Vox Popoli

Scientific American helps explain why so many smart people are so bloody useless:

Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability—along with confidence in that ability—is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.

The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.

Praising children’s innate abilities, as Jonathan’s parents did, reinforces this mind-set, which can also prevent young athletes or people in the workforce and even marriages from living up to their potential. On the other hand, our studies show that teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.

I don’t think this tells the whole story, but it is a relevant element of the problem. The truth is that you can’t think your way to anything; I don’t think execution and hard work is 99 percent of the equation but it is more than 50 percent. I don’t think the intelligent are actually any less averse to risk than the norm – the overwhelming majority of people won’t lift their finger if it’s not of immediate material benefit to them – I suspect that it’s the realization of opportunity cost that is a larger factor among the highly intelligent. The “I wasn’t trying” defense becomes pretty empty once one is pushing thirty and begins to realize that one has accomplished absolutely nothing of any note despite one’s supposed intelligence.

I personally find it very difficult to concentrate on any one project for a long period of time, mostly because I get bored easily once things are past the strategic stage. I’m quite willing to work hard, but working hard at one specific thing and ignoring all the other opportunities out there is pretty much impossible for me. The problem is that as studies of the truly great have shown, it takes about ten years of near psychopathic concentration on an activity to reach a level of superlative excellence.

But the study is a real wake-up call to parents with highly intelligent children. There’s nothing wrong with being open about their intelligence, trying to hide it from them merely gives them a greater sense of elitism and contempt for those who attempt to deny the obvious. (Seriously, would you ever try pretending that a tall or fast kid is just like everyone else? It’s just as stupid to try to deny a child’s intelligence, which is equally observable to all and sundry, including the child.) But presenting it to the child as a challenge to excel rather than a fabulous aspect of his self is more likely to foster that excellence.

Talent and intelligence are great tools. But like all tools, their utility depends completely upon how – and if- they are used.

Rod Dreher seems a little stunned by the new report from the The Center of Immigration Studies:

+ Immigrants account for one in eight U.S. residents, the highest level in 80 years. In 1970 it was one in 21; in 1980 it was one in 16; and in 1990 it was one in 13.

+ Overall, nearly one in three immigrants is an illegal alien. Half of Mexican and Central American immigrants and one-third of South American immigrants are illegal.

+ The primary reason for the high rates of immigrant poverty, lack of health insurance, and welfare use is their low education levels, not their legal status or an unwillingness to work….

The report concludes that: “Even during the great wave of immigration at the turn of the 19th century, the immigrant population was much less than half what it is today.” We simply are being swamped, and there should be a time out for assimilation. Yet as a liberal, Spanish-speaking friend admitted to me yesterday, in a conversation about what each side in the immigration debate is loath to admit, that on his pro-immigration side, “The uncomfortable truth is that Latino immigrants are not assimilating.”

Thank the NEA that we’ve got all those excellent public schools with which we can bring transform all those little Garcias and Rodriguezes into productive Anglo-Saxon Americans. That’ll work, right? All they really need to get caught up is a few years of indoctrination in global warming, gay rights and gender-bending. But not in English, of course. That would be ethnocentric.

LBRFTHOI demonstrates statistical incompetence:

Actually, statistics bear out that well over 50%, and upwards of 70%, of all child abuse- sexual and otherwise- is committed by parents. So, as much as I hate to respectfully disagree with those being so ignorantly and vulgarly disrespectful to our public schools and their teachers, I will nonetheless do so respectfully and rationally using nothing but the numbers: statistically, it is the public school that should be worried about protecting children from parents, especially in the area of sexual violation, and not the other way around.

This would only be true if you happen to ignore the accessibility and population factors. The average parent has access to his children around sixteen hours per day. The average teacher has access to a particular child approximately one hour per day. There are also far more parents than teachers. LBRFTHOI is doing the equivalent of comparing the number of murders in the United States with South Africa and concluding that the USA is more dangerous despite its far lower murder rate per 100,000 population.

Also, if you’re using “nothing but the numbers”, it would be helpful to provide an actual number; a range somewhere between 50 percent and “upwards of 70 percent” is so imprecise as to approach completely meaningless.

My disrespect for the teachers and schools is hardly ignorant; I have yet to see or be informed of any reason to regard either with even the slightest bit of respect. As for the vulgar nature of that disrespect, I only seem to recall referring to the latter. But I do appreciate the notice that I have been remiss, by all means, fuck the idiots at the chalkboard who so amusingly call themselves “teachers” too.

And yet the “conservatives” at National Review won’t support him:

Poor Paul [Kate O’Beirne]

So unfair to ask Ron Paul to name only three federal programs he’d eliminate.

But you have to wonder where this moron has been for the last thirty years. Yes, Seth, it does exist.

Point of Order [Seth Leibsohn]

Please all NRO readers and writers raise your hand if you’ve ever had any contact with or from the trilateral commission. Paul said ‘it exists’. Does it? Does it really? Does it influence anything?

There’s idiocy, there’s lunacy, and then there’s a demonstated inability to use Google. NRO should revoke the loser’s Corner-posting privileges for total intellectual incompetence.

Violence depicted on television, in films and video games raises the risk of aggressive behavior in adults and young viewers and poses a serious threat to public health, according to a new study.
After reviewing more than 50 years of research on the impact of violence in the media, L. Rowell Huesmann, of the University of Michigan, and his colleague Brad Bushman concluded that only smoking posed a greater danger.

“Exposure to violent electronic media has a larger effect than all but one other well known threat to public health. The only effect slightly larger than the effect of media violence on aggression is that of cigarette smoking on lung cancer,” he said in a statement.

Wolfenstein 3D and Mortal Kombat, the two games that are primarily responsible for violence in video games, were both published in 1992. That year, there were 23,760 murders in the USA which represented a murder rate of 9.3 per 100,000 population. In 2005, following more than decade of spines being ripped out with bare hands and demons being disemboweled by chainsaws, there were 16,692 murders, but the nation’s larger population means that the murder rate is 5.6, a 40 percent REDUCTION.

Another day, another video game scare.

TRP begins to respond:

You ask:

There are three possibilities here. Either (1)God was lying to the man about not knowing where he was, (2) He was asking rhetorical questions to which He already knew the answer, or (3) He did not know where the man was and did not know – as opposed to correctly deduced – that the man had eaten from the tree that He had commended him not to eat from. I ask TRP, which he believes to be the correct answer?

I Choose 2 – God knew where Adam was.

That’s a perfectly reasonable answer, and I’ll respond to it in full once TRP finishes responding to the rest of my questions. As for TRP’s belief that it is normal to believe that those they disagree with are making use of the four-step process I described, that may be so, and yet I specifically deny that the charge can be credibly made in all cases. As I will demonstrate throughout the course of this debate, it cannot be reasonably applied to my particular expression of the aprevistan view. Note that I did not have to rely on those specific five verses in order to support the aprevistan case, there are literally hundreds that are equally relevant. I do, however, I also must point out for clarity’s sake that unlike many omniderigistes and atheists, TRP does not deny the existence of Man’s free will.

If you’re an ESPN Insider, you may be interested to know that Bill Simmons is going for the SportsNation chat record today, hoping to beat Rob Neyer’s record of six hours 37 minutes. I think he’s good for at least 10 hours, if he doesn’t get derailed by technical difficulties.

Do me a favor and ask him if Childress should be fired or not. And ask him if we can pretty please have Randy Moss back. With a side order of Tom Brady.

How can you not want to take part in history with epic exchanges like these:

Otis (Toronto, ON): This is dedication: 1. Start your chat at the office while closing door to office and declaring a “brainstorming session” 2. Continue on the commmute home via blackberry 3. Continue chat on the home computer, taking breaks for smokes and steaks that being said, how close are we to having the Knicks banished to the WNBA?

SportsNation Bill Simmons: (12:29 PM ET ) That a boy, Otis! I like the idea of banishing the Knicks to the WNBA – Renaldo Balkman would be the 10th most attractive player in the league.

Iowa parents pull their children out of the public schools:

State officials in Des Moines confirmed to WND that at least 80 children whose parents were alarmed by the “Gender-Bender Day” during homecoming week at the city’s East High School have moved their children from the various districts in the area into homeschooling plans. Several parents told WND that the number could be in the hundreds.

The sad thing is that their kids school could be serving cannibal lunches in the cafeteria and teaching a Red Guards curriculum straight out of the Cultural Revolution, complete with the mass murder of priests, authors and artists, and half the nominally Christian parents in America would dumbly nod their heads and say: “Well, I don’t really approve of the overall direction, but my kid’s school is actually pretty good. Just last year, it won an award for purging the most bourgeous elements in the faculty and at least fifty percent of the graduating seniors can actually read!”

There is no “fixing” to be done. You don’t fix a poisonous snake in your child’s crib, you kill it. This parent’s response is the only correct one; if you still have your kids in a public school, you’re just kidding yourself.

“TUESDAY AT ONE OF OUR LOCAL HIGH SCHOOLS THEY HAD WHAT IS CALLED ‘GENDER BENDER DAY!’ IF YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT THAT IS THEN LET ME EDUCATE YOU REAL QUICK … IT IS WHERE THE BOYS DRESS LIKE GIRLS AND VICE VERSA!! THIS WAS ALLOWED AND CARRIED OUT AT OUR SCHOOLS!!! … I IMMEDIATELY PULLED MY CHILD OUT OF THE DES MOINES PUBLIC SCHOOL! WE ARE NOW HOMESCHOOLING ALONG WITH SEVERAL HUNDRED OTHER PARENTS!”

Fuck the schools. Burn them all. Pull down the walls and sow the ruins with salt. Collective “education” was never a good idea and whatever limited utility it ever might have had is overwhelmed its negative aspects. The average child would get a better and more useful education by sitting in front of a PlayStation playing video games eight hours a day for 12 straight years than he would by attending school.

John Derbyshire’s excellent three-part piece on the IQ/race issue concludes with a hopeful prognosis that this time, the intellectuals and scientists won’t screw it up:

Genetic engineering? I’m sure something will come of it. It shouldn’t be that hard. Noah Millman suggests that our hopes for genetic engineering are overblown, in the way that hopes for social engineering were 100 years ago, leading to all the well-known failures of state socialism.

I disagree. To be sure, a human being, or just a human brain, is an extremely complicated thing, and we shouldn’t underestimate the scientific challenges of genetic tinkering. (I am not aware of any scientists involved in this work who do underestimate them.) A human society, though, is at the next level of complexity up, consisting as it does of millions of human beings! From the fact that we screwed up the engineering of societies (and, as Noah concedes, we didn’t make a total pig’s ear of it — we tamed the business cycle, for instance) it does not follow that we’ll screw up the engineering of the genome.

Derb’s not an economist, so he may not be aware that we haven’t actually tamed the business cycle, we’ve simply created massive amounts of money out of thin air to inflate bubble after bubble in a desperate attempt to push a massive trough out into the future. The 4.5 percent drop in housing prices last quarter – which could have been as much as 12.4 percent if inflation was being correctly accounted for – is merely one warning sign that the economy has finally reached the “pushing on a string” point.

In any case, I am quite confident that the same sort of individuals who seized on the idea of social engineering 100 years ago will rapidly come up with new and far more nightmarish applications combining genetic engineering with social engineering. I’m not sure what the best way of combatting this will be; I suspect the most important thing to keep in mind is that posthumans and machine intelligences will have no reason to think any more highly of the human elite than we do.

I’m not a fan of his fiction, but I am definitely down with his recommendation of Britney Spears as Person of the Year. I think it should be a rotating award given out to Miss Spears, Miss Hilton and Miss Lohan until an ambitious new slutress proves herself worthy of replacing one of the Hollywhore Triumvirate. Hey, if news is nothing but what the sheep are interested in reading about, why not?

So you’ve got these things going on… and instead, you see a lot of this back-fence gossip. So I said something to the Nightline guy about waterboarding, and if the Bush administration didn’t think it was torture, they ought to do some personal investigation. Someone in the Bush family should actually be waterboarded so they could report on it to George. I said, I didn’t think he would do it, but I suggested Jenna be waterboarded and then she could talk about whether or not she thought it was torture.

And the guy says to me — the Nightline guy — I didn’t get the guy’s name…. he said to me, “If we didn’t cover cultural things, we wouldn’t be covering you and The Mist, and promoting the movie.” And I’m like, “Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan aren’t cultural.” They aren’t political. They’re economic only in the mildest sense of the word… Britney Spears is just trailer trash…. And yet, you know and I know that if you go to those sites that tell you what the most blogged-about things on the Internet are, it’s Britney, it’s Lindsay. So I think it would be terrific [to have them as TIME Persons of the Year]. There would be such a scream from the American reading public, sure. But at the same time, it’s time for somebody to discuss the difference between real news and fake news…

As for the justification of waterboarding in the linked post, I note that the same rationale which is always used to justify it and other forms of torture – what if you could save X number of people by torturing Y number of people in an urgent situtation where X > Y – could easily be used to rationalize the elimination of the Jewish people or any minority deemed overly troublesome by the majority.