Robert E. Howard and the Pacific Fleet

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

Robert E. Howard would have been 104 years old yesterday, if (a) he hadn’t killed himself, (b) none of his imagined enemies did either, and (c) he had mastered black sorcery enough to defy the ravages of time.

Unlike many modern fantasy writers, Howard had to read history and historical fiction to sate his yearnings for adventure, and he knew a thing or two about war — as evidenced by his thoughts on the Pacific fleet, which he put down in a letter to H.P. Lovecraft, in December of 1932:

Considering the Philippines — if we were allowed to fortify them, they would be a strength. As it is, they’re a weakness. Instead of being a rifle aimed at the heart of Japan (as would be the case were they fortified and a goodly portion of our Pacific fleet stationed there), they tend to divide our forces, to scatter our lines, and to subject American citizens to danger, in case of war with Japan. I think it would be a point of strategy to abandon those islands entirely, and concentrate our forces about Hawaii. That Japan would gobble them is certain, but I scarcely think they would add much to her ultimate strength, increased as it is so enormously by her grabbing of Manchuria.

The Very Flower of Enlightenment Rationalism

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

After attacking Christianity in the first volume of his Decline and Fall, Gibbon revealed himself not to be the embodiment of amoral despair, Robert Kaplan says, but the very flower of Enlightenment rationalism:

He was a conservative along the lines of his contemporary Edmund Burke, who saw humankind’s best hope in moderate politics and elastic institutions that do not become overbearing. Only rarely did imperial Rome or early Christianity display the necessary traits. Gibbon, like Burke, was shocked by the French Revolution. His Rome had also known violent mobs screaming noble platitudes in order to remove a tyrannical ruler, only to see another one set in his place.

Gibbon’s certainty that the tendency toward strife is a natural consequence of the human condition — a natural consequence of the very variety of our racial, cultural, and economic experience, which no belief system, religious or otherwise, can overcome — is reminiscent of James Madison in The Federalist. Madison, too, was convinced that a state or an empire can endure only if it generally limits itself to adjudicating disputes among its peoples, and in so doing becomes an exemplar of patriotic virtue.

Jesus Rifles

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

Years ago, while eating at In-N-Out Burger, I picked up my empty drink cup and noticed a reference to a fairly famous Bible verse — John 3:16.

In-N-Out is still a privately held company, and the Snyder family has been printing such references on their wrappers and cups for years.

Now it appears that the privately held Trijicon company has been doing the same thing — with the ACOG sights it sells the US Army and Marine Corps, for use in the counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan — Muslim countries, in case you haven’t been paying attention.

If you look carefully — very carefully — you can see that the sight’s model number includes the characters ACOG4X32JN8:12, a not-immediately-obvious reference to John 8:12 — “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” — the kind of thing a bored, Christian soldier might notice, but not the kind of thing anyone else would catch in passing.

Ah, but ABC News was there to make sure the people of Islamic world knew that American weapons had “secret Jesus Bible code” inscriptions. How responsible!

Trijicon has agreed to remove the references. I’d like them to change them to AU3:16.

(Hat tip to Todd.)

What Makes a Great Teacher?

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

What makes a great teacher?

Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve success in a poor school — like prior experience working in a low-income neighborhood — don’t seem to matter. Other things that may sound trifling — like a teacher’s extracurricular accomplishments in college — tend to predict greatness.

Great teachers constantly reevaluate what they are doing — and share four other tendencies in common:

  1. They avidly recruit students and their families into the process.
  2. They maintain focus, ensuring that everything contributes to student learning.
  3. They plan exhaustively and purposefully — for the next day or the year ahead — by working backward from the desired outcome.
  4. They work relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.

What did the best teachers have in common when they applied for the job?

Based on her own experience teaching in the Mississippi Delta, Ayotte-Hoeltzel was convinced, for example, that teachers with earlier experience working in poor neighborhoods were more effective. Wrong. An analysis of the data found no correlation.

For years, Teach for America also selected for something called “constant learning.” As Farr and others had noticed, great teachers tended to reflect on their performance and adapt accordingly. So people who tend to be self-aware might be a good bet. “It’s a perfectly reasonable hypothesis,” Ayotte-Hoeltzel says.

But in 2003, the admissions staff looked at the data and discovered that reflectiveness did not seem to matter either. Or more accurately, trying to predict reflectiveness in the hiring process did not work.

What did predict success, interestingly, was a history of perseverance — not just an attitude, but a track record. In the interview process, Teach for America now asks applicants to talk about overcoming challenges in their lives — and ranks their perseverance based on their answers. Angela Lee Duckworth, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and her colleagues have actually quantified the value of perseverance. In a study published in TheJournal of Positive Psychology in November 2009, they evaluated 390 Teach for America instructors before and after a year of teaching. Those who initially scored high for “grit” — defined as perseverance and a passion for long-term goals, and measured using a short multiple-choice test — were 31 percent more likely than their less gritty peers to spur academic growth in their students. Gritty people, the theory goes, work harder and stay committed to their goals longer. (Grit also predicts retention of cadets at West Point, Duckworth has found.)

But another trait seemed to matter even more. Teachers who scored high in “life satisfaction” — reporting that they were very content with their lives — were 43 percent more likely to perform well in the classroom than their less satisfied colleagues. These teachers “may be more adept at engaging their pupils, and their zest and enthusiasm may spread to their students,” the study suggested.

In general, though, Teach for America’s staffers have discovered that past performance — especially the kind you can measure — is the best predictor of future performance. Recruits who have achieved big, measurable goals in college tend to do so as teachers. And the two best metrics of previous success tend to be grade-point average and “leadership achievement” — a record of running something and showing tangible results. If you not only led a tutoring program but doubled its size, that’s promising.

Knowledge matters, but not in every case. In studies of high-school math teachers, majoring in the subject seems to predict better results in the classroom. And more generally, people who attended a selective college are more likely to excel as teachers (although graduating from an Ivy League school does not unto itself predict significant gains in a Teach for America classroom). Meanwhile, a master’s degree in education seems to have no impact on classroom effectiveness.

The most valuable educational credentials may be the ones that circle back to squishier traits like perseverance. Last summer, an internal Teach for America analysis found that an applicant’s college GPA alone is not as good a predictor as the GPA in the final two years of college. If an applicant starts out with mediocre grades and improves, in other words, that curve appears to be more revealing than getting straight A’s all along.

The problem, of course, it that the traits that correlate with being a good teacher correlate with being a good executive, too. Smart, motivated people are good at stuff.

Football Island

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

There’s a small community that produces more NFL players than anyplace else in America — Football Island, or American Samoa:

From an island of just 65,000 people, there are more than 30 players of Samoan descent in the NFL and more than 200 playing Division I college ball. That’s like 30 current NFL players coming out of Sparks, Nev., or Gastonia, N.C.

60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley traveled 8,000 miles to American Samoa and found a people and traditions so perfectly suited to America’s game — it’s as if they’d been waiting centuries for football to come ashore.
[...]
It’s estimated that a boy born to Samoan parents is 56 times more likely to get into the NFL than any other kid in America.

The Samoan people are big. And big is beautiful, according to Togiola Tulafono, the governor of American Samoa.

Tulafono said it’s not just size that makes the Samoans such great football players. His people come from a farming culture that prizes hard work, reverence and discipline. And he thinks that’s why scouts and coaches are pulling out their atlases.

Steve Sailer, who often writes about biodiversity, says, Now, was that so hard?

A Standard for Literary Bravery

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall sets a standard for literary bravery, Robert Kaplan says:

He sought no one’s approval and was afraid of nothing. In his day the Church was a sacred cow; he was merciless in his exposition of its evolution. According to Gibbon, Christianity — to use the words of the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in his introduction to the Decline and Fall — emerged from a “heretical Jewish sect” to become a “novel cult of virginity” and the most “persistent of the competing new Oriental superstitions,” eventually to capture power as a “revolutionary ideology.” Concerning the persecutions of the Christians, Gibbon concluded, after exhaustive documentation,
Even admitting, without hesitation or inquiry, all that history has recorded, or devotion has feigned, on the subject of martyrdoms, it must still be acknowledged that the Christians, in the course of their intestine dissensions, have inflicted far greater severities on each other than they had experienced from the zeal of infidels.

Not surprisingly, the publication of the Decline and Fall met with bitter controversy. Though the book was praised by the philosopher David Hume and others, attacks on Gibbon for his treatment of the Church were widespread and sustained: almost sixty denunciatory books about him were published in his lifetime.

Too many corporations wait too long before firing the boss

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

Too many corporations wait too long before firing the boss, Robin Hanson says:

Consider Michael Eisner at Disney, Carly Fiorina at HP, Jack Stahl at Revlon and Scott McNealy at Sun. All of these chief executive officers were kept on long past the point when a rational owner of the companies in question would have told them to leave.

Why are boards so slow to fire the chief? One reason is that they don’t have enough skin in the game. They own few shares and therefore don’t feel obligated to protect their investment from an out-of-touch boss. Besides, most of them owe their cushy jobs to the chief executive.

Hanson suggests a solution though:

Set up two new stock markets where investors would be making not outright bets on the future of a company but conditional bets. In one market the trades are consummated only if the current chief executive remains in place at the end of the current quarter. In the other market the trades are consummated only if the incumbent is bounced out by the end of the quarter. The price spread between these two markets would send a signal about whether the boss should stay or go.

The directors’ job then would be to listen to the markets, and, if a wide enough spread opens up in favor of a departure, get out the pink slip.

Hanson believes that such fire-the-CEO markets could evolve into a political tool superior to one-vote-per-person democracy — something he calls futarchy. Mencius Moldbug, no fan of democracy, is no fan of futarchy either and dismisses it out of hand as too easy to manipulate. Hanson retorts:

In the debate, I suggested we start by trying fire-the-CEO markets, and only gradually rely more on them in CEO decisions as such markets collect good track records. Moldbug seems to accept wide trading in ordinary stock markets because he doesn’t think any decisions depend on them, but strongly advises against allowing non-employees to trade in fire-the-CEO markets, due to manipulation concerns. But even a track record showing that firms which followed market advice do better on average than firms that do not would not persuade him.

In fact, Moldbug the “engineer” says no data anyone could collect in the lab or in any organization smaller than a nation would be relevant, and even with nations he doubts we’d see hidden manipulation. Nor does any data collected in the last century test his belief that the best governments are single rulers running city-sized polities with iron fists and complete discretion. It is not even clear what prior data makes his case — apparently it can’t be summarized in any concise form; you have to just read dozens of books and have a feel for it.

Not only does Moldbug know such iron fists would rule best, allow emigration, not cheat their investors, and never ever accept manipulator payola, he apparently knows this deductively, as a noble philosopher, not like we data-addicted pansy social scientists. And he has no interest in improvements in the status quo below his philosopher-deduced-best pinacle.

What more can one say to such a person?

The Entrepreneurial Personality vs. the Bureacratic Personality

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

Arnold Kling looks at the entrepreneurial personality vs. the bureacratic personality:

The entrepreneur wants to test ideas empirically. The bureaucrat wants to say “no” a priori. Large organizations need bureaucrats, because otherwise they would waste too much organizational capital (human as well as financial) trying out bad ideas. Entrepreneurs start with less organizational capital to lose, so they are the ones that you want to try out risky ideas.

Only in desperate situations will organizations turn to entrepreneurs (I am thinking of wars, when the military will dismiss some of its bureaucratic leaders and elevate some entrepreneurial ones.) Haiti looks like a desperate situation.

How much do we learn from disasters?

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

How much do we learn from disasters? Not much, Steve Sailer says:

Urban earthquakes tend to be rare enough that we forget a lot of what we learn.

In the more than a century after the catastrophic San Francisco earthquake of 1906, America has been lucky in the time and place when its quakes have hit. For example, the most urban of the subsequent earthquakes, the 1994 Northridge earthquake, killed only 72 — but not because the San Fernando Valley was all that well prepared despite the nearby 1971 Sylmar earthquake that killed 65. Instead, it happened to strike at 4:31 AM when most residents were tucked safely in bed, so the mall and freeway collapses were remarkably non-fatal.

A massive California earthquake that will kill thousands seems only to be a matter of time.

Several weeks after the 1994 earthquake, my father, who had been through major earthquakes back to the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, took a map in the newspaper of the hundreds of condemned buildings in the San Fernando Valley and showed how they matched up remarkably to an old map he found at the library of the region’s typically dry riverbeds of sand and gravel. A large majority of condemned buildings were were found in the limited amount of development build on old riverbeds. The typical apartment building that fell down was, as the Bible says, “a house built on sand.”

Similarly, the worst damage done by 1989 Lome Prieta earthquake near Santa Cruz happened in the landfill-based Marina neighborhood of distant San Francisco. An earthquake “liquefies” sand and gravel, turning solid ground into an angry sea beneath your feet.

The slump in real estate prices that followed the 1994 earthquake would have been an ideal time for the city to buy up some of the ruined buildings on the most dangerous soil and convert that land into parks, which Los Angeles is notoriously short of.

In Defense of James Cameron

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

Steve Sailer loved Terminator and Aliens, and he’s a bit of a contrarian, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when he wrote a piece in defense of James Cameron — but calling Cameron a worthy successor to the greatest American science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) strikes me as going a bit too far:

Heinlein’s thumbprints can be found all over Avatar’s pastiche of a plot. For instance, the device that launches Cameron’s scenario — one identical twin must substitute at the last minute for his brother on an interstellar voyage — is also in Heinlein’s 1956 novel Time for the Stars. Moreover, Avatar appears to borrow one of its central ideas — Pandora, a planet where the entire ecosystem is a single living network exchanging information — from the climax of Heinlein’s 1953 book for boys, Starman Jones.

Indeed, Avatar’s main plot — a human soldier teams up with a seemingly primitive but actually wise alien tribe to prevent an evil Earthling mining company from despoiling their sacred tropical homeland — an be found in Heinlein’s 1948 “young adult” story Space Cadet.

This is not to say Cameron is plagiarizing Heinlein. Rather, Heinlein’s ideas are part of the creative DNA of every artist working in hard sci-fi.

Further, Cameron is confronted with the same storytelling problem as Heinlein: they both love giant machines, but audiences don’t want to see the overdog win. Heinlein used a more convoluted variant of the Avatar plot in both Red Planet (1949) and Between Planets (1951). In these, the heroes are human settlers on Mars or Venus who enlist the admirable indigenous aliens in their fight for planetary independence from the oligarchic rulers of Earth.

In Heinlein’s books, it’s as if the American Revolution saw the American settlers allying with the American Indians to defeat King George. (The reality, of course, was closer to the opposite. As the Declaration of Independence’s reference to “merciless Indian Savages” suggests, “democracy” and “indigenous rights” are more antonyms than synonyms.) Not surprisingly, Cameron, who was born and raised through age 16 in Canada, can’t be bothered with Heinlein’s contortions, so Avatar is politically simpler than its sources in the Heinlein canon.

The Disturbing Freshness of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

Robert Kaplan discusses the disturbing freshness of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

If I could have one voice in my ear as I traveled through the Third World, with its innumerable rebellions and migrations; through Europe, as nationalism impedes unification; or through the United States, as it tries to reconstitute itself for a transnational age, the voice would be Gibbon’s, with its sly wit, biting irony, and fearless realism about an event that “is still felt by the nations of the earth.”

The collapse of Rome left in its wake the tribal configurations from which modern European states emerged, and I can think of no work that offers a shrewder historical perspective on today’s foreign and domestic news than the three volumes of the Decline and Fall that cover Rome from its territorial zenith, in the early second century A.D., under Trajan (the first and last Roman general to navigate the Persian Gulf), to the dissolution of the western half of the empire, in A.D. 476.

Those volumes offer more than just the story of Rome’s decline though:

Among other things, they constitute a general theory of history, a controversial interpretation of the birth of Christianity, an extended essay on military elites and the fickleness of public opinion, and an unequaled geographical and cultural primer on Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
[...]
The Decline and Fall instructs that human nature never changes, and that mankind’s predilection for faction, augmented by environmental and cultural differences, is what determines history. In this Gibbon was influenced by the Baron de Montesquieu, who saw history not as mere politics and ideas but as a complex of cultural, social, and climatic forces. The brilliance of the Decline and Fall lies in Gibbon’s ability to build a narrative out of individual agency and the surprises of history — such as the empire’s restoration in the third century under the able rule of Claudius, Aurelian, Probus, and Diocletian — even as the sheer accumulation and repetition of events over centuries ultimately robs many an effective emperor (each with a distinct personality early in the story) of his identity in the reader’s mind, and as the initially successful restoration flows into the larger movement of decline. Only patterns, rather than individuals, endure at the end of the three volumes.

Immigration Then and Now

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

In discussing how to help Haiti, Tino explains why opening our doors to low-skill immigrants may not be a good idea — even if it was a good idea in the past:

  • The most through and investigations of the fiscal impacts of immigration, by the prestigious National Research Council, found that low-skill immigration costs $120,000 per immigrant, in 2009 dollars. They even used the over-optimistic assumption that immigrants 100% converged to natives in 3 generations (not true empirically).
  • Low skill immigration in 1850 was not a problem, because almost everyone was low skilled, and there was a strong demand for low skilled workers in agriculture and industry. Today because of technology there is almost no demand for low skilled workers. The biggest problem in America is plight of the low-skilled underclass.
  • There was no welfare state in 1850.
  • There was no ideology of multiculturalism in 1850. People assimilated. Today immigrants do not assimilate, and are encouraged by the education system and media to keep their culture and language.
  • Transportation and communication costs made sure that only people who accepted to cut ties with their home country immigrated. This is no longer true.

Looking Beyond MCATs

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

According to a recent study in The Journal of Applied Psychology, a Big 5 personality test can predict how successful students will be in medicine:

For nearly a decade, three industrial and organizational psychologists from the United States and Europe followed more than 600 medical students in Belgium, where premedical and medical school curriculums are combined into a single seven-year program. As in the United States, the early portion of their education is focused on acquiring basic science knowledge through lectures and classroom work; the latter part is devoted to mastering clinical knowledge and spending time with patients.

At the start of the study, the researchers administered a standardized personality test and assessed each student for five different dimensions of personality — extraversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. They then followed the students through their schooling, taking note of the students’ grades, performance and attrition rates.

The investigators found that the results of the personality test had a striking correlation with the students’ performance. Neuroticism, or an individual’s likelihood of becoming emotionally upset, was a constant predictor of a student’s poor academic performance and even attrition. Being conscientious, on the other hand, was a particularly important predictor of success throughout medical school. And the importance of openness and agreeableness increased over time, though neither did as significantly as extraversion. Extraverts invariably struggled early on but ended up excelling as their training entailed less time in the classroom and more time with patients.

Of course, once applicants know which personality traits lead to success, the personality test becomes useless. You can’t fake your way through an MCAT, but you certainly can fake your way through a written personality test.

Yelp’s Beginnings

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Founded by two young engineers from PayPal — and funded by one of PayPal’s founders — Yelp did not rise from humble beginnings:

The company was, literally, conceived over lunch and funded — to the tune of $1 million — by dinnertime. At the time, Stoppelman and Simmons, who were 26 and 25, respectively, were working in a 10-person incubator created by Levchin. He instructed them to look at a handful of investment ideas, one of which was “the yellow pages for the 21st century.”

As Stoppelman and Simmons ate lunch one afternoon in the fall of 2004, they talked about building a service that would allow you to e-mail a question to your friends — for instance, “Who knows a good doctor in San Francisco?” — and then publish the results online. (The idea of allowing people to publish reviews without being prompted, which is today Yelp’s core offering, was an afterthought.) It was Levchin’s 29th birthday, and about an hour after the lunch ended, Simmons and Stoppelman approached their boss and pitched the concept. They had no PowerPoint presentation and no specific revenue plan; just a sense, Stoppelman says, that they could make something that would appeal to lots of people.

Levchin hesitated. “I wasn’t sure if it would work,” he says. “But the guys were really enthusiastic about it. And in my experience, when you have smart people who work well together, it’s foolish not to invest.” Maybe because it was his birthday — or maybe because he had made tens of millions of dollars on PayPal — Levchin agreed, investing $1 million in the half-baked idea.

During its first few months, Yelp was a failure. It attracted few readers or writers beyond the founders’ friends and family, and it did not impress the venture capital investors whom Stoppelman pitched at the end of 2004. After a few weeks of unsuccessful meetings, Stoppelman and Simmons went back to the office and set about trying to improve their product. “We got the doors slammed in our face over and over again,” Stoppelman says. “But that was lucky.” Had Yelp succeeded in raising money, it probably would have attempted a national rollout. But without any additional funding, he and Simmons had to stay local. “We said, ‘You know what? If we just create a cool city guide in San Francisco and it’s worth $10 or $20 million, that would be a win. We don’t care.’ “

The idea of talking about a $20 million exit as a mere “win” betrays a hardheadedness that is one of Stoppelman’s strengths but that can also make him seem strangely cold. Stoppelman’s analytical tendencies make his reviews almost comically dispassionate. Writing on his blog about a book he read recently, The Lives of Ants, he calls it, “an okay survey of the ant species.” A review of the clothing retailer French Connection sums it up as “clothing of medium-level quality.”

Without the cash for a national rollout, Stoppelman decided to focus on making Yelp famous locally. With the help of a buzz-marketing guru he hired on a whim, Stoppelman decided to select a few dozen people — the most active reviewers on the site — and throw them an open-bar party. As a joke, he called the group the Yelp Elite Squad.

Levchin thought the idea was crazy — “I was like, ‘Holy crap: We’re nowhere near profitability; this is ridiculous,’ ” he says — but 100 people showed up, and traffic to the site began to crawl up. Because the parties were reserved for prolific reviewers, they gave casual users a reason to use the site more and nonusers a reason to join Yelp. By June 2005, Yelp had 12,000 reviewers, most of them in the Bay Area. In November, Stoppelman went back to the VCs and bagged $5 million from Bessemer Venture Partners. He used the money to throw more parties and to hire party planners — Yelp calls them community managers — in New York, Chicago, and Boston. The company now employs 40 of these people.

As Yelp’s influence grew, bars and restaurants were increasingly willing to host the parties — which involves giving away drinks, food, and space — in the hope that the crowds would come back and write positive reviews. By the summer of 2006, Yelp had amassed 100,000 reviews and was attracting more than a million users a month. That June, the San Francisco Chronicle called it “San Francisco’s online ‘it’ guide for what’s hot and not.” Around the same time, potential acquirers came calling. Neither Stoppelman nor Levchin will discuss specifics, but they acknowledge that a large technology company offered to buy the then-30-person company in 2006. Yelp turned down the offer. “It was a tough call, and it was contentious at the board level,” says Stoppelman. “Because if we said no, we’d have to build a real company.”

When Work Doesn’t Pay For The Middle Class

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

There are definitely times when work doesn't pay:

Eighteen months after being laid off, Judith Lederman, a 50-year-old divorcee who lives in Scarsdale, N.Y., is ready to consider jobs paying half the $120,000 she earned as a publicity manager at Lord & Taylor. That’s mostly because she’s desperate, but it also makes sense when you consider how this country punishes work effort. While the first $60,000 of her income would be lightly taxed, the next $60,000 would be hit with what is in effect a 79% tax rate.
[...]
How did a middle-class single mom wind up with a 79% marginal tax rate? At $120,000 she would pay $16,500 a year more in federal and state taxes, wouldn’t qualify for the five-year $12,000-a-year cut in her mortgage payments she’s applying for and would be eligible for $19,000 a year less in need-based college financial aid.