Hidden Figures: Excellence rather floundering

I finished the book. It's a good book. I learned a lot of history that I didn't know before, and not just about the specific women profiled in there. I learned more about the origins of NASA and some of the backstory to how decisions were made early in manned spaceflight. For instance, the process for validating space flight trajectories in an era when electronic computers were not yet considered more trustworthy than human calculations.

But it's not really a NASA history. It's a history of black women in STEM. So let's talk about diversity in STEM. What strikes me most is the contrast between the celebration of excellence in this book and the daily conversation on deficits in a modern third-tier university. There's nary a word about failure in this book, but many mentions of women who skipped grades and aced every math class in college. This is not solely a contrast of past and present: The book was written in the 2010's and published in 2016. Notably, the author is not in academia, and so she doesn't feel the same obligations that professors feel. In academia today, we have endless conversations about fail rates in core classes and the implications for diversity. The feeling is that the only way to get diversity is to somehow redeem large numbers of students who are currently floundering.

Now, if the question is whether we should give second chances as a matter of human decency, the answer is of course. If the question is whether some people might even surprise us on a third, fourth, or fifth chance, the answer is that this world is full of surprises. But if the question is whether such surprises are not only be good for the individuals involved but sufficient in number to actually transform the demographics of STEM, the answer is assuredly no.  Remember, the floundering students who might surprise us are not exclusively "diverse." I've seen plenty of white boys flounder and fumble even on fourth chances, and if there's a trove of fifth-chance redemptions in the offing then surely there will be more than a few white boys in the "Fifth Time's The Charm" club. Good for them, but it also means that fifth chances or whatever won't move the ratios in ways that people hope.

I have no easy answers for transforming ratios so we finally get enough diversity in STEM--if I did, I would be able to save the world. To the extent that I can guess at answers, they surely involve starting well before kids reach college. And they surely involve fewer desperate attempts to redeem some D students and more cultivation of actual excellence wherever we find it.

The women in this book were not floundering students. They surely had some ups and downs like anyone else, but they were successful anytime they were given a chance. And by "a chance" I don't mean somebody saying "Well, she got a D, but maybe if we offer more encouragement and follow Equitable Best Practices in the remedial algebra course..." I mean that people looked at these women and said "Wow, they do quite well in math. Maybe we should hire them to do math instead of discriminating." If that isn't the essence of much-maligned meritocracy I don't know what is. These women had been succeeding since early in their educations, when they were skipping grades in k-12. They distinguished themselves in college and grad school (if they went to grad school). They earned respect in whatever jobs they held before joining the Langley facility to work on aircraft and later spacecraft. They were meritocratic hires, and in the many cases where the system deviated from meritocracy it worked to their detriment, not to their benefit.

Outside of the highest tiers, American educators are an anti-excellence bunch. Always have been, as Hofstadter showed. We don't know how to handle students who don't need coddling, especially if they come from groups that we frame as victims. We want to be saviors to the wretched of the earth rather than launch crews supporting astronauts on their way to the farthest stars. (Unless we can get photographed alongside the astronaut, and use that photo to get our grant renewed.) We were founded by farmers, who fare best on level ground, not by city-dwellers whose greatest pride has always been towers.

A careful reader of the book might fault me for neglecting the part where the women did receive additional training to fill gaps. However, these "gaps" sprang not from weakness but specialization. They majored in math and then joined engineering teams. They worked on aircraft engineering teams before transitioning to spacecraft. Their additional training was not remediation but professional development. It's utterly normal for professionals to pursue continuing education as they specialize and move into new areas, and it's utterly different from remediation.

I don't know how to produce more Katherine Johnsons and Dorothy Vaughans. If I did I could boost our economy, solve our most pressing technological, medical, and environmental needs, and end racial inequity. Alas, I don't. But I do know that the shift in educational discourse from "Katherine meets and exceeds every challenge, hire her!" to "Well, maybe if we are more progressive and less selective we could promote success..." mirrors the collapse of Dunbar High School. No good will come of it.

Current read: Hidden Figures

 I'm finally reading Hidden Figures, the story of African-American women mathematicians who were involved in the space program. One thing that strikes me is how different the attitudes towards excellence were. Or, for that matter, how different they actually are even today, if you step beyond the academic world. To wit, the author (Margot Lee Shetterly) has spent her career in media and publishing, mostly, not academia, so she hasn't drunk our anti-excellence kool-aid. Consider this passage from page 73, describing a professor who taught mathematician Katherine Johnson:

On staff in the math department was William Waldron Shieffelin Claytor, move-star handsome with nut-brown skin and intense eyes fringed by long eyelashes. Just twenty-seven years old, Claytor played Rachmaninoff with finesse and a mean game of tennis. He drove a sports car and piloted his own plane, which he once famously flew so low over the house of the school's president that the machine's wheels made a racket rolling over the roof. Math majors marveled to hear Dr. Claytor, originally from Norfolk, advancing sophisticated mathematical proofs in his drawling "country" accent.

Claytor's brusque manner intimidated most of his students, who couldn't keep up as the professor furiously scribbled mathematical formulas on the chalkboard with one hand and just as quickly erased them with the other. He moved from one topic to the next, making no concession to their bewildered expressions. But Katherine, serious and bespectacled with fine curly hair, made such quick work of the course catalog that Claytor had to create advanced classes just for her.

I cannot imagine progressive educators eagerly lauding him today, given the highlighted parts. Yet we know that this polished, demanding genius trained an accomplished woman who did important technical work for American victory in WW2 and then contributed to the greatest of human achievements: The moon landing. Even his hobbies, bespeaking a Renaissance flair for exotic and edgy pursuits, would be deemed a bit out of place; far better to show enthusiasm for pop culture and stuff like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObvxPSQNMGc

Not that there's anything wrong with enjoying pop culture, but it should be equally fine to enjoy Rachmaninoff and other decomposing composers.

Final Thoughts on The Son Also Rises

 The last few chapters touch on minority groups and then his final thoughts on the bigger picture. He mostly addresses minorities that have been unusually successful, but also touches on Travelers (Gypsies) in the UK. Naturally, these things attract controversy; Clark is careful, and I will try to do likewise. His points are mostly inoffensive, but since he doesn't have surname data to address the full sweep of history as he would like, he gets speculative. But he does make a few good points:

If a minority group persists unusually long in a successful tier of society (e.g. Christian and Jewish minorities in certain Muslim societies), one thing you should ask is whether unsuccessful members of the group disaffiliate. This doesn't necessarily mean that people leave their religion in frustration if they don't succeed as merchants or whatever. But in many Muslim societies there were historically special taxes levied on non-Muslims. An economist would expect this to lead to conversions among people who cannot easily afford the tax. 

It's not necessarily that a Christian or Jew would say "Screw it, God doesn't pay enough." But if somebody lives among Muslims, likes their neighbors, and sees them as good people who worship the same God of Abraham, somebody might decide to assimilate into their community rather than paying a price to remain distinct. On the other hand, people who feel particularly strong bonds with and benefits from their minority group are going to pay the price to remain in their group. This will not only filter out people based on willingness to pay or ability to pay, it will also foster strong in-group ties that successful merchant classes have leveraged. In eras where people didn't have instant communication and bank transfers, long-distance trade required strong bonds of trust, bonds that are easy to foster in close-knit kin groups. And such bonds will be even stronger if people feel deep connections to far-flung members of their tribe, bonds even stronger than bonds with immediate neighbors. But if somebody does not make their living off those far-flung tribal ties, it's not just that they'll say "Eh, I'm no merchant, let's convert", it's that they'll likely feel stronger ties to their immediate neighbors. Their kids will marry into neighboring families. They'll convert. These are not crass transactions but normal human bonds.

So, as data-sparse as elements of his analysis are, I think they also bring a deeply human insight to groups that haven't always been treated well. Both the Jewish and Armenian diasporas in the Middle East have often been particularly successful in the merchant class, and similar things can be said for Parsis and other groups in India, but Clark argues that this is in part because the people who were most successful stayed in the group, and those who were more like their neighbors married their neighbors, as humans do when they connect to people.

One other point Clark makes is that everyone tries to explain the success of prominent minority groups in terms of some unique cultural factor, but every group has successful and unsuccessful people. If a group seems particularly successful, you need to ask if the people who aren't succeeding select out of the group. (The part about long-range bonds of trust is something I've read elsewhere; you'd expect it to matter less in a world where you can communicate and transfer money instantly across long distances.)

He makes related points about prominently successful diasporas in the US today. If you look at the ranks of medical doctors and certain other professions, you'll see disproportionate numbers from certain immigrant groups. Clark notes that much of this is not because some particular group is particularly good at medicine, but because US immigration law makes it easier for doctors for that group to come in and harder for poor manual laborers. He expects to see regression to the mean over generations, unless selection processes keep it so that only certain members can enter and replenish the ranks, while people who marry out of the group lose their identity.

A few other points:

1) If we all face Markovian dynamics in social mobility, nobody can truly feel secure. Obviously it's better to have more money rather than less, but people are loss-averse, and people with more money make bigger investments that can result in bigger losses or gains. So they face remarkably similar anxiety.

2) Adoption studies are all over the map on nature vs nurture, showing some nurture effects but also real nature effects. One thing he does note is that the nurture effects are subject to statistical range restriction: Adoptive parents go through selection processes that birth parents don't have to go through. Yes, there are always bad adoptive parents, but they'll be comparatively less abundant, so the bottom of the range will be under-represented in adoption studies. Combine that with diminishing returns on parenting beyond the basics, and you wouldn't expect huge nurture effects in adoption studies.

Pinker under-emphasized that point. Clark, an economist, is much more open to the idea that parenting matters but has diminishing returns. Sending your kids to a half-decent school and making them do their homework is important. Sending them to the fanciest school imaginable will not matter nearly as much, because of diminishing returns.

3) He disagrees with Charles Murray on the effects of assortative mating. People select for phenotype, not genotype, and phenotypes are heavily influenced by noise. So regression to the mean will keep happening, and with Markovian dynamics. (His disagreement with Murray made me breathe a sigh of relief.)

4) In the 1830's Georgia had a lottery to give formerly Cherokee land to white settlers. The value of the land was about $150,000 per lot in today's dollars, so effectively Georgia handed out a whole bunch of winning lotto tickets. A generation later, outcomes for descendants of the winners were remarkably unaffected by the win. Some people are bad at business no matter how much of a windfall you give them. (America's most recent head of state provides ample evidence for this.)

The Son Also Rises, Chapters 8-12

 The first few chapters in this section look at India (specifically the state of West Bengal), China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and Chile. The specific numbers that he finds when looking at England and certain US demographics don't always hold up; I think he's a bit too wedded to the idea that he's found a universal law of class mobility/persistence. Shocks from big events do matter, to some extent. However, a few patterns do hold:

1) If you look at the persistence of families in elite tiers of society, as opposed to intergenerational correlations of income, you see very slow regression to the mean. Income is just a proxy for status, and is imperfectly correlated 

2) Social reforms don't have nearly the effect that reformers were hoping for. Families that know how to navigate society still do fine, for a while at least. This should be deeply dismaying for social reformers who think that we can remedy inequality in the classroom. We can probably have some effects on the margin, but not only are our students not blank slates, they aren't even erasable slates, and large portions of the slate are off-limits to us.

3) When he's able to look at long time scales there are strong signs of Markovian dynamics in many cases, and these Markovian dynamics are as true for upward regression to the mean as downward regression to the mean. While the pace would be dispiriting to social reformers, the fact that each generation has an element of reset should be encouraging for them.

Chapter 12 is the most interesting chapter for me, as a physicist, because he looks at time reversal. He shows that if, instead of starting with people who were high-status centuries ago in England, you start with people who were high-status more recently, and then look into the past, going backwards in time they also regress to the mean. This is consistent with the idea that microscopic dynamics of Brownian motion look the same in either time direction, even if macroscopic dynamics look very different. This is just such a cool chapter that I would seriously consider discussing it the next time that I teach statistical physics. Seriously.

As to the persistence of the upper classes after putative egalitarian reforms, let me just note that upper-class jerks always write the best Diversity and Inclusion Statements. I don't if it's always been that way, or if they learned it after the French Revolution, but the offspring of the upper classes seem to be absolutely amazing at explaining that they're One Of The Good Ones and it's those other assholes who need to face a guillotine.

The Son Also Rises, Chp. 3-7

 I'm a bit less skeptical after reading more, but only up to a point. When examining surnames in England, Clark looks at more than just medicine and law (rather specific professions). He looks at estates and probate cases in English courts, enrollment in Cambridge and Oxford, and even elections to the House of Commons. Perhaps most interesting is that he doesn't just look at common elite surnames (where people might benefit from everyone around them knowing that, say, Montgomery is an elite name), but also rare elite surnames. This is an important way to rule out the possibility that people benefit from name recognition. Interestingly, his patterns hold up through the 20th century, even though the past few centuries saw substantial changes in social policy, educational admissions standards, professional standards, etc.

In the US, he is looking at shorter time periods (his analysis of England goes back to the Middle Ages), and some of his patterns are less convincing, but plausible. Perhaps most interesting is that he looks at both downward mobility (e.g. decline in common surnames of doctors and lawyers) but also upward mobility (rises in surnames from disadvantaged groups). When looking at disadvantaged groups he includes both the obvious ones (African Americans, Native Americans, Jews) and also a less obvious one (French people in the northeastern US). The less obvious one is interesting because totally different mechanisms should be in play. While I have no doubt that families lower on the socioeconomic scale will be known locally, and face stigma accordingly, white people of French descent have some clearly plausible ways to blend in if they move a little ways away. Nonetheless, multi-generational persistence in comparatively lower status shows patterns similar to other situations in both the US and elsewhere.

In the case of the US, the nice Markovian upward regressions to the mean are a bit less obvious. The 20th century saw some pretty clear and significant changes to laws that barred advancement for certain groups, so one would expect upticks, and some of the data is messy. If we take away any message, it's that some of the regressions to the mean have not involved changes as sharp as one would have hoped. We have an obvious explanation: Ongoing discrimination. And no doubt that is part of it. But Clark invites us to consider the possibility that the patterns of adjustment are close enough to other societies that maybe slow progress is sadly inevitable.

There are obvious things that a 21st century college professor must say at that point. Some of those mandatory responses even have some validity! As much as I'm a skeptic of rapid progress, even I hold out hope that we can change more rapidly than the English class system. I mean, there's a ton of room between "We'll totally transform things in one generation" (which some people seem to think is the only goal we can allow ourselves to have) and "Well, we'll improve as slowly as a country that still has a House of Lords."

Clark proposes in chapters 6-7 that families pass on knowledge and skills, which, yeah. It's pretty much what we advanced primates do. He gives much less consideration to genetic explanations than I feared, acknowledging that anything passed from parents to children will show similar statistical patterns whether it involves nature or nurture. That's encouraging. Also, as much as the slow progress is dispiriting, the Markovian nature of the patterns means that each generation is, in some sense, a new start. A start with loaded dice, but at least a fresh dice roll.

There's one other encouraging thing in these chapters (and I note that encouragement about social problems is a rarity from the Dismal Science of economics): He argues that whatever parents are doing to make their kids successful, it isn't (for the most part) about their money. If it were about money, families with more kids would have less successful kids than families with similar financial resources but fewer kids. The per-child investment would differ. But the data he cites doesn't support such a model.

Now, at this point one might say "What kind of idiot thinks rich kids don't have it better?" Of course they do. His point is that it's not JUST the money spent on the kids. It's also the fact that people who have money know how to get money and they know how to teach kids to do the same. That includes connections.

I can't find the reference now, but I vaguely recall reading that after the Communist revolutions in Russia and China, the bureaucracies remains in the hands of more or less the same families. Yes, yes, there were some high-profile punishments of selected upper-class people, but you can't run a complex country without keeping the people who are experienced at running it. You can hand over a few things to the revolutionaries (e.g. punishing ideological crimes), but if you want the public infrastructure to run you keep more or less the same people at the Department of Water and Sanitation. An extreme example is Egypt, where my understanding is that even after successive conquests by Greeks, Romans, and Arabs, the public records continued to be kept in Coptic (the language that evolved from Ancient Egyptian) until at least a century after Arab conquest. Yes, eventually they switched to Arabic, but when the Arabs first arrived the bureaucracy was run by Copts. I imagine that the Copts simply explained that this place only functions if they properly manage all of the water infrastructure projects associated with the annual rise and fall of the Nile, and if the new rulers want to avoid bread riots they'll let the pros continue to handle all of the civil engineering projects.

Finally, if the role of families is as great as Clark suggests, it makes more sense that revolutionaries frequently contemplate (but never succeed at) major changes to family structure. It also makes sense that Rawls would call for massive projects to ensure truly equal lifetime chances (from the earliest stages) for children. You don't really have equal opportunity unless you massively engineer the most influential period of life. Except you can't actually do it, at least not without horrors.

First thoughts on "The Son Also Rises"

 The main topic of the book is a study of last names. He looks at names that were, at some point in the history of a particular society, associated with a high or low status group, and then looks at data on professions and income over subsequent decades or centuries. He makes two points, one of which is inoffensive and the other of which is controversial:

1) While correlations between parental income and children's income can be surprisingly weak (suggesting that there's better mobility than we think/fear), if you look at names there's surprising persistence of certain families in high or low income tiers and elite professions. Nonetheless, the persistence decays, albeit much more slowly than the individual income data suggests.

He notes that the fact that there's a decay of correlation in this data does show a churn, and it's an exponential (Markovian) decay, strongly suggesting that it's hard to entrench certain advantages, but the decay is slow. This I agree with. The slow decay can be a problem from many perspectives, but the Markovian decay gives assurance that parents aren't destiny, that people can rise or fall. In a Markov process each step is a "reset", even if a rest with weighted probabilities.

He suggests that the correlations on single-generation time scales capture short-term random fluctuations, and ignore the longer-term effects, and that tracking names means it's easier to see long-term persistence. This is also reasonable. His attention to professions sheds light on some of this: Suppose that we look at a family of doctors, and a grandparent is a surgeon (high pay) while the next generation has a pediatrician (usually more modest pay), and the third generation has some high-paid specialist. This is a family that isn't leaving the upper tiers of society anytime soon, but a simple income analysis would show large fluctuations, even though those fluctuations are all within a comfortable tier.

Since names are usually patrilineal, a name analysis is leaving out half of the population, but if your goal is to understand control of resources then it's not completely inappropriate to focus your attention on the half of the population that has controlled and, sadly, largely still controls the most resources. Of course, it is still a significant limitation of the data set, and you have to be honest about that. But all real-world data on social phenomena comes with huge limitations, so as long as he is candid about this it's an acceptable study.

2) He argues that since this persistence shows up in many societies, both at the top and at the bottom, and across centuries (I've only read his analysis of Sweden so far), and since it remains unaffected even by major changes to economic conditions (e.g. it shows up both in egalitarian Scandinavia and cut-throat capitalist America), workers' rights, and educational systems, there's probably a genetic component.

This is obviously more controversial and less convincing, partly because parents pass on customs and ideas as much as DNA, and your childhood environment in any society depends on your class position.

Also, thus far his analysis of professions has been limited to law and medicine, two professions that have high barriers to entry (medicine especially). And the barriers have only risen as educational credentials have become more common. Once upon a time some people attended med school or law school without finishing an undergraduate degree. Now you see many people not only do a bachelor's degree but even a master's degree or a few years of carefully-chosen professional or community service experience to polish their applications. It's a lot easier to spend a few years studying for the MCAT and volunteering at community health clinics after college if you have affluent parents. But if your affluent parents are in some other profession, they might say "Why are you wasting your time so you can take out huge med school loans and then work for low pay as a resident? Just go get a job in my field!" It might be that you need a parent who's a doctor to see it as worthwhile to spend a few years further polishing your application.

I'll have to see what else he looks at besides medicine and law.

This essay's on fire

 From the Chronicle, an essay by Justin E. H. Smith. He takes apart a professor of higher ed administration who got in trouble for praising college football and then had to apologize for the sin of racism. Smith has his own criticisms of college football (as do I) but the spectacle of the ritual apology is just bizarre. Smith puts it in the context of bigger problems in universities. A few choice quotes:

Mayhew’s career, which began well before that critical year but was also a harbinger of it, has been built entirely on tracking and echoing the transformations of the university itself. He obtains research funding for projects with names like “Assessment of Collegiate Residential Environments and Outcomes,” and publishes in volumes with titles like The Faculty Factor: A Vision for Developing Faculty Engagement With Living Learning Communities. He has an h-index, according to Google, of 34, which indicates that he is doing whatever it is he is supposed to do according to the rules — which increasingly is to say, the algorithms — that shape the profession. And this is where I think his spectacular public recantation is significant: Hewing so close in his career to the vicissitudes of the institution that both pays him and constitutes the object of his study, Mayhew sooner or later could not fail to embody and express, through his own personal conversion, the conversion of higher education to whatever you want to call this peculiar new sensibility that has transformed large sectors of American society in the Trump era.

I wonder if Mayhew would understand why Smith considers a recitation of Mayhew's accomplishments to be a takedown. Probably now.

Or this:

My considered view is that there is nothing more important or worthy than drawing out submerged and forgotten voices. What makes me sad is the pro forma character of the new emphasis on this among my contemporaries. I do not, to say the least, get the sense that it is motivated by intellectual curiosity. I detect something much more like a survival instinct — a desperate effort to adapt to a transformed university landscape, where different rules apply than the ones we signed up for.

The prevailing air of desperation today makes a temperamentally curious person into a rarity and an oddball in the university setting. You are supposed to affirm the value of including more non-Western traditions in the philosophy curriculum, for example, but only in a way that anchors this change to current social and political goals, even if in the end these goals only ever require fairly small-stakes adjustments that do not so much improve society as display conformity to a new moral sensibility. If you get into deciphering Nahuatl cosmological texts, but really into it, not because it is part of a concern to see greater Latinx representation in the philosophy curriculum, but simply in the same way you are into Paleolithic cave art or Aristotle on marine biology or Safavid pharmaceutical texts — because you are a voracious nerd and you thought when you were a student that that was precisely what made you prime professor material — then you are really not doing what is expected of you to adapt to the new academic ethos.

Pretty much. As I wrote a while ago:

Dwelling on similarity suggests, at a minimum, a lack of enthusiasm for the zeitgeist, and perhaps even a lack of awareness of one’s privileges. Actually valuing similarity over difference borders on subversive. However, for all the value in diversity, and all the confusion and conflicts that can arise if we fail to understand differences, diversity is most valuable when people succeed in shared endeavors rather than stare across chasms of difference. While The Farewell centers people from backgrounds not usually seen in Hollywood films, it has succeeded both critically and commercially by getting the audience to identify with a character, regardless of whether we share the character’s identity labels.

A great reason to study Mesoamerican thought prior to Columbian contact is that the people of the Americas are people and they built civilizations and thought thoughts about the human condition and it's always worth geeking out on that. A boring reason is that we should study them for representation's sake. They become steamed vegetables that you eat because you want to be virtuous, not a savory vegetable stir-fry that you eat because you like the texture and seasoning. I like learning about all sorts people because of the interplay of similarity and difference and uniqueness and universality, not because I want to satisfy some moral mandate to achieve a proper balance on my reading list.

Next book: The Son Also Rises

 I've been reading some books that I lacked the energy to blog, but the semester is wrapping up, so I have more energy to write. I'm going to read The Son Also Rises by economist Gregory Clark, a study of class mobility in different societies. He looks at family names and apparently draws big conclusions. I'm reluctant to say more than that until I get farther into the book.

"Indifference" and the restlessness

 An article by Mark Lilla in the new journal Liberties (only available in print, alas) solidified some of my thinking on the restlessness. He talks about the concept of "indifferent" acts in ethics and theology. Do all of our actions carry inevitable moral weight? Is it possible to engage in some small activity without being good or bad, or is even a small act of leisure a sin? What if that act of leisure promotes morality? We see this all the time in modern lefty discourse, with endless articles about how "problematic" something or other is. One needn't be amoral or nihilist to recognize that you'll go crazy if you agonize over the ethics of every small deed. But people do that nonetheless. Just a few hours ago I was scolded over some small joke, because even though the person I told it to totally got it, some outside observer might lack context and think I was doing something bad. Lilla goes through the history of indifference in theology and philosophy, and I won't attempt to rehash it here. But I will note that the modern scolds of political correctness are searching for sin everywhere, and the modern restless educators feel like we must keep trying to further purify everything.

My one key complaint about The Cult of Smart

I still have one chapter to go, so maybe Freddie will address this in the remaining fifty pages, but there's one big thing I dislike about his argument: He joins everyone else (including many of the people who want to retain absolutely every kid in STEM) in critiquing meritocracy. But there isn't one meritocracy, or at least there shouldn't be. There are many meritocracies. The credentials that will get you a job as a software engineer won't get you a job fixing cars. The credentials that will get you a job fixing cars won't get you a job selling real estate, and a real estate license won't get you a job as a dentist.

There are plenty of things to be said against particular forms of professional licensing, but the basic idea of people getting jobs if they demonstrate that they can do the job (or at least learn on the job quickly enough) is inoffensive to me and probably most people. Everyone, socialist or capitalist or whatever, wants the brakes on my car repaired by a person who knows what they're doing. The other drivers want it, the pedestrians want it, and the bicyclists want it. The capitalists want me to have my consumer desires fulfilled by that service provider and the socialists want my car to be maintained in a condition that won't hurt the interests of society.

We can debate whether that brake technician should go to trade school, get a certification from an industry organization, or just train on the job under the supervision of people who know what they're doing, but one way or another we all want that brake technician to demonstrate his skills and knowledge to the satisfaction of people in the field. We want the repair shop down the street to hire qualified brake technicians. That's meritocracy. It won't be perfect--maybe the shop owner prefers to hire friends and family--but as long as they cross some threshold of competence we accept that an imperfect meritocracy is way better than no meritocracy.

If meritocracy means that your ability to enjoy basic human decency and some safety net of protection hinges on some form of desert, well, yes, we can morph any concept into something insane. But if it just means that getting a job requires some demonstrated competence or ability, I don't think most people object. Likewise, nobody except certain co-workers thinks a kid should invest time and money in a physics degree if they struggle with freshman calculus after repeated attempts. But arguing against "meritocracy" in general sounds like arguing for unqualified brake repair technicians, or arguing for dentists who don't sterilize their instruments. It sounds like arguing for accountants who haven't read an updated tax code document in a decade. It sounds like arguing for the boss's idiot son over the qualified applicant with a great resume.

I have read other things by Freddie, and heard him engage with people in various discussions, so I know that he doesn't want dentists who don't sterilize their instruments. And I know from his book that Freddie, critiques of meritocracy notwithstanding, disagrees with my colleagues who want to keep kids in degree programs that aren't working out for them. But I still think that critiquing meritocracy in broad terms, without being clear on the kind of meritocracy one supports, is a dangerous style. If somebody reads all 240+ pages of Freddie's book then they know he's not opposed to the more sane forms of meritocracy. (I doubt he wants his MRI read by a total dunce.) But in the current rhetorical climate, I think it helps to be clear on what one means when arguing against a term that has several usages, some far more benign than others.

Cult of Smart, Chapters 7 and 8

 Chapter 7 explores educational discourse in light of Rawls' concept of the "Veil of Ignorance." Philosopher John Rawls argued that a just society is the sort that people would agree to live in if they viewed it from behind a "veil of ignorance", i.e. they had no idea what sort of station they'd occupy, or what sorts of abilities or limitations they'd have. People would want to live in a society where they know that if they are disabled they'll be cared for, if they're whatever race they won't be discriminated against, and if they're talented they'll get some benefit from doing what they do well (even while contributing to the care for the disabled, etc.). Rawls has been influential on the left, and Freddie's key point is that leftists have accepted an ethical philosophy built around the notion that some people might have different abilities.

Also, while Freddie makes his argument in a way that should appeal to people with many different perspectives, he doesn't hide the fact that he himself is very, very left-wing. And one staple of socialist thought is "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs." It's not so different from the Parable of the Talents, in which Jesus says that those who have more should do more for all. Again, the key point is that it is perfectly possible to conceive of a charitable, egalitarian, and compassionate ethos that allows for differences in talent.

I like this quote on page 161:

Many people seem to believe that an assessment of academic potential necessarily involves an assessment of someone's overall human worth, despite the fact that the later does not at all follow from the former.

Indeed. Being bad at something can be a fact that does not diminish one's moral worth. I might be incapable of carrying a tune but that doesn't mean a musician needs to think less of me as a human. A musician might be terrible at physics but that doesn't mean I should think less of them.

Page 163:

When we look at a school system that we say is flawed, thanks to the impossible task that we've handed it, we are eeing our basic failure to really grapple with the reality of unequal human potential.

To be fair, Freddie is giving short shrift to the other inequalities that plague some school systems. If Chet McRitchie doesn't get the same high test scores as Rich Nobleford, the McRitchie parents might complain to the principal of their suburban high school, and the principal might need to take some headache medicine, but the higher level authorities are unlikely to strip away funding from the school. OTOH, if kids in an inner-city school get bad test scores (because of course they do), we know that authorities will continue to use that school as a canvas for their latest educational fad.

But, again, the fact that the task is hindered by nurture as much as nature does not make it any less impossible. What can a teacher do in the face of parents and neighborhoods and injustice and everything else that affects the kids in all the days and hours that they aren't in school?

Chapter 8 deals with Freddie's recommendations. I don't want to enumerate and address all of them. I just want to look at a few that interest me, because I blog books for fun, not for work.

Page 169, regarding whether it's a good idea to provide preschool and daycare and after school programs and other things for kids whose parents have to work and don't have good access to safe, enriching environments outside of school:

To constantly harp on the supposed academic advantages that these programs confer is to leave them vulnerable: they can then only be defended so long as those academic advantages actually assert themselves. As I've said, the research record for these programs is mixed at best, running to poor. If we make test scores and related indicators our primary argument, then we preemptively disarm ourselves in this fight.

Indeed. What if the "only" effect of afterschool programs or pre-K or whatever is that kids have a warm, safe, fun thing to do when their parents are working? What if the only effect of helping people is some human comfort but not an educational miracle? I actually see that as wholly consistent with my insistence that kids who do badly in physics shouldn't major in physics. What if the effect of them changing majors is that we don't solve a systemic issue but some people do spend 4 years actually learning something and experiencing the satisfaction of success? That doesn't guarantee a particular long-term outcome for them, but it won't hurt, and it will make 4 years of life genuinely good. Is that not good in and of itself?

Also, Freddie addresses and basically concurs with the argument made by Andrew Hacker in The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions. I like Freddie's version better because he makes it clear that he's totally fine with closing down some paths early on. He's considered all of the dark possibilities of our educational system and he accepts that some paths and tracks should be closed off early.

More Freddie quotes

1)  Pages 79-80:

It's important to understand that the "blame teachers first" school of thought arises not from chance, or even convenience, but from absolute necessity. If we are to preserve the blank-slate myth and all that goes with it--the long climb up the academic ladder, the preeminence of pluck and determination, the righteousness of the academic sorting system, and the rewards if offers to those who succeed within it, the entire meritocratic edifice--then blame has to go somewhere other than natural talent.
...
If we've assumed away the possibility of inherent differences in natural ability, who else could we blame but teachers? We might immediately indict the parents, but there's a problem there too: we have precious few policy levers that can affect parenting. With the (thankfully) rare exceptions of criminal negligence or abuse, government officials don't grade how well parents are doing. We don't have state-run facilities where inadequate parents are sent to brush up on their parenting skills. Nobody is proposing standardized tests of parenting. Diving into the educational research archives, you can find yourself wondering how such an intuitively big piece of the puzzle could be so little discussed, but this is why. There is no policy mechanism to utilize, and thus no interest from the policy minded. Instead of looking in the dark where we dropped the keys, we are looking where the light is.

(There is a similar quote about why people focus on schools rather than parents on page 89, but the relevant language comes from a Rand corporation analyst, not Freddie's own words.)

I agree with what he said about how shocking it is about parents being ignored as key variables. Later, though, when discussing the role of genes in educational outcomes, Freddie claims that parenting has little influence. I don't quite believe this. I can believe that most parents cross some threshold of decent parenting so that the marginal effect of small differences in parenting will have little effect. And I can believe that the insane lengths to which elite parents go don't actually matter nearly as much as they think. That's not quite the same as saying that parenting doesn't matter. Indeed, Freddie agrees that plenty of social variables can negatively affect performance, so why wouldn't really shitty parenting have an effect? I think the only conclusion we can actually draw is that as long as parenting is reasonably decent by the standards of the wider social situation the kid is in (and most conscientious people will cross that threshold), marginal changes in parenting approach will not produce statistically significant changes in outcomes.

Also, I admit that I kind of support some form of the meritocracy. Or, more specifically, I support a meritocracy among many meritocracies. There should be many paths in society, and for each of those paths there should be some meritocracy. If you want to be an educated professional you should pursue a path that you can do well in, not a path that you'll flounder in. If you want to be a skilled manual laborer you'd better do well at that manual skill. If you want to sell you'd better be a good salesman. And so forth. Education is a reasonable and appropriate path into some pursuits, but a less useful filter for other pursuits. And there should be a safety net for those who just aren't doing well on their path through no fault of their own. But this is very different from a 1-dimensional meritocracy.

2) Page 81, regarding why people fear dystopian outcomes from acknowledging that some kids are smarter than others:

Even if we had perfect knowledge at conception about a given child's academic potential, there is no reason that we would be forced to act on this knowledge in an authoritarian way.

Well, not forced, but the darker side of human nature is a thing... Nonetheless, I agree that there's no reason why we must structure society so that book learning is the only way to be treated well. I love book learning. A lot. I think it's a crucial thing for most leaders. That doesn't mean it should be crucial to human dignity.

3) Page 114, regarding the obsession with fixing society and the economy via education:

Far more likely is that it will take ending socioeconomic gaps to begin closing educational gaps.

I've said this here many times before. Nonetheless, we have to believe that everything else will get better if we just "teach a man to fish." Conservatives like the idea of making the fisherman self-reliant, and liberals like the idea of giving the fisherman a certificate documenting that he is a fully-qualified member of the Fishing Profession, trained in Best Practices for Safe, Sustainable, Equitable, and Inclusive Fishing Boat Management. All of which is great, except they want to make everyone a fisherman, even though we also need boat repair technicians, net manufacturers, retail fish sellers, sushi chefs, oceanographers (STEM! STEM! STEM!), truckers to take the fish to market, etc. In other words, they tend to get myopic about what we should train people for.

4) Pages 120-121, regarding research finding that the only intervention shown to have much of an effect on performance gaps is individual or small-group tutoring:

As someone who spends a great deal of his time in the world of education policy and politics, I don't hear tutoring mentioned that often, certainly less often than I hear about gamifying the classroom, flipping the classroom, how technology will solve all of our problems, and so on. Why? Well, for one thing, high-quality tutoring is expensive; you have to train the tutors and you have to pay them. But I suspect the more important reason is that there's nothing sexy about tutoring. Tutoring isn't some new breakthrough, it doesn't lend itself to hype, and it has no major corporation pushing for its adoption, unlike ed-tech boondoggles like the Los Angeles school system's $1.3 billion iPad fiasco. In the world of education policy, attention--and, more importantly, dollars--flows to those programs that most flatter the policy world's obsession with "disruption."

Indeed. We know that one-on-one or small group attention works. We know this because Oxford and Cambridge have been doing it for a thousand years via tutorials, and it works. Yes, there are problems with measuring educational quality, especially since top schools only take top students. Still, given the chance, everyone always goes for individualized attention from an expert. It's how people have always learned best. It's why office hours are better than class time, even if that class time is spent with students sitting in circles and talking to each other. The teacher is smarter and more knowledgeable and more useful. We know this. Everyone knows this. It's why rich people pay for tutors and send their kids to schools with small classes.

Doctors, arguably our most elite profession, know this. It's why, after the large introductory lectures on physiology and whatnot, they get the rest of their training in small groups in the clinic. There's a senior doctor and then residents of varying levels of seniority and then students, and the group is small. Progressive kool-aid drinkers would focus on the hands-on aspect, but if scale were feasible then one doctor would supervise a whole ward of trainees. But they don't do that because it wouldn't work. Patients would die and residents would remain clueless. So instead they train in very small groups with intense supervision and instruction. And it works well enough that the rest of us trust them with our lives. It's expensive as all hell, but it works so well that people learn how to do insanely complicated things like take apart the most vital organs in the body and put them back together again, or how to diagnose a subtle and deadly illness successfully, and not kill the patient while trying things along the way.

Everyone in higher education knows this, hence PhD dissertations are done in that model. Again, it's expensive (the opportunity costs for everyone involved are astronomical), but it works.

In the less prestigious trenches, people apprentice for trades, and it works well enough that we can drive across bridges.

So everyone knows that intensive one-on-one or small-group instruction works, but it requires paying an expert to spend time. And nobody will get an innovation award for something that we've been doing since a caveman gave a kid one-on-one instruction on how to properly sharpen a stone.

Next book: The Cult of Smart by Freddie deBoer

I haven't felt like blogging much lately, but my latest read, The Cult of Smart by Freddie deBoer, has some choice quotes that I want to blog so I won't forget. Freddie argues simultaneously that education isn't and shouldn't be everything, AND that it's OK to recognize that some kids are smarter than others, some kids will benefit from being in more advanced tracks in school, etc. We don't need to push college on everyone, but we can recognize that some kids are probably better cut out for it than others, and that's OK.  Some key quotes:

1) On page 7:

For decades our educational politics have obsessed over between-group variation, that is, gaps between black students and white, between girls and boys, between rich and poor. But to me the more interesting, more essential, insights lie in the nature of within-group variation. Take any identifiable academic demographic group you'd like--poor black inner-city charter school students, first-generation Asian immigrants in Los Angeles public schools, poor rural white girls in the Ozard Mountains. There are indeed systematic differences in outcomes between these various groups. But what's more telling and more interesting is the variation within these groups. In any such groups, you will find students who excel at the highest levels and students who fail again and again.

Freddie goes on to argue that so much policy is aimed at getting everyone to the same target, which is insane.

2) On page 12, regarding the idea that effort is everything (which he has encountered in many teaching jobs):

The cruelty of that idea--that we are all so equal in ability that only effort and character can keep us from success--was apparent. The evidence was sitting at a desk in front of me, weeping real tears.

I've said repeatedly that a theory of success needn't be a theory of failure, but certainly they go together closely. Saying why people succeed says nothing about why people don't do what is required for success--maybe a cruel society has discouraged them from trying. Nonetheless, there's a strong implication that if they disregard a cruel society they'll succeed, and however well-intentioned that belief might be, it won't really help a kid who just isn't cut out for something.

3) Page 17, regarding "weed-out" intro courses in science and engineering:

And I grew to think that rather than representing a failure of educators to do their jobs, these classes that screened out students performed a necessary if unfortunate function for institutions dedicated to training young people for their futures.

There's nothing wrong with saying to people that if this is hard the next thing will be even harder, so the time to make a good decision is now, when changing course is still easy.

4) On page 20, an interesting indictment of "positive thinking" and related notions:

Everywhere I turned as a teacher I seemed to find the same empty talk of excellence (without the necessary corollary of failure), innovation (without any sense of what we should be innovating toward), and positive thinking (even while its acolytes accused everyone else of having failed).

The negativity and implicit judgmentalism of the "positive thinking" types is an important point. He's also getting at The Restlessness that I often talk about here. We need to be constantly innovating toward, um, something. The achievement of an impossible goal, I guess.

5) On page 64:

We of course should equalize the environment of all children by giving them safe, stable, happy homes in which to grow and learn. We should do so as an end, not as a means to achieving educational equality.

Amen to that. Children deserve good childhoods because they are people, and particularly vulnerable people at that. While we shouldn't be short-sighted, we also shouldn't subordinate everything to super-long-term planning either. Something can be good in the moment because this moment has value and a person deserves good.

Perlstein on liberals vs conservatives

 Quick thought about a quote on page 812:

There is a saying: Conservatives seek converts, liberals seek heretics. And: Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line.

There's a tension between these but it's a resolvable tension. Regarding the first point, it fits with history: Liberals trace their roots to the Puritans, who had a morality code to enforce, and oh did they enforce it! Conservatives trace their roots to the Scots-Irish, who have preferred revivals and conversions. They sin all the time and oh do they need redemption. Puritans sin, but they do so as blots on uptight perfect lives. They should know better, they know it, and they'll never let anyone forget it. The right, well, they're raisin' hell, ya know? Of course they need redemption. It all fits the history.

(For the record, I still prefer Puritans. I grade papers for a living.)

Of course, when you seek impossible purity you'll never find it, so in order to feel like you found it you'll have to fool yourself, and fools fall in love. And then you'll fall out of love.

But what has he done?

The Cal State system has announced the selection of a new Chancellor to oversee the 23 campuses. He's been serving as President of CSU Fresno for several years, and if the campus is being run well then one can reasonably suspect that he'll do a decent enough job running the system. So far so good.

The announcement, however, says very little about his professional accomplishments and skills.  They're mentioned, of course. But far more attention goes to his ethnicity (Mexican-American), parentage (single mother), grand-parentage (immigrant grandfather), class background (first-generation college student), and place of origin (California's central valley). So what? Millions of people share these characteristics, and some of them would be great at running a university system while others would be terrible. Is he any good? We don't know.

At this point somebody could say that I'm treating him as a token, presuming that he must be lacking qualifications if they talk about identity, but that's not what I'm presuming. I think it's entirely possible that the CSU press release is doing him a grave disservice. (The CSU is well-known for doing people grave disservices on a daily basis.) Of course, it's also possible that he's an untalented and unaccomplished mediocrity, but that would simply make him utterly typical of CSU administrators. The CSU's untalented and unaccomplished mediocrities come in all sexes, genders, races, colors, etc. I've met pale and male administrators who couldn't manage their way out of a paperbag if handed a scissors and a map. I'm not presuming anything except that he probably reflects the CSU's administrators, and that the CSU PR office is serving him as poorly as the CSU serves everyone else.

And I still want to know what he's actually accomplished. Because, you know, he's just been promoted. It would be nice to know if the new boss is any good.

Interesting take on de Tocqueville

There's so much to say these days, both in the frustrations of my immediate work and the insanity of the wider world. I should probably blog more thoughts and mouth off on Facebook less, but blogging takes more effort. Hence social media slew blogs.

Anyway, today I came across an interesting essay in Areo about victimhood culture and de Tocqueville. de Tocqueville noted that competition in America is intense, and (aside from the richest, who are always secure) the comfortable classes enjoyed less surety than elsewhere, while the poor at least enjoyed a baseline of material comfort assured by a prosperous society that has made certain material conveniences cheap and abundant. The rich and poor being close to each other, they find more ways to compete with each other.

The author goes on to note that this can help explain victimhood culture in America. If you can't easily attain greater strength, why not signal greater vulnerability? Even the comfortable feel more vulnerable than elsewhere (indeed, 19th century British literature describes a secure class that is not noble-born but is essentially trust funders), and it's not like the uncomfortable can easily pull far ahead. So vulnerability is a plausible thing to reach for. The author goes on to note that humans are uniquely vulnerable among animals, a status that is necessary because our strength comes from an extended period of learning skills rather than relying on inborn strength and instinct. It has given us dominance over the planet, but also means that our species is wired to support others during their vulnerable stage.

Our desire to help the vulnerable can be channeled to great good and nobility, but it can also be abused. Like any instinct with a downside, we are wired with a compensating mechanism, in this case a desire to detect cheaters. We want to punish bad faith. So much of the culture war today arises from both an excess of victimhood and a resentful reaction to it. (You can reverse the order of causality if you like but the dynamic remains self-reinforcing.)

One thing I've noted before is that America's elite classes are justly proud of having slain a racist dragon.  Yes, there is still racism, hence I said "a racist dragon" rather than "all racist dragons." But still, a great victory was won, and multiple challenges to the system's authority came directly from racism. The elite classes know that the system's greatest tests have come from these dragons, and it brings out their best instincts. Of course, it also sets certain instincts to high alert, which has both upsides and downsides. We see those downsides in victimhood culture. We see their upsides in the very fact that victimhood culture is disproportionate: If those upsides hadn't won great victories there's be nothing excessive about claims of victimhood. It's an eternal tradeoff between false positives and false negatives. Our system's finest moments have come from confronting the true positives, so it's understandable that it's eager to find positives.

Perlstein on American business

 Just a quick observation from page 204: I've known for a while that mid-size and small businesses are more conservative than big businesses, and I attributed it mostly to the big businesses being more like bureaucracies distant from the founder, while the smaller to medium businesses are closer to their entrepreneurial roots. This is certainly still a factor. But Perlstein makes another point: Bigger businesses often have more exposure to consumers via brands if not direct sales, and rely on the mid-size companies for supply chains. And when mid-size businesses do interact with consumers, the media is often less important than local connections. So there's no need to filter things through a media-friendly liberal lens.

Latest book: Reaganland by Rick Perlstein

 The next book I'll blog about is Reaganland by Rick Perlstein. Perlstein has spent the past 20 years chronicling the rise of the modern American right wing, starting with "Before the Storm", a history of Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign. He then wrote "Nixonland" about the 1968 and 1972 elections. After that he wrote "The Invisible Bridge", about Reagan's attempt to secure the GOP nomination in 1976. One common theme in this chronology of the right is that Republicans don't give up like Democrats do.  Look at Nixon losing in 1960. Look at the people who came out of the Goldwater campaign in "Before The Storm" to lead the right in decades to come.  Look at Reagan losing in 1976. The right is determined. They see every defeat as an illustration of why they need to double down, not an illustration of why they need to go to the center. Hence the Democrats are running the quintessential centrist, while Republicans are running a batshit insane Twitter troll.

Perlstein's books are thick, and I doubt I'll deeply analyze everything, but a few stray thoughts from chapter 2:

1) A frequent figure in Perlstein's work is Richard Viguerie, who spent decades perfecting mail-order campaign fundraisers. On page 35 Perlstein notes a lesson that Viguerie got from the leader of YAF (Young Americans for Freedom): Even though they have only 2,000 members, they should like and claim to have 25,000. If the lie is more effective then use the lie.

Democrats lie, of course.  Everyone lies. But mostly I think Democrats try to deny, while Republicans outright invent. I don't say that as disparagingly as you might think. Republicans, much like Keyser Soze, understand that the winner just has to be willing to do what the other guy won't.

2) On page 36, I learned that the right saw the appointment of Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State as a betrayal. Kissinger was as Machiavellian as any right-winger, but he was willing to sit down and talk to the USSR, so he wasn't conservative enough. To the right, there's no such thing as too conservative, while to the Democrats moderation is a virtue. And before we mock the right for this, let me note something: Their batshit insane Twitter troll won. Because the right fights.

And as much as I might argue for traditionalism, I also want to be fair, so I don't fight as hard as I should. I pull punches. And this is why traditionalist academics lose: Because we aren't radicals. The progressive educators are radicals. They've got their kool-aid and they know that the only thing better than kool-aid is more kool-aid. We traditionalists lose because we don't fight dirty enough. And the thing about fighting dirty is you don't even have to choose to be dirty. You just have to choose to be relentless and go wherever that implies.

More thoughts on the restlessness

My main goal is to understand why the people around me want to confer credentials on everyone possible without regard to whether the recipients need, deserve, or, upon introspection, even want what is being thrust upon them. Some of it is the self-interest of credential-givers who need to remain employed, but there are ways to structure our work that would profitably focus on a different balance of quality vs quantity. I read an interesting interview this morning with a bunch of ideas in it, some of which are abhorrent, and thus I will not link to it. But sometimes the people outside of your own value system see things that you cannot see as easily, and this guy said that in the 60's the WASP elites lost their confidence in their own rule. Separate from that, I read some commentary recently on how China and Iran see themselves as civilizations, not mere countries, and something became clear to me about how unworkable America is, and how profoundly sad that is.

The basic problem of human nature is that people can often get ahead if they don't cooperate, so they don't cooperate.  Nobody knows this better than real communists, i.e. people who have actually implemented communism. They try cooperation for about two nanoseconds, then everyone grabs at the same thing rather than waiting for the planner to decide who gets what, so the communists promptly implement a brutal system of control. If you want people following plans rather than pursuing their own agendas within a system of incentives or disincentives, you'll need to control them.

Free market types have an obvious answer: Instead of planners, just base everything on voluntary exchange. You only get what someone is willing to trade with you for. Instead of force there are market incentives. Sounds great, but there's one problem: Somebody will show up and steal. OK, well, then we'll have enforceable property rights.  So force is wrong except when countering wrongful force. Great idea, and I largely agree, but then we run into the problem that two people can't agree on who the rightful owner of something is. Maybe they don't have a clear property deed or undisputed transaction record, or the prior owner died and the will was never clearly written out. Or maybe one of them is just plain lying. So you need an arbitrator to decide which one is right to grab the thing away from the other while pointing a gun and saying "You can't have it!" (Or, God help us, actually squeezing the trigger on the gun.)

So you wind up with authorities and rules, and these things can be used well and sparingly, or be used poorly and frequently, or even used sparingly but poorly. So you need to figure out who should be the authority. And no matter how you dress it up, you're ultimately deciding who has the right to decide when to point guns at someone, when to say "Yep, this guy was right to point a gun", and when to say "Nope, that guy was wrong to point a gun, let's punish him." Of course, "right to decide when..." just begs the question of where the right comes from. Great philosophers and political thinkers have said far more about this than I could hope to say well, but that's the basic problem. The best you can probably hope for is a situation where most people see a benefit in trading without pointing guns or swords or whatever, and the people who carry guns and lock other people up only do so when somebody else really did start the violence or really did steal.

Of course, no system gets it perfectly right. Even the best cops screw up at times, but you hope that the errors are few and far between, and are of the honest sort ("The guy who actually did it looked just like the guy we locked up. I feel terrible about this.") rather than the malicious sort ("My buddy said this guy is a punk so I roughed him up. He had it coming."). So you try to inculcate a sense of duty and honor in the people doing this.

It gets worse: Some of the rules are inevitably going to enrich somebody to somebody else's detriment. Even a simple rule like "The person who owns property upstream can't dump crap into the river because it hurts people downstream" has stakes for both parties, especially since the actual rule will be more like "You can't dump more than X amount of this kind of crap each day." So now there's some calibrated tradeoff between the interests of the person upstream and the person downstream, and there are stakes in that rule no matter where you strike the balance. Or you have a rule like "You can only stable horses in this part of town but not that part" because the horse manure causes sanitation problems. How you zone the horse and no-horse sections of towns has stakes for property owners and renters alike.

So everyone wants to be in charge. It's really good to be king, and it's pretty good to be one of the king's officials. And you have to figure out who gets these positions. And hence we come to the problem of elites and confidence. Everything I said so far was pretty elementary political philosophy: You'll have a hierarchy whether you like it or not. Now we get to the specifics of a particular hierarchy in a particular society.

Historically, the people in charge needed to satisfy 3 basic requirements: Keep the loyalty of the people with swords, strike deals with the people who have enough money to cause trouble or prevent trouble, and keep the public happy enough that they would rather not riot. Many societies have tried many ways to do this, but universal equality has rarely been a problem for them. Sometimes the people of a particular class would see themselves as equal citizens, but the masses rarely enjoyed that level of citizenship.

In a modern western democracy, alas, that's not good enough. So we have democracy. Everyone can vote, and while most of them won't, they elect people who allegedly represent their wishes. (God help us.) Of course, gaining those offices requires campaigning, which requires resources and endorsements, which means intrigue, and where you start off in life affects how likely you are to succeed at that.  Even worse, it doesn't just affect your chances of reaching elected office, it affects your chances of rising to positions of respect and responsibility in the structures of society.  (Duh.) Well, if everyone's supposed to be equal, this is a problem.

In the 60's the WASP elites lost confidence. Ironically, they lost it around the time that they were racking up political and legal victories over the white southern elites.  If anything should legitimize the WASP elites it's a victory over the racists of the south, except that the egalitarian logic called ALL hierarchy into question. And we don't have a good answer for that. We can accept the necessity of decision-makers, but nobody (myself included) wants accidents of birth to be determinative.  Of course, I also don't want southern California to have a fire season, but I don't get to have what I want. We can sand off the rough edges of birth accidents, but we can never completely erase them. Everyone knows this.

But there's a lot of room between "Accept every accident of birth as a fait accompli" and "Work tirelessly to completely erase all effects of birth." How far do you go between those extremes?  How far is enough? Nobody has an answer.  There's no obviously right place to draw a line. And so you eventually get to the point where it's considered grossly politically incorrect for me to say that if you have a bunch of kids with sucky SAT math scores, most of them will probably not do well in physics, even with considerable hand-holding. Yes, yes, there's always "This one person" who defied the odds, but the whole point of odds is that they involve probabilities and averages, and just as some people will be above average some will be below average. The existence of non-zero variance hardly refutes statistical reality.

We lack any ability to say what sort of deviation from perfect equality is acceptable, even in the short-term. It would be one thing if we could say "Look, we should try to lift up people so that even if they themselves can't go as far as they hoped, their kids can." That would frame equality as a journey, not a destination, let alone an instant destination. I would love a goal of "Let's help most people do better than their parents" rather than "Let's help everyone do the same as everyone else."

I'm framing things in extreme forms to get at principles.  Everyone will say that universal A grades are not the goal. But the fact remains that there are some stark realities that people around me deny. We cannot get everyone with a shitty SAT math score to be an accomplished physics student.  Sorry, can't happen. We can get an exceptional subset of them, but we can't make everyone an exception.

But as long as we regard accidents of birth as utterly unacceptable, we have to try the impossible, even if the consequences are predictable.

China and Iran have no such compunctions, and not just because they are ostensibly a People's Republic and an Islamic Republic. Communism is a recent aberration for China. They're proud of being China, which was old when Marx was an infant. And according to the Iranians whom I know, Islam is a "recent" phenomenon in their society, a product of Arab invasions. Their memory goes back much farther than that. Both societies have made great strides in educating their populations, but not because of any modern notions.  While we Americans have lamentably held the descendants of illiterate Scots-Irish border raiders in high esteem (seriously, why?), the Chinese and Iranians have long traditions of learning. They don't need to take in any modern baggage with education, so they don't need to try the impossible.  They just need to build up human capacity, which is a distinct project. 

And while Iran is far more democratic than Americans think, whatever loyalty they have to their far from perfect system is not rooted solely in the extent to which it respects democratic equality.  They desire it, of course, but it's not their sole basis for loyalty. They are a civilization with ancient roots and accomplishments, while we're a society framed around a handful of English cultural strains. I say that with no notion of Anglo-Saxon supremacy; I think England is a perfectly fine civilization by global standards, but far from the top of the heap in a world that has China, Japan, Egypt, Iran, Greece, Rome, Anatolia, Iraq, Syria, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Israel, Mexico, India, etc. The fact is that as much as our gene and skin tones are diverse, we Americans are rooted in English colonists. That's the society our ancestors assimilated into. The Puritans and Quakers were great, but the Cavaliers and Scots-Irish were mistakes.  I feel sorry for the Scots-Irish, but the Cavaliers were beyond contemptible.

We've done a lot since then--rock and roll, moon landings, the internet--but we're still a flash in the pan. We have a sinful past, and while other societies are perfectly capable of shrugging at their sinful pasts (God knows Iran and China have sinned) we don't know how to merely shrug. We either deny it (which inevitably leads people to double down on the racist mistakes), or else we self-flagellate endlessly. It's our Christian nature to do so. Christianity is a great basis for personal growth and redemption, but a society that takes it too far will either sink into denial or self-abuse. I feel terrible writing this, because I am too inquisitive and Christian for denial, too proud of learning to follow the egalitarian project to its utmost absurdity, and too Christian to escape guilt. 

I don't know what will become of us. We've done amazing things, and we will no doubt do more. But I question our stability, because we lack a proper way of answering our guilt or rationalizing our hierarchy. We can never completely undo the sins of history, but we cannot live with them either. But we will do some great things until we finally become undone in one way or another. Our egalitarian commitments will never enable us to accept the inevitability of hierarchy and elites' ability to secure advantages for their offspring. So I will have to continue to hand physics degrees to kids who can't do algebra, to try to wipe away the stain of a past that can never be erased.

Tacitus Book I: AD 14-15

I'm partway through Book I, which covers the political struggles after the death of Caesar Augustus.  One thing that's confusing is how many people have similar names, because everyone has long names/many names, and political families were always marrying, divorcing, remarrying, and adopting kids from other families for political purposes.

Tacitus is a more interesting writer than Plutarch. He's more of a storyteller than an instructor. I decided to read him because I heard that Catherine the Great (late Tsarina of Russia) admired his political insights.  Tacitus definitely understood people. I've particularly enjoyed his treatment of the mutinies in the Roman legions, and the ways in which shrewd commanders suppressed the mutinies. One commander allowed the men to punish mutineers themselves, and did nothing to stop brutality. Tacitus noted that if he had tried to stop them, then he'd be responsible for anything he didn't stop. This way he let the men own the bloodshed, both for good (they have staked their honor on avenging disloyalty) and for bad (the shame of excess is on them, not him). This is a shrewd insight.

Next book: Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus

I read a bunch of books that I didn't feel like blogging.  Now I'm going to read Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus. I'm sick and tired of the news, nothing but a crumbling empire wracked by plagues, debts, wars, and decadent politicians.  Let's read something different!

Galileo's ship

I've seen debates about whether Galileo actually conducted certain experiments or not.  On page 297 of The Tuscan Artist, Greco says that the ship experiment, in which an object is tossed straight upward on a steadily moving ship, only to fall at the feet of the person who tossed it, was performed in 1624. I hope it's true.  He cites some works be L. Conti (1990), which were written in Italian.

A few more observations on Galileo

I'm about 40% of the way through this biography. A few things I hadn't realized before:
1) Galileo wasn't actually working for Cosimo Medici when he discovered the moons of Jupiter and dedicated his article to them. He just wanted to work for them, because they could give him a job as Court Mathematician that would be 100% research, zero teaching. Some things never change.

2) I knew that Galileo did not invent the telescope, and that he based his work on that of Lippershey in the Netherlands. What I didn't realize is just how many people besides Galileo and Lippershey were making telescopes, and even pointing them at the moon.

3) Galileo made telescope eyepieces for the Republic of Venice (he was a professor in Padua) and signed an agreement not to disclose his secrets to anyone else.  Then he turned around and gave some eyepieces to the Medicis.  He really wanted to work for them

4) This makes perfect sense now that I've read it, but making telescope objective lenses was not the hard part, because those lenses have long focal lengths and hence small curvatures (large radii of curvature). The eyepieces were the tricky part because of the short radii of curvature.

5) The Republic of Venice was independent of Vatican authority and willing to protect his academic freedom. The Medicis?  Not so much. Had he realized the implications of this fact, I'm sure that he would have stayed in Padua.

Next book: Biography of Galileo

I'm reading Galileo Galilei, the Tuscan Artist by Pietro Greco. Two quick thoughts:
1) I learned that before Galileo dropped out of med school he invented a simple proto-watch to improve pulse measurements.

2) I didn't realize how much of the 16th century medical curriculum was based on Arab authors. The "Western" canon was more diverse than I realized.

The conservatism of progressives

Related to yesterday's post, a recent media spectacle shows just how conservative the modern progressives are. Last week in Toronto, a woman was being interviewed on TV about her nonchalant attitude toward public wearing of masks [note: I do NOT endorse her views about masks! I repeat: I do NOT endorse her views about masks!] when a man suddenly came up and kissed her on camera.  The woman was apparently quite happy with what happened. Nonetheless, the television station faced substantial criticism for airing this incident, and subsequently issued an apology. Some of the reporting on the matter has even opened with a "trigger warning."

Now, let me start by saying that I do NOT encourage men to go up and spontaneously kiss women that they barely know.  I repeat: Do NOT kiss women that you barely know!

Oh, and just in case I wasn't clear, I should add that men should NOT go up and kiss women that they barely know!

That said, as inadvisable as his conduct was, I have to note that in subsequent interviews it turned out that they'd spent some time interacting earlier that day.  We don't know exactly what transpired in their interactions, but apparently there was some romantic chemistry there, and when he acted on that romantic chemistry it was reciprocated. He wasn't doing this blindly, he was following up on interactions, making judgments based on how she had responded to him thus far. In most cases his actions wouldn't be well-received, but the competent adult woman that he kissed responded positively to a kiss from a man that she'd been interacting with and was clearly interested in. I can't bring myself to condemn a kiss between two people who had already interacted with each other and developed some romantic chemistry. That has to mean something, that a real, live, and apparently* competent woman responded enthusiastically to a kiss from a guy that she'd been interacting with.

Nonetheless, because so much of the context was off-camera, it looks like something else, a kiss out of the blue with no interaction that would suggest it's welcome.  I get why that would be off-putting to people, and I get why they wouldn't want young people (especially young men) to see kisses like that without crucial context.  I get that it could send the wrong message.

I guess what I would say is that expressing disapproval of public sexual displays that lack crucial relationship context is a fundamentally conservative stance.  And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with being conservative. There are many situations in life where I think a conservative approach is good, just as there are situations in which I think a liberal or progressive approach is good. Frankly, I think it's good to be conservative when it comes to telling young men to get consent (if not verbal consent then very strong non-verbal cues) before kissing. But let us not fool ourselves: Lamenting a media portrayal of a kiss that "sends the wrong message" is a conservative stance.

I harp on this because we need to get past the idea that nominal progressives are the heirs of 1968. They aren't.  Maybe that's a good thing. I mean, I wasn't around (or even conceived) in 1968, I have no stake in defending that year. But we need to get past the idea that the people we call progressives are heirs of an older counterculture. They aren't. Maybe they are wise to reject that counterculture. Or maybe not. But, wise or foolish, there is nothing counter-cultural about a cultural faction that can get a TV station to apologize for erring a spontaneous kiss without the prelude of a romantic relationship.

Yes, at this point somebody will say that the issue is consent, and I will say that consent also requires context, and emotional preludes are the appropriate context for seeking consent. Suppose that a man briefly interacted with a woman, and that there was no emotional or romantic chemistry in their interactions.  Suppose that he then formally, explicitly asked for consent to kiss. Even if he respected her inevitable "no", would anybody say "Yeah, this was an OK interaction"?  I think not.  Everybody would recognize that it is creepy and inappropriate to seek a kiss without strong signals of romantic interest. "Yes" may be the only thing that means "yes", but "yes" should not be sought out of the blue.

So, let us not kid ourselves: If we had seen the romantic prelude to this kiss, it's likely that many people would be less bothered by it, because they'd see an interaction with context that would make it seem plausibly consensual beforehand, not just afterward.

The woman and man in that video are the real bohemians. Maybe it's fine to be a bohemian. Or maybe they are playing with fire and unwittingly encouraging others to do likewise. Think of them as you will, but know that they are the bohemians, however good or bad you deem them to be. If you approve, well, maybe you're a bohemian. Or maybe you at least wish you were one. But if you disapprove, you are not a bohemian, no matter how outlandish the hairstyle that you wear while drafting codes of conduct.

Finally, since I didn't say it enough, men should NOT go up and kiss women that they barely know!

*I mean, I'm not a psychologist, I haven't conducted an interview and neurological exam to verify that she is of sound mind, but I'm going to make an assumption.

I am NOT a company man! I am an empowered creative with a non-conformist outlook that is valued in our diverse workspace!

This essay in American Affairs Journal is full of insights into how educated professionals conduct themselves as corporate bureaucrats while portraying themselves as non-conformists. For instance:

A key benefit of any prestige university is the social network. In order to take full advantage of this, students must participate in party culture without losing control of their appetites. Fiction often con­fronts open secrets, and The Secret History by Donna Tartt follows a group of eccentric college students who destroy their lives after taking their professors’ Dionysian stories too seriously. This might point to obvious truths about moderation: self-control accompanies success. Yet vices and virtues are not doled out equally, and when leadership training is done in a hyper-permissive atmosphere, we narrow the type of character who emerges.

When I think back to the rituals of certain honor societies in my senior year of college, I think about various rituals that involved long, sleepless nights, hard work and hard celebration, and the bonds that were forged.  And I get it. It's a balancing act of work and play reminiscent of Daniel Bell's observations in Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Not everyone can pull it off, but it's a badge of honor for those who do.

Also, regarding why so many in the professional classes eat up the dumbest pop psychology like it's pita chips and humus from Trader Joe's:

Forty years ago, Christopher Lasch wrote that “modern industry condemns people to jobs that insult their intelligence,” and today employers rub this insult in workers’ faces with a hideously infantilizing work culture that turns the office into a permanent kindergarten classroom. Blue-chip companies reward their employees with balloons, stuffed animals, and gold stars, and an exposé detailing the stringent communication rules of the luxury brand Away Luggage revealed how many start-ups are just “live, laugh, love” sweatshops. This humiliating culture dominates America’s companies because few engage in truly productive or necessary work. Professional genre fiction, such as corporate feminism, is thus often told as a way to cope with the underwhelming reality of working a job that doesn’t con­tribute anything to the world.

There is another way to tell the story of the young career woman, however. Her commute includes inspiring podcasts about Ugandan entrepreneurs, but also a subway stranger breathing an egg sandwich into her face. Her job title is “Senior Analyst—Global Trends,” but her job is just copying and pasting between spreadsheets for ten hours. Despite all the “doing well by doing good” seminars, the closest thing she knows to a community is spin class, where a hundred similar women, and one intense man in sports goggles, listen to a spaz scream Hallmark card affirmations.

Regarding genuine non-conformity:

Trump’s antics are indicative of his different route to power. Forget everything else about him: how would you act if you never had a job outside a company with your name on the building? The world of the professional managerial class doesn’t contain many characters, and so they associate eccentricity with bohemianism or ineptitude. But it’s also reliably found somewhere else.

Indeed, the more ostensibly bohemian a professional pretends to be, the more adamant they are about the Code of Conduct. I can recall sitting in a seminar where a speaker with a distinctly "alternative" appearance was introduced, and the host made sure to mention that this speaker had been quite active in developing codes of conduct for professional organizations. I'm old enough to remember when this person would have been denouncing the Code of Conduct, not writing it. I have never been a hippie, punk, or bohemian, and the only time my skin gets pieced by metal is during medical procedures. Still, I miss the days when deviating substantially from some "normie" expectation meant a person was probably harder to offend, not easier to offend.

Now, to be sure, I think conservatives have lately drifted too far away from codes of conduct, as evidenced both by the Tweeter-in-Chief and also some chance encounters with conservatives. At the same time, I think there has to be a middle ground where we keep our hands to ourselves and avoid the dirty talk while at work, but also don't elevate the perpetually-offended to the highest moral pedestals.

I miss the days when it was the right-wingers who wanted the kids to turn down their music and stop watching those blasphemous movies. The other day I was watching Monty Python's Life of Brian, and partway through I realized that this movie would be roundly condemned for blasphemy today, but the condemnations would come from the left.  The right has (mostly) learned how to deal with jokes about religion.  Or, at least, they know they can't bankrupt a theater chain. But the left would go ballistic over the punching down, never mind that Monty Python also punched up, sideways, diagonally, and into the fifth dimension. And never mind that Eric Idle's Loretta character actually had her name and pronoun preferences respected, snide remarks from Reg not withstanding.

This is NOT a test! I repeat: This is NOT a test!

The University of California, possibly in collaboration with the California State University, as well as anyone else who would like some roasted unicorn with a side order of rainbows and fairies, is going to devise its own admissions tests.  These tests will be totally better than the SAT/ACT, will do a better job of predicting college performance, and will NOT perpetuate inequities, because they will only test what REALLY matters.  So all groups will score equally well and all of our problems will be solved.

These tests will be made from scratch and available by 2025 (really, 2024 if they want to admit freshmen freshpersons people of freshness with it in the fall of 2025). Whereas so many other educational measures reflect disparities in American society, these tests will not show disparities, and so they will be much fairer than the SAT/ACT, and will get buy-in from all ethnic groups.  (Except for Asian Americans, who are doing great on the SAT/ACT and will lose spots from this.  But I'm told that Asians aren't diverse, so I guess that's OK.)

Look, if it is true that a test of what REALLY matters for academic performance is blind to all of the disparities and inequities in our k-12 system (not to mention the wider societal context in which k-12 students are reared and prepared) then those equities don't actually matter.  Years of under-preparation?  Irrelevant! None of it mattered.  The preparation that other kids got wasn't an advantage, and the preparation that some were denied was not a disadvantage.  Everything is the same for all people in all context so who cares about anything? Inequality of opportunity is just a lie. (And, well, yes, it springs from falsehoods, but falsehoods can do real harm.) If we accept these premises, then everyone is off the hook for the first 18 years of life, and all responsibility now rests on the shoulders of college professors.

Sadly, under-preparation is real.  Some of it can be remedied, because people are (to some extent) adaptable.  Some of it can't be, because what happens early in life is (to some extent) of lasting consequence.  But pretending that it's irrelevant, and everyone can just be admitted to the same programs that start from the same place and proceed at the same pace, that's insanity.

Let us not talk falsely now.  Everybody knows what this is about. Everybody knows what they want.  So let's do it.  Let's replace the admissions tests with neural nets that infer race.  It's what they want.  It's illegal under Prop. 209, but it's nonetheless ethically defensible (at least from certain premises), so do it, and let the righteous battle be joined.  Fight for principles and premises that you believe in, rather than demanding that we all tell lies about preparation and tests. My 100% sincere opinion about affirmative action is that it is far more honest than anything else we do in higher ed, and I hate lying more than anything else. So let's do it.

The inevitable consequence of egalitarianism

A syphilitic Roman Emperor recently mused on whether doctors should inject disinfectants into people in order to cure the COVID-19 virus, and now companies that make cleaning products are issuing statements warning people not to do that.

It's easy to mock him, but what on earth did my colleagues think would happen if we spent decades proclaiming that everyone is equally smart and every perspective is equally valid? Did they think that Marcus Aurelius would rise from his grave and usher in a new era of philosopher-kings?  Did they think that after we knocked the sages from their stages the demos would find enlightenment and start proclaiming sublime truths? Did they think that the products of these school systems would engage in skeptical, careful examination of hypotheses and demand sound statistical evidence?

What happened is that the American people selected a game show host who's failed at every endeavor in his life (except reality TV) to be their king, and a critical mass of the American people would push their Senators to acquit him when he inevitably conflated public and personal interests. That's what happened.  And now this idiot stands over doctors and makes them genuflect while he prattles on.

And every kool-aid-drinking liberal can say that this isn't what they intended, but isn't it?  Didn't they want to stop elevating the smart and accomplished?  Didn't they want every idiot out there to feel comfortable expressing their views?  Didn't they want to flatten society and diminish the importance of expertise? Didn't they want the smart kids to twiddle their thumbs while the teacher kept pace with the slowest?

You can't make it a moral imperative to hand a college degree to everything that floats to the surface of the k-12 toilet bowl and then scratch your head and wonder how an idiot is standing up there talking over America's most accomplished infectious disease specialists. This was inevitable.

Meritocracy and virtue signaling

I like this take-down of Ivy League faculty who virtue signal by arguing against meritocracy:

Look, it's possible that the anti-meritocratic and anti-competitive posture of so much of the enlightened academy is really grounded in academics' own experience of the rottenness of their paths to success, their skepticism that the system that produced them is producing good leaders for our regime, and their conviction that therefore, they are necessarily part of the problem. But given these kinds of arguments, it's not a very plausible conclusion. When you read stuff like this, the conclusion that the elites now turning against meritocracy are just people who've gotten theirs and now want to pull up the ladder behind them so that they don't have to face any further competition is much more plausible. 

I don't actually think that they're intentionally trying to pull up the ladder. Rather, I think that they don't actually think. When you spend your days around the products of selective educational programs, you see them with all of their warts. They are fully human (except when they seem more sub-human...) and have human flaws. Meanwhile, that nice assistant at the dentist's office seems at least as decent as any of the professors on your hallway, let alone that one jerk who acts so selfish in department politics. And you read all about kids who did poorly in school until someone sat down and really helped them and now they're flourishing. So clearly this whole selective education system is far from perfect.

Of course, if they thought carefully they'd realize that:
1) Well, nothing is perfect, including whatever system you'd like to replace the current one with. Have you actually made the case that the alternative is really better?

2) The dental assistant is a great person who deserves respect, a chance to advance in their endeavors, and the same safety net as anyone else, but that in and of itself doesn't mean they should (or would even want to) work as a college professor.

3) Yes, there are always some kids who do great when given an extra chance. There are plenty of kids who flounder when pushed into a more advanced path. By all means, make room for the diamonds in the rough, but not everyone is a diamond in the rough. There's a perfectly fine left-wing argument to be made that what most people need is a safety net and some respect for their middle class jobs rather than a shot at an elite educational path.

So this is less about shielding themselves from competition and more about remaking John Lennon's "Imagine" in op-ed format. To the extent that it might be about competition, it's about winning a virtue competition against other elites.