Half Sigma

New comment policy

I've created a comment policy statement for the blog.

Two years in jail for killing cat

Jurors heard opening arguments on Tuesday in the trial of a bird-watching enthusiast who fatally shot a cat that he said was stalking endangered shorebirds.

The defendant, James M. Stevenson, is the founder of the Galveston Ornithological Society and leads bird-watching tours on this Gulf Coast island 60 miles southeast of Houston. If convicted on animal cruelty charges in the shooting last November, he faces up to two years in jail and a $10,000 fine.

...

In her opening statement, Paige L. Santell, a Galveston County assistant district attorney, told the jury of eight women and four men that Mr. Stevenson “shot that animal in cold blood” and that the cat died a slow and painful death “gurgling on its own blood.” [NY Times article]

Two years in jail for killing an animal? We eat animals for food, for crying out loud. This guy's going to do more time than O.J.

Religion and equality

Vox Popoli, self-proclaimed “Christian Libertarian,” writing about the recent NY Times article about race and DNA:

It is fascinating to see the way in which ideological equalitarians, including scientists, are reacting in precisely the way that they suppose the religious faithful will act when the scientific evidence appears to contradict their religious beliefs. "Stop," they beg, "just stop." And so much for that romantic notion that "many sociologists and anthropologists have argued for decades" about race being "a social invention historically used to justify prejudice and persecution".

We are all equal before God. If God does not exist, then there is no such thing as equality. That is the reality.

He correctly points out the hypocrisy of leftists who criticize Christians for denying Darwinism.

But when he says “we are all equal before God,” he's forgetting that during the era of slavery, exactly the opposite was said, that God endorsed slavery and that Africans were the descendants of Canaan, doomed to slavery because of the Curse of Ham.

The thing about religion is that it gives you a justification to believe in whatever you want. But science reveals inconvenient truths.

Genes affecting human intelligence

A blogger whom I presume to be Indian (thus not a racist trying to prove white superiority) has a blog post summarizing the various genes that have been discovered that are related to intelligence, as well as comments regarding how they vary in frequency in different races.

The best blogospheric proof yet that races are not genetically identical in average cognitive abilities.

The CHRM2 gene accounts for a 2 IQ point difference between East Asians and whites. The average East Asian IQ is estimated to be about 5 points higher than the average white IQ, so just the CHRM2 gene accounts for a good chunk of the difference.

The same blogger also posted two years ago about two genes related to larger brain size, which don't appear in sub-Saharan African populations:

In the case of MCPH1 this allele emerged around 35,000 years (14000>60000 yrs) and in ASPM this allele arose around 5000 years. These new alleles appear to have swept through whole or parts of the Eurasian population due a selective advantage conferred due an effect on brain function. There are likely to have been cognitive adaptations that helped in surviving the Eurasiatic environments.

It has been observed by researchers that (1) brain size is correlated with IQ; and (2) Asians and whites have larger brain size, after correction for body mass, than do blacks.

[BUT, as pointed out in a comment below, further research indicated that normal versions of these genes are related neither to brain size nor to IQ, so it's a mystery as to what they do and why they spread to Asian and European populations. Per the Wall Street Journal:

A team at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently tested whether the gene variants actually affect brain size. They studied DNA from 120 people whose brain volumes they had already measured using magnetic-resonance imaging. They didn't find any difference. "It certainly makes you want to look at other explanations" of what the variations mean, says Roger P. Woods, a UCLA brain-mapping expert who reported the results in May.

Nevertheless, the left-wing got really SCARED when they heard Bruce Lahn was investigating brain-related genes that didn't exist in blacks, and they tried to shut down his research. The left-wing FEARS the truth.

It should be noted that Bruce Lahn is Chinese, so he's not a white supremacist trying to prove that Aryans are the master race.

There really is a brain size difference between blacks and non-blacks, so it's only a matter of time before the genes causing the size difference are discovered, if some are not already included in the Indian blogger's list.]

Aftermath of the NY Times article

The article, which only made it to the #2 most emailed article, has now sunk to #3, behind an article about a masseuse who became a multi-millionaire (anarcho-capitalists can explain how her wealth is due to something other than dumb luck). And of course, it’s far behind the most emailed article ever, about the woman who trained her husband the way one trains a sea mammal to perform tricks.

Steve Sailer says we shouldn’t be celebrating:

Most people who notice this article will simply assume that Malloy and Half Sigma are mentioned because they are evil people who represent this horrible trend, and they must, sooner or later, be dealt with.

The zeitgeist is very powerful and has tremendous momentum. One semi-fair article in the NYT won't make a dent in it.

Traffic volume to my blog has been surprisingly low considering that the NY Times has millions of readers. Sitemeter says I had 4,728 visits on Sunday. At best we can attribute 4,000 visits to NY Times readers. The real number is lower. So approximately one tenth of one percent of the readers bothered look up my blog or follow the link.

A link from Instapundit leads to a lot more traffic, but that mainstream blog decided not to touch the subject. Glenn Reynolds is busy posting pictures of hot women who attended a blogging convention.

Andrew Sullivan says “Race exists. Even the NYT now concedes it.” But he avoids mention of the significant part of the article, that races differ in cognitive abilities. I think that only left-wing loonies have really bought into the notion that race doesn’t exist at all, so Andrew Sullivan hasn't said very much.

* * *

For the first time since I’ve been blogging, I’ve had to turn on comment moderation and delete a lot of comments. It’s my blog and I don’t have to let people call me a “racist” over and over again. Such comments will not be tolerated. [Including comments no-so-subtly implying racism.] But once one goes down the slippery slope of deleting comments, where do you stop?

The following comment I published, but I had to think before I published it:

I have a lot of trouble believing any of these differences are actually statistically significant. Addtionally, in the past 100+ years in particular, people are fairly mixed, especially in America. How can you tease out the true IQ difference amongst races? If IQ tests are supposed to judge average intelligence, perhaps they need to be adjusted so that all subgroups test on the average. Then test to see if such differences still occur. Finally, what becomes of this information if it was ever to be widely accepted? Mandatory racial inter-mingling to mitigate the differences? Further ghettoization of gene pools with lower average IQ scores?

The author of the comment is talking nonsense. The “statistical significance” of IQ scores has been proven in zillions of studies. Even when examining the imprecise 10 question Wordsum test in the General Social Survey, there are a lot of statistically significant results (which the SDA program conveniently marks with a bright red or blue box).

And I have no clue what she means by “adjusting” the tests so that “all subgroups test on the average.” Is she talking about race-norming, which is illegal under the Civil Rights Act of 1991? Or is she operating under the illusion that there are questions where the black subgroup performs equally as well as the white subgroup? She is obviously unfamiliar with the fact that here are no such questions where blacks perform as well as whites. Twenty-seven years after Arthur Jensen’s book Bias in Mental Testing, people are still repeating arguments long ago disproved.

If someone posted a comment disproving global warming over at the Daily Kos community, it would quickly be censored. Maybe I should follow the same policy as the left-wing?

* * *

Here’s an email I received:

I taught elementary school for a few years here in [a mixed-race semi-urban school district in the northeast], and the racial differences are simply there to see. Whether these differences were due to in- utero or post-partum abuse, I do not know. But anyone with eyes could see the dolorous effects on the black children. All the teachers know but none would voice their knowledge.

NY Times article: time to celebrate?

"gc" who used to be "godless capitalist" has a celebratory comment over at the blog Gene Expression that I will repeat in its entirety (if he doesn't mind):

-------begin "gc" comment--------------

This is the ripest fruit yet of our labors. There have been others, and more yet to come, but this is an occasion to pop the bubbly and gloat. I am sipping Cristal *right now*, compiler a compilin' in the background, blasting We Takin' Over by DJ Khaled. An appropriate track. Christmas came early this year. If I had an AK I'd be firing it in the air, waving it like I jus' don't care.

I'm proud to say that we pioneered the discussion of the Hapmap's implications. Right here on GNXP. More than five years ago, we saw the future with clear eyes. From 7/30/2002:

[link]

In other words, if you think of the human genome project as a massive effort to provide a "first order" approximation to human sequence space, the HapMap will be a massive effort to provide a "second order" approximation to human sequence space. How is this useful? Suppose we want to describe the sequence of a randomly selected Joe. If you're limited to describing Joe's sequence with a single string, you'd give the consensus human genome sequence. If you can afford to be more accurate than that, you'll start figuring out which haplotypes are most common in Joe's population group, and give the haplotype distribution instead. A higher degree of accuracy would of course be to sequence Joe's genome de novo , but that's not yet cost effective. We can thus see that while the consensus human genome sequence is an approximation of what we have in common, the HapMap is fundamentally about finding the genetic roots of human differences. Yes, it may be useful for curing diseases, but that will only be the beginning of the applications and not a major one at that. There is much dispute over whether combinations of common mutations cause disease or whether rare mutations are more likely to do so, but such disputes miss the forest for the trees. The main haul of the HapMap will be a flood of data that will overwhelm those who would deny that significant genetic differences exist between humans. Even more importantly, it will provide an invaluable base of information for those who would usher us into an age of reengineered humans.

It is a fucking visceral rush to see your ideas, your blog, your baby diffuse out and percolate up to the highest neurons in the nervous system.

And at such a time it behooves us to thank our poor demonized blogfather, Steve. He's been in the NYT before (e.g. Dirt Gap and so on), but they've never taken on the fundamental h-bd premise directly. Now they have. And even though he's not mentioned by name, Sailer begat GC and Razib, and Razib/GC begat GNXP, and GNXP begat Malloy and (I believe) Half Sigma. And so the lurking reader became the blogger, and thus was the h-bd blogosphere populated, and lo it was good. And goddamn if I'm not proud as hell of what we've accomplished here, of what p-ter and Darth and Rik and all of the gang have done.

Mencius is right. This is possibly the most remarkable article -- of world historical importance, really -- that I've ever read in the NYT. The implications are that far reaching, for reasons I need not elaborate. And it's doubly important that it's not by Nick Wade. This is no isolated truth teller.

I mean, Christ Almighty, Marcus f'ing Feldman (!!!!) is acknowledging that IQ might vary by race! Do you understand what this *means*? The implications this has for peer review, for so many things...they are profound.

It's funny, I was just in a discussion over at 2Blowhards for the first time in a while ([link]), engaged in the usual kinds of repetitive block-and-tackling vs. the 101 tiresome ways to minimize the importance of h-bd. I was thinking, not for the first time, that it is and was a complete waste of time to lop off the branches of the tree rather than to strike the root. I mean, it's very difficult to see any long term benefit to arguing in a blog comment section about whether the earth moves around the sun or vice versa. But then you see something like this, and fuck, it's all worthwhile.

Anyway....as far as I'm concerned, the intellectual war is over. We've won. That doesn't mean the revelations will come quickly enough for the West or America. Hell is truth seen too late.

But in terms of the fate of the world, even if the priest class continues to burn Galileos and Watsons and Summers' who speak out in public, the international scientific journals in which history is made are now going to be incrementally more open to publishing that eventual series of articles which breaks it all wide open, which takes hammer to chisel and splits that granite facade right down the center. And everyone reads those international journals.

Even, y'know, people in other countries...

Five years ago we were right about the implications of the Hapmap. And five years hence we will be right again about our genetic engineering future. Y'all don't have to take my word for it, of course.

It'll be on the front page of the New York Times.

-------end "gc" comment----------------

Regarding my mention in the comment, I will point out that I knew about these issues since the late 1980s, but I did read about them at the Gene Expression blog before I ever blogged about them myself. I also kind of feel bad for Steve Sailer. He's been writing about these issues tirelessly for years, but I'm the one who gets quoted on the front page of the New York Times. He also deserved a mention.

I understand why he's happy. After many years of arguing with people who have no idea what they are talking about, it feels really good to be vindicated.

But my question is whether this celebrating is premature? After all, way back in 1979, Time Magazine printed an article about Arthur Jensen's book, and it was ignored. In 1994, The Bell Curve was published, and even though it sold a million copies, race realism did not go mainstream.

Is this article any different? Please limit comments to the issue of whether it's different this time.

Response to comments on race and intelligence

What expertise do you have to write about this subject?

I’m an amateur psychologist, sociologist, and economist. In my blog, I often post my original research using publicly available databases such as the General Social Survey. My most interesting original research includes my findings that religious people are less intelligent, that high intelligence is actually associated with lower income when education is held constant, and that more intelligent people have less sex.

Ad hominem attacks

Don’t know what “ad hominem” means? I’ve grabbed the following definition from someone’s website:

An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Typically, this fallacy involves two steps. First, an attack against the character of person making the claim, her circumstances, or her actions is made (or the character, circumstances, or actions of the person reporting the claim). Second, this attack is taken to be evidence against the claim or argument the person in question is making (or presenting).

I’ve been deleting most of these comments, because it’s my blog and I don’t have to let people insult me. But if I may psychoanalyze the people who make such attacks, they are doing so because the evidence in favor of a genetic explanation is so powerful that it creates cognitive dissonance, and the only way they have to work off the cognitive dissonance is to attack the messenger.

Race realism

I’m going to be using the term “race realism” in the remainder of this blog post. Race realism is the recognition of the fact that there are genetic differences between the races, especially with regard to their effect on average intelligence and average behavior. In contrast, the false but politically correct egalitarian view is that the races are exactly the same in average intelligence and behavior, and that it is only present and past racial discrimination and cultural bias that prevents all races from performing at the same level.

Existentialist arguments

This is a common argument used by race-realism deniers. “No one really knows what race is. No one really knows what intelligence is. We don’t really know the meaning of any of this.” These types of sentiments eventually lead to jumping out of a high window, because who can really say if there’s any point to living?

Ironically, the same people who make these existentialist arguments in this context have no difficulties pronouncing people they don’t like (such as George W. Bush) to be stupid. And they have no problems finding “racism” everywhere, but if we don’t really know what race is how can you accuse someone of being racist? If race is just a meaningless social concept, why get all upset when a high percentage of black children are unable to read at grade level?

If you were to read the actual literature on the subject, such as The g Factor by Arthur Jensen, you will see that there is a huge amount of empirical evidence demonstrating the reality of intelligence, which cognitive scientists refer to as g. How much evidence? Well the bibliography of the The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray is 58 pages long. And there has been a lot of additional compelling evidence since that book was published.

Your analysis of the DTNBP1 gene doesn’t prove anything

This refers to the blog post that was linked to by the New York Times. It’s correct that, in isolation, the analysis of the DTNBP1 gene doesn’t prove a whole lot. But let me explain again why it’s significant.

There is a huge body of psychological research proving intelligence is a genetically inherited trait, and that the average intelligence of races differs. Once again, I refer people to The g Factor. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no need to discover the actual biological processes that cause differences in intelligence in order to conclude beyond any doubt that such processes do exist. But this evidence has never been enough for the race-realism deniers. “Show us proof of these ‘genes’” they would say, and they would surround the word “genes” by quotes as if to mock the whole idea.

But it has now been acknowledged that intelligence is indeed an hereditary trait. There are many other genetic differences between the races, the most obvious being physical appearance. If intelligence is a genetic trait, and if races have been separated from each other for thousands of years, then it logically follows that different evolutionary pressures in different environments would result in different average cognitive abilities in different races. But against all logic, race-realism deniers insist that whatever genes might control intelligence must be distributed exactly equally in every race’s gene pool.

However, genetic researchers have now discovered several genes that affect cognitive abilities, and one can go to the HapMap database and demonstrate that those genes are not distributed the same in the different races. So the last refuge of race-realism deniers, that whatever genes might control intelligence must be distributed exactly equally in every race’s gene pool, that argument is proven to be false.

I know a really smart black person

So do I. Several. People who think that the existence of some very smart black people disproves race realism don’t understand that intelligence is approximately normally distributed, and that the normal distributions of different population groups overlap. For example, the average man is taller than the average women, but there are some women who are taller than the average man, and there are some men who are shorter than the average women.

To help put this in perspective, there is a two standard deviation difference between male and female height, but only a one standard deviation between white and black intelligence in the United States.

IQ tests were created by white people, therefore they are biased against people of other races

This has been disproven in the book Bias in Mental Testing by Arthur Jensen. A Time Magazine article summarizes the findings of the book:

Among Jensen's conclusions:

> The argument that whites do better than blacks because they have larger vocabularies is wrong. In fact, blacks do slightly better on verbal tests than on nonverbal ones.

> IQ tests, both verbal and nonverbal, are not expressions of "white culture" that penalize blacks. Surprisingly, blacks do better on "culture-loaded" tests than on "culture-fair" tests that are carefully constructed to root out references more familiar to middle-class whites than to blacks.

> The idea that culture-fair tests framed by whites will inevitably favor whites is also wrong. In a Japanese language version of the U.S.-conceived Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Japanese youngsters outscored American whites by an average of six points.

> The major tests used by schools, employers and the armed forces are very accurate in predicting future success or failure for native-born English-speaking Americans.

> When white and black children of equal socioeconomic status are tested, whites score an average of twelve IQ points higher than blacks.

And an additional very important point:

Those who belittle the tests because whites do them better than blacks, Jensen says, are evading the issue that all attempts to make the tests fairer have failed to raise blacks' scores. His conclusion: "None of these attempts to create highly culture-reduced tests has succeeded in eliminating, or even appreciably reducing the mean differences between certain subpopulations—races and social classes—in the United States."

The binary argument

People who make what I call the binary argument say that people who talk about intelligence are saying that a single number, one’s IQ score, says every possible thing worth saying about a person and that one’s entire worth as a human being is tied up in the one number. They then say this proves that intelligence is completely irrelevant to anything.

Obviously there are many other aspects to our humanity besides our ability to reason and learn. But that doesn’t mean that one’s intelligence is not important in some aspects of one’s life. As I mentioned above, I’ve done some original research into this area, so I know as well as anyone that high intelligence isn’t the end all and be all of human existence. However, it should be noted that average differences in intelligence between races seems to be especially important in explaining average differences in economic outcomes between races.

Another type of binary argument people make is that because one’s environment can have an impact on one’s intelligence as measured by test scores, this means that environment is so powerful it trumps any possible influence of genes. Once again, people are unable to understand that both effects can be important, or that environment can be important but perhaps slightly less important than one’s genotype.

David Altshuler makes the binary argument in the NY Times article:

“I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life researching how much genetic variability there is between populations,” said Dr. David Altshuler, director of the Program in Medical and Population Genetics at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass. “But living in America, it is so clear that the economic and social and educational differences have so much more influence than genes. People just somehow fixate on genetics, even if the influence is very small.”

He’s saying because there are some influences caused by environment, this must prove that genes account for nothing. I should point out that his title makes him sound like he might be an expert, and although I’m sure he’s an expert on genetics in general, I doubt that he’s read the psychological research about intelligence, such as the Arthur Jensen books mentioned above, so with respect to the relative impact of environment and genes on one’s observed intelligence, he’s making a layman’s argument based on lack of any real knowledge of the science of g.

Correlation doesn’t prove causation

This is an argument that some people have ironically used in comments attempting to discredit my posts. This is ironic because the egalitarian position is that the lower economic status of the average black family in America is what causes blacks to underperform on standardized tests. They are unable to grasp that cause and effect can be reversed, and that it is lower average black intelligence that causes blacks in America to be the most economically disadvantaged group.

Race-realism deniers are also unable to understand that there can be a vicious circle, or a feedback loop, in which genotype and environment interact to suppress black intellectual achievement, relative to whites, more so than if everyone could be raised in identical environments. I think it’s pretty obvious that there are a whole host of advantages to being raised by upper-middle-class parents rather than by underclass parents (or more typically among the underclass, just parent without the plural), but that doesn’t mean that genotype isn’t also very important to one’s ultimate outcome in life.

The end of today’s post

I am sorry but I have other things I need to do today besides write more, and probably I have already written more than most people will bother to read.

I would urge anyone leaving a comment to check this post to make sure your comment hasn’t already been answered.

Half Sigma in the New York Times

Longtime readers of my blog know that I link to the New York Times on an almost daily basis. Well finally, the New York Times has returned the favor and linked to me, in the article In DNA Era, Worries About Revival of Prejudice. Like Soylent Green, the New York Times is made of people, so I really need to thank New York Times reporter Amy Harmon for mentioning my blog in her article. And I would also like to thank her editors for publishing the article, which is the fairest coverage of the subject that I've seen in the mainstream media in a long time.

I will probably get a lot of new visitors because of the article. Unfortunately, because of the way the topic of race and intelligence has been framed by the mainstream media, most of the visitors will be prejudiced into thinking that I must be some kind of racist because I wrote that intelligence is mostly a genetic trait (although this is now generally acknowledged), and more controversially I wrote that this is a genetic trait that’s not distributed equally among the different races of humans (just as it’s not equally distributed among breeds of dogs).

I assure my new readers that I am neither a skinhead nor a white supremacist living in some compound in Idaho stocked with survivalist gear. I am an over-educated professional living in Manhattan. Once upon a time, I too believed the politically correct view that everyone had equal intelligence and it was all a matter of environment. When I was in college, I stumbled across the books of Arthur Jensen, which I found fascinating. Arthur Jensen is/was an educational psychologist at the University of California, Berkely who was the foremost researcher in the field of human intelligence. (See my recent blog post about Arthur Jensen.) Because I have a scientific and mathematical mind, I realized that Arthur Jensen was correct, and those who were attacking his research were obviously motivated by political reasons rather than a pursuit of the scientific truth.

When I first began blogging, race and intelligence was a topic I feared to write about, because I was afraid of being branded a racist. Larry Summers mentioned that men and women might have biologically based differences in cognitive abilities, and he was fired. James Watson recently mentioned the issue of race and intelligence, and he was fired. We live in a world where free speech and scientific inquiry are suppressed, mostly by the political left. The Catholic Church is often mocked for sentencing Galileo to prison for publicly advocating the view that the earth revolves around the sun. Yet most people today, if they were told it was racist to believe that the earth revolves around the sun, would merrily call for Galileo’s excommunication from the world of work. They wouldn’t bother to try and understand what Galileo was saying. After all, understanding his theory requires knowledge of geometry and math. It’s much easier to call him a racist and demand that he be fired.

I have since discovered that there are many other like-minded bloggers in the blogosphere, the most notable of which are Steve Sailer and the bloggers at Gene Expression. Because of the internet, the truth can no longer be suppressed forever, and within fifteen years I predict that a person will be able to publicly state the truth about genes and intelligence and not be cast out from polite society. Fifteen years is the timeframe mentioned by James Watson for discovering the root genetic basis for human cognitive abilities, and as the former head of the Human Genome Project and Director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, he probably knows what he’s talking about.

For this reason, I have recently been blogging more often on the topic of human cognitive abilities. I feel like I am playing a small but important part in publicizing scientific knowledge that will have a major impact on the way we view psychology, sociology, and economics, and will have important implications for government policies. I know that many people fear this knowledge becoming public. They think that horrible things will happen. Images of Nazi Germany are often evoked. I think such fears are ridiculous. Will you become an evil genocidal murderer because you know that intelligence is genetic? Of course you won’t. So why do you think your neighbors will? Understanding our genetic differences will help us solve our social problems. Because no problem can be solved without knowing the causes of the problem. And that is what we are trying to do now: solve problems based on a faulty understanding of their causes.

Democrats are sore losers

The 2004 GSS asked the following question:

1482. Thinking of the last national election in America, how honest was it regarding the counting and reporting of the votes?

An astoundingly high 50.2% of "strong democrats" found the election "very dishonest." In contrast less than 4% of Republicans found the last election "very dishonest."

This demonstrates that some people are judging the honesty of the election not on how honest it actually was, but on who won.

Ah, but who is guilty of not being able to fairly judge the honesty of the election? I am pretty sure it's the Democrats. This is because the liberal mind has has a much simpler, and I may even say defective, approach to judging fairness. To the liberal, fairness is based entirely on outcomes. Therefore, to the liberal, their guy lost, so therefore the election was "dishonest." But the conservative mind is more nuanced than the liberal mind, and also judges fairness based on the fairness of the procedures. The liberals are unable to comprehend that an election is a contest with rules, and under the rules of the Florida election their candidate lost.

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		ELECVOTE
		1 VERY HONEST	2 SOMEWHAT HONEST	3 NEITHER HONEST NOR DISHONEST	4 SOMEWHAT DISHONEST	5 VERY DISHONEST	ROW TOTAL
PARTYID	0: STRONG DEMOCRAT	4.4 11	9.6 23	5.5 13	30.3 73	50.2 122	100.0 242
	1: NOT STR DEMOCRAT	5.2 14	27.0 71	11.7 31	27.9 73	28.3 74	100.0 262
	2: IND,NEAR DEM	7.9 10	8.2 11	10.7 14	38.4 49	34.7 45	100.0 129
	3: INDEPENDENT	8.0 18	30.2 69	19.6 45	24.9 57	17.3 40	100.0 228
	4: IND,NEAR REP	21.3 29	37.0 50	22.6 31	15.0 20	4.1 6	100.0 136
	5: NOT STR REPUBLICAN	20.3 44	37.2 81	20.0 43	18.1 39	4.3 9	100.0 217
	6: STRONG REPUBLICAN	34.5 73	35.0 74	12.0 25	15.2 32	3.3 7	100.0 212
	7: OTHER PARTY	29.4 5	16.7 3	19.8 3	28.3 5	5.7 1	100.0 16
	COL TOTAL	14.1 204	26.5 381	14.2 205	24.2 349	21.0 303	100.0 1,442

What makes us happier? Income or wealth?

The 2006 GSS is the first year they bothered to ask the very important question of how much wealth the respondent has. I think it's nuts that no one figured out to ask such an important question for thirty years. What kind of morons are in charge of the GSS?

Anyway, this gives us the opportunity to figure out what makes us happier: income or wealth?

Of course, you always have to include marriage in happiness studies, because no variable in the GSS is more highly correlated with happiness than being married.

It turns out that family income is much more important to happiness than wealth. Which is an interesting discovery, because a lot of pundits would have us believe that wealth is more important.

Note that I used family income because it's more highly correlated with happiness than the respondent's personal income. Note also that the variables use income buckets, which probably results in a better regression because it the buckets have a logarithmic relationship with the actual dollar values. Note also that there are three levels of happiness, with 1 being very happy and 3 being not too happy. And note that the chart below looks better in Internet Explorer, but there's a horizontal scrollbar at the bottom for Firefox users.

----------------------------------------------------

SDA 3.2: Regression General Social Surveys, 1972-2006 [Cumulative File]

Nov 09, 2007 (Fri 09:20 AM PST)

Variables Role Name Label Range MD Dataset Dependent HAPPY GENERAL HAPPINESS 1-3 0,8,9 1 Independent MARITAL(d:1) - MARRIED MARITAL STATUS 0-1 1 Independent WEALTH TOTAL WEALTH OF RESPONDENT 1-15 0,98,99 1 Independent INCOME06 TOTAL FAMILY INCOME 1-26 0,98,99 1 Weight WTSSALL WEIGHT VARIABLE .4297-6.4287 1

Regression Coefficients Test That Each Coefficient = 0 B SE(B) Beta SE(Beta) T-statistic Probability MARITAL(d:1) - MARRIED -.316 .034 -.260 .028 -9.403 .000 WEALTH -.005 .006 -.022 .031 -.710 .478 INCOME06 -.014 .004 -.112 .030 -3.720 .000 Constant 2.229 .061 36.547 .000

Color coding: <-2.0 <-1.0 <0.0 >0.0 >1.0 >2.0 T Effect of each variable: Negative Positive

Multiple R = .328 R-Squared = .108 Adjusted R-Squared = .108 Std Error of Estimate = .574

Recode for 'MARITAL' 1 = 1 "MARRIED"; 0 = *-*

Allocation of cases (unweighted) Valid cases 1,435 Cases with invalid codes on variables in the analysis 49,585 Total cases 51,020

Datasets 1 /7502docs/D3/GSS06 2 /7502docs/Npubvars/GSS06

CSM, UC Berkeley

Scientists predict global cooling

The 1974 Time Magazine article about the coming ice age is so hilariously ironic that it deserves its own blog post. So here it is.

In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada's wheat belt, a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting and may well bring a disappointingly small harvest. Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have recently experienced the mildest winters within anyone's recollection.

As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval.

In 1974, a "growing number" of unnamed and uncounted “scientists” say that various weather events are evidence of “global climatic upheaval.” Except that they are not talking about global warming. No sir. They are talking about global cooling!

However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades.

Today, the temperature record of the last three decades proves that there is global warming. But in 1974, the temperature record of the last three decades proved that there was global cooling.

The trend shows no indication of reversing.

Boy was that an ironic statement.

Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.

OMG! We are doomed! Cassandra is the Trojan prophetess who saw the future but no one listened. The difference between the real Cassandra and “climate Cassandras” is that the real Cassandra was always right. “Climate Cassandras” seem to have a track record of being wrong. (As an aside, there’s a great Al Stewart song about Cassandra.)

Telltale signs are everywhere —from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest.

Today it’s the polar bears, back then it was the armadillos. And of course, they still talk about the ice.

Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data.

Covincing data. Very convincing.

Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.

What happened to all that snow since 1974?

Scientists have found other indications of global cooling. For one thing there has been a noticeable expansion of the great belt of dry, high-altitude polar winds —the so-called circumpolar vortex—that sweep from west to east around the top and bottom of the world.

Back then, technical stuff that no one actually understands, like the “circumpolar votex” proved that there was global cooling. Today, technical stuff that no one actually understands proves that there is global warming.

As the winds swirl around the globe, their southerly portions undulate like the bottom of a skirt. Cold air is pulled down across the Western U.S. and warm air is swept up to the Northeast. The collision of air masses of widely differing temperatures and humidity can create violent storms—the Midwest's recent rash of disastrous tornadoes, for example.

In 1974, storms indicated that the globe was cooling. Today, storms are seen as signs that the globe is warming. Has anyone considered that storms are just random events that happen? Nah! It’s more fun to predict doom and devastation.

The University of Wisconsin's Reid A. Bryson and other climatologists suggest that dust and other particles released into the atmosphere as a result of farming and fuel burning may be blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the surface of the earth.

In 1974, “fuel burning” was causing global cooling. Today, fuel burning is supposedly causing global warming. Wow, let’s blame fuel burning for everything.

Whatever the cause of the cooling trend, its effects could be extremely serious, if not catastrophic. Scientists figure that only a 1% decrease in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth's surface could tip the climatic balance, and cool the planet enough to send it sliding down the road to another ice age within only a few hundred years.

In 1974, as today, the predicted effects of climate change is “catastrophic.” The direction of the temperature has reversed, but the same scare words are used. Will Manhattan be underwater? Or will it be covered by a huge glacier?

The earth's current climate is something of an anomaly; in the past 700,000 years, there have been at least seven major episodes of glaciers spreading over much of the planet. Temperatures have been as high as they are now only about 5% of the time.

It would be pretty inconvenient to have glaciers covering “much of the planet.” If there really is global warming we should be thankful for it rather than trying to stop it.

University of Toronto Climatologist Kenneth Hare, a former president of the Royal Meteorological Society, believes that the continuing drought and the recent failure of the Russian harvest gave the world a grim premonition of what might happen. Warns Hare: "I don't believe that the world's present population is sustainable if there are more than three years like 1972 in a row."

Then, as now, doom and gloom scenarios are the stock in trade of climatologists. Is climatology even a real science? Or just a pseudoscience?

* * *

This is a Rush Limbaugh post. It mocks the stupidity of liberals, which is really fun to do, but it won’t change any minds. Those who are brainwashed into believing in the global warming religion will get pissed at me. They are thinking “people were stupid back then, today we know so much more.”

My question for Al Gore and his ilk is this: what scientific discoveries were made between 1974 and today that causes the predicted direction of the climate to reverse course? As far as I can tell, the only thing that’s different is the direction of the temperatures for the preceding 30 year period. But it has obviously been proven that a 30-year temperature trend does not foretell the global climate for the next thousand years.

More evidence that it's better to be "overweight"

Today's NY Times has an article about the most recent study, published in JAMA, about the relative risks of various weight classes. The authors confirm their original findings that there's lower risk of mortality from being "overweight" (that's a BMI between 25 and 30):

We found that underweight was associated with increased mortality, primarily from noncancer, non-CVD causes. Overweight was associated with significantly increased mortality from diabetes and kidney disease combined; was associated with significantly decreased mortality from other noncancer, non-CVD causes; and was not associated with mortality from cancer or cardiovascular disease. The net result was that overweight was associated with significantly decreased all-cause mortality overall. [emphasis added]

Why do I find this fascinating? Because it's one of many examples where everyone following a politically correct bandwagon (or an informational cascade) is completely wrong.

Although everyone was happy to tell you to lose weight based on the skimpiest evidence, now that there is stronger evidence that you are better off being overweight, where are the calls for people to gain weight?

This somehow seems related to the reluctance of the media to warn of the dangers of marathon running. For some reason, the media is desperate to get people to lose weight, even if it causes people to die.

The Ron Paul post

Ron Paul has been the talk of the internet because of his surprise fundraising performance.

Paul at PowerlineBlog writes:

The only other seriously distinguishing feature of the campaign is that it's nutty. Being anti-war is respectable, but Paul's opposition to the war is founded on conspiracy theories, over-the-top isolationism, and an unhealthy dose of hostility to Israel. Paul's opposition to big government is not a distinguishing feature. There are plenty of other Republican candidates this cycle who embrace small government conservatism. Again, the only only distinguishing feature of Paul's small government platform is its nuttiness -- the gold standard, the Federal Reserve conspiracy stuff, etc.

(I agree with the above, except that the key difference between Paul's small government conservatism and the other candidates' is that Paul is actually serious about it.)

A hott Jewish babe supports Paul.

So does the Stormfront White Nationalist Community.

And Muslim voters.

And a hott Jewish babe.

Arthur Jensen returned (in 1979)

Now that Time Magazine has put all of its archives on the web, for free, we can read classic articles, such as a 1979 article summarizing Arthur Jensen's research, entitled The Return of Arthur Jensen.

It's quite surprising to discover that the article accurately and succinctly states the conclusions of Arthur Jensen's research without casting any doubt on it or calling him a racist. It's highly recommended reading!

But as usual, Time Magazine was completely wrong in its predictions:

Jensen's findings clearly have horrendous implications. Indeed, they come close to saying that blacks are a natural and permanent underclass—an idea so shocking that the book is likely to spark the most explosive debate yet over race and IQ. While his critics will not have their shots until his book is published, their job, according to Jensen, is simple enough: disprove the evidence or learn to live with it. But he is confident that his evidence will stand. "I think I have shown that the black-white differences are real, not artifacts of the test system." he says.

As it turns out, his book was ignored, and there has been no acknowledgment of anything, despite the fact that there has been lots of new research since 1979 confirming his original conclusions. (What research? The 1985 followup of the Minnesota Transracial Adoption study. The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. MRI scans of the brain showing link with intelligence. Discovery of actual genes associated with intelligence.) Time Magazine's ominous warning of global cooling from 1974 also failed to take hold.

Buyer's remorse, guilt, and optimism

In addition to his article about cognitive dissonance, John Tierney has a blog post about buyer's remorse.

Buyer's remorse is sort of the opposite of cognitive dissonance. After buying something, the normal behavior is cognitive dissonance. "It’s uncomfortable to think you’ve bought something while also thinking you wasted your money, so you reduce the dissonance by convincing yourself it was a great purchase." But sometimes people have the opposite reaction, and feel bad about their purchase.

I think a commenter is on the right track:

Buyer’s remorse is nothing more than guilt felt by a person when they have bought something they do not need and/or cannot afford.

I agree that guilt is a big part of it (and guilt is a fascinating emotion in its own right), but that still doesn't explain why some people feel such guilt while others build a psychological wall of cognitive dissonance to block the feeling of guilt.

The quote in Tierney's post suggests that depressed individuals are more likely to experience buyers remorse. That too is interesting. Depressed people tend to be pessimists. Optimists are more likely to indulge in cognitive dissonance because the truth harms their optimistic view of the world. Optimism is generally considered to be the healthy way of thinking, and an insufficient amount of optimism is considered to be both un-American and a warning sign that one needs to see a therapist.

Cognitive dissonance in the NY Times

There's an excellent John Tierney article in today's Science Times about cognitive dissonance.

Experiments show that monkeys and 4-year-old children display cognitive dissonance. Once a child or monkey makes a decision, they then ignore all evidence that they made the wrong decision. Just like adult humans. This demonstrates that it's not a complicated adult-level thinking function, but rather an instinctive animal emotion.

Cognitive dissonance is especially dangerous in the realm of politics. Present evidence to a liberal that global warming is bogus, and watch him shout and scream at the messenger rather than read the message.

Looney left, part 2

An anonymous comment left on my recent post about a looney nut at Daily Kos sarcastically says:

I look forward to your next series of posts mocking the blogs of the wingnut Right which serve as auxiliaries & lackeys of the GOP.

There is no such phenomenon on the political right. Daily Kos is huge site that supposedly gets 20 million visits per month and "kos," the founder of the site, is according to this article the 12th most influential liberal. Real politicians actually make occasional posts at Daily Kos, so the Daily Kos website really is like an auxiliary of the Democratic Party.

Sure there some crazy far-right communities on the web, such as Stormfront.org (which sees Jewish conspiracies in everything), but no mainstream Republican politician would dare be associated with such a website. The major right-wing blog is Instapundit, which consists mostly of links to moderately conservative and and libertarian blog posts and news articles.

Jewish Atheist writes:

Did you know that Hitlery Klinton had Vince Foster murdered???

When someone commits suicide or otherwise dies under suspicious circumstances, it's a normal reaction for people to wonder if, perhaps, foul play was involved. It is not at all uncommon for such suspicions to be true. Take, for example, the infamous Wanstrath murders in Houston in 1979. The medical examiner originally declared the deaths a double murder/suicide. But Houston police officer Johnny Bonds was suspicious, and as documented in the book The Cop Who Wouldn't Quit by Rick Nelson, Jonny uncovered the real murder scheme. (One of the convicted murderers, Walter Waldhauser, was released from prison after ten years, changed his name to Mike Davis, and attended law school with me. He seemed like a really nice guy. But as Johnny Bonds wrote in a comment on my old blog, "He is one of the most evil humans I have ever dealt with.")

So my answer to Jewish Atheist is that people who wanted Vince Foster's death to be fully investigated were justified.

Support for Musharraf

A poster who claims to be a Pakistani wrote the following comment at a BBC forum:

Being a Pakistani I undestand Pakistan's situation. I would like to advise U.S, U.K and the West not to ask Pakistan to move towards democracy, at least at this time. There are two options:

1) Accept emergency enforcement in Pakistan

OR

2) Accept Alqaeda and Taliban

No civilian government will be able to handle terrorists but Pakistan Army. Democracy that is found in the West is never suitable for a volatile country like ours.

Look mom! I'm in the encyclopedia!

The Wikipedia article on religiosity and intelligence says:

Also in 2006, another study was undertaken[4] using data from the General Social Survey. The study analysed the religious beliefs of those with the highest verbal IQ (the top 13.8% of respondents). The study concludes that, of the most intelligent respondents, a disproportionately high percentage did not believe in God or did not believe that it was possible to know whether or not God existed. Similarly, a disproportionately high percentage of the most intelligent surveyed considered that the bible was not the “inspired word of God.”

Footnote 4 refers to one of my earliest GSS posts, Religious people are less intelligent.

Nope, I didn't edit the article myself. But I'm glad that my blog post contributed to humanity's base of scientific knowledge. (Given that an unlikely coalition of Christians and left-wing IQ deniers are trying to get the article removed, my starring role in the encyclopedia may only be fleeting.)

Looney nut at Daily Kos predicts Bush/Cheney coup

glitterscale writes:

I postulate that we only have the time between now and next November to make a difference. I figure that Bush will call into place his artificial crisis and put off elections "for our national security". A coup may come less dramatically with Blackwater recruits checkpointing any meaningful election. But I figure Cheney will not want Ghouliani to take over for HIM.

I would like to tell this guy (gal?) that he's a total moron, and the only president who even came close to this kind of behavior was Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt who tried to pack the Supreme Court so he could violate the Constitution.

As Fred Barnes wrote three years ago:

These flights of paranoia, far-out analogies, conspiracy theories, and wild charges devoid of evidence are the stock in trade of the Loony Left. Normally such ideas are ridiculed or ignored by those in the political mainstream. But these days the fantasies of the Loony Left are increasingly embraced and nearly always tolerated by the Democratic party and its auxiliary groups. The result? The Loony Left now has a toehold on the Democratic party.

The Daily Kos community is an auxiliary Democratic group, and this post demonstrates Barnes' point.

Foreign buyers jacking up the price of Manhattan residential real estate

It's just as I feared. Even though real estate prices are tumbling everywhere else in the country, they remain high in Manhattan because of a new wave of foreign buyers. The very fact that real estate prices are declining elsewhere is what's causing prices to stay high in Manhattan!

Manhattan real estate is also benefiting because buyers have lost confidence in other United States markets, especially Florida. “There is the fear factor that prices are going to go down even further,” especially in Miami, said Jacky Teplitzky, an executive vice president at Prudential Douglas Elliman.

She said that she had seen a 20 percent jump this year in inquiries from Latin Americans about the Manhattan market and recently, more inquiries from Eastern Europeans, specifically Russians.

There goes my hope of every being able to buy a cheap Manhattan apartment.

Marathon running: the sport that kills

A 28-year-old died today during the Olympic trials marathon.

Doing a little bit of research, I found the following marathon deaths, all during the last year:

Man dies in Chicago Marathon
22-year-old runner dies in London Marathon
Man dies in Tucson Marathon
Two die in Comrades Marathon in South Africa
Nine German running deaths so far this year

And this is all during just the last year. The weird thing is that there's no public outcry about all of these marathon deaths. I couldn't find a single news article via Google summarizing all these marathon deaths. It's as if there's a conspiracy to conceal the dangers.

Musharraf of Pakistan imposes emergency rule

Musharraf has declared a state of emergency. It's not clear exactly how this is different than martial law.

The knee-jerk American reaction is "OMG! The Musharraf d00d be fascist. Democracy rulz!" That seems to be the Bush administration position.

Democracy will not work in Pakistan. Polls show that 60% of Pakistanis support Sharia law. Democracy in Pakistan means Talibanization of Pakistan. A Taliban with nuclear weapons.

Musharraf imposes a sane secular order on the crazy Muslim majority and he needs to be supported.

Israel's ultra-Orthodox

According to this article, 800,000 of Israel's 5.4 million Jews are ultra-Orthodox. And "most families have six or seven children." If they can keep that up for two generations, the ultra-Orthodox minority will become the ultra-Orthodox majority.

Most secular Jews give the ultra-Orthodox more respect than they deserve. This is because Judaism is a religion based on guilt rather than true belief, and the secular Jew tends to feel guilty that he's not as good a Jew as the ultra-Orthodox. They see the ultra-Orthodox as living an unattainable but pure Jewish lifestyle rather than as crazy religious nuts. (I also believe that the typical non-jihadist Muslim looks at Al Queda the same was as secular Jews look at the ultra-Orthodox, which is an insight I owe to a friend who's a secular Jew.)

One positive thing about the ultra-Orthodox is that they are badasses when it comes to dealing with the Muslims. When the ultra-Orthodox take over Israel's politics, they are going to kick some Islamic butt. But an ultra-Orthodox Israel isn't a place where I'd want to live, even if it's safe from terrorism.

RESPONSE TO COMMENTS

(1) Yes, it's hypocritical of the ultra-Orthodox to be hawks for two reasons: First, because they don't serve in the military. Second, because they study the Talmud instead of working at jobs that actually boost the economy, and a strong economy is needed to buy the latest military hardware.

(2) In Israel, the secular Jews probably do see the ultra-Orthodox as religious nuts. I was writing from my background as someone living in New York City. Some people have said stuff to the contrary, but from my perspective I see that most of the Yom Kippur Jews (the kind that go to synagogue once a year on Yom Kippur) look at the beard and hats Jews with reverence.

The smarter you are, the more lawyers you know

People have been complaining that the blog was more interesting when I was analyzing the General Social Survey. Well here's some more GSS analysis.

One of the questions on the 2006 GSS asks how many lawyers the respondent knows. It turns out that knowing lawyers is highly correlated with a person's score on the Wordsum vocabulary test. Only one out of seventeen respondents who scored a perfect 10 on the Wordsum test didn't know a single lawyer.

Of course I expected there'd be a positive correlation between Wordsum score (which is the GSS's best proxy for intelligence) and how many lawyer a person knows, but it's nevertheless surprising to see how strong it is.

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		ACQLAWS
		Zero	One or more	ROW TOTAL
WORDSUM	0	100.0 1	.0 0	100.0 1
	1	39.3 2	60.7 3	100.0 4
	2	73.6 8	26.4 3	100.0 11
	3	47.1 13	52.9 15	100.0 28
	4	66.1 29	33.9 15	100.0 44
	5	44.1 41	55.9 52	100.0 94
	6	47.9 60	52.1 65	100.0 124
	7	33.3 44	66.7 89	100.0 133
	8	35.4 29	64.6 53	100.0 83
	9	22.5 13	77.5 43	100.0 56
	10	5.3 1	94.7 16	100.0 17
	COL TOTAL	40.5 242	59.5 354	100.0 596

At Daily Kos, dissent is quashed

At the Daily Kos website, I have been rating-up the good quality comments because I feel sorry that the authors of such comments are otherwise being ignored.

The website allows you to look at a list of all comments that you have rated up. When I check the list, I notice that a large percentage of those comments just say "[Hidden]."

"Trusted users" of the site are allowed to "troll rate" comments, and such troll ratings cause the comments to become hidden. If too many of a user's comments become hidden, that user is then banned from the site.

By rating up the good quality comments, I've gotten a window into how dissent is quashed. I assure you that I've only rated-up quality comments, but they generally pointed out the fallacy of the arguments being promoted.

In contrast, I don't delete comments at Half Sigma because of mere disagreement with what I posted. This is an example of how liberals are less tolerant of free speech than common sense people like Half Sigma.

The world is my butler

The lastest in outsourcing is personal services. A kid in California has an English tutor in India. The tutor makes $2/hour.

In India, all a college degree is good for is a $2/hour job doing personal services for truck drivers in the United States.

It should be noted that the company marketing the services to U.S. residents seems to be making several times as much on the deal as the employees. Yet another example of how marketing is more valuable than actual work.