The Igon Value of Intelligence

Steven Pinker bitchslaps Gladwell:

What Malcolm Gladwell calls a “lonely ice floe” is what psychologists call “the mainstream.” In a 1997 editorial in the journal Intelligence, 52 signatories wrote, “I.Q. is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic and social outcomes.” Similar conclusions were affirmed in a unanimous blue-ribbon report by the American Psychological Association, and in recent studies (some focusing on outliers) by Dean Simonton, David Lubinski and others.

Gladwell is right, of course, to privilege peer-reviewed articles over blogs. But sports is a topic in which any academic must answer to an army of statistics-savvy amateurs, and in this instance, I judged, the bloggers were correct. They noted, among other things, that Berri and Simmons weakened their “weak correlation” (Gladwell described it in the New Yorker essay reprinted in “What the Dog Saw” as “no connection”) by omitting the lower-drafted quarterbacks who, unsurprisingly, turned out not to merit many plays. In any case, the relevance to teacher selection (the focus of the essay) remains tenuous.

Actually, depending on the blog, you might be better off to bet on it over the average peer-reviewed article. "Peer-review" is just a sciency name for what is more commonly known as "editing". And you have only to look at a newspaper to see that no amount of editors necessarily precludes egregious errors of fact and logic. But otherwise, yeah. Gladwell is a twit. Sure, he's sold a lot of books, but then, so did whoever wrote "Who Moved My Cheese" and "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie". Does anyone seriously ascribe intellectual relevance to those best-selling authors?

Steve Sailer follows up Pinker's stake-and-garlic with a beheading, showing that Gladwell isn't just a twit, he's apparently a clueless and cowardly little bitch as well:

Without admitting it, Gladwell seems to have given up former position that NFL achievement "can't be predicted," there's "no connection," etc. etc. He now seems to be saying that, when you take into account the higher pay of higher draft picks, NFL teams aren't economically optimizing their draft picks, which is a wildly different thing.

NFL teams aren't economically optimizing their draft picks! I'm sure Detroit fans will be SHOCKED... as are those who have suffered through seasons of the Tarvaris Jackson Experiment (2nd round, 2006). Gladwell obviously pays zero attention to professional football or he could not have possibly have written this: "And what Berri and Simmons in particular—and Massey and Thaler in general—remind us is that that kind of blind faith in the likes of Matt Millen and Al Davis simply isn’t justified."

Yes, because there were just massive legions of fans in Detroit and Oakland with blind faith in Davis and Millen.... For crying out loud, why do some people find it so impossible to admit that they're wrong even when smart people are rubbing their noses in their mistakes in the national media? Everyone is wrong from time to time. Absolutely everyone! I despise those who try to move the goalposts once they've been cornered and proven wrong; are they so stupid that they genuinely believe that no one is going to notice that what they're saying now is not what they were saying before?

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AGW/CC travesty confirmed

There isn't any science to support the outrageous conclusions driving Kyoto and Copenhagen. None. Cram this statement from one of the leading IPCC scientists down the throat of the next idiot you hear using the term "global warming denier":

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong.
- Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a lead author of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC Scientific Assessment of Climate Change

Here's another one: "I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline."

The so-called scientists know their models are wrong. They know the global warming they predicted isn't happening. And yet they are trying to keep it quiet, so that all the credulous science fetishists who believe wholeheartedly in the "science" won't lose faith in the cause and pull out the scientific supports from the global governance scheme. Speaking of which, here's another: "One particular thing you said - and we agreed - was about the IPCC reports and the broader climate negotiations were working to the globalisation agenda driven by organisations like the WTO."

This is confirmation that AGW/CC is indeed what I said it would turn out to be, namely, The Biggest Science Fraud Yet. Of course, if the climate scientists had one-tenth the integrity that the fetishists claim they do, it wouldn't have been necessary to learn what they really think about the matter from a whistleblower releasing hacked emails.

Ian Wishart's Investigate Magazine confirms the emails are real(4.1 meg PDF):

The director of Britain’s leading Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, has told Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition tonight that his organization has been hacked, and the data flying all over the internet appears to be genuine. In an exclusive interview, Jones told TGIF, “It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.”

We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it."

In a word: awesome! Whoever did this merits knighthood by the Legion of Doom.

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Multiculturalism in Minnesota

I tend to suspect the reported "racial tensions" aren't actually about race. There were certainly never serious problems of this sort at North, South, Washburn, or Roosevelt when I was in school and there was not exactly a shortage of brothers there:

Racial tension has been building at Owatonna High School this week after a fight broke out Monday between white and Somali students, prompting heightened police presence, backpack searches and widespread parental worries. Owatonna Police Chief Shaun LaDue said between six and 15 officers have been assigned this week to the school, which usually uses one liaison officer.

Principal Don Johnson said the problems began when two white students wrote papers in recent weeks that were "inflammatory and very disrespectful." One student handed out copies of his paper to friends, while the other posted his on a class blog. Both were suspended from the school of 1,600 students -- about 100 of whom are Somali.

Johnson said that before the second student returned to school Monday, the student sent text messages over the weekend to white and Somali students that were "unapologetic and in your face." He then walked into a common area Monday where more than 20 Somali students were gathered and sat down. An altercation erupted that sent one of the white students to the hospital for observation.

Isn't it lovely to see such vivid cultural vibrancy filling what was once a pallid and boring German-Scandinavian enclave! It's such a pity that the Somali students can't be left alone to prepare for their future jihads in peace. Of course, given the reported bomb threat, perhaps they won't even bother returning to Somalia before detonating themselves.

UPDATE: The only reasonable answer is to deport the criminal aliens. If they are so desperate for excitement, there is plenty to be found in their homeland. Given Minnesota carry laws, it's only a matter of time before one of the foreign idiots attacks the wrong individual and gets blown away. At which point, no doubt the Star & Sickle will run the usual sob story about the tragic end of the dead imported thugfine, upstanding example of foreign vibrancy just trying to live the American dream. And, of course, the need for gun control.

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Overselling swine flu

I've been wondering about swine flu since the time the English papers were full of panic-stricken reports that a perfectly healthy child had died of swine flu. Upon reading the details, it became clear that she had only died of it after first suffering through the medical equivalent of getting run over by a truck twice:

If you've been diagnosed "probable" or "presumed" 2009 H1N1 or "swine flu" in recent months, you may be surprised to know this: odds are you didn’t have H1N1 flu. In fact, you probably didn’t have flu at all. That's according to state-by-state test results obtained in a three-month-long CBS News investigation.

What I don't understand is why the medical authorities seem so determined to see an epidemic of one sort or another take place. First bird flu, now swine flu, and in two years time we'll probably be instructed to quake with fear over the lethal dangers posed by Malaysian Spitting Frog Flu. I've never seen anything like the media coverage of medical matters like the last five years. Even the height of the AIDS scare was nothing like this.

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Is that really a good thing?

Chad the Elder writes of the new conservative critic-in-chief:

It might seem unlikely that a man who was born in Quebec, trained as a psychiatrist, once a speechwriter for Walter Mondale, and a writer for the New Republic would become one of the foremost conservative critics of the Age of Obama. But fate has worked in favor of conservatives in the case of Krauthammer and we're fortunate to have his voice leading the resistance.

While I think Krauthammer is a less obtuse individual than most of the big op/ed names, I think the constant elevation of non-conservatives to positions of conservative leadership in the media is one reason that the conservative movement continues to find itself in such intellectual disarray. Why are they so reluctant to elevate those who are genuine conservatives and have always been genuine conservatives rather than liberals who belatedly claim to have seen the light?

But the fact that Krauthammer may be reliably correct in his analysis of Obama doesn't mean that his ideology is reliably compatible with the conservative grass roots, and indeed, I note that he supported TARP even if he subsequently turned against the automotive bailouts. He has also been generally supportive of the neocon's world democratic revolution, which is a profoundly non-conservative position of zero national interest to Americans. So, if Krauthammer does, in fact, become the chief voice of the ideological opposition, I suspect conservatives will once again find themselves regretting what was always more of a temporary alignment of anti-Obama interests rather than genuine ideological opinion leadership.

This isn't a criticism of Krauthammer. He's just doing his job and I'm merely pointing out what I think to be the obvious. Conservatives need actual conservative leadership and they need to stop settling for liberals, neocons, and nominally reformed liberals as their intellectual leaders. My feeling is that anyone who supported the banking bailouts, much less dismissed opposition to them as "know-nothingism" should be completely disqualified from any sort of conservative leadership, opinion or otherwise. If you're capable of falling for demands for money from the cynical Chicken Littles of the world, you're far too much of a naif to be a conservative leader.

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Al Gore commits an Igon error

As I have said many, many times before, AGW/CC is a complete crock of steaming bovine ejectus. The "scientists" who subscribe to the theory are either corrupt, ignorant, or ideologically supportive of global governance and this will become increasingly obvious to everyone over time. So, it should come as no surprise that the leading AGW/CC salesman should demonstrate that he has very little grasp of temperature as his numbers are off by an order of magnitude:

Conan: Now, what about … you talk in the book about geothermal energy …
Al: Yeah, yeah.
Conan: and that is, as I understand it, using the heat that's generated from the core of the earth …
Al: Yeah.
Conan: … to create energy, and it sounds to me like an evil plan by Lex Luthor to defeat Superman. Can you, can you tell me, is this a viable solution, geothermal energy?
Al: It definitely is, and it's a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy — when they think about it at all — in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, 'cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot …

The interior of the earth is actually somewhere between 3,700 and 6,000 degrees Celsius, depending upon the estimate. Needless to say, this suffices to show that no intelligent individual should pay any attention whatsoever to Al Gore's statements about planetary temperature, past, present, or future. Everyone makes mistakes, but in this particular case, as with Gladwell's infamous Igon Value, the nature of the error indicates the degree of the ignorance.

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Krugman and the babysitting coop

Paul Krugman loves to use the story of the baby-sitting coop told in an article published by Joan and Richard Sweeney in the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking in 1978 and has repeatedly recycled it, all the while failing to understand that it is a very poor analogy for the American economy and that the lessons he draws from it are false. I have updated and modified it to explain what is actually going on in the U.S. economy as well as to show why Krugman's proposed solution - print more money - cannot possibly work:

Twenty years ago I read a story that changed my life. I think about that story often; it helps me to stay calm in the face of crisis, to remain hopeful in times of depression, and to resist the pull of fatalism and pessimism....

A group of people (in this case about 150 young couples with congressional connections) agrees to baby-sit for one another, obviating the need for cash payments to adolescents. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement: A couple that already has children around may find that watching another couple's kids for an evening is not that much of an additional burden, certainly compared with the benefit of receiving the same service some other evening. But there must be a system for making sure each couple does its fair share.

The Capitol Hill co-op adopted one fairly natural solution. It issued scrip--pieces of paper equivalent to one hour of baby-sitting time. Baby sitters would receive the appropriate number of coupons directly from the baby sittees. This made the system self-enforcing: Over time, each couple would automatically do as much baby-sitting as it received in return. As long as the people were reliable--and these young professionals certainly were--what could go wrong?

Well, it turned out that there was a small technical problem. Think about the coupon holdings of a typical couple. During periods when it had few occasions to go out, a couple would probably try to build up a reserve--then run that reserve down when the occasions arose. There would be an averaging out of these demands. One couple would be going out when another was staying at home. But since many couples would be holding reserves of coupons at any given time, the co-op needed to have a fairly large amount of scrip in circulation.

Now what happened in the Sweeneys' co-op was that, for complicated reasons involving the collection and use of dues (paid in scrip), the number of coupons in circulation became quite low. As a result, most couples were anxious to add to their reserves by baby-sitting, reluctant to run them down by going out. But one couple's decision to go out was another's chance to baby-sit; so it became difficult to earn coupons. Knowing this, couples became even more reluctant to use their reserves except on special occasions, reducing baby-sitting opportunities still further.

In short, the co-op had fallen into a recession.

Since most of the co-op's members were lawyers, it was difficult to convince them the problem was monetary. They tried to legislate recovery--passing a rule requiring each couple to go out at least twice a month. But eventually the economists prevailed. More coupons were issued, couples became more willing to go out, opportunities to baby-sit multiplied, and everyone was happy.

Later in the article, Krugman goes on to explain how the coop's "central bank" can manage the coupon supply to prevent couples intent on staying in from accumulating too many coupons and acquire coupons on loan if they found it necessary to go out more often than they'd planned. But what he fails to anticipate is the situation where the coop board has provided lots and lots of coupons to the various couples in anticipation of their future use for an extended period of time. In short, he fails to account for the possibility that the "recession" is not caused by a coupon shortage, but rather by the limits of babysitting demand.

There are three limits to the demand for babysitting coupons, one physical, one practical, and one psychological. The physical limit is that a couple cannot possibly make use of more than seven evenings-worth of coupons per week since that is the maximum number of evenings they can go out and leave the children home. The practical limit is the financial resources the couple has to spend on going out, and the psychological limit is based on the amount of the couple's desire to actually spend evenings with their children. If, in a given time period, any of these three limits are exceeded by the amount of the coupons distributed or loaned out to the couple, the couple will not make use of them regardless of how many more coupons they are given. Therefore, it should be obvious that any decline in the amount of going out that is based on one of these three limits of demand cannot be solved by simply distributing more coupons for babysitting.

In fact, for the coop, the correct policy prescription is to do exactly the reverse of what Krugman is recommending. Not only should more coupons not be distributed, but all coupon distribution should stop so that people can use up the coupons they have. Coupons given out on loan should be either repaid or simply cancelled; more coupons can be distributed once people have used up their existing supply and actually require more babysitting.

Note: the fact that babysitting coupons are less fungible and important to the coop than money is to a national economy means that one cannot concoct an example of the Austrian business cycle utilizing this analogy. The coupon supplier is not causing the problems here; they are exogenous to the coupon supply. But, this invocation of the material and immaterial limits of demand should demonstrate that Krugman's analogy is not necessarily relevant to the present economic situation, and to the extent that it can be shown that the American consumer has exceeded the limits of his demand, it shows that his conclusions are demonstrably inapplicable.

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Malcolm Gladwell is a whiny little liar

His hapless attempt at CYA isn't going to convince anyone who isn't already foolish enough to take the silly man seriously:

It is always a pleasure to be reviewed by someone as accomplished as Stephen Pinker, even if—in his comments on “What the Dog Saw” (Nov. 15)—he is unhappy with my spelling (rightly!) and with the fact that I have not joined him on the lonely ice floe of IQ fundamentalism. But since football has been on my mind these days, I do want to make one small observation about his comments.

In one of my essays, I wrote that the position a quarterback is taken in the college draft is not a reliable indicator of his performance as a professional. That was based on the work of the academic economists David Berri and Rob Simmons, who, in a paper published the Journal of Productivity Analysis, analyze forty years of National Football League data. Their conclusion was that the relation between aggregate quarterback performance and draft position was weak. Further, when they looked at per-play performance—in other words, when they adjusted for the fact that highly drafted quarterbacks are more likely to play more downs—they found that quarterbacks taken in positions 11 through 90 in the draft actually slightly outplay those more highly paid and lauded players taken in the draft’s top ten positions. I found this analysis fascinating. Pinker did not. This quarterback argument, he wrote, “is simply not true.”

I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof” of the connection between draft position and performance is, I’m sure Pinker would agree, crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl.

First, describing an eigenvalue as an "Igon Value" is not a spelling error, it's strong evidence that you don't know what the hell you are writing about. It's like an economist writing about Gross Domestic Prada; the nature of the mistake reveals the full extent of the ignorance. Second, as Steve Sailer points out, Gladwell did not write "that the position a quarterback is taken in the college draft is not a reliable indicator of his performance", instead he claimed that there was "no connection between where a quarterback was taken in the draft... and how well he played in the pros." This clearly reveals that Gladwell is not only ignorant of eigenvalues, but of the NFL as well. Yes, JaMarcus Russell sucks, as anyone with half a brain knew he would, but it's not hard to note that the distribution of the excellent young quarterbacks in the league, from Eli Manning, Phillip Rivers and Ben Rothlisberger to Matt Ryan and Joe Flacco, was not random throughout the draft as it would be if Gladwell's thesis was correct. When it's Gladwell vs Football Outsiders, who are you going to believe?

Third, Pro Bowls are a perfectly reasonable measure of NFL excellence, the players' voting bias towards past performance notwithstanding. More importantly, though, it's only one of several measures that Sailer has cited, all of which demonstrate Gladwell's ridiculous assertion to be false. And fourth, Gladwell's attack on Sailer as a source for Pinker is nothing but a naked genetic fallacy and suffices to show what a scrawny little slimeball he is.

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Three RGD reviews

Vox Day's Return of the Great Depression is an short, ambitious book which attempts to make a case that the mainstream economists are very wrong about where things are headed economically, and more importantly that we are headed towards another depression which will be worse than the first. While technical subject matter by nature it is written in a readable style and peppered personal anecdotes, pop culture references, and some humor.... In all an excellent, if too short of a book, which one would do well to read and decide for oneself which way the economic winds are blowing.
- J. Simonsen

Interest in economics appears to be inversely proportional to the strength of the economy. When wealth seems to be expanding--when houses can be bought, flipped, and resold quickly and at great profit, or when IPOs of Internet startups make everyone involved filthy rich--only contrarians and pessimists question the soundness of what is universally regarded as a good thing. But when the boom turns to bust, it becomes imperative to understand where things went wrong.... If Saint Bernanke and his fellow central bankers have actually ended the current recession, government intervention will see a boost of popular support, while the doomsayers, Day among them, will be justly ignored. On the other hand, if Day is correct, the coming depression presents an opportunity to diminish the role central bankers, bureaucrats, and politicians play in the economy. A freer, more prosperous world depends on radical adjustments to the structure of our economic system. Although the picture it paints is rather dark, RGD ultimately provides a useful blueprint for a better economic future.
- Eric Jackson

Excellent book on the financial crisis with unique perspectives you are unlikely to find anywhere else. I enjoyed this book for the way it elucidates the major perspectives on the crisis, including Keynesian, monetarist, and Austrian economic theories, the latter being the author's preference. The book critiques much of the mainstream thinking on the crisis, with a particular emphasis on our favorite Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. I now feel I will be able to read Krugman's columns with more understanding, but not with any less exasperation!
- Heather Veinott

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Where is the money?

Here's something I wish I'd been able to devote some space in RGD. Where is all the stimulus money? Where is the TARP money? Consider the non-defense Federal expenditures plus Federal investments in the most recent GDP report.

3Q08 $344.7 billion
4Q08 $355.4 billion
1Q09 $356.0 billion
2Q09 $362.1 billion
3Q09 $368.4 billion

So, according to the GDP reports, non-defense government spending has increased only $23.7 billion despite the fact that we know $700 billion was spent in the banking and automotive bailouts and at least $336 billion was spent in the Bush and Obama stimuli to date. Where is it? Why does it not show up in the GDP reports as government expenditures or anything else? Even if items such as the automotive bailouts are considered loans, it should have showed up as expenditures by Chrysler and GM. And moreover, the $100 billion in TARP loans to bailed-out corporations that went bankrupt should be written off as an expenditure since they're never going to be repaid.

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