rather keep burrowing into one topic for a long time.

* By the way, Sally Jenkins is the daughter of Dan Jenkins, one of the half dozen top sportswriters of the second half of the 20th Century. I have this theory that women who succeed in masculine fields are much more likely to have fathers who were in that field.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

David Foster Wallace

The only thing I've ever read by David Foster Wallace, a famous novelist who killed himself a couple of years ago, was his 13,800 word giganto article called "Host" in The Atlantic in 2005 about how David Foster Wallace was smarter than a minor LA talk radio host named John Ziegler. 

I don't doubt that Wallace was smarter that KFI's evening talk radio host (although when Ziegler interviewed me a couple of years later, I found him quite professional and sharp). But what was bizarre about DFW's vast essay were the handful of issues where he decided to draw the line between himself and the conservative talk show host, typically about race, and specifically about the guilt of O.J. Simpson. DFW wanted readers to know that the villain of the piece believed O.J. was guilty while DFW had "doubt."

If you don't believe me, here are the last two paragraphs of this endless article, in which DFW watches Ziegler watch Katie Couric interview OJ:

It's odd: if you've spent some time watching Mr. Z. perform in the studio, you can predict just what he'll look like, how his head and arms will move and eyes fill with life as he says certain things that it's all but sure he'll say on-air tonight, such as "I have some very, very strong opinions about how this interview was conducted," and "Katie Couric is a disgrace to journalism everywhere," and that O.J.'s self-presentation was "delusional and arrogant beyond all belief," and that the original trial jury was "a collection of absolute nimrods," and that to believe in Simpson's innocence, as Ms. Couric says a poll shows some 70 percent of African-Americans still do, "you have to be either crazy, deluded, or stupid—there are no other explanations."

To be fair, though, there truly are some dubious, unsettling things about the Dateline interview, such as for instance that NBC has acceded to O.J. Simpson's "no editing" condition for appearing, which used to be an utter taboo for serious news organizations. Or that O.J. gets to sit there looking cheery and unguarded even though he has his lawyer almost in his lap; or that most of Katie Couric's questions turn out to be Larry King—size fluffballs; or that O.J. Simpson responds to one of her few substantive questions—about 1994's eerie, slow-motion Bronco chase and its bearing on how O.J.'s case is still perceived—by harping on the fact that the chase "never ever, in three trials that I had, it never came up," as if that had anything to do with whatever his behavior in the Bronco really signified (and at which non-answer, and Ms. Couric's failure to press or follow up, Mr. Z. moans and smears his hand up and down over his face).    Or that O.J.'s cheerful expression never changes when Katie Couric, leaning forward and speaking with a delicacy that's either decent or obscene, inquires whether his children ever ask him about the crime. And when someone in the arc of chairs around John Ziegler says, almost to himself, that the one pure thing to hope for here is that Simpson's kids believe he's innocent, Mr. Z. gives a snort of reply and states, very flatly, "They know, and he knows they know, that he did it." To which, in KFI's prep room, the best response would probably be compassion, empathy. Because one can almost feel it: what a bleak and merciless world this host lives in—believes, nay, knows for an absolute fact he lives in. I'll take doubt.

I guess all you can say is that if Johnnie and Marcia had agreed to put America's most brilliant young novelist on the OJ jury, well, he wouldn't have performed any worse (or better) than the ladies and gentlemen who acquitted the Juice.

Did Wallace write better than this, or is it all this, ultimately, stupid?

For one of the many, many pro-DFW opinions, see here.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer