"If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community."

"They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value."

Says University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, quoted in this John Tierney piece in the NYT, which gets pretty good if you read past the first half. The first half invites mockery for being so head-slappingly obvious. Glenn Reynolds already wrote just about exactly the post I was about to write. I might have gone even shorter, though. "Duh" is shorter than "Indeed." So, yeah, conservatives are so radically underrepresented in academia that it can't be mere chance.

But let's skip into the middle of the piece and think about the mechanisms of exclusion, these "sacred values" that displace scientific thinking. Haidt notes the example of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, back in 1965, who "warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks" and "was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist."

Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.”

According to Tierney, Haidt's audience of social psychologists "seemed refreshingly receptive to his argument."

A few even endorsed his call for a new affirmative-action goal: a membership that’s 10 percent conservative by 2020. 

Affirmative action? Why not just stop giving affirmative action to liberals? I think that would get you way above the 10% quota... if you could do it. Ironically, talking "affirmative action" is inherently off-putting to conservatives. It's more of those sacred values from the tribal-moral community that ward off outsiders.

***

Here's Haidt on Bloggingheads, back in 2008, talking about the social psychology of conservatives and liberals. And here's Haidt's "Your Morals" website project about morality and political ideology.

How to know everything you need to know.

I overheard this snippet of conversation today, as I was walking down State Street here in Madison, Wisconsin. 2 college-age guys, one in shorts. (The temperature is in the 20s.)

"Where's Mount Everest?"

"Seattle?"

"Did you say Seattle?!"

"Uhh..."

"I think it's in India somewhere."

"I don't care."

Now, there's wisdom in this ignorance. Is there not? As long as you don't care about whatever it is you don't know, you've got perfect intellectual equilibrium. You know everything you need to know. Unshakable wisdom. Sublime.

"Study: Many college students not learning to think critically."

Not surprising.

Many of the students graduated without knowing how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument or objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event, according to New York University sociologist Richard Arum, lead author of the study....

I'd like a study analyzing whether the professors know how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument, and objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event.

Howard Gardner, a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education known for his theory of multiple intelligences, said the study underscores the need for higher education to push students harder.

"No one concerned with education can be pleased with the findings of this study," Gardner said. "I think that higher education in general is not demanding enough of students — academics are simply of less importance than they were a generation ago."

But the solution, in Gardner's view, shouldn't be to introduce high-stakes tests to measure learning in college because, "The cure is likely to be worse than the disease."

Hmm. Continuing my refocus to the failings of the teacher, let's analyze the critical thinking skills of Harvard professor Howard Gardner. Faculty ought to push students harder, but not resort to high-stakes testing? Why not? What's "likely" to be worse about that solution? Gardner blathers out some verbiage in pseudo-response to the study. He sounds as though he just knee-jerk hates the pressure of exams. Presumably, it has something to do with his famous theory of multiple intelligences, but I wish he'd be honest and specific about why he thinks these things.

How about adding to the list of "intelligences" the capacity to evade critical thinking without getting caught?

"Why are liberals more intelligent than conservatives? Because liberalism is 'evolutionarily novel.'"

Says the evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa:

[Kanazawa's study] showed that young adults who identified themselves as "very liberal" had an average IQ of 106 while those who identified themselves as "very conservative" had an average IQ of 95.

"The ability to think and reason endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions. As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognise and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles," Dr Kanazawa said.

Humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends. Being liberal and caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.

Evolutionary psychologists certainly have a lot of leeway to explain anything that they see in the data and to pick the explanation that pleases them the most.

The study is of young adults. Intelligent young adults might be liberal because they are going to better schools, and schools promote the liberal world view. What happens when these intelligent folks — and they're not that intelligent! — get a little older?

The linked article summarizes the material in the book "Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire-- Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do." I read that book a while back. It's pretty interesting.

A thought experiment on intelligence and the presidency.

A hypothetical: The next President of the United States will be chosen from the group of individuals with whom you have worked in your field — your colleagues/co-workers. (I'm especially interested in hearing from law professors!) Assume there is a method that allows these individuals to be ranked from most intelligent to least intelligent. You cannot look at this list, but you are assured that the ranking is accurate. The President will be chosen randomly from one segment of this list, and you have been given the power to choose a segment constituting 10% of the individuals on the list. That 10% will be the pool for what will be a random drawing. What do you choose? The top 10%?

"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee..."

"... to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years."

"Can Bacteria Make You Smarter?"

"Mycobacterium vaccae is a natural soil bacterium which people likely ingest or breath in when they spend time in nature...."

"See, for example, the words of former Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska: 'If [the Pledge] was good enough for the founding fathers, its [sic] good enough for me....'"

Those words appear in Palin's Gubernatorial Candidate Questionnaire, Eagle Forum Alaska, July 31, 2006. In his dissenting opinion in the new 9th Circuit case upholding the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance, Judge Reinhardt cited Palin's words in a footnote in support of the proposition that "some individuals" don't know their history:

For many Americans, the current version of the Pledge is the only version they have ever known. Some individuals not familiar with our political history may even be under the impression that its language dates back to the founding fathers.

Orin Kerr sees the hand of a smartass clerk:

I think it’s notable when a federal court of appeals judge with a well-established political view picks up a meme from political blogs and pokes fun at a politician on the other side in a pretty gratuitous way. It also screams “law clerk idea.” If you don’t think that’s notable, then I suppose we’ll just have to disagree.

A Kerr commenters defends Palin. DrGrishka says:

Reinhardt’s citation is misleading. The question to which Sarah Palin responded read:

11. Are you offended by the phrase “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?

The answer was

Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance

It could be that she gave a stupid answer in which the “it” referred to the Pledge itself. That would be historically inaccurate. But the “it” could have just as easily referred to the phrase “under G-d.” If so, the answer would be completely plausible as founding fathers used such phrases all the time.

And Palin's task at hand was to be an effective political candidate, and that is not about parsing the question and saying the most technically correct thing. People who assume they are smarter than Palin need to perceive the contextual dimension of intelligence. Are you smart at doing the thing you are currently trying to do or smart in the abstract? Because life is not in the abstract, and the people who are smartest in the abstract are not the ones who win political power. Reinhardt/his law clerk was overconfident, perhaps, in his own intelligence and failed to pay attention to the context in which he was operating, a judicial opinion. Fortunately, the political process is pretty good at filtering out individuals afflicted with this form of stupidity. But if they have life tenure, as judges do, we are stuck with it. And yet, Reinhardt needed votes too, and here we see he is writing in dissent, having lost.

Another commenter, footnoter, says:

What a sad reflection on Reinhardt. When a judge gets to doing this, it’s past time to hang up the spurs.

On the topic of a 133-page dissent with its own table of contents, on a rather simple issue, I’m reminded of EZ Rider’s dictum: “simple arguments are winning arguments; convoluted arguments are sleeping pills on paper. . . . when judges see a lot of words they immediately think: LOSER, LOSER. You might as well write it in big bold letters on the cover of your brief”

[I]magine if Judge Bybee or Justice Scalia said “we have 50 states– a fact unknown to some Americans in power” with a footnote saying “see, e.g., President Obama’s remarks he had visited ’57 states.’”

What if the other side had done the equivalent? That question pops up so often these days.

"[T]he key to understanding David Brooks is that he hates the culture war."

"But when he says the 'similarities are more striking than the differences,'" Jonah Goldberg thinks "he gets it backwards. The differences are more striking than the similarities."

The Tea Partiers, fundamentally, love America. The hardcore New Lefters, simply, did not.

Towards the end, Brooks offers  this rhetorical flourish:

...both the New Left and the Tea Party movement are radically anticonservative. Conservatism is built on the idea of original sin — on the assumption of human fallibility and uncertainty. To remedy our fallen condition, conservatives believe in civilization — in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages and structure individual longings.

Some Tea Partiers may get all sorts of things wrong. No doubt conspiracy theories find fertile soil at Tea Party rallies. But unlike the New Left, they do not believe in starting over with a plan hatched from a new cultural avant-garde. They believe in getting back to basics. They take the founding, the Declaration and the Constitution seriously....

For years — decades — I've found insight into the way other people think with the simplification that there are 2 kinds of human minds: Those that focus on difference and those that focus on similarity. I think most people, like Jonah, figure things out by observing and heightening the ways in which things are different. We're taught to pursue that tendency from an early age. Think of the kindergarten/"Sesame Street" quizzes asking which of these things is not like the other. But the skill of likening things to others is also useful. Perhaps it should be encouraged by repurposing those old quizzes and asking kids: If you had to explain why all these things are alike, what would you tell me? And then you could grow up to be David Brooks.

"Who do you think made the first stone spear? That wasn't the yakkity yaks sitting around the campfire."

"It was some Aspberger sitting in the back of a cave figuring out how to chip rocks into spearheads. Without some autistic traits you wouldn't even have a recording device to record this conversation on."

Said Temple Grandin to the Wall Street Journal, which is, presumably, responsible for misspelling Asperger.

I mean, really, Aspberger? What is it? Cleopatra's last meal?

Ah! I am distracted by a worm! We all have our mental quirks and orientations, and the point is: The world benefits from the diversity of human minds. I'm inclined to tap out endless assorted bloggings to the web, and Temple Grandin's precursor chips away at stone and invents the spear.

Grandin opposes the "handicapped mentality" some people take toward kids with Aspergers:

"When I see these kids with 150 IQ and their parents want to put them on Social Security [disability], it drives me nuts." These kids "will come up to the book table and start talking about 'my Aspergers.' Why don't you talk about becoming a chemist, or a computer programmer, or a botanist?"

She continues: "It's important to get these autistic kids out and exposed to stuff. You've got to fill up the database." Silicon Valley and the tech companies are like "heaven on earth for the geeks and the nerds. And I want to see more and more of these smart kids going into the tech industry and inventing things—that's what makes America great."

Ms. Grandin lives in a simple apartment in Fort Collins, Colo., and has used the profits from her books to put students through school. "Four PhDs I've already done, I'm working on my fifth right now. I have graduate students at Colorado State—some of them I let in the back door, like me: older, nontraditional students. And I've gotten them good jobs."

"You know what working at the slaughterhouses does to you? It makes you look at your own mortality."

"When I was younger I was looking for this magic meaning of life. It's very simple now," she says. Making the lives of others better, doing "something of lasting value, that's the meaning of life, it's that simple."

So Aspergers is not just an aptitude for designing technical things. It also opened a different path into morality.

"hate audio books where women speak man's part."

This is a Google search that brought a couple readers to my blog — to a post that wasn't about being annoyed when female audiobook readers do the dialogue of male characters. But it's a good topic for discussion! I too hate the way female readers — especially the really dramatic ones — do male voices. They macho it up ridiculously. I have an audiobook of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" — read by Emilia Fox — and the male characters all sound so brutish. Some of that is in the text, but I'd like the text to speak for itself.

"No; my heart's as numb as a potato, my penis droops and never lifts its head up, I dare rather cut him clean off than say 'shit!' in front of my mother or my aunt... they are real ladies, mind you; and I'm not really intelligent, I'm only a 'mental-lifer'. It would be wonderful to be intelligent: then one would be alive in all the parts mentioned and unmentionable. The penis rouses his head and says: How do you do? -- to any really intelligent person. Renoir said he painted his pictures with his penis... he did too, lovely pictures! I wish I did something with mine. God! when one can only talk! Another torture added to Hades! And Socrates started it."

I'd rather try to figure that out without a woman trying to sound like the man who would say that.

"Is Conservatism Brain-Dead?"

Eh. The question should be: Is it any more brain-dead than everything else? It's not as if the liberals running the government have a coherent and compelling intellectual foundation under them.

I miss Carl Sagan.

I miss Carl Sagan. I miss Carl Sagan.

***

For one thing, I don't see Tyson writing something like this:

There is a very nice self-titering aspect to cannabis. Each puff is a very small dose; the time lag between inhaling a puff and sensing its effect is small; and there is no desire for more after the high is there. I think the ratio, R, of the time to sense the dose taken to the time required to take an excessive dose is an important quantity. R is very large for LSD (which I've never taken) and reasonably short for cannabis. Small values of R should be one measure of the safety of psychedelic drugs. When cannabis is legalized, I hope to see this ratio as one of he parameters printed on the pack. I hope that time isn't too distant; the illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.

(Read the whole thing — and don't assume I'm endorsing it. I'm not.)

***

Oh my God, Becky
Look at his cerebellum, it is so big!...

If you graduated from college at age 17, would you go to law school?

The story of Kate McLaughlin, who didn't go straight to law school. She waited until she was 19.

So why do we worry about McLaughlin’s decision to go to law school? Perhaps we shouldn’t. She certainly seems interested in social causes: “I’m an idealist; I want to change the world,” she said. “I bleed blue; I’m a Democrat. I’m an ardent feminist. I’m big on LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) rights – Prop. 8 was a big issue for me.”

At the same time, she says being a lawyer isn’t at the top of her to-do list. Rather, she wants to be a science fiction writer. “Writing and reading are my passions,” she said. “I get the most riled up discussing fiction.”

And on law school, she says: “I’m worried I’ll hate law school because it will take up too much of my time on things I’m not interested in.” McLaughlin, who keeps a blog, will take out student loans to pay for Northwestern.

Shouldn't we all do what gets us "most riled up" — what interests us? But if you love and excel at writing and you want to "change the world," law school is a fine choice. And a legal education could be the foundation for a fiction-writing career... perhaps even science fiction writing.

Whatever. It's her choice. It must be weird to be a teenager and have the Wall Street Street journal and the legal blogosphere opining about something you decided to do.

And here's her blog, evilprodigy. Sample:

I'm a writer. First and foremost, I'm a writer. I write fantasy, science fiction and horror: specifically, I most often write historically based fantasy set in 1820s England -- because the world needs more historical fantasy that takes the messed-up and oligarchic nature of European imperialism seriously rather than further celebrating how wonderful and clever it was to be rich and pretty and white and rich in the 19th century, and clever, and witty, and rich, and pretty. Also because I like cravats, otherworlds and Judeo-Christian myth. I love fantasy. I love comics: I love fantasy comics, DC's Vertigo imprint and many of its titles being near and dear to my heart. I'm a very budding artist (possibly an embryonic artist, or perhaps a zygote artist). In other words, creativity in some form or another is my passion and my life, and has been as long as I've been old enough to know what I want out of life....

I've also had a school background of academic acceleration. And I'm Asian....

[P]eople love to dismiss the academic and professional achievements of Asian-Americans of every shape and size, and people especially love to dismiss it with the word logical. Or hard-working. Or any number of other words, and they all boil down to the same thing -- automaton. Robot. Time and time again white people dismiss the intelligence, the talent, the creativity of Asian people with these words -- "pointing out" that "Asians are only good at math," or that Asians are only good at science, and the only reason why they're good at these things is that they're Vulcans hardwired to compute (which has drastically taken away from their other human capacities, of course) -- ignoring the economic reasons why immigrant Asian families might encourage their second-gen kids to study lucrative subjects, of course, ignoring the all-around high scores. It's robotics. No other explanation. They all do math, anyway. Just human calculators. Just automatons. Just Spock, with pocket protectors and SAT academies.

I point to this astoundingly atrocious CNN article, Why right-brainers will rule this century, for an example: In "A Whole New Mind," he explains that one of the trademarks of the Conceptual Age is the outsourcing of traditional white-collar jobs such as law, accounting, and engineering to less-expensive overseas workers, particularly in Asia. But as he points out, you can't outsource creativity. Not to Asians you can't! They ain't born with it!

As you can see, as soon as an Asian starts doing something, it becomes a robot job. Even if it's the practice of law. Even if it's engineering.

My last name is McLaughlin and I have brown hair, so I have the lucky privilege of more people being willing to believe that my accomplishments are my own, that my ideas are my own, that I might actually just be a smart human being. However, my mother's last name was Kwon and I have that unlucky old friend, the epicanthic fold, so I'm still faced with legions of people willing to self-justify themselves into believing that verbal acuity is just another form of Asian Spock -- for real. People who have the nerve to say, "well, writing isn't really art." People who have the nerve to say, "well, you don't play music as an artist." People who have the nerve to say, you scored that high because you're Asian -- you skipped those grades because you're Asian -- you're good at that because you're Asian -- well, you had an Asian parent (a slavedriver) -- your mom's a tough parent (a dragon lady) -- you're Asian -- you're a robot -- you're Asian, you're Asian --

Maybe that guy scored higher than you on the SAT because he wasn't raised with the complacent knowledge that he could get into a good old boys' club whether he was Einstein or dumb as a post. Maybe that Asian engineer won the Nobel because he had a great idea. Maybe that girl has better grades than you because she deserves them. And maybe, just maybe -- maybe it doesn't take a robot to kick your lazy, self-satisfied, entitled ass to the curb anyway.

Ha ha. Excellent. Snazzy. Good luck.

ADDED: Remember when Seamus Farrow went to Yale Law School at the age of 16. What's he up to now?

Shepard Fairey — who made the famous Obama "Hope" poster — thinks the Joker Obama poster is "great."

"The artwork is great in that it gets a point across really quickly. The Joker is a sinister, evil character that can't be trusted. And if they want to make that parallel with Obama — bam."

Somehow the L.A. Times sees fit to headline the article "Shepard Fairey has 'doubts' about intelligence of Obama Joker artist." The intelligence doubt is actually a "grammar" point, that the caption should be "socialist," not "socialism," because it's a picture of a man, not his belief system. Hmmm... but Mr. Fairey, your poster of Obama has the word "Hope" as the caption. If it's an error, you made it too. If it's a sign of low intelligence, why should I listen to you, a man of low intelligence?

"Wild crows can recognize individual people. They can pick a person out of a crowd, follow them, and remember them — apparently for years."

Are you as smart as a crow? Take the test.

"We are not suggesting that finger length measurements could replace SAT tests."

"Finger ratio provides us with an interesting insight into our innate abilities in key cognitive areas. We are also looking at how digit ratio relates to other behavioural issues, such as technophobia, and career paths. There is also interest in using digit ratio to identify developmental disorders, such as dyslexia, which can be defined in terms of literacy deficiencies."

Okay, everybody, let's see your fingies.

"If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity..."

"... then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible."

(Via Jac.)

"This is how we know he is not a a New Yorker or a Jew."

David Brooks said that about Senator Jeff Sessions, "who puts on a plain old boy front but is deep down extremely sophisticated and intelligent." (Sessions is important because he's now the ranking Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and there are hearings on a new Supreme Court nominee coming up.)

So what is Brooks saying about New Yorkers and Jews?

In the long history of my people, there has never been one who was willing to appear less smart than he or she really is. We tend to go the other way.

(Why "tend to" if there has "never been one"?) That's some serious stereotyping, but presumably Brooks thinks it's perfectly fine, because he's got "my people" immunity.

ADDED: The double "a" — "a a New Yorker" — is in the original NYT text.

AND: Hey, Brooks, did you know The 3 Stooges were Jewish?

"A simple example would be the number 37, which is lumpy like oatmeal, and 111, which is similarly lumpy..."

"... but also round like the number three (being 37 × 3). Where you might see an endless string of random digits when looking at the decimals of pi, my mind is able to 'chunk' groups of these numbers spontaneously into meaningful visual images that constitute their own hierarchy of associations."

Lessons in how to think from an autistic savant. Maybe you find them useful. Maybe you don't.