Half Sigma

Legal protections for the appearance challenged?

The story about the Delta Zeta sorority evictions has gotten me thinking about legal protections for the ugly. Or shall we call them the appearance challenged?

Consider that the following types of discrimation are illegal in at least some cases: national origin, race, gender, age, pregnancy status, sexual orientation, disabilities and handicaps, and religion. But the appearance challenged have no legal protection. Not only is there no protection, the very people who would abhor discrimating on the basis of race themselves discriminate on the basis of appearance.

But there are two roadblocks to providing protection for appearance challenged people. The first is that there is no bright line identifying someone who's appearance challenged. In contrast, it's usually pretty easy to say if someone is black, over the age of forty, or a woman. Be because appearance is probably distributed along a continuous bell curve, there is no clear line separating the average person from the appearance challenged person.

The second roadbloack is that there is no appearance challenged movement. This is because appearance challeneged people are so ashamed of their status. People are proud to be black, Puerto Rican, homosexual, or even Moslem, but there's no one proud that they are appearance challenged. Many appearance challenged people are in self-denial about their status, and their self-deception is abetted by society's taboo. Appearance challenged people can go through life not fully aware of how unattractive they are because no one will tell them how ugly they really are.

Thus the appearance challenged, instead of banding together, actually participate in the discrimation. That's why the Delta Zeta sorority at DePauw was losing membership. Other appearanced challenged young women had no desire to hang out with their own kind. They took to heart the words of Groucho Marx who said, "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members."

Escape from New York

Here's yet another interesting real estate story from this weekend's NY Times. The author of the article decided to move to the midwest after the landlord raised the rent on her Williamsburg studio from $975 to $1200.

The tipping point may have been when she discovered that everyone else in her neighborhood was receiving financial support from their parents.

And all the “struggling writers” who had just graduated from Bard and brought their $500 vintage typewriters with them? Trust me, they are not “struggling.” They are frittering away their trust funds. When I got home from working two dead-end jobs to make rent and wondered why all my neighbors looked as if they’d been slacking all day at ultra-hip coffee shops, it was because they had been slacking all day at ultra-hip coffee shops.

Only half of the housing market will crash?

Here's some interesting real estate news from the Wall Street Journal:

Fears about defaults are slowing the gusher of investor funds going to riskier segments of the mortgage market. That means less money available for "subprime" loans to riskier borrowers, forcing lenders to focus more on borrowers who can afford down payments and have well documented finances. With fewer lower-income Americans able to buy homes, downward pressure on prices will probably increase.

...

Economists don't expect the tightening of standards to tank the economy because loans remain plentiful for borrowers with good credit.

But "at the low end, it ought to whack 5% out of effective home demand right now," says Thomas Lawler, a housing economist in Vienna, Va. In a recent report, Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analyst Frederick Cannon said "constraints on lending to first-time home buyers are likely to prolong the housing downturn" by limiting sales of entry-level homes, making it tougher for the owners of those homes to trade up.

Sad news for me, if true. I had hoped the whole housing market would crash so I could afford to buy something, but it seems that the low end of the market is going to crash while high end housing, like the stuff for sale in Manhattan, will stay at their high prices.

This is going to increase the wealth gap between the haves and the have-nots.

Christian Right has no one to vote for

This story about "a private meeting at a Florida resort" of the most influential members of the Christian Right affirms my posts about how Rudy Giuliani is destined to win.

We already know the Christian Right doesn't like Rudy, but the article also affirms my point that they also don't like John McCain nor Mitt Romney.

Surprisingly, they also have problems with Mike Huckabee and Sam Brownback because they are not anti-immigration small government conservatives. In any event, they admit that these guys have no chance of winning. "[M]any conservatives expressed concerns about whether any of the candidates could unify their movement or raise enough money to overtake the front-runners."

How did she save $100,000?

Here's a snippet from a NY Times real estate article:

For nine years, Candice Spielman, a 37-year old freelance television producer, lived in a rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side that measured about 150 square feet if you count the sleeping loft she had built over her refrigerator and desk.

...

At this point, Ms. Spielman realized she had to buy. By saving and investing all of the money her grandparents had given her over the years, along with what she saved by living in a cheap rental for so long, she had put away more than $100,000.

She put down 20 percent on a $510,000 apartment, a 470-square-foot studio in the Cocoa Exchange building downtown, and expects to pay about $2,500 a month for the mortgage and common charge.

The meaning changes a lot depending upon how much money her grandparents gave her.

If they only gave her $20,000, then it's still a story about a woman who saved $80,000.

But if they gave her more than $100,000, then it's yet another story about a woman who wouldn't be living in Manhattan if she weren't receiving financial support from her family.

Pole dancing

It was suggested that I should blog about the NY Times article on pole dancing.

It just sounds like a dumb exercise gimmick to me. It's understandable how some women want the benefits of exercise without the boredom of going to a gym and running on treadmills and lifting stuff. Although I suppose that some will say that society is once again glorifying the licentious.

The ugliness taboo

From Wikipedia:

A taboo is a strong social prohibition (or ban) against words, objects, actions, discussions, or people that are considered undesirable by a group, culture, or society. Breaking the taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent. Some taboo activities or customs are prohibited under law and transgressions may lead to severe penalties. Other taboos result in embarrassment, shame and rudeness.

That certainly applies to the topic of ugliness, especially when young women are ugly.

So we see in a NY Times Article about girls who were expelled from a sorority because they were ugly, the word "ugly" or any reasonable synonym is not used anywhere in the article.

Let's review the story. There was a Delta Zeta sorority chapter at DePauw University where the majority of the girls were ugly. The national chapter came in, interviewed the 35 members, and told the 23 ugliest ones to leave. Of course the NY Times article doens't directly tell us that they were ugly, rather that the "women" who were allowed to stay were "conventionally pretty." Even use of the word "conventionally" is interesting, implying that under a different set of conventions, the whole situation might have been reversed.

The NY Times also implies that there was racism. We are told that the Korean and Vietnamese members were evicted. But look at this evicted Asian girl's photo. She's ugly. There's no evidence of any race based discrimation here, only looks based discrimination. If she looked like my Asian former high school classmate, she probably would have been allowed to stay.

The national sorority had to pretend that the girls were expelled for "demonstrating a lack of commitment to meet recruitment goals." Because to mention ugliness is taboo.

Do the ugly girls have any legal recourse? I don't think so. The law prohibits discrmination based on race, gender, religion and sometimes even sexual orientation. But not ugliness. It's perfectly legal to discriminate against the ugly. Although it seems that ugliness is a far greater burden in society than being black or gay. Everyone tries their hardest to demonstrate their sensitivity by giving breaks to minorities and gays. But the very same people go out of their way to keep the ugly down.

The taboo doesn't benefit the ugly. How can the ugly get the legal protections enjoyed by homosexuals, Muslims and illegal Mexican immigrants if no one can even talk about the problem?

Reading scores are declining

In the news today, national reading and math test scores are down. The average reading test score for 12th graders declined from 292 in 1992 to 286 in 2005.

As usual, Half Sigma goes beyond the report in the popular media to tell you what it really means.

Of the 6 point drop, 2 points is due to the declining percentage of 12th graders who are white. (This is based on the simple observation that scores for white students only declined by 4 points during the time period.)

1.5 points is due to dysgenic breeding. (I am estimating that the standard deviation is 30 and that during 13 years there would have been a 1/20th of a standard deviation decline in intelligence because of dysgenic breeding.)

2.5 points is due to unknown factors. Perhaps the declining quality of education?

It's possible that it's the combination of dysgenic breeding and "diversity" which is causing the decline in the quality education, because in schools with less intelligent children, teachers need to spend more time on discipline and thus less time on teaching, and furthermore the lower average intelligence of all the children lowers expectations and causes instruction to be dumbed down.

Women and wealth

Robert Frank's Wealth Report has a post about women and wealth.

I learned how women become wealthy:

The study, conducted by Asset Management Advisors and scheduled for release later this month, polled 555 women, most with net worths of $1 million or more. The survey found that 36% of the respondents inherited their wealth, while another 29% made money from their husband’s employment. Only 7% made their fortunes from their own businesses and less than half of the women surveyed were employed full-time.

And their favorite hobby:

The women also placed a strong emphasis on charity. More women were likely to be knowledgeable about charitable giving and philanthropy than they were about investment management, taxes and insurance planning.

As I've written before, philanthropy is entertainment for rich people and requires them to buy $5,000 dresses.

Moving for a better private school

People trying to educate their children on the cheap will move to a neighborhood for the public schools. But in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, there's an article about how "a small but growing number of parents ... are dramatically altering their families' lives to pursue the perfect private school for their children."

The story of the O'Gormans is pretty inspiring:

Settled in the well-groomed Los Angeles suburb of San Marino, Derek O'Gorman worked as an insurance broker. His wife, Mary Ann, took care of their two girls, both stellar students at top-ranked local schools. But in 2005, when the family visited a nearby private high school they expected the girls to attend, they came away disappointed. After an extensive search, the O'Gormans found the perfect fit: the Winsor School. Winsor, famed for its academic rigor and participatory classes, is also known for the academic success of its 420 students: About a third of its latest graduating class went to Ivy League colleges.

The hitch: Winsor is in Boston. After months of debate, the O'Gormans sold their house. Mr. O'Gorman, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, quit his job, and the family moved to a small Boston apartment. It would take three months and most of the family's savings before Mr. O'Gorman, 45 years old, found an insurance job in the new city.

"No place is perfect, but I wanted the place that was the most perfect for us and them," says Ms. O'Gorman, 44. "To me, it's better than leaving them a house or my 401k."

...

"It's a crazy world, and they need to be equipped both from an educational and social standpoint," [Ms. O'Gorman] says. Since the family's move, "I think I breathe a little easier...knowing I'm doing the best that I can."

...

Mr. and Mrs. O'Gorman are still grappling with the basics of East Coast life -- such as Boston's myriad roads and its aggressive drivers. Life in a two-bedroom apartment is a big change. Its swanky urban décor stems from the unit's origins as a model home. The family can't afford the $30,000 tab to move their furnishings. Money from their home sale is being plowed into the girls' tuition, which totals nearly $56,000 a year.

On a recent gray December day, sitting in her new living room, Ms. O'Gorman said she's still adjusting. She talked about the china the family traditionally used at Thanksgiving, and her clear blue eyes brimmed with tears with the reminder of her former life. Their finances depleted, Ms. O'Gorman said she soon plans to return to work.

"Some days you feel like the odds are stacked against you -- when Derek didn't have a job for three months -- but then Colleen comes in excited about a Greek test they had," she said. "Those moments are great."

South Korea importing huge number of brides

South Korean men are seeking brides in China and Vietnam, taking advantage of South Korea's greater relative wealth. (See NY Times article.)

In 2005, marriages to foreigners accounted for 14 percent of all marriages in South Korea, up from 4 percent in 2000.

And this has created a big industry in the country, and sometimes it's even subsidized by the government:

In South Korea, billboards advertising marriages to foreigners dot the countryside, and fliers are scattered on the Seoul subway. Many rural governments, faced with declining populations, subsidize the marriage tours, which typically cost $10,000.

14% is a pretty huge number for this type of thing. The issue of foreign brides coming to the U.S. was discussed previously in this blog, but the number of native born American men marrying foreign women is a very tiny percentage of U.S. marriages.

Of course it's only men seeking foreign wives. You don't hear of any women, South Korean or American, seeking young good looking husbands from abroad. (But there are some American women who go to Haiti to have sex.) One presumes we are observing basic principles of evolutionary psychology.

Rudy pulling ahead

The latest poll shows that Rudy continues to pull ahead:

Asked whom they favored for the Republican nomination, 40 percent of Republican voters named Mr. Giuliani, while 18 percent chose John McCain.

I think this race will be wrapped up months before a single primary vote is cast.

Hot girls get fewer speeding tickets

Via Marginal Revolution, I came across a resarch paper about traffic citations.

The paper is analyzing what happens after a traffic stop. In other words, after the police officer, at his discretion, can issue a ticket, who does he issue a ticket to, and who does he decide to let off the hook.

I honed in on the most interesting part: "young females have the lowest probability of receiving a speeding ticket."

The women weren't rated for attractiveness, but one assumes that attractive young females had a lower probablility of receiving a speeding ticket than unattractive young women.

So we see that justice isn't blind, and the police officer is often writing tickets with his penis instead of his pen.

Yet another privilege which pretty young women have that the rest of us don't.

Praising children

There has been some internet chatter about an article in NY Magazine subtitled The Inverse Power of Praise.

The point of the article, with hindsight now that I've read it, seems pretty obvious. If you praise your child for something, the child will try to duplicate that behavior. So praising your child for being smart, which is essentially accomplishing things more easily than his peers, then he will try to duplicate that behavior.

The article seems to favor praising children for their effort rather than their intelligence. The problem with this approach is that it can be taken too far, because effort without results isn't really what you want your children to be doing either. Furthermore, the article pointed out that children are smart and can see through false praise. If adults are genuninely impressed by effortless results, the children will manage to pick that up.

The real issue, which is not addressed by the article, is that it's bad for children to be in a classroom where the other kids are less intelligent than them. If a child is in a classroom where his intelligence is average for that classroom, then he will only be able to surpass his classmates by putting forth some effort. Thus the problem of how to praise the kids is eliminated. Praising their results now encourages them to put forth effort because now they cannot achieve higher level results unless they put some effort into it.

Sperm banks and The Bell Curve

There's a wonderful article in yesterday's NY Times about sperm banks. I learned that only 1 to 2% of men who offer to donate to sperm banks are accepted as donors, and of those that are accepted, some donors are much popular among the donees than others.

Women who use sperm banks are looking to make a perfect baby:

Handsome and brilliant. Talented and charming. Loving and kind. A match one might only dream of finding in the flesh.

“Many women see this as another way to give their child a head start in life,” says Lori Andrews, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law who has studied the sperm bank industry, of the high stakes of sperm selection.

And increasingly, say the banks, women want proof of perfection before buying a dream donor’s sperm.

They ask for SAT scores and personality test results.

I think this is highly ironic, because somehow one suspects that the women who use the services of sperm banks voted for John Kerry in the last election. Under normal circumstances, they'd agree with the following statement: "The Bell Curve is racist pseudo-science proven wrong by experts." But these same women become True Believers in The Bell Curve and eugenics when it comes to selecting genes for their own children.

Girls who wrestle

Today on the NY Times most emailed list: girls' wrestling.

Jessica Bennett, Montville High School’s 103-pound wrestler, waited until Rich Wood went down to try to grab her leg, then launched herself onto his back, and got him down to his knees. After a brief stalemate later in the match, Jessica, 15, lifted him off the ground and took him back to the mat, for more points.

At that, several of Rich’s teammates, from St. Bernard High School here, looked down at their feet. There is still some pain in watching a teammate being beaten by a girl — even a girl like Jessica, who has won 23 of her 35 matches this season.

Art supplies in the red states

As I recently blogged, certain sorry excuses for psychologists told the New York Times that art supplies are liberal commodities.

However, having lived in both the Phoenix Arizona area, a conservative "red" area, and the Washington DC area, a liberal "blue" area, I can testify that there were a lot more and better art supply stores in the Phoenix area.

The was a pretty cool art supply store in Georgetown on M street, but it went out of business in 2004. Whatever the kids at nearby Georgetown University are studying, it sure isn't studio art. There was a little art supply store in Foggy Bottom near George Washington University, but not big enough to be worth the trip.

The other art supply store I went to in the DC area was Pearl, which used to be off the Beltway near (but not in) Alexandria. It looks like the store has subsequently moved to the Falls Church area. Hopefully the new store is managed better, because the Pearl off the Beltway was a big mess.

There is a Utrecht Art Supplies in DC, but I have to confess that I never visited it because 1250 I Street seemed like an out of the way location.

Meanwhile, there is also a branch of Utrecht in Tempe near the University of Arizona. There was another little art supply store near ASU which had a larger branch in Scottsdale. And the best art supply store in the area is Arizona Art Supply, at Indian School Rd and Central Ave, which has an incredible selection of merchandise. And since I left the area, it looks like a Jerry's Artarama opened in Tempe.

There used to be a Pearl in Phoenix but it was way on the west side, so I'm not surpised that it closed down. The west side is the prole area of Phoenix. Art supplies buyers are middle class. But not upper class, because Paul Fussell made a big deal of pointing out that having paintings in your house that someone who lives there painted causes you to drop in class.

Both areas had several Michael's, but those stores sell art supplies for little old ladies and not real artists. So we won't count them.

And there you have it. Phoenix, a conservative "red" area, has many thriving art supplies stores. While in the Washington DC "blue" area, the art supplies stores can't make a profit.

Of course New York City has more art supplies than both Washington and Phoenix combined (including the original Pearl and the original Utrecht), but this is the art capital of the United States so it's not really a fair comparison.

Pro-abortion Republicans have the highest IQs

I thought of a new way to break down Americans' political orientations and compare this to their average Wordsum (vocabulary test) scores, using the General Social Survey.

RESULTS

Pro-abortion Democrat: 6.48 (N=544)
Pro-abortion independent: 6.48 (N=495)
Pro-abortion Republican: 6.51 (N=298)

Anti-abortion Democrat: 5.63 (N=558)
Anti-abortion independent: 5.77 (N=649)
Anti-abortion Republican: 6.30 (N=550)

DISCUSSION

Pro-abortion Republicans are the smartest segment of the electorate, although their average Wordsum score is so close to pro-abortion Democrats and independents that it's more properly called a tie. But I will call it for pro-abortion Republicans so I can congratulate myself for being in the smartest of the six segments of the electorate.

We see a dramatic difference in the anti-abortion segment of the electorate. Anti-abortion Republicans are significantly smarter than anti-abortion Democrats and independents.

Pro-abortion Democrats are a little bit smarter than anti-abortion Republicans, but the average IQ of the Democratic party is dragged down by the majority (yes, that's a majority!) of Democrats who are anti-abortion.

Because pro-abortion Democrats are significantly smarter than anti-abortion Democrats, the pro-abortion group gets to control the party's policy platform despite being a minority of the party. As I've pointed out before, the Democratic party is best thought of as being divided into the smart half and the dumb half, but because approximately 100% of the Democratic opinion writers are from the smart half, everyone tends to forget that the dumb half even exists.

On the Republican side, the pro-abortion wing has a much smaller IQ advantage over the anti-abortion wing than is the case in the Democratic Party. The much higher IQ of anti-abortion Republicans (as compared to anti-abortion Democrats), combined with their larger share of the Republican Party, explains why they have been able to swing the Republican Party platform to the anti-abortion side.

Based on this data, I don't believe that the Republican Party is so overwhelmingly anti-abortion such that it will prevent Rudy Guiliani from winning the nomination. After all, Democratic Party voters are also anti-abortion, but that doesn't prevent pro-abortion Democrats from consistently winning primary elections.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

Pro or anti-abortion is determined based on the ABANY question:

206. Please tell me whether or not you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if. ... G. The woman wants it for any reason?

Note that only 42.7% of the sample believes that a woman should be allowed to have an abortion for any reason.

People born out of the country are excluded because they are disadvantaged when taking a vocabulary test.

Only survey years 1994-2004 are used, because the goal is to examine the current electorate and not how people aligned themselves back in the 1970s.

The GSS tables used to compute the data are posted here.

GSS tables

GSS tables used for my post on pro-abortion Republicans having the highest IQs.

Politics and psychology

I am definitely a strong believer in the idea that one's political views are based heavily on emotion rather than logic, so while I applaud this NY Times article for discussing the issue, the researchers mentioned and the writer of the article seem pretty clueless.

Folk music and a collection of feminist poetry may well be dead giveaways that there is a liberal in the house.

There's folk music in my apartment, but there sure aren't any liberals living here. The article already starts out dead wrong.

offices and bedrooms of conservatives tended to be neat and contain cleaning supplies, calendars, postage stamps and sports-related posters; conservatives also tended to favor country music and documentaries. Bold-colored, cluttered rooms with art supplies, lots of books, jazz CDs and travel documents tended to belong to liberals

First of all, I don't understand the part about postage stamps. I have some in a draw in my kitchen. How do liberals mail letters if they don't have any postage stamps? I beseech liberal readers without postage stamps to answer this question in the comments.

Are people too poor to travel allowed to be liberals? Does Thomas Kinkade, the conservative Christian artist who's a fan of George Bush, realize that his art supplies make him liberal?

The researchers are obviously mixing up cause and effect. The crowd you hang with has a big influence on your tastes and hobbies. For example, people in red states listen to country music because it's what other people around them are listening to. I doubt that the country music sound is inherently liberal or conservative.

These researchers don't seem to understand how class, intelligence, religiosity, preference towards procedural or distributive justice (possibly related to guilt), and economic status all intersect to cause people to identify as liberal or conservative, identities which in the U.S. are not based on any pure tendency but are rather coalitions of interests which formed in response to the political realignment of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Amy Benfer

Commenters brought up the fact that Amy Benfer, who wrote the piece about Ayn Rand, has an interesting story of her own.

In a magazine article entitled Return of the Deadbeat (and I should remind you that it's possible that the magazine editor, not Amy, made up the title), we learn that Amy became a single mother when she was 16.

But then, a decade later, the father suddenly comes back into her life and wants to bond with the child. Amy doesn't like the idea.

To me, the requests seemed outrageous. It didn't help that the differences between Steve and me about politics, lifestyle, and childrearing philosophies had become comic. He worked as a roofer, voted as a conservative Republican, worshipped as a Baptist, and lived in rural Idaho.

Oh my god, Steve is a prole! Amy, the elitely educated writer, can't allow her precious daughter's mind to be filled with Steve's lower class ideas about God and the propriety of blue collar careers. He surely has a whole bunch of other low class behaviors that Amy doesn't want her precious daughter to emulate.

Now normally I'd sympathize with Amy. Steve's influence can't possibly be good for precious Kate's future chances of getting accepted to an Ivy League school. Assuming she can score high enough on the SATs given that half her genes come from Steve who clearly isn't Ivy League material.

And shooting off his sperm isn't such a great accomplishment that it should entitle him to have such an influence on Kate's life considering that Amy raised her without Steve's help.

Except that Amy did have Steve's help:

He had dropped out of high school before our junior year, was working as a dishwasher, and, for a couple of years, had been in and out of juvenile hall for petty crimes like shoplifting. In the months after the breakup, we talked on the phone, and my parents and I invited him to our house so that he could see Kate. We established paternity (though at first he protested about taking the test) and child support ($80 a month since he was so young, though he didn't want to pay and, after he owed thousands in back support, had his wages garnished).

So Amy's solidly middle class family (both her parents are college graduates), which is perfectly financially capable of raising the baby, decides they should sue a high school dropout dishwasher for child support and then garnish his wages when, naturally, he doesn't pay. This is a pretty scummy thing to do.

As someone who writes pro-abortion pieces for liberal websites, it seems hypocritical of her to force Steve to pay for his fatherhood if he doesn't want to. The appropriate response to a teenage pregnancy with a loser dad, for a liberal "pro-choice" woman, is an abortion.

So after being put through the financial wringer, isn't Steve entitled to be part of Kate's life if he wants to, now that he seems to have a stable life with a decent job?

I got a lawyer and, without telling Steve, filed for sole legal and physical custody.

Steve was too much of a loser to get his own lawyer and fight for his rights, so Amy won, and she still got to keep all of the child support money.

If Amy had any honor, she'd send Steve a check for all of the child support she collected from him, plus interest.

Hearts and loss aversion

Because it's Valentine's Day, this is a good day to write about Hearts. Of course I'm referring to the card game I used to play when I was in college.

For those unfamiliar with the game, the each heart is worth 1 point and the queen of spades is worth 13 points. The goal is to win as few points as possible, because once one players's score reaches 100, the game ends and the player with the lowest score wins.

The twist which makes the game really interesting is that a player who wins all of the 26 possible points in a round gets to either add 26 to everyone else's score or subtract 26 from his own score. This is called "shooting the moon."

We first started playing Hearts for just the honor of winning the game, but quickly discovered a motivational problem. The person in a hopeless last place position would always go for the high risk strategy of shooting the moon because he had nothing to lose. A successful shoot would put him on the road towards catching up. So he'd try to shoot the moon even if he had a very bad chance of doing it based on his cards.

In order to fix this problem, we started playing for money. The player in first place would win the difference between his score and each of the other players' scores, multiplied by two cents. (Ha ha, not much money, but two cents went further in the 1980s.) The addition of playing for money created a huge change in the behavior of the last place player. He'd no longer try to shoot the moon unless he had a good chance of doing so. Otherwise he'd try to minimize his losses.

There are several real world activities in which we see these types of motivations. Take, for example, the CEO who has lots of options which are far out of the money. That CEO is like the last place player in the Hearts game. He will pursue a high risk strategy to raise the stock price becuase he wins big if the stock price rises high enough to put his options in the money, but loses little if he makes things worse. The CEO who has no options but owns a large amount of stock will behave differently. Even if the stock price sunk, he will prudently manage to company so as to avoid further loses and make modest gains even if there's no hope of getting the stock price back up to where it used to be.

And then there is the issue of prediction markets, which was in the NY Times today. You can create a prediction market, but how do you get people to play it seriously? In the United States, it's considered illegal gambling to have people play prediction markets for real money. But if you create a contest in which the person with the most money wins, people will be motiviated to place long shot bets in order to win, because they have nothing to lose and there is only something to be gained by beating everyone else. Prediction markets will work best if every bet made hurts the bettor if he loses.

Short rant about IQ tests

Because there is no well normed, standardized "IQ test" given to a large number of people, the IQ score on some test taken once upon a time is pretty meaningless. The WAIS-R is supposed to be a pretty good test, but who has actually taken it? Just because two completely different tests produced by different companies proclaim to give test takers an IQ score doesn't mean scores from those tests are comparable.

Jessica Cutler, for example, bragged about her IQ of 140. It was later revealed in her blog that this was a test she took in elementary school. Who cares what she scored on some unknown test in elementary school? What's important is what she scored on tests she took when she was older that other people have also taken so scores can be compared. That test would be the SAT.

Why was Jessica Cutler bragging about some test she took in elementary school and not her SAT? Obviously because her SAT wasn't worth bragging about.

The funny thing about IQ tests is people of only middling intelligence wil brag about a high score on one, but people of genuinely high intelligence will brag about their low scores. Once again, why tell people about some test taken in elementary school if you took graduate admissions tests and did well enough on them to get admitted to MIT or an Ivy League graduate program?

The best tests we have are those college admissions exams. They are given to hundreds of thousands of test takers, and millions if we are talking about the SAT. This means that there is a massively huge sample size with which to norm the tests, and the testing companies are also able to include experimental questions that aren't used to calculate the scores but are used for purposing of norming and developing future tests. No self-proclaimed IQ test comes anywhere close to level of psychometric refinement which goes into college and graduate school admissions exams.

According to the Flynn Effect, people are getting smarter because scores on certain unspecified IQ tests which hardly anyone has ever taken are rising. Why isn't this reflected in standardized reading and math tests given to grade school students? Why aren't SAT scores rising? Why hasn't the popular culture become more intellectual? One has to wonder if the Flynn Effect is real or if the IQ tests being used just plain suck.

Ayn Rand, loved by teenage girls

According to Amy Benfer, Ayn Rand is popular with teenage girls. Who knew?

I thought Amy might finally explain to me the meaning of the rape scene from The Fountainhead, but I'm still just as confused.

What Harvard is selling

I recommend Steve Sailer's latest VDare column on Harvard.

But there is one part I'm going to disagree with:

Nonetheless, there may be one thing Harvard can't afford: to be honest about what it is really selling. Summers, with his talk of IQ bell curves, came perilously close to spilling the beans, So he had to go.

What students are actually buying from Harvard is not so much a Harvard education as Harvard's certification that, as high school seniors, they were among the country's best and brightest. (A Harvard degree doesn't add much distinction over just getting in, because 96 percent of Harvard freshmen graduate.)

There are, however, potentially much quicker and cheaper ways to certify such things than to spend four years and $185,000 at Harvard—for example, IQ tests.

No, Harvard is not selling IQ certification, Harvard is selling its prestige. How could Harvard be selling something that hardly anyone believes in? Blog readers who hang out in the "Sailersphere" can get the mistaken impression that IQ is commonly understood to be important. But this is not true. The vast majority of people in the overclass, if asked, will adamantly insist that IQ is meaningless, or even worse, sinisterly racist. And for the most part, they believe it too, although there are a few, like Larry Summers (before he accidentally spilled the beans), who keep their beliefs to themselves, like a Jew pretending to be a goyish Nazi. But I think they are a pretty small number of people.

Harvard and other elite universities are looking for future leaders, and while too low of an IQ is a bar to high level leadership, it's possible that too high of an IQ is an equal bar. George Bush, leader of the free world, is widely ridiculed for being dumb, yet he scored higher on his SATs than a lot of other high level politicans.

Part of being a future leader is having the right familiy connections, so Yale and Harvard gladly accept applicants, such as George W Bush, who are sons and daughters of importnant people, while nerdy super-high IQ applicants are rejected.

Some people in the Sailersphere make the argument that court cases prevent employers from using their own IQ tests and thus they are forced to rely on prestigious degrees, but I don't buy this at all. If there were a big mass desire on the part of companies to use IQ they'd figure out how to do it. Google (one of the most successful companies of the decade), for example, relies heavily on IQ. Companies (a limited subset of companies such as investment banks) prefer graduates from top schools for reasons of prestige and tradition and not a scientific analysis of why they are better employees.

Can a pro-abortion Republican be nominated?

People say that presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani can't win the Republican Party nomination because he's "pro-choice."

However the Republican nominating process is a series of state contests, and there are plenty of examples of "pro-choice" Republicans who have won state-wide contests.

The following Republican Senators are in the "pro-choice" camp:

Lincoln Chafee, Rhode Island
Olympia Snowe, Maine
Susan Collins, Maine
Lisa Murkowski, Alaska
Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania

The following Republican governors are in the "pro-choice" camp:

Arnold Schwarzeneggar, California
George Pataki, New York
Christine Todd Whitman, New Jersey

This above is only a partial list. And surely many pro-abortion Republicans won state-wide primaries but then lost in the general election, because pro-abortion Republicans tend to come from states where Democrats usually win. Supposedly anti-abortion Mitt Romney was pro-abortion back in 1994 when he ran for the Senate in Massachusetts and lost in the general election.

Giuliani, who is "pro-choice," will surely win primaries in nearly all of the states which Gore won in the 2000 election, and Guiliani will surely win Florida where he is very popular because a lot of ex-New Yorkers live there. Gore's states plus Florida will contribute about half the delegates to the Republican National Convention. (Republican delegates don't match exactly with electoral college delegates because of the bonus delegates which are given to States that voted Republican in the 2004 presidential election. See this explanation.)

Being pro-choice hasn't prevented Giuliani from raising massive money for his campaign.

Sure, there may be some super-conservative states in the midwest which vote for some other candidate, but it's not clear who. The religious side of the party never liked McCain much, Mitt Romney flip-flopped on abortion and he also believes that God is an alien from another planet, Newt is solidly anti-abortion but his multiple divorces and lesbian sister surely don't endear him to the religious wing. Officially, Newt isn't even running. Sam Brownback or Mike Huckabee will have to rise up to rally the anti-abortion vote but so far they are barely registering in the polls.

It's hard to see how Giuliani's pro-abortion stance will stop him from at least bringing a plurality of delegates to the convention, although that scenario is pretty doubtful. When was the last time a nomination was actually unknown going into the convention? The likely scenario is that Giuliani will win the lion's share of early delegates and the other candidates will drop out, leaving Giuliani the undisputed winner long before the convention.

Gas

I'm so excited about natural gas that I started posting again to my investing blog.

Anna Nicole and the power of big breasts

Anna Nicole Smith showed us that a white trash girl can become a billionaire simply by being pretty and snagging herself an old rich husband. She also showed us that a girl doesn't have to be skinny in order to do this.

There really aren't that many billionaires to go around, so maybe she had a little luck on her side as well. Yet surely any girl in the top quintile of looks could marry herself an old decamillionaire if she wants to, and that's still a hell of a lot more money than she'd otherwise ever see in her lifetime.

So the interesting part of the Anna Nicole story is not that she married an old billionaire, but the fact that it's so uncommon. I guess that 99% of young hot women are so repulsed by the idea of sexual intimacy with an 89-year-old that it's not even worth a billion dollars to them.

I think this is a sad commentary on aging.

Anna Nicole Smith, 1967-2007

Her death really saddens me.

How much does a female athlete weigh?

According to a NY Times article about how the weights of female athletes are kept hidden from the public, 19-year-old Courtney Paris, considered the top collegiate female basketball player in the country, is 6'4" and 240 lbs.

That gives her a BMI of 29.2, leaving her only 0.8 shy of being "obese" according to the official definitions.

I sure wish that more information like that was available to the public.