One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman

Friday, February 7th, 2020

Human Diversity by Charles MurrayAfter discussing proto-feminist Mary Astell (in Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class), Charles Murray discusses other early feminists. Most first-wave feminists didn’t concern themselves with innate differences, but Kate Austin did, as this quote illustrates:

“We know that at birth the feet of the little baby girl were straight and beautiful like her brothers, but a cruel and artificial custom restrained the growth. Likewise it is just as foolish to assert that woman is mentally inferior to man, when it is plain to be seen her brain in a majority of cases receives the same treatment accorded the feet of Chinese girls.”

George Bernard Shaw had this to say:

“If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot—because they have never seen one anywhere else.”

This first wave of feminism led to a second wave, with a different emphasis:

After the great legal battles of first-wave feminism had been won during the first two decades of the twentieth century, a new generation of feminists began to devote more attention to questions of nature versus nurture. The result was second-wave feminism, usually dated to the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe, a massive two-volume work published in 1949.

[...]

“On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.” One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

Posted in Policy | 6 Comments »

Amman had been imprisoned for terror-related offenses

Friday, February 7th, 2020

On Streatham High Road in London, a terrorist stabbed two pedestrians — and then was shot by police. There were armed police right there, on the scene? Why, yes, there were:

Press reports quickly identified the stabber as Sudesh Amman, a 20-year-old whose radical beliefs were well-known to authorities. Amman had been imprisoned for terror-related offenses and was slated to serve three years. But he was released early in late January after doing only about half that time behind bars.

According to the Deputy Assistant Commissioner (DAC) of the Metropolitan Police Service Lucy D’Orsi, Amman was being followed on foot by armed officers as “part of a proactive counter-terrorism surveillance operation.”

The counter-terrorism detail quickly shot him dead after he started stabbing at civilians at around 2pm in the afternoon London time.

DAC D’Orsi explained that Amman had been imprisoned for “Islamist-related terrorism offenses.” He was wearing a “hoax device” that was evidently intended to confuse authorities and others.

But the security detail called in “specialist explosives officers and additional armed officers to deal with the potential threat that” the device posed. They quickly determined it was a fake explosive device.

Three people were hospitalized as a result of the attack, two of whom Amman assaulted and a third was wounded “by glass following the discharge of the police firearm,” according to DAC D’Orsi.

Earlier today, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the stabbings, describing Amman as one of its fighters.

Posted in Crime, War | 2 Comments »

If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves?

Thursday, February 6th, 2020

Human Diversity by Charles MurrayBefore discussing the biology of gender, the first topic of Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, Charles Murray discusses proto-feminist Mary Astell and her twist on Locke’s famous assertion — “If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves?” :

If Astell’s language seems extreme, consider: An English woman at the time Astell wrote and for more than a century thereafter rarely got any formal education and had no access to university education, was prohibited from entering the professions, and lost control of any property she owned when she married. She was obliged to take the “honor and obey” marriage vow literally, with harsh penalties for falling short and only the slightest legal protections if the husband took her punishment into his own hands. Men were legally prohibited from actually killing their wives, but just about anything less than that was likely to be overlooked. When the first wave of feminism in the United States got its start at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, women were rebelling not against mere inequality, but against near-total legal subservience to men.

Posted in Policy | 16 Comments »

Can you draw a bicycle?

Thursday, February 6th, 2020

We overestimate our ability to explain how things work. Cognitive psychologist Rebecca Lawson at the University of Liverpool measured how well people understand how everyday objects work using the bicycle:

I have given the test to over 200 students and parents coming to Open Days at the University. Over 96% had learnt to cycle as children with a further 1.5% learning as adults and less than 3% never having learned. Also 52% of this group owned a bicycle. Sadly, the figures on actual cycling were low, with just 1% cycling most days, 4% cycling around once a week and 9% cycling about once a month. The vast majority either never cycle (52%) or rarely do so (33%). Nevertheless, even for these non-cyclists, bicycles are a common sight. Secondly, if Rozenblit and Keil are correct, people should greatly over-estimate their understanding of how bicycles work because bicycle parts are visible and they seem to be simple, mechanical devices.

Draw a Bicycle Figure 1

I first asked people to draw a bicycle and I then asked them to select which of four alternatives were correct for the frame, the pedals and the chain, see Figure 1. I used the multiple choice test to check that errors that people made were not just due to problems with drawing or in my judgement of the accuracy of their drawings, see Figure 2.

Draw a Bicycle Figure 2

I looked at three types of errors which would severely impair the functioning of a bicycle (see Figure 3 for examples of all three):

1. drawing the frame joining the front and back wheels (making steering impossible)

2. not placing the pedals between the wheels and inside the chain (the pedals were sometimes drawn attached to the front wheel, the back wheel or dangling off the cross-bar)

3. not putting the chain around the pedals and the back wheel (these errors were almost all because people drew the chain looping around both the front and the back wheel of the bicycle)

Draw a Bicycle Figure 3

It seems that many people have virtually no understanding of how bicycles work. This is despite bicycles being highly familiar and most people having learnt how to ride one. Most people know that turning the pedals drives one or both of the bicycle wheels forward, but they probably understand little more than this.

[...]

One last thing: unexpected sex effects. One finding that I was not looking for jumped out from the data. There were huge sex differences with females making many more errors than males.

[...]

Thus, at least for frame and chain errors, females make around twice as many errors as males. It could be argued that this is still a matter of experience. It is likely that boys cycle more than girls so many males who currently rarely cycle may have, over their lifetime, seen and used more bicycles than females. However the sex difference is even more extreme for those who claim to cycle around once a month, once a week or most days.

[...]

Not only do male non-cyclists make fewer errors than female non-cyclists, they also make fewer errors than female cyclists; whilst male cyclists make almost no errors.

Posted in Education, Science, Technology | 23 Comments »

This won’t deter critics from saying it’s all pseudoscience

Wednesday, February 5th, 2020

Human Diversity by Charles MurrayDespite his experience co-writing The Bell Curve, Charles Murray went ahead with Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class:

I’m also at a point in my career when I’m immune to many of the penalties that a younger scholar would risk.

He thought he was careful with The Bell Curve, and it wasn’t enough — if only because no one read the book before attacking it. He has tried being careful again:

Almost all of the findings I report are ones that have broad acceptance within their disciplines. When a finding is still tentative, I label it as such. I know this won’t deter critics from saying it’s all pseudoscience, but I hope the experts will be yawning with boredom because they know all this already.

Posted in Policy, Science | 1 Comment »

Mr. Hoare began his post-war career as an accountant

Wednesday, February 5th, 2020

“Mad Mike” Hoare, the mercenary leader of the Wild Geese, has died at age 100:

Born in India to Irish parents, he led campaigns in the Congo in the 1960s that earned him fame at the time, and a controversial legacy years later.

[...]

After serving in the British Army during the Second World War and reaching the rank of major, Mr Hoare began his post-war career as an accountant, running several small businesses in South Africa.

But it was in 1961 that he was introduced to Moïse Tshombe — a Congolese politician and businessman who would go on to become prime minister of the Congo three years later.

In 1964, Mr Tshombe hired Mr Hoare to take on the communist-backed Simba rebellion.

When the campaign was completed 18 months later, Mr Hoare and his unit of mercenaries — which he nicknamed the “Wild Geese” — were internationally known.

His fervent anti-communist beliefs earned him no fans in many nations, with East German radio regularly describing him as “that mad bloodhound Hoare”. This led to him being nicknamed “Mad Mike” — a moniker with which he was delighted.

In 1978, a mercenary adventure film called The Wild Geese was released. The film starred Richard Burton as Colonel Allen Faulkner, a character based heavily on Mr Hoare.

[...]

Mr Hoare spent his final years in South Africa, and published several memoirs — including Mercenary, The Road to Kalamata, and The Seychelles Affair.

The Road to Kalamata is available on Kindle. Congo Mercenary, The Road to Kalamata, and The Seychelles Affair are all available on Audible.

Posted in Media, War | 1 Comment »

Both sons also later attempted suicide

Tuesday, February 4th, 2020

Human Diversity by Charles MurrayEarly in Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, Charles Murray notes that:

The explicit rejection of a role for biology in the social sciences occurred from the end of the nineteenth through the beginning of the twentieth centuries, with the leading roles played by Émile Durkheim in sociology, Franz Boas in anthropology, and John Watson in psychology.

I didn’t immediately recognize John Watson. He was the American psychologist who established the psychological school of behaviorism — and I think he had his reasons:

Watson was born in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, to Pickens Butler and Emma Kesiah (née Roe) Watson. His mother, Emma Watson, a very religious woman who adhered to prohibitions against drinking, smoking, and dancing, named Watson after a prominent Baptist minister in hopes that it would help him receive the call to preach the Gospel. In bringing him up, she subjected Watson to harsh religious training that later led him to develop a lifelong antipathy toward all forms of religion and to become an atheist. His alcoholic father left the family to live with two Indian women when Watson was 13 years old (a transgression which Watson never forgave).

[...]

Despite his poor academic performance and having been arrested twice during high school (first for fighting, then for discharging firearms within city limits), Watson was able to use his mother’s connections to gain admission to Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina.

[...]

John B. Watson married Mary Ickes, a sister of Harold L. Ickes, while he was in graduate school. They had two children, also named John and Mary Ickes Watson. The younger Mary’s husband was Paul Hartley, and their daughter is the actress, bipolar disorder advocate, and founder of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Mariette Hartley.

John B. Watson’s wife Mary later sought divorce due to his ongoing affair with his student, Rosalie Rayner (1898–1935). Watson’s affair had become front-page news during divorce proceedings in the Baltimore newspapers. Mary Ickes Watson, his wife, had searched Rayner’s bedroom. She discovered love letters Watson had written to Rayner. In October 1920, Johns Hopkins University asked Watson to leave his faculty position because of publicity surrounding the affair.

After the divorce was finalized, Watson and Rayner married in 1920 in New Jersey. They remained together until her death in 1935. John and Rosalie had two children, William Rayner Watson (1921) and James Broadus Watson (1924), and they raised them with behaviorist principles that John believed in. Like their half-sister, Mary, both sons also later attempted suicide. William died of suicide in 1954.

Posted in Science | 4 Comments »

Pest managers are 30 years ahead of oncologists

Tuesday, February 4th, 2020

Pest managers are 30 years ahead of oncologists:

Robert Gatenby, the co-founder of Florida-based Moffitt Cancer Center’s new Center of Excellence for Evolutionary Therapy, is a pioneer in the field and driving the bulk of the work in the U.S. on adaptive therapy. He is also a co-author on a small, pilot study, with initial results published in 2017 in Nature Communications, that showed that patients lasted at least 27 months on average without their tumors growing, compared with the usual 16.5 months, while receiving less of the same drug.

Dr. Gatenby, who had a background in physics before going into medicine, often points to pest control to describe therapy, and others in the field have picked up the analogy as well. In pest management, managers often don’t try to eliminate all of the insects but instead reduce their numbers, keeping the spray-sensitive bugs around to compete against the resistant bugs. Pest management developed the technique after overusing insecticides, which eliminated most of the insects. But some resistant bugs came crawling back.

Adaptive Therapy for Cancer

Posted in Science | 2 Comments »

Patrick Mahomes became the NFL’s best quarterback by refusing to specialize in football

Monday, February 3rd, 2020

Patrick Mahomes became the NFL’s best quarterback by refusing to specialize in football:

At Whitehouse High outside Tyler, Tex., Patrick Mahomes did not think of himself as a quarterback first, if at all. He told inquiring coaches his favorite sport was whatever was in season. He started at point guard as a freshman and quietly harbored a dream to play for Duke. He pitched and played shortstop for the baseball team and turned down a signing bonus after the Detroit Tigers drafted him. He played defensive back as a freshman and didn’t earn the starting quarterback position until early in his sophomore year.

[...]

He used his developmental years to cultivate a broad spectrum of tangible and intangible athletic capabilities. He gained a profound, intrinsic sense of how to wield his body in competition. He learned how to be the best quarterback by not playing quarterback.

[...]

Had Mahomes chosen to specialize, it is likely he never would have become a quarterback — his father, Pat Mahomes Sr., was a major league relief pitcher, and Mahomes’s best early success came as a pitcher.

The selection process isn’t the only benefit of waiting. Epstein said that several studies have shown athletes who play multiple sports require less time to become elite in the game they ultimately choose.

“[This] seems particularly to be true for athletes who play multiple ‘attacking’ sports,” Epstein wrote in an email. “That is, anything that requires you to build anticipatory skills — the perceptual expertise that allows you to react faster than your reflexes would allow because you’re essentially seeing things unfold before they actually happen.”

In Mahomes’s most luminous moments, a direct line can be drawn to the sports he played as a teenager in the winter and spring. He completes passes from various arm angles with precision, a skill Mahomes said he honed manning shortstop. He zings throws under pressure or without looking at his intended target, a feat he once made routine on the hardwood.

“We welcomed teams to press and trap us when he had the ball,” said Ryan Tomlin, Mahomes’s high school basketball coach. “He would throw no-look, diagonal passes across the court to a spot to where he knew a player was going to end up being. Which is exactly what I watch him do today. He’s just seeing things really before they happen, and he knows who’s going to be where, and he knows where the ball is going to be. Just things you can’t teach.”

Mahomes was an unselfish point guard with an unorthodox jump shot who managed to score when needed, a sneaky defender who, Tomlin said, was “fast without being fast.” He would often get out of position on defense, but Tomlin trusted Mahomes to sneak behind a ballhandler and make a steal. Mahomes credited basketball with enhancing his spatial awareness.

“You can tell by his vision he’s played basketball,” Chiefs quarterback coach Mike Kafka said.

When Mahomes reached the NFL, he leaned on footwork and technique picked up on the diamond. His proficiency at off-platform and across-body throws, he said, traces back to baseball. The bubble screen is a staple of Kansas City’s offense, and the play requires a quarterback to make a rapid-fire throw laterally, without even gripping the football’s laces, in a move similar to turning a double play in baseball.

[...]

Mahomes’s unusual style scared off college recruiters and, later, teams in the draft. What some NFL scouts and executives saw was a raw quarterback with unorthodox mechanics and shoddy footwork. What those evaluators missed was a genius athlete who understood his biomechanics on a deep level after developing, to his benefit, outside the Quarterback Industrial Complex.

[...]

Mahomes sat his rookie season behind Alex Smith, but he validated Veach’s evaluation immediately. During training camp, Mahomes led Kansas City’s third-string offense against its third-string defense. His performance quickly became legend.

“It was like a phenomenon with Pat, where we run back to dorms and we would put the threes vs. threes on just because we wanted to see the throws he was making,” Veach said. “That doesn’t happen. You have training camp dog days. The veterans, they’re in the tent and they’re watering down. The vets would stand there … to watch the kid go against the threes. You knew you had something.”

David Epstein makes a similar point in Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.

Posted in Education | 3 Comments »

It felt like the political classes in high school in China

Monday, February 3rd, 2020

While researching the future of America’s contest with China, Evan Osnos visited Joan Xu, an American screenwriter with an office at a WeWork downtown:

She wore a slate-blue silk shirt and jeans, and handed me coffee in a mug with a WeWork slogan: “Do what you love.” Xu’s parents emigrated from China to the U.S. to attend graduate school in economics. She was born in Pittsburgh and raised in Maryland. “I grew up in white suburbs with other lawyers’ and professors’ kids,” she said. In 2003, when she was fourteen, the family moved to Beijing. Her mother became a professor at Peking University, and Xu entered a prestigious middle school, where she had to catch up by learning to read and write Chinese. “Before that, I was very much single-culture,” she said. “Now we were memorizing poems written two thousand years ago. That was just mind-blowing to me, coming from an American education, where two hundred years is old.”

After high school, she returned to the U.S. to attend Harvard, where she sang in an a-cappella group and reëmbraced American life. In her application, she described wanting to be “a U.S.-China bridge” who might bring the countries closer together. “Everybody was, like, ‘Oh, this is great,’ ” she said. She loved Harvard, where she majored in political science, but a tone in her classes surprised her. “My sophomore tutorial was themed ‘Democracy.’ It was basically a whole year of every famous professor coming in and giving a lecture about why democracy is the only legitimate form of governance.” She told me, “It felt like the political classes in high school in China, where everyone knows it’s propaganda. It didn’t encompass the world I’d known.”

Xu moved back to Beijing in 2012, and eventually started working on co-productions between Chinese and American filmmakers. “It was, like, ‘Oh, this is the future! The two greatest countries producing culture together.’ ” Her optimism has since waned. “It has become pretty clear in the last few years that the Hollywood-China co-production is not a thing. It still happens financially; it just didn’t happen creatively.” A breaking point came in 2016, with the release of a historical fantasy called “The Great Wall,” directed by Zhang Yimou; it starred Matt Damon as a warrior with Chinese comrades, all fending off monsters. In the hype preceding its release, the producer hailed it as “a new kind of film.” Afterward, USA Today judged it “a complete train wreck.” Xu told me, “No one has attempted to do a large-scale creative collaboration like that again.” She went on, “It was already, conceptually, about as middle ground as a blockbuster had gotten. So, it was just, like, ‘O.K., there is no middle ground. Culturally it’s just too different.’ ” Chinese audiences will watch Chinese movies, or American blockbusters, but the combination doesn’t work.

Xu still wants to be bicultural, but she finds it increasingly difficult to combine both sets of values. “All of my friends who are similar to me in Beijing, in every one of our industries, ‘U.S.-China’ is not a thing anymore,” she said. “We’re basically seen as just China people now.”

Xu told me she is “pro-China,” and I asked what she meant. “Most people who are within the sphere of the West kind of reflexively look at China and see, ‘Oh, wow, totalitarian dictatorship, oppression, no human rights, suffering.’ Just evil, right? To be ‘pro-China’ is simply to realize that’s not right; there is much more going on. It’s not perfect, but it’s just simply an alternative system.” She went on, “I would say that the ideals of human rights are not bad to aim for, but it’s not a universal, God-given thing. It was something that was consensus-driven at a certain point in Western history. If you look at Chinese social progression, things are genuinely getting better for most people, despite the problems. It’s more of a battle of narratives about values.”

Posted in Education, Policy | 9 Comments »

The point is to make you look like a monster

Sunday, February 2nd, 2020

Most people tolerate the unpleasant ramifications of the status quo because they’re used to them, Bryan Caplan notes:

“What if a poor person gets sick, doesn’t have insurance, and can’t get friends, family, or charity to pay for treatment?”

“What if an elderly person gets defrauded out of his entire retirement and the perpetrator vanishes into thin air?”

“What if a child is starving on the street, and no one voluntarily feeds him?”

“What if someone just can’t find a job?”

If you’re a libertarian, you face what-ifs like this all the time.  The point, normally, is to make you say, “Tough luck” and look like a monster.  What puzzles me, though, is why libertarians rarely ask analogous questions.  Like:

“What if Congress passes an unjust law, the President signs it, and the Supreme Court upholds it?”

“What if the government conscripts you to fight in an unjust war, and you die a horrible death?”

“What if a poor person drinks and gambles away his welfare check?”

“What if the government denies you permission to legally work?”

“What if the President decides your ethnicity is a national security risk and puts you in a concentration camp, and the Supreme Court declares his action constitutional?”

“What if a person lives an extremely unhealthy lifestyle, so by the time they’re retired, they’re in constant pain no matter how generous their Medicare coverage is?”

“What happens if a President lies to start a war, and voters don’t particularly care?”

Once you start the what-if game, it’s hard to stop.  Name any political system.  I can generate endless hypotheticals to aggravate its supporters.  The right lesson to draw: Every political perspective eventually has to say “Tough luck” when confronted with well-crafted what-ifs.  There’s nothing uniquely hard-hearted or cruel about libertarianism.  Defenders of democracy, nationalism, liberalism, conservatism, the American Constitution, and social democracy all eventually sigh, “Life’s not fair,” or “Well, what do you want me to do about it?”

Posted in Economics, Policy | 8 Comments »

Just respect it and respect China

Saturday, February 1st, 2020

When Evan Osnos started studying Mandarin, twenty-five years ago, China’s economy was smaller than Italy’s:

It is now twenty-four times the size it was then, ranking second only to America’s, and the share of Chinese people in extreme poverty has shrunk to less than one per cent. Growth has slowed sharply, but the country still has legions of citizens vying to enter the middle class. It is estimated that a billion Chinese people have yet to board an airplane.

[...]

To a degree still difficult for outsiders to absorb, China is preparing to shape the twenty-first century, much as the U.S. shaped the twentieth. Its government is deciding which features of the global status quo to preserve and which to reject, not only in business, culture, and politics but also in such basic values as human rights, free speech, and privacy.

[...]

For nearly a century, the U.S. has been the dominant military power in the Pacific, as it has in much of the world. Xi sees this as an unacceptable intrusion. “It is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia, and uphold the security of Asia,” he has said. To achieve that, China has strengthened its military to the point that Pentagon analysts believe it could defeat U.S. forces in a confrontation along its borders.

The most anticipated moment of the day was the début of a state-of-the-art missile called the Dongfeng-41, which can travel at twenty-five times the speed of sound toward targets more than nine thousand miles away, farther than anything comparable in the American arsenal. Watching the missile roll by, Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of the Global Times, a nationalistic state newspaper, tweeted, “No need to fear it. Just respect it and respect China.” Hu, a seasoned provocateur, added a sly jab at the travails of democracy: above a picture of the missile, he wrote that China was just fine forgoing the “good stuff” of electoral democracy on display in “Haiti, Libya, Iraq and Ukraine.”

Posted in Economics, Policy, War, Weapons | 20 Comments »

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