No one seems to have recognized a key person who is responsible for this moment in American history: Eric Topol.

Remember him? He was the medical researcher who saw to it that the results of the vaccine trials would not be released before the election in 2020. As Steve has argued, this very likely prevented the vote from being swung to Trump.

And now Trump has come into his second term with a powerful mandate, and what looks like a well organized plan (not exactly typical of the Trump of his first term) to take power and enforce his vision.

We should all be thankful for the unstinting efforts of Dr. Topol, who was so gloriously careless of what he wished for.

What is most interesting about this entirely sensible proposal will be to see how the tech giants respond to it.

Can they really bring themselves to implement it, when they know how it exposes their ideological agenda? Yet on what grounds can they refuse to implement it?

I have a feeling we’re going to hear many excuses why it just can’t be done.

Actually, I slightly misremembered the number from the NY Times article: it was in fact 15% blacks:

“Once we brought the test requirement back, we admitted the most diverse class that we ever had in our history,” Schmill told me. “Having test scores was helpful.” In M.I.T.’s current first-year class, 15 percent of students are Black, 16 percent are Hispanic, 38 percent are white, and 40 percent are Asian American.

I have no idea where Schmill got that number, but he, as dean of admissions at M.I.T., should be in a position to know.

It is an eye-popping number, and far greater than in previous years, it seems.

What the article fails to do is to reckon with the consequences of the recent SC ruling on Affirmative Action.

Sure, it’s quite true that one can select the most capable blacks by emphasizing their SAT scores. But this only works if you can treat blacks as a separate category. The problem remains that blacks, in comparison to other groups, do most poorly on academic measures on the SAT. Blacks can do OK on grades, relatively speaking, because they compete mostly against each other in most high schools they attend.

So introducing, or retaining, the SAT as a significant factor makes them seem overall only less worthy academically than they would seem otherwise. If the ruling of the SC is at all respected, and they are not separated out for special treatment, their numbers should plummet only more dramatically with the use of the SAT as a factor than without it.

MIT boasts that it got 14% blacks with the use of the SAT, because it was able to select the best blacks. But that would be only because it was allowed to treat blacks separately. Those numbers can’t possibly stay in the same range if they can’t do so, unless they take huge hits on quality of students.

The article would have made a lot more sense and have been far more applicable before the SC ruling than afterwards.

I’m wondering, might Barack Obama take on the job of being President of Harvard?

It wouldn’t be crazy. He’d be the perfect case of a supposedly qualified DEI hire. And what is he doing now that’s so important anyhow? Who outside of the right would dare to criticize him?

And it would suit his delusions about how educated and sophisticated he is.

The thing that baffles me about the approach the “Race does not exist” crowd takes in contexts like this is that it seems to contradict the claims they make elsewhere.

If indeed including race in models does not add any power to prediction of health outcomes, how can it be that it is racism that creates worse outcomes for blacks?

You see, if adding race as a parameter does not alter the predictions, that does not tell only against relevant genetic differences between blacks and whites, it also tells against relevant environmental differences between them. And yet, according to these same authors, it is supposed to be the massive effects of racism — above and beyond all other environmental factors — that engender worse outcomes in blacks.

If these authors really believe their claims about racism, why don’t they demand that race be taken into account, lest blacks not be found to be as vulnerable as they are to health issues?

In contrast to the medical profession, economists in academia are considered quite right wing and unwoke — but their ratio of Democrats to Republicans is about 2 or 3 to 1.

One thing that puzzles me is how extremely woke is all the commentary coming out of the medical profession. It seems as woke as the worst of academia.

But the political affiliations of the medical profession hardly seem woke — indeed, it seems to be about as unwoke as it gets among the professions.

Here’s a tweet summarizing the situation as of 2016, when essentially half of all MDs have registered as Republicans — Republicans!

Surgeons are consistently among the most right-wing doctors and psychiatrists are among the most left-wing.

In line with this, here were their surveyed party registrations in 2016:
This sort of pattern also (largely, but not always) holds up when discipline-level affiliation is… pic.twitter.com/Ui2s5MZhHC

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) November 15, 2023

And the more exclusive are the specialties, the more Republican they are.

How did the medical profession come to be utterly dominated by a faction that must run completely against the scientific and moral sensibilities of such a large and intellectually powerful segment of the community?

It’s not just that, obviously, the predictive power of the algorithm goes down if race is omitted. It’s that it is blacks who will suffer from the loss of predictive power: they, and their doctors, will be less likely to be informed of significant risk of heart disease and so less likely to take corrective measures. In short, they will die more often.

The dishonesty of the writer here is remarkable. She even brings up the case of an adjustment in how a kidney metric was calculated that originally employed race which, apparently, put blacks at greater risk of not receiving correct treatment. Clearly, she wants the reader to infer that that’s what’s going on in the case of the cardiac algorithm which includes race, when it is certainly the opposite.

Blacks might ask themselves, with allies like this, who needs hostile racists?

Tabery’s analysis is amazingly stupid.

The entire point of the “thrifty genome” is that diabetes is nowadays common in Indigenous peoples precisely because the environment for which their genome was evolved, in which energy rich food was often scarce, differs from their current environment, in which it is easily accessible. The fact that they have developed diabetes in great numbers after energy rich food became readily available doesn’t tell against the idea of a “thrifty genome”, it is exactly what that theory was intended to explain.

Talk about “pseudoscience”!

One thing I haven’t seen addressed is the potential impact of the Wilson Effect — the fact that IQs are more heritable and more reliable at ages 18+. My recollection is that in some earlier studies of the race gap, it was found that the gap had been becoming distinctly smaller at younger ages, but remained large and constant at 18+ (1.1 SD, I think).

The age of these students is 10 — which would seem subject to the Wilson Effect. One might guess that the gap would become even larger at 18.

I suspect that you’re right that in Boston, and generally on the east coast, there’s a lot more pure virtue signalling than on the west coast. I see Black Lives Matter signs everywhere in the rich suburbs of Boston, but virtually no Black lives.

Not walking the walk is a good thing.

There’s a lot to be said for hypocrisy.

I wonder how the Romans might have hit upon a mixture that was so much more durable than even modern concrete. The mixers wouldn’t be around the hundred or more years later when the difference would clearly have been noticeable. Would there be detectable differences on a much shorter timetable — say, within a career of an artisan?

Or was it just dumb luck?

Isn’t the innovation of cryptocurrency to improve upon the tulip market by removing the tulips?

I wonder if part of the answer might be that UK has a faster feedback mechanism than does the US. The Parliamentary government of UK might induce more rapid feedback generally.

The US system is about to get a major shock in the midterm elections. A massive rejection of the left will propagate up the hierarchy of leftist institutions, hitting first the Dem party, then the media supporting it, then (though to a lesser extent) the NGOs and academics behind the most extreme leftist policies.

But even the best insulated segments, the NGOs and academics, will likely feel obliged to pull back on their positions if they are themselves spurned as embarrassments by both the media and the Dem party.

The argument in the article is rather bizarre.

The authors emphasize that, over the last almost 20 years of aggressive Affirmative Action, blacks haven’t improved their lot.

And somehow this becomes a case for continuing Affirmative Action, rather than discontinuing it for abject failure to produce the intended effect?

Well, the the proof of the halting problem was a fairly straightforward reworking of Godel’s proof of his first Incompleteness theorem. And Alonzo Church beat Turing to the punch on the result, though he cast it in terms of his ugly lambda calculus. Perhaps Turing’s biggest claim to fame was his articulation of the Turing machine, which was a nice encapsulation of what it means to be computable.

Turing was very important as a computer scientist, but he’s not exactly in the company of the greatest mathematicians of the last century.

I wonder how much of our ignorance of the genetic correlates of facial features comes from a poverty of phenotype data.

How many of those in the data stores for GWAS studies have pictures connected to the genotype data?

It would seem pretty easy to gather such photos, but I suspect it might not be permissible to use those photos, since they would identify the contributors. Even abstracted data, such as distance between eyes, etc., might be enough to do so.

I’d press the analogy to ESP a bit further.

Against ESP we have the standard science of brain states which requires, and finds, no room for ESP to act, and sets a very low prior for ESP being true. In favor of ESP, we have only very dubious experiments, typically contradicted by other experiments.

Against separate mental states we have the standard science of brain states, which finds no room for separate mental states to act, and no reason to posit their existence, and sets a very low prior for the existence of separate mental states to be true. In favor of separate mental states, we have only quite dubious metaphysical arguments and intuitions. Suffice it to say, metaphysical arguments and intuitions don’t enjoy a record of great reliability.

Why should we be far more convinced of separate mental states than of ESP?

Here, from Wikipedia, is a quick and good enough summary of the Hard Problem:

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why and how humans have qualia[note 1] or phenomenal experiences.[2] This is in contrast to the “easy problems” of explaining the physical systems that give us and other animals the ability to discriminate, integrate information, and so forth. These problems are seen as relatively easy because all that is required for their solution is to specify the mechanisms that perform such functions.[3][4] Philosopher David Chalmers writes that even once we have solved all such problems about the brain and experience, the hard problem will still persist.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

The chief point is that, say, Chalmers grants that science may come up with a full explanation of all brain states, which would imply perfect predictability (which is the so-called “easy problem”), without any explanation of subjective experiences or mental states such as qualia. Insofar as something explains the existence of qualia, it goes beyond standard science which addresses empirical matters. Chalmers assumes that standard science can, at least in principle, get all empirical matters correctly, and that there’s no strange set of forces that would allow brain states to deviate from their expected paths. Put another way, qualia, and mental states, do not have causal effects that would induce alterations in the physical world as standard science understands it.

The Hard Problem is that qualia seem nonetheless to exist, and demand some kind of explanation. But what is that explanation? Standard science, which predicts only things in the physical world, cannot do so.

I brought up the comparison to the existence of ESP. Sean Carrol has made the point that science really doesn’t seem to have any wiggle room for radically new phenomena at certain scales. It would certainly seem that the behavior of brain states are at such a scale. I think it’s fair enough to say that in the end brain states are reducible to the interactions between neurons in our brains. But the behavior of individual neurons in our brains seem to be perfectly predictable based on standard chemical and electrical principles, even if we don’t yet know all the details. Likewise, we certainly don’t yet have all the details relevant to how these neurons interact as a network, but there seems to be no room for a deviation from how the set of individual neurons in fact would be predicted to act.

I ask, where is the wiggle room in this understanding of how the brain behaves? Where’s the opportunity for either a totally separate set of entities, such as qualia, or for ESP, to alter these otherwise perfectly predictable physical processes?

A couple points to make here in response.

The first is that the common understanding of the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness is that it is Hard precisely because science will never explain it. That is, those who point to the existence of the Hard Problem assume that, from the standpoint of science, there will never be a scientific account of consciousness: mental states exist as a separate substance from brain states, but are perfectly correlated with brain states, and brain states have an entirely physical explanation. What you are suggesting instead is that there may very well be a new, scientific explanation for consciousness.

The second point is that the physics behind brain states is far more pedestrian, and better understood, than you seem to grant. The same point has been made against the existence of ESP, as in the following debate between Steve Pinker and the physicist Josephson. Sure, physics still has important unresolved issues — but not at the scale that would affect the workings of brain states that would allow for ESP:

But should we go meta, and adjust the priors to acknowledge the possibility that our understanding of physics is incomplete and yet-to-be-discovered laws might explain how psychic powers are possible? Though many phenomena at extreme scales of space and energy—near the Big Bang or a black hole, at the size of a photon or of a galaxy—are incompletely understood, this cannot be said about the physics of everyday life. As Sean Carroll shows in The Big Picture, on these scales, from nanotech to moon rockets, the laws of physics are completely understood. We aren’t in need of strange new forces or fields to explain how a bicycle works, or why eclipses happen. Carroll takes the argument a step further: our understanding is so complete that if there were as-yet unidentified fields in addition to those underlying gravity, electromagnetism and so on, we would be able to detect them, and we don’t.

https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/debate-is-belief-in-esp-irrational/

The same considerations apply to the notion that consciousness might alter our brain states. If there were forces able to effect such changes, we’d presumably already know about them.

Just to continue the final point I was making:

Do you think that consciousness can somehow alter the path that physical entities and forces are taking in the brain? Can it make an electron swerve that otherwise wouldn’t? Can it change the quantum probabilities? How does it do its causal business in our physical world?

And if it can’t change a damn thing, what is it doing for us?

So are we to say that, somehow, consciousness just arose, rather magically, as a distinct substance at some point in evolution? Or that it actually co-occurs with all material objects, even though we don’t see evidence of it except with certain animals?

Isn’t either of those assertions just a little at odds with our conception of the world as science would seem to show it?

And you talk about the causal influence of consciousness. Here I’ve got a bone to pick. Are you actually claiming that consciousness influences what happens in our real world in a way in which science would never be able to account for? Do you really want to say that if we think of the world as being composed of particles and physical forces, etc., we won’t be able to account for, and, at least in principle, predict everything that will take place in the world? (Yes, quantum phenomena make this a little messier, but essentially never at a level that affects thoughts or emotions.) If physical phenomena determine basically all cognitive activity, what’s left for the causal influence of consciousness?

The big problem with consciousness as a separate substance is that it adds zero to our understanding of the real world, which is entirely determined by physical phenomena. We need it like we need God.

Well, I should have been more precise about how Kripke thought about dualism: he did indeed put up a defense of dualism (or at least a set of strong arguments for dualism) — very similar indeed to that which Chalmers and others produced — but that he was nonetheless unconvinced of it, because of countervailing considerations. As he says at the very end of the note you refer to:

I regard the mind-body problem as wide open and extremely confusing.

But, again, the arguments he produces in favor of dualism are essentially those of Chalmers, and certainly predate him.

Kripke’s larger argument is found in this excerpt from Naming and Necessity:

https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil375/Kripke3.pdf

The thing about dualism and the Hard Problem of Consciousness is that the so-called Hardness quickly becomes an embarrassment.

If there’s just no scientific accounting of Consciousness, when and where and how did it first come about? Did it pop into existence at some point in the evolution of life? Or does it inherently co-occur with all material things, and only becomes evident in certain organisms? Doesn’t any answer to these questions seem little short of invoking magic?

The Harder the Problem is, the more it seems like a reductio ad absurdum of dualism. The rational response to it should be, let’s get rid of this consciousness-as-a-separate-substance stuff. The arguments for dualism might seem to make sense, as metaphysical arguments often do, but they can’t possibly hold up in our very real world.

Kripke famously put up a defense of dualism in Naming and Necessity. Kripke is perhaps the most highly regarded philosopher of the 30-40 years.

When I first heard of Chalmers, my first reaction was, what did he add to Kripke’s argument? To this day, I’m not sure what fundamental improvement Chalmers has made upon Kripke.

Chalmers was rather clever in his nomenclature. The “Hard Problem of Consciousness” has stuck pretty well over the years.

I recently became quite aware of just how much legal language can be like computer programming.

The definition of inheritance by representation, as stated in certain state laws, actually involves recursion. It took me a serious thinking to assure myself I understood it right — and there was a lot of money at stake.

And this is an issue a pretty standard local lawyer might have to deal with in handling an estate.

Imagine what would happen if the SC decided to reject Affirmative Action.

I’d think that if they can bring themselves to retract Roe v Wade, they should be able to forbid Affirmative Action in federally funded institutions.

I hope that they haven’t squandered whatever courage they may have on rescinding Roe v Wade, which, in my view, may have been bad jurisprudence, but reasonable policy.

The Ukrainian military has a very simple and effective strategy for opposing the Russian advance: retreat to cities, and, in effect, use the civilian population as a human shield. In today’s world, this works very well because no advanced nation wants to be held responsible for high civilian deaths.

I wonder if the Ukrainian military has already been reduced to this tactic. I see no evidence that they’ve ever been able to prevail in open countryside, where it is military vs military.

This analysis is interesting, but it is from April 1.

What I never seem to run into is any credible account of how the Ukrainian military is faring today, and what its prospects are.

Russia supposedly was cutting off supplies, etc. to the bulk of the Ukrainian military in the south and east — but did this really happen?

What’s left of the Ukrainian military at this point? If the supplies can’t get to most of it, of what account is the Western initiative to supply them with weapons?

Everybody’s talking about the Russian military — but we know little to nothing about the Ukrainian military.

Is Ukraine going to be reduced to fighting a guerilla war? That would be ugly and likely pointless from a Ukrainian point of view. What would they be fighting for? Possible NATO membership? Really?

I think you underestimate the power of network effects.

Human population was about 1-15 million at the advent of agriculture. It’s now about 8 billion.

That’s a lot of reproductive success to work with. One would think that those who were better at agriculture and agricultural societies might be strongly favored by selection.

Actually, almost all the selection for cognitive ability works on standing variation, not new mutations. The effects of common SNPs are exceedingly small. New mutations, if they impact cognitive ability, and are of sizable effect, are almost certainly deleterious, and are, as quick as possible, rooted out.

Agriculture very likely does bring about selection for cognitive ability. But it does so because it directly favors reproductive success, not because it has better variants to work with.

The absurd use of “dark skinned” shows how the Times own stylistic policy bites back at it.

The point of “Black” is to bring attention to the race of blacks, and to serve as an honorific.

But what happens if the black newsmaker does something horrible? “Black” then becomes a great embarrassment, doing the opposite from what it was intended to do, and looking ridiculous in the process.

Did it ever occur to these Times people that blacks might, in fact, feature in a number of horrible stories — in fact, in well more than their share? How did they ever think they would handle such cases?

Shouldn’t they have something like speed golf, like speed chess?

I really think we have to investigate a good deal more carefully before we can conclude that Russian forces committed all, or most, of these atrocities.

Both sides have pushed a lot of propaganda already.

And generally, the Azov element, where ever it is involved, is brutal, barbaric, and deceptive beyond belief.

Hate hoaxes aren’t just for BLM.

Standardized testing puts supporters of Affirmative Action between a rock and a hard place.

On the one hand, using a standardized test puts on record the gross differences between white/Asian males and their favored groups. On the other hand, if they are to select the members of those groups least likely to fail, standardized tests are the best measure. Indeed, those tests are likely well more critical in making the correct decisions for their favored groups than for white/Asian males.

MIT probably saw too many minorities/women fail out (especially minorities), undermining their desire to do aggressive Affirmative Action. So they bit the bullet and went back to standardized testing.

The civilian casualties in this war have been (apparently) quite low — less than 1,000, I have read.

This must be a deliberate choice made by Putin — if he had in mind to win the war by killing civilians, I don’t see how the decisions to launch various kinds of artillery attacks, or bombing sorties, or missile could be resisted by his military commanders.

If anything, it would seem that part of what is holding Russia back from quick dominance (given its numbers) is a policy of avoiding civilian deaths, and minimizing damage to civilian infrastructure.

Putin may be a thug and a bully, but he clearly imposes limits on his tendencies.

FIghting wars in the 21st century by a largely civilized country is as much constrained by what is acceptable methods as it is by military prowess.

We managed to resolve the Cuban Missile crisis by imposing a military blockade, intercepting Russian ships which carried missiles to Cuba. We came as close as we ever have to full scale nuclear war in this crisis — far, far closer than Russia has pushed its current war. Yes, we didn’t need to invade Cuba under those circumstances — but no one could reasonably assert that we were not being militarily aggressive, given the real threat of nuclear war. We didn’t need to launch a full scale invasion of Cuba because we managed to get what we sought by means of these threats.

There is no reason to believe that Russia would achieve its self interested goals for security short of an invasion. Would anyone be reassured if, instead, it threatened, in effect, to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war if it didn’t achieve its goals? I don’t think so. An invasion is the far more tolerable means of doing so.

As for Estonia and Latvia, I would expect that they simply present far less of a threat to Russia than does Ukraine.

This war, as is true in any war, tests our ability to hold many seemingly contradictory thoughts and attitudes at the same time.

On the one hand, what Putin declares himself to be seeking, namely neutrality in Ukraine and disarmament, seems reasonable. We would never tolerate a country bordering us — or even in the same hemisphere — which was both hostile and heavily armed.

On the other hand, the bar for actual use of military force is, especially in these times, very high. It’s hard to accept that Putin has achieved that sort of justification.

But would we not have employed military force if a hostile and heavily armed nation were neighboring us?

I know it’s the time for 5 minute hate sessions over Putin, and he is indeed generally a thug. But, from his point of view, why isn’t he behaving, if not rationally or justly, then at least as expected, given the circumstances and the self interest of Russia?

The thing I find strange and distressing about this situation is that I have no idea which source of news I can trust to give a reasonably objective account of what’s going on.

I can’t trust the NY Times, God knows, or any of the mainstream press. Fox News is also likely to be biased and selective.

Forget about prediction–I’d like to know what’s already happened. So who can I go for basic, unselected, and comprehensive facts?

Seriously, is this a massive Russian invasion or something else? How many troops have entered, and where?

I’ve always wondered why we don’t seem to see this sort of effect for cognitive accomplishments.

You’d expect that, say, being almost 7 vs almost 6 would have a very big effect on performance in first grade, and that teachers would reward the better students with more praise, higher level instruction, segregation into more advanced reading groups, etc.. But these advantages don’t seem to propagate through the education of students, so far as I am aware.

Why not?

In general I would say that people give too little credit to the importance and difficulty of inventing useful models of the world, and the distinctive talents which doing so requires, and too much credit to strictly mathematical techniques and talents, which tend to be rather cheap and abundant.

The world is in the end a bunch of word problems.

Galton’s breakthrough on correlation was fundamentally driven by a major conceptual leap that had little to do directly with mathematical techniques or sophistication. In fact, formulas which captured certain aspects of correlation, based on multivariate normal distributions, had been developed before Galton, but were never applied as did Galton.

From Stephen Stigler, “Darwin, Galton and the Statistical Enlightenment”:

It is true that if you dig deeply in earlier literature you can find instances of multivariate normal densities: Robert Adrain in 1808, Laplace about 1812, French work on artillery fire in the 1820s, the crystallographer Auguste Bravais in 1846 and Erastus De Forest in the 1870s, among these. But all of these are as simple generalizations of univariate frequency functions and none examined or exploited the conditional distributions – the multivariate structure – as Galton did. Indeed, there seems to be no one before Galton who even asked what the conditional distributions were in this setting, and much less found them and commented on the deep statistical messages that they implied.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40666271

Major conceptual advances in applications of mathematics can take a great amount of time to come about, and, again, have little to do with mathematical sophistication per se. The history of statistics is a testament to this fact, in which such things as a clear understanding of conditional probabilities and their importance in modeling the world dragged on over centuries.

From the prominent alterations in the quote, it’s obvious that the ACLU chose it not to communicate RBG’s message about abortion, but to drive home that “men” can be pregnant.

RBG has been served notice that she’s now on the wrong side of history.

What I find amusing about this incident is how fast the media got on top of it, to demonstrate the moral that Texans are awful, only to have it turn on a dime and demonstrate that Blacks are awful.

And this is a pattern, of course. If you insist on believing things that aren’t so, Reality is always Lucy with the football, and you’re flying through the air like Charlie Brown.

Right.

The deep problem is not the incorrect prognostication itself — it’s the dead certainty with which it is held, despite so many failures in the past in prognostication.

If an expert hasn’t learned that he can be wrong, what has he learned?

The thing that gets me is that every single Afghan seems to be wrong in a different way.

What are the odds?

Great column, Steve, and I admire the intellectual ambition.

Trying to understand the Great Divergence is a grand exercise in pattern finding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Divergence

There are a lot of angles on this. Upthread, someone mentioned Heinrich’s recent book on the WEIRD people of Europe. Another relevant recent book is The Knowledge Machine, which attempts to locate the peculiar mindset behind modern science. In my reading so far of The Verge, it takes, I gather, a multifactorial approach.

It’s a big puzzle to solve. A first rank pattern finder unencumbered by strictly environmental approaches is likely to make real progress.

There are several in my neck of the woods, around Lexington MA, which were developed by the architecture school at Harvard.

Five Fields is a well known example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Fields

They all have a Back to the Future feel about them. Personally, I like their combined suggestion of optimistic progress and nostalgia. When I was a kid, these sort of homes seemed supercool, and now they still seem pretty cool.

Steve, your ability to predict cultural/political developments is remarkable.

It’s fairly easy to imagine outcomes of movements which would be “logical” steps in the current ideological direction, but most of those would be too extreme to get traction. The delicate thing is to have a good sense of what’s viable what’s not.

You seem to have an excellent balance between appreciating the craziness of the left and understanding its limits.

For all the talk of how the best students from Africa might overpower African-Americans, it would be nice to see a single such former student who actually contributed in a major way to Western civilization.

Where are the scientists, the thinkers, the writers, the entrepreneurs?

What were her SAT or ACT scores, one wonders?

The dog isn’t barking.

OT, well known environmentalist Eric Turkheimer proudly displays his totalitarian colors:

https://twitter.com/ent3c/status/1387070086469627909?s=20

So a journal whose very name is Journal of Controversial Ideas must publish only articles which someone on the editorial board will publicly agree with.

The man is an out-of-control control freak. He will tell you what you are allowed to think about.

It’s a very good thing to see such a journal appear in philosophy, which has been fully under the thumb of identity politics.

The paradox, of course, is that philosophy historically, and by its very nature, questions basic assumptions. Any discipline that suggests that we might all be brains in a vat ought to have room to entertain the idea that some groups are, on average, genetically different from others on a social trait.

I can’t think of another academic journal that is so explicitly pitched toward controversial ideas. Quillette seems so designed for the more general intelligent public. Philosophers ought to be well trained to do some of the more intellectual and foundational work.

It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. I wonder what kind of contributors it will attract. One hopes that pseudonymity will draw out a number of philosophers who have, to date, mostly bitten their tongues.

The admixture studies cited are of course interesting, but the overall number is impressively small.

If a scientist had an interest in the evolution of human beings, admixture studies would be the natural first method to which he (or she!) would turn. Admixture studies of ancient peoples tell us a lot about how those peoples migrated, merged, split, or supplanted. But the other side of evolution is the selection of traits, and we can’t easily recover that information from long gone people. We can rather directly assess average differences in traits by looking at existing groups, measuring their phenotypes, and comparing via admixture.

Admixture studies are by far the most direct way to do this. Other methods, such as comparing SNPs underlying traits, are limited by difficulties in assessing SNPs across groups. SNPs across groups often don’t capture the same effects. The linkage disequilibrium for a given SNP may be quite different in different groups. And a good deal of heritability is found in rare variants, typically rare variants of negative effect. These variants are not likely to be the same across groups — they are likely, instead, to be “private” to a group.

Admixture studies can estimate the full differential effect of all variants, rare or common, and across LD structures, on a trait. If you want to understand how human groups have evolved, which traits have evolved, admixture studies are the go-to method. The results can bracket what may be found by techniques examining variants.

That admixture studies aren’t already standard and extensive demonstrates how much science has already been forestalled by ideological concerns.

One area in genetics that seems to me to be very much underexplored because of the toxicity of belief in group differences is admixture studies.

The genetic composition of the blacks in the US creates an almost perfect setting in which to explore the differential effects of genetics on long separated human groups. Blacks in the US vary in the amount of European ancestry they carry — and the amount they do is basically cryptic to them. This should allow convincing studies as to the effects of genes vs. the environment on many important human traits — not just such things as IQ, but also the panoply of other traits, such as disease susceptibility, development, etc. which are of natural scientific and practical import. Likely, admixture studies are by far the most direct and best way to approach these issues. And of course admixture studies are a staple technique in an area of genetics which is free (so far) of toxicity: studies of ancient genetics and ancient peoples.

How much glory — after much initial scorn — awaits those who pursue such approaches?

“My strength is not that I’m smarter, it’s that I’m more willing to offend the crowd.”

Ambitious scientists and intellectuals should take Watson’s statement as a guiding principle, if it is lasting achievement they seek.

How much important and original science and thought lies undiscovered today because researchers refuse to entertain obvious but currently toxic hypotheses?

If one is willing to take as a premise that groups differ on average in significant ways, what new insights in genetics, political theory, moral theory, sociology, psychology, economics, and history, become possible — perhaps even easy?

I think a more accurate statement would be that young people no longer seek to defy authority.

I live in a very left leaning area, and a common bumper sticker from not so many years ago was “Question Authority”. I never see that sticker anymore.

I suspect anyone who displayed it would today be liable for cancellation.

Not sure what it means to say that young people no longer aspire to be cool.

Being non-binary is cool. Purple hair is cool — ask the female staffer who accompanied Blinken to the diplomatic meeting with China. She showed the world how cool she was, and Blinken allowed it to show the world how cool he was.

It is my observation that Jews tend to be outspoken.

Seriously?

Here I disagree with you.

We haven’t heard much about Creationists in a long time, at least not among the cultural powers that be. Creationists are mostly considered a long defeated enemy. It’s as dated an issue as gay marriage, or defense of gays, rather than transgenders. It hasn’t taken much time for the interests of actual gays — such as Andrew Sullivan — to be thrown under the bus. A new cultural battle is to be won.

I see Darwin as having served his purpose for the left. He is ready to be reviled.

Makes you wonder if the royal family has ever done DNA tests on its members. You’d think that an enterprise based exclusively on genealogy would want to know exactly what its true genealogy might be, even if it keeps it secret from the public.

Equity, coming in fast and hard from the Democrats:

The so-called Justice in Policing Act, introduced by Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., is being touted by the Biden administration as necessary to solve “systemic misconduct — and systemic racism — in police departments.”

“To make our communities safer, we must begin by rebuilding trust between law enforcement and the people they are entrusted to serve and protect. We cannot rebuild that trust if we do not hold police officers accountable for abuses of power and tackle systemic misconduct — and systemic racism — in police departments,” the White House said in a statement.

Section 311 of the act identifies that officers who pull over certain identity groups, such as more black men than black women, will be defined as a “prima facie evidence” violation. If men are found to speed at higher rates than women in a given region, for example, a police department would technically be in violation of the act. The Justice in Policing Act also calls for racial quotas for “traffic stops,” “pedestrian stops,” and “interviews.” In essence, departments would be forced to deal with all people equitably, which would fundamentally contradict the notion of equal justice in a free and fair society.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/04/the-sole-republican-to-vote-in-favor-of-the-george-floyd-bill-did-so-accidentally/

What could go wrong?

I used to be quite skeptical myself of the importance of the results described in Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow. But I’ve become very much persuaded that they are indeed quite basic and of great consequence.

The point isn’t whether Kahneman is “tricking” us into coming to the wrong conclusion in cases like Linda the bank teller. It is that we seem to have an extraordinary and powerful attraction to thinking in terms of representativeness rather than of pure logic. In this sense, Kahneman’s results might be understood as demonstrating just how easy it is for people to be tricked in this particular way — how much more inclined we are on average to leap to the intuitive, but wrong, conclusion rather than the logical one. Much of his work involved finding just how far this could be pushed before we finally succumb to logic — just how explicitly the correct logical inference had to be featured before most people would concede that the logical conclusion was the right one. Some of his more extreme examples make this clear.

And it’s not trivial in cases like decisions in sports. Certainly it was initially very hard for many managers in baseball to think in terms of the actual statistical results rather than prototypes.

I do wish that the SC would be handed a number of cases in which these issues are paramount.

I can’t see any reason they shouldn’t rule on how these clauses are to be interpreted.

What are they there for, if not for that?

Maybe cabalistic is the better word here.

While I’m quite the ignoramus on music theory, the description of Schenkerian analysis sounds a lot like Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar, with deep structures and surface manifestations.

But, as with Chomsky, the question seems to be, how much of the deep structure is real, and how much an ornate illusion?

For an outsider, both seem a bit, well, Talmudic.

On McNeil’s Wikipedia page, I find this sentence:

He left The New York Times in 2021 following public reports of making racist remarks, including use of the word “n****r”, during a 2019 trip to Peru with high school students.

where the so-called n-word is actually spelled out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_McNeil_Jr.

So it’s a cancelable act to quote or mention the word in conversation, but OK to write it out in a setting as public — and as woke — as Wikipedia?

Show me the man, and I’ll find you the thought-crime.

Of course, The Name That Shall Not Be Spoken in the Times continues: Steve Sailer.

One of the problems I have with Scott Alexander is his refusal to entertain at any length the possibility that there exist between group differences on socially relevant traits.

I get, of course, how much more “toxic” that topic is than those he does consider.

But, in the end, if it is truth you seek, how do avoid such a basic, consequential truth? How do you understand a world in which this fact plays such a pivotal role, and, indeed, is figuring larger and larger over time?

Our current culture is simply built upon the dogmatic belief in the opposite. If you do believe that all differences between groups are socially constructed, on what grounds, other than procedural, can you reject attempts to right disparities in outcome by blunt, even gross corrections? Isn’t something like Critical Race Theory nearly unavoidable if you believe that all groups are the same, except for environment? What, other than some great, systematic, structural oppression, could explain the deep disparities we see?

The agnostic views of Scott Alexander and company are really helpless to understand these issues, or to correct them. He and they must instead point out the downsides and limitations of, say, Affirmative Action without addressing the full force of the arguments in its favor. I don’t see this to be an effective way of opposing them in the long run, nor does it allow a deep understanding of how the world really works.

If you wish to understand the world, you need to start from true premises, and follow them to true conclusions. That’s the only way knowledge can be advanced.

I found this tweet illuminating of the difference between Brady and Mahomes:

Here are the path's that Patrick Mahomes (top) and Tom Brady (bottom) took before pass attempts in shotgun during tonight's #SuperBowl

Red: complete
White: incomplete pic.twitter.com/TLFEOxzwhr

— Michael Lopez (@StatsbyLopez) February 8, 2021

How hard would it be to cheat on the Wonderlic, if so inclined? Aren’t there answers one could memorize?

I could see players in certain positions wanting a higher score, and agents or insiders happy to oblige them.

And I could see some players wanting to game it so that it doesn’t come out too high or too low.

I think it’s probably going to be pretty hard to make a convincing case as to the efficacy of the vaccine by subtle arguments as to relative rates of infections, hospitalizations, or deaths across segments of the population. It would require careful controls not possible to impose.

But in the end the numbers must come out in the large statistical wash at the end of the vaccinations. Fortunately, Israel will almost completely vaccinate its over 60 population within a few weeks, and, within a few weeks after that, the downstream effects should show up.

If the efficacy of the vaccines is anything like what the trials found, the results should be obvious and incontestable. The numbers should be something like an order of magnitude lower, and should stay there pretty much for the duration.

I counsel patience. We will get some clarity soon.

Moderna has greater side effects, but I wonder if that doesn’t come with greater benefits, which have yet to show up in the statistics.

They did have a more challenging set of volunteers, with representative sets of over 60s and minorities, than did Pfizer. So equal point estimates of efficacy might indicate better efficacy for Moderna. Also, as I recollect, among those vaccinated, Pfizer had 1 serious case among 11 cases, whereas Moderna had 0 serious cases among 30.

The really important numbers for serious cases and deaths were, within the trials, too small to support strong conclusions in the comparison.

But we may see a measurable payoff in the large numbers of the real world. And it’s also possible that the higher dosage in Moderna may have a payoff in fighting mutations.

Time, and only time, will tell.

I’m sure I’ll regret this, but I’m curious about which of the numbers in this tweet you seriously dispute:

For those of you keeping score at home

26 million Americans are known to have had COVID
420K of them died from COVID

29 million Americans have gotten COVID vaccines
0 have died from COVID vaccines

When it comes to generating immunity

vaccine > infection

Easier, way way safer

— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) January 30, 2021

Even if these numbers are pretty far off — say, the exact number of deaths due to covid, or the exact number of infected — doesn’t the point remain?

One thing odd about the numbers being reported by JJ is the relative efficacy between US cohorts and those in SA, 72% and 57%. That’s a dropoff, of course, but far less dramatic than the dropoff reported in the Novavax vaccine, 89% to 60%, between UK and SA cohorts.

Now I assume that UK has mostly been similar to the US in the tractability of the virus — the UK version has shown no greater resistance to vaccines than has the original version, from what I’ve gathered.

But the ratio between, say, 11% infection rate and 40% is obviously dramatically different from the ratio between 28% and 43%. If one applies the ratios to the 5-6% of infected from the mRNA vaccines, one gets vastly different numbers — one quite troubling (app 20%), the other (app. 8-9%) not.

That’s an original, deep, and persuasive book.

It seems to me that there’s another point to add to your analysis, namely, the likely effect of a slow vaccine rollout, especially as considered globally.

If, say, all mRNA vaccines were administered very quickly, the likelihood of a new strain able to escape them would be much lower, under the assumption that it would require a number of mutations in order to escape the vaccine.

If the vaccinations were to occur very quickly, then, under the pressure of selection against the vaccine, each of the required mutations might evolve separately among the 100s of millions of vaccinated people. But they would not have a chance to combine, because they would run out of potential targets. Yet if the vaccine is rolled out slowly, then each mutation might spread to a large number of people, who can then incubate another required mutation, until, at some point, all of them are present, and the virus strain can escape the vaccines entirely.

Anyway, this is a possibility I’ve been worrying about lately.

Here’s some further data for Israel, which may or may not be compatible with what’s reported above:

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/israel-shows-promising-results-from-pfizer-vaccination-campaign-657051

In this article, Maccabi reports that 66 (of 248,000) got Covid a week or later after their second dose. I suppose that the increase of numbers may reflect a greater length of average time after the second dose for the group.

It’s a little hard to make out in the graph, and the data are quite limited, but the number of hospitalizations overall seem to have taken a greater dip — it peaks at 2.3%, following the rise in the number of cases, but goes down to 0.3% on the final day reported.

I wonder if we see this because the most vulnerable — perhaps the oldest — patients were given the vaccine first, and are much overrepresented among the 60,000 vaccinated, and now much less frequently need hospitalization.