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John Derbyshire muses on the difficulty of speaking with the differently intelligenced:

William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar, wrote recently about the difficulty of talking to a plumber:

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League [degrees], and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

It’s a horrifying story, but not a surprising one. This is indeed what we have come to. An acquaintance of mine, an academic in the human sciences (not Charles Murray) holds the opinion that across an IQ gap of more than one standard deviation (i.e. about 15 points), communication between two people becomes difficult, and that beyond two standard deviations it is effectively impossible.

I think this is somewhat of an exaggeration. There’s no question that crossing the intelligence chasm can be very hard, but it can be done if there is sufficient patience and respect on both sides. I doubt it has escaped the attention of many readers how often I am accused of being crazy despite the obvious trappings that indicate a high level of social functionality; these accusations mostly stem from there being a gap of three standard deviations between me and many of my critics. They simply can’t understand what on Earth I’m talking about, and because they know they are of above-average intelligence and therefore not stupid, they conclude that I must be insane.

Hence Vox’s First Law.

I didn’t formulate that law due to any Internet skirmish, by the way, but long before I first put pen to paper. The reason was that I happened to notice how almost every single person of exceptionally high intelligence I knew was considered to be more or less off their rockers by the majority of normal people of their acquaintance. Some dealt with this well, others retreated into a drug-infused shell and wound up turning the popular perception into an auto-fulfilling prophecy.

There are a number of ways to deal with the problem, my solution was to embrace an area of broad common interest, athletics. Martial arts worked out very well, since no one in the dojo cares what you think, who you are, or what you do. The only thing that matters is how good you are and how tough you are. It was a brutal janitor with broken teeth who taught me how to talk to plumbers; years later he told me that when I first walked in, he couldn’t wait to beat the hell out of this pansy-ass rich boy with a Porsche. And he did, for years, although I do remember that once, after about the twentieth time that he’d decked me with a right to the jaw, he stepped back and nodded approvingly when I pushed myself back to my feet. It was the first friendly gesture he’d made in six months.

It took me four years of training and weightlifting six days a week to reach the point where I could fight him on reasonably equal terms, although he was always the better fighter. By that time, we were reasonably friendly and we always had plenty to talk about, whether it was mocking the flashy Tae Kwon Do kickers, musing about the feasibility of adding Aikido techniques to our repertoire or trying to figure out how to deal with that damned Muy Thai centerline trap. (His brilliant solution, unsurprisingly, was to go in hard enough to send them reeling with the first shot. Of course, that works a lot better when you go 225 instead of 175.)

So, I think the problem mentioned by Deresiewicz is less about the very real intelligence gap referenced by Derb and more about the general unwillingness of the highly intelligent to grant the less intelligent the respect they deserve as autonomous individuals with their own unique interests and occupations, however boring or pointless one might find them to be.

On a tangential note, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Deresiewicz couldn’t actually speak very much to people from other countries in other languages. In addition to the “Ivy retardation” of which he speaks, there is also the “Ivy illusion”, which is the tendency of many Ivy Leaguers to vastly overrate their own individual competencies on the basis of their alma maters. From what I have seen over the last 10 years in Europe, most of the people who studied a language in college don’t really speak it.

Not with Russia and China holding the U.S. economy hostage:

Today, fully 21% of Russia’s monetary reserves are invested in the obligations of Fannie, Freddie and the Home Loan Banks. And the largest holder of Fannie and Freddie debt is another friendly foreigner, China. The middle kingdom, according to the FreedomWorks organization, owns $376 billion worth of U.S. agency bonds.

This is an interesting fact with some implications I had not considered before. It may explain the unusual combination of verbal bellicosity with total inaction that we’ve seen from the White House over the last six months. Despite the hysterical neocon lobbying for a third undeclared war, the Federal Reserve bailout guarantee would appear to ensure there will not be any U.S. attack on Iran without approval first being granted by the two largest holders of Fannie and Freddie debt. Now, it’s not hard to imagine Russia being at least open an invasion given how they’d stand to profit from a massive jump in oil prices. But the Russians are probably not keen to see a second U.S. military presence established so close to their area of influence. They’re also a long-time Iranian ally, Iran is an important buyer of Russian technology, and furthermore, there is no way that China, an oil importer, would be amenable to seeing its production and transportation expenses continue to rise. So, the logical conclusion is that the U.S. mortgage system is now hostage for U.S. behavior with regards to Iran.

Of course, this analysis relies heavily on the idea that the Bush administration would like to avoid the complete collapse of the U.S. mortgage banking system and the negative consequences of such a collapse on the U.S. economy. Given the near-complete contempt the administration has shown for the long-term health of the economy over the last eight years, this may be an unwarranted assumption.

An Israeli historian turns up the volume in an attempt to get the USA to do the dirty work on Israel’s behalf:

“Israel,” he avers, “will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months.” Either that, he writes, or else Israel will eventually have to launch “a preemptive nuclear strike.” His message to the West: take out Iran, or we’ll nuke ’em!

The Israelis have been threatening to strike for the past six months, so nothing new there, except for the tone of certainty. Morris is no fringe nut-job flailing away on his obscure blog; he’s a prominent Israeli historian writing on the most noted opinion page of them all, a veritable bulletin board for governing elites worldwide. As such, he is almost certainly speaking with some insight into Israeli government plans. It is, in any case, almost inconceivable that he wrote his piece without the foreknowledge and consent of Israeli government officials.

I have no problem with Israel defending itself, none at all. Israel has both a right and an obligation to do so. But it does not have the right to demand that the USA do its fighting for it; in fact, this reliance on the superior power of an ally has been quite often been disastrous for both the smaller and the greater ally.

The president and the neocons would be wise to resist Israeli pleas and threats, not only in America’s interest, but in Israel’s too. An Israel that is reliant upon American military force for its own defense is an Israel that is weaker than it should be.

Jaime wants to discuss today’s column on the economy:

[I]f the economic news is much worse than is commonly reported or understood, what can you do to prepare yourself for the negative climate? Unfortunately, it’s difficult to give precise recommendations at the moment, mostly because the primary question of hyperinflation or deflation remains unsettled. The Federal Reserve’s natural tendency is to pursue inflation, and certainly Bernanke’s refusal to follow Paul Volcker’s lead and aggressively raise interest rates tends to indicate higher inflation is in order. However, inflation rates have been very high for more than a decade and have only made matters worse, and there is also a school of thought which insists that deflation is inevitable even if the Fed unleashes the full power of the printing press and sends out the hyperinflating helicopters.

It’s worth noting, however, that the existing credit crunch was predicted by the deflationists, not the hyperinflationists, even though the sky high prices of oil, gold and other commodities tends to support the latter.

First PZ ran away from me. Now Richard Dawkins is running away from Dinesh D’Souza. As you may recall, this is exactly the behavior that I predicted from the New Atheists just before the publication of TIA. Now that their errors, and more importantly, the illogic they habitually use in constructing their arguments, have been methodically exposed in print, anyone with half a brain can take them apart with ease.

We’re both scheduled to discuss issues of Darwin and God on the Riz Khan Show on Al-Jazeera on Monday, July 21. Viewers who are interested can watch the show live here. The segments will also be posted on Youtube and I’ll link to them.

But a few hours after I mentioned our forthcoming debate on this blog, you posted a comment on your website essentially accusing me of making the whole thing up. So first you accuse me of having a Hitler voice, and now you accuse me of misrepresentation.

Here’s what happened. Al-Jazeera contacted me a while ago, asking me to appear in a point-counterpoint format with a leading opponent. I said I was writing about God and atheism, and suggested I appear with a prominent atheist. They chose you. Then the producer Zeresnaey Abraha confirmed that you were ready to do it. Late last week I got a studio notice from Al-Jazeera giving me the time for me to arrive at their rented San Diego studio. The other guest was listed as “Richard Dawkins” and your studio details at Oxford were given.

Apparently when you found out that the two of us were booked on the same show, same segment, you rushed to the producer to insist that we appear separately. Your pretext according to Abraha was that you have a long-standing pledge not to debate “creationists.” I can understand that you don’t want to give legitimacy to people who flatly deny evolution or who insist that the earth is less than 6,000 years old. The only problem with you invoking this pledge is that I believe in evolution and am not, nor have I ever been, a “creationist.”

Apparently the format now is that we will each be interviewed separately. So technically it’s no longer a debate, although it is most certainly an exchange of rival ideas on the same topic. It’s a pity that we cannot engage each other directly.

To be honest, I find your behavior extremely bizarre. You go halfway around the world to chase down televangelists to outsmart them in an interview format that you control, but given several opportunities to engage the issues you profess to care about in a true spirit of open debate and inquiry, you duck and dodge and run away.

Dawkins is not only a coward, but a hypocrite. He’s been quite open in the past about his willingness to debate “up” but not “down”; does anyone doubt that he’d be willing to debate a creationist if that creationist was the Pope? What he fails to realize is that his fame doesn’t give him the ability to confer legitimacy on anyone; don’t forget that Paris Hilton and Victoria Beckham are far more famous than Dawkins and Katie Price sells more books. It’s Dawkins’s own legitimacy that has been called into question, first with his shallow, error-filled book, and now with these cowardly antics intended to avoid allowing the public to learn that the godless emperor has no intellectual clothes. The New Atheism will not survive because it is completely incapable of standing up to criticism. This is becoming increasingly obvious to everyone, theist and atheist alike; all this dancing, evading, and running away only delays the day of ultimate reckoning. Of course, a small cult of personality will continue to cling desperately to the Four Horsemen and their lackeys as they continue to retreat from their critics; an ironic homage to the very religions that they so hate and fear.

Take the test. As before, I’m interested in knowing your religious self-identification: theist, agnostic or atheist. My AQ is 9, by the way. I think I scored an 11 the last time I took the test, so obviously the Nintendo Wii has made me more social.

In a post entitled “What does Vox think he will accomplish by such a bald faced lie?“, Norm Doering actually attempts to defend himself by uploading the early rough draft of the chapter I sent him for criticism onto the Internet! Perhaps some altruistic atheist might care to explain to Doering why this is simply not done before my publisher sends the lawyers after him.

I read what Vox sent me and that wasn’t it. I did a global seach on what Vox sent me and the quote on his blog post is not there. If you want to check me out on this, I have uploaded the chapter he sent me and I’ve put it up on an old spammed up yahoo groups site I haven’t bothered with in years. You’ll have to join the group to download what Vox sent me. Then you click on “files” and it will be the only file there.

Here’s what I wrote to Doering on May 20, 2007 when he offered to critique the chapter prior to publication. He never delivered the promised critique, although he twice said that he would on May 11 and May 22 last year. Note that he does NOT have permission to release the text.

Hello Norman,

Please have a crack at it and let me know which arguments you think are weak, baseless or insufficiently proven. I’d appreciate it if you’d not write anything publicly about it yet or share it with anyone, I plan to provide the complete text to those who have helped just prior to release in order to give them the first chance to blog about it.

Thank you,
Vox

Please keep in mind, this is the lunatic behavior of the atheist who is accusing me of lying due to a rough draft of TIA that was never published or released. Still have doubts about that social autism theory? And on what planet is it considered reasonable to criticize an author on the basis of an inaccuracy in a rough draft that was corrected prior to the first publication of the book? An inaccuracy, I might add, that was caught by the author himself before it was corrected since the critic never provided the critique of the rough draft that he promised.

UPDATE – I received an email from Mr. Doering, who has had the good sense to realize that publicly announcing one’s posting of material that does not belong to one isn’t the best idea and taken down his two posts relating to the matter. Unfortunately, he has still not grokked the difficult concept of a “rough draft” and stubbornly insists that I am a “bald-faced liar” who not only lied about Sam Harris, but also about Norm Doering.

All in all, a fine example of the rationality of the New Atheist.

UPDATE II – Here’s another fine one. First, Ed Drayton pulls the usual atheist stunt of asserting a judgment without providing a single example in support of the assertion – they do this because whenever they do, they are publicly shown to be wrong – and fails to notice that a) the Northern Alliance Radio Show is not my radio show, and b) a correct prediction of cowardice is not inane.

Even more amusingly, one of Mr. Drayton’s commenter adds: “If he does it he’s an evil bastard and if he doesn’t he’s a coward. This is grade-school level “gotcha” debate technique. Which pretty much sums up Vox Dipshit.” Debate technique? There is no debate, PZ ran away with his tail between his fat little legs. As for the dilemma in which PZ finds himself, caught between the Scylla of evil bastardy and the Charybdis of cowardice, that’s of PZ’s doing, not mine. Myers made his threat to present the photographed evidence “profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse” on July 8th. That was nearly two weeks ago and there’s still no sign of the promised fanfare… so if PZ’s not a coward, one can only conclude that those must be some amazingly intimidating crackers.

is an incompetent opponent. In the comments to PA’s review of TIA, Norm Doering failed to pass up a very good opportunity to avoid demonstrating his reading comprehension issues, to say nothing of the all-too-typical veracity of the vehement atheist:

Watch out for Vox. I caught him in a rather bald faced lie when I read his sample chapter on Sam Harris.

Details here on my blog post.

Don’t be so sure he is using the full quotes, he quote mines and takes things out of context. Don’t rely on him to get the real views of Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens.

Now, first of all, understand that this “bright” hasn’t actually read the book. He read an early draft of the Sam Harris chapter which I sent out to a few people in order to get constructive criticism before writing the book. That chapter, like every other chapter, saw subsequent changes made as minor errors and mistakes were caught and changed prior to the publication of the book. This is the excerpt which is the source of his ludicrous accusations:

Factual error. Harris begins The End of Faith by strongly implying that almost all suicide bombers are Muslims. Jane’s Intelligence Review reports that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who are not Muslims but a Marxist liberation front that committed 168 of the 273 suicide bombings that took place between 1980 and 2000, have historically been the leading practitioners of suicide bombing. Harris tries to cover up his blunder in the Notes section of the paperback edition by claiming that to describe the Tigers as secular “is misleading” because they “are Hindus who undoubtedly believe many improbable things about the nature of life and death.” But the Tamil Tigers themselves expressly claim secular status, a declaration supported by the fact that the recently deceased Anton Balasingham, the LTTE’s chief political strategist and ideologue, was a Roman Catholic. It’s also worth noting that slain Tigers are buried rather than cremated according to Hindu ritual. More importantly, there is no definition of “secular” that precludes a belief in improbable things about the nature of life and death or anything else, including the Labor Theory of Value, String Theory, or multiple universes.

Doering reads this and concludes: “One factoid Vox used in that early draft was to claim that it’s a “lie” or “factual error” in Harris’ book that Sam “claims” that most suicide bombers are Muslims.”

1. Doering invents an accusation of my claim that Harris is lying.
2. Doering demonstrates an inability to comprehend what he reads in failing to grasp that the factual error of which I am accusing Harris is his claim that the Tamil Tigers are not a secular organization, not his implication that most suicide bombers are Muslim.
3. Doering doesn’t notice that Harris has already conceded the point by attempting to argue that the Tamil Tigers are not secular; he never attempts to defend his original point about Islam being a uniquely correlated factor in causing suicide bombings.
4. The reason that underlies the factual error I highlighted is that theoretical correlation between suicide bombing and Islam by is extremely questionable, bordering on the downright stupid, given its problematic dependence on the irrelevant “bombing” rather than rather more salient “suicide”. That this is the result of preconceived notions is obvious given the tendency of those who subscribe to the Islamic theory to somehow include the 21 suicide attackers of 9/11 while ignoring the 3,912 tokkōtai who committed aerial suicide attacks in less than a year during 1944-45… four years after the phrase “suicide bombing” had already been used to describe a tactic used on the European front in World War II.
5. It is obviously absurd, bordering on actual lunacy, to criticize the actual published book which you have not read on the basis of an early draft that was never published. And given that Doering has not, by his own admission, actually read the book, how can he possibly state whether the quotes it contains are accurate and in context or not?

Every now and then, I find myself sitting on the deck, looking out over the sea with only a bottle of prosecco to keep me company, wondering if I truly am as stunningly intelligent as it seems. Or is it possible, I muse, that it only looks that way because my critics are so mind-bogglingly stupid.

Barack Obama may not have turned out to be post-racial after all, but he is staking a claim to be the first post-parodic presidential candidate. It’s very hard to distinguish this parody piece from the Onion on the sheer wonderfulness of Senator Obama from all the straight-faced ones in the mainstream media.

Hailed by media critics as the fluffiest, most toothless, and softest-hitting coverage of the presidential candidate to date, a story in this week’s Time magazine is being called the definitive Barack Obama puff piece.

“No news publication has dared to barely scratch the surface like this before,” columnist and campaign reporter Michael King wrote in The Washington Post Tuesday. “This profile sets a benchmark for mindless filler by which all other features about Sen. Obama will now be judged.

I’m truly beginning to hope that Obama wins. I can’t wait to see the reaction when he does for the nation what other dynamic, young black leaders have done for large American cities like Detroit. Combined with the inevitable African invasions – my guess is Zimbabwe, but Congo and Kenya aren’t out of the realm of possibility – I think an Obama presidency is probably the best hope for triggering a powerful conservative reaction capable of sweeping the neocons and Brooksian slow liberals to the side.

One of the more amusing things about this brief shining moment for secular society is the way in which its organs often ape the institutions of religious society. The latest encyclical from the American Physical Society is a case in point:

The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:

“Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate.”

Now, don’t forget to say your Hail Gores today, o ye sinners against Gaia! My favorite part of the papalAPS statement is this: “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.”.

Icontrovertible! Except, you know, for the last ten years.