Half Sigma

Massive HBD-related blog traffic today

There have been more than 25,000 hits to my blog today, because an old post about the DTNBP1 gene suddenly appeared on the front page of reddit. You may read the hundreds of comments on reddit. I've previously responded to the most common HBD-denialist comments.

The iPad is a really big and expensive PDA

The iPad seems to me like an oversized PDA. Remember PDAs? Once upon a time, people thought they were going to be the Next Big Thing, pocket-sized computers with a touch screen. It turned out that nobody wanted a pocket-sized device for anything except making phone calls and reading emails (or “texting” if you’re under 18).

The iPad is a really big and expensive PDA.

(Maybe it will be a big seller if they can get World of Warcraft to work on it. Or even better for Apple, some really addictive multiplayer game which only runs on the iPad.)

* * *

A reader informed me that I presciently predicted the demise of the Palm Foleo back in 2007:

So this makes me wonder, what kind of morons are running Palm? Why are these guys getting paid million dollar salaries for being so stupid? I'd work for them for a mere $200,000 year, and I would have told them to junk this stupid Foleo project and instead concentrate on improving the products they already have. Why hasn't a new PDA been introduced in nearly two years? Sure, the market for those things is dying, but I guarantee that Palm will sell many more PDAs during the next three years than they will sell Foleos. The Foleo will probably sell so badly that it will be canceled before three years have passed.

I’m not so quick to predict the demise of the iPad. Apple seems to be resurrecting the idea of the PDA with the iPod Touch and now the iPad. And Apple has a lot more marketing momentum behind it. Palm was a dying company when it introduced the Foleo. Apple is hot, and a lot of fanboys wil buy the iPad because it’s an Apple product.

I was serious about the World of Warcraft remark. Apple needs to put some application on the iPad that people really want but which won’t run on any other device.

UK schools don’t teach Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims

It’s a two-and-a-half-year-old article, but I just read it today:

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government backed study has revealed.

It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.

The Holocaust makes Europeans look bad, yet Europeans fear teaching what happened because Muslims would be offended by it.

$11 million love nest

What was she getting out of the relationship? Well, he let her live in this $11 million estate.

Rainbow Republicans

Standing behind Republican Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell is a nerdy Asian man and a cute black woman. This random slice of the Republican Party demonstrates how the Republicans are the more racially diverse of the two parties; a white man and a white woman were sitting behind Obama.

I knew her

Not in the Biblical sense, but she worked as a receptionist at the same place where I worked for a year in the 1990s. She was a nice girl. She liked sushi. She wanted to be an actress. She has a unique ethnic background: 1/2 Mexican, 1/4 black, 1/4 French-Canadian. She had a very perky personality. She's about 5'10" and very thin (although she looks a little heavier now than she was 15 years ago).

The mystery is where she got $250,000 to pay for the billboards. There's no evidence that she ever had any job that would have enabled her to save up that much money.

Does Republican Andre Bauer support HBD?

AP article:

At a town hall meeting Thursday, Bauer, who is running for governor in his own right now that Sanford is term-limited, said: "My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed! You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that."

He seems to understand that the poor lack future time orientation, and that they pass on this trait to their children.

Remains found

Three months ago, I blogged about the cute college girl who had gone missing. Today her remains were found.

Scott Brown's daughter voted for Democrat

No, she didn't vote against her own dad. But in 2008, she voted for Senator John Kerry.

I wonder if she voted for McCain or Obama?

Now I know why I hate the idea of Ruby on Rails

Camlost writes:

The romantic marketability of programmers is certainly decreasing over time, IMHO.

I work with a lot of software engineers, and some of them are entirely wrapped up in their Web 2.0 cyberworld for (literally) 24 hours per day with the explosion of gaming and social networking technologies. Also, many of the best programmers are able to work from home quite a bit, further insulating them from social interaction.

In earlier decades, programmers mainly came up through the ranks of telecom technical work, and were trained on computer systems by their employer. Today's generation of programmers have made a conscious decision to major in computer science (or start dabbling in programming during their high school years).

In general, the least socially-adjusted developers are the ones who were part of the first wave to move to that newest, "cool," cutting edge technology. (especially if it's open-source) If you ever meet a guy that tells you he's a "Ruby on Rails Developer" I'll bet good money that he sees less than 5 hours of sunlight per year...

Every year or two, some new technology comes along that’s supposed to make everything “better” than it was before. But it takes a year or two in order to get good enough with a development technology to really use it well. So only people who spend all of their non-working hours learning the latest technologies can use them effectively. This ensures that only those “least socially-adjusted developers” are the ones who can program effectively.

The solution is to stick to a proven technology like ASP.NET, and to stop adding new unnecessary stuff to it just because some geek thinks it’s “cool.” (Last year, Microsoft added a crappy “MVC framework” to appease geeks who think Ruby on Rails is “da bomb” because it’s MVC. Bad move Microsoft.)

Bestselling romance novels

These are the five best-selling romance novels, today, at eHarlequin.com.

* * *

#1: Marrying the Lone Star Maverick
by Sara Orwig

He needed a wife…fast. And Texan Jeff Brand's lovely new assistant would do just fine. After all, the heat between him and Holly Lombard was becoming impossible to resist. And a no-strings marriage would certainly work for them both.

Yet once he put the ring on her finger, Jeff realized he may have gotten in over his head. He could ride a wild bronco, run a multimillion-dollar business and charm any woman he chose. But keeping feelings out of this in-name-only union? With a wife like Holly, the maverick groom had just discovered his toughest challenge yet.

#2: The Desert King's Housekeeper Bride
by Carol Marinelli

Housekeeper Effie, a practical yet slightly frumpy virgin, has been summoned to the desert to serve the sheikh!

Ruthless Sheikh King Zakari had gone to seek solitude in the sands, but nights alone are not something this ruler is used to. However, with his housekeeper at his service, there's no need to allow his bed to grow cold….

After hot hours of passion, Effie's heart is near to bursting. But what she doesn't realize is that something has compelled Zakari to take her, a lowly servant, as his royal bride!

#3: The Desert Prince
by Jennifer Lewis

Mr. February: Salim Al Mansur, desert prince

His Quest: Marry and produce an heir

His Quandary: The woman he wanted, he couldn't have

He'd been determined to keep their relationship strictly business. Though seeing Celia Davidson again had Salim reconsidering seduction. Yes, he'd once rejected her because she would not make a suitable bride. But surely Celia understood he could not deny his duty, and the lovely American could never give him an heir.

Or had she already done so?

#4: Seduction and the CEO
by Barbara Dunlop

Making money comes easily for millionaire Jared Ryder, though the hectic corporate lifestyle has him heading to his Montana ranch whenever possible. There, a new female hired hand has the CEO thinking about mixing a little pleasure with business.

Melissa Warner certainly doesn't have many ranching skills. But her beauty's too captivating to ignore, and Jared's ready to stake his claim. Yet even in his passion-induced haze, he suspects Melissa of hiding something. Heaven help her if he discovers her lie, for there's nothing more dangerous than Ryder retribution.

#5: Executive's Pregnancy Ultimatum
by Emilie Rose

Flynn Maddox, the driven vice president of Maddox Communications, thought he was over his ex-wife, Renee. But when he learned that they were still married—and that she was trying to have his baby—he realized he had never stopped wanting her. It was time to put his fierce negotiating skills to good use. He would give her the baby she so desperately wanted…but not without getting her to sign off on some terms of his own.

* * *

If these books were being written by men and read by men, feminists like Maureen Dowd would be outraged, but of course they are written by women and read by women. Women like reading about rich and powerful men seduced by women who don't have their own money-making skills.

* * *

I did a search through the site and couldn’t find a single book where the male romantic interest is a computer programmer. Except this one which I don’t think really counts:

Teach Me Tonight
by Jacquelin Thomas

She always said they were just friends. But Tamara Hodges has never forgotten Micah Ross, her smart-as-a-whip college math tutor—and the guy who got away. Their ten-year reunion could be her chance to make things right. But the computer geek turned hip Beverly Hills record producer is giving her a very cool reception. Until Tamara turns up the heat….

Even after all these years, Micah is still hot for his gorgeous ex-pupil—and hurt by her cruel rejection. So when the sorority sister turned magazine writer shows up to interview a singer on his label, Micah seizes his opportunity for sweet revenge. But his scheme goes awry when passion ignites in an evening neither can forget. Is this Micah's chance to walk off with the ultimate prize—the homecoming queen of his dreams?

A computer programmer can only find love if he’s built like a bodybuilder and quits computer programming to become a “hip Beverly Hills record producer.”

Note the similarity of the male romantic lead to the Barack Obama illustration in the post below.

Bad painting of Barack Obama

No, I didn’t paint it myself, I stole it from someone else’s blog post. But it’s hilarious. I sense that the person who did paint it didn't intend it to be parody.

I’m almost tempted to try my hand at doing my own Barack Obama painting instead of another landscape.

* * *

Commenter coldequation pointed out that the illustrator intended the painting to be humorous.

Men are happier when women earn more than them

Talk about NY Times misinformation! The NY Times is telling us that when women work, the result is a happier marriage with less divorce.

But on the surface, this is obviously ignoring a boatload of confounding factors. Women with higher IQs are more likely to work, because they are more likely to have educational credentials and a career track that makes it worthwhile for them to work. And a high IQ is associated with better marriage outcomes.

Women who don’t have a career track are better off not working if they have a husband who works, because the cost of child care would exceed the income from working at Walmart.

* * *

Kristen W. Springer, a sociologist at Rutgers, has found that among men in their 50s, having a wife who earns more money is associated with poorer health. Among the highest earning couples in her study, a husband who earns less than his wife is 60 percent less likely to be in good health compared with men who earn more than their wives.

While it would be fun to say, “ah ha, a high earning wife causes bad health!”, it’s more likely that bad health causes a man’s earning power to be lower, making it more likely that his wife would earn more than him.

Senator-elect Scott Brown's daughter is hot

Somehow, I missed this important fact during the pre-election news coverage.

People who live without heat

In yesterday’s NY Times there was an article about people who live without heat. I note that none of the people profiled in the article have any children. I don’t think any of them are even married. I guess when you’re responsible to nobody but yourself, you can get away with having a really weird lifestyle.

* * *

This is the sort of special article you can only read at the NY Times, so when the Times starts charging for access, I’ll have to decide if articles like this are worth the money.

Steve Sailer writes about facial recognition and g

Read Steve Sailer’s post about how facial recognition is a non-g-factor mental trait.

I like to simply define intelligence as the ability to reason and learn (which I stole from Arthur Jensen), although it’s even narrower than that because it applies only to certain types of reasoning and learning. (IQ most helps learning by reasoning; learning a foreign language, for example, falls more into the category of learning my mimicking. Henry Kissinger is often given as an example of someone who was very smart but couldn’t learn how to speak English without a funny accent.)

Facial recognition is less of a reasoning function and more of an instantaneous reaction. People with bad facial recognition ability but high IQs are probably better able to reason out who people are based on other cues, compared to people with bad facial recognition ability and low IQs; but a person with a low IQ and good facial recognition would recognize faces better than a super-high-IQ person with bad facial recognition because the person with good facial recognition has a brain which just does it automatically without him having to do any reasoning at all.

* * *

Last year, Randall Blogger blogged about research which showed that some people are super-recognizers. Facial recognition is probably distributed on a bell curve like IQ, with both a small number super-recognizers and a small number of people who are "retarded" in this area, a syndrome called prosopagnosia said to afflict 2.5% of the population, and obviously hereditable based on this news article about couple who both have the syndrome and their daughter has it too. And it was identified as a genetic trait in this article. Face recognition ability is yet another mental trait which is dependent on one's genotype.

Even Top Fourteen no longer a ticket

From a NY Times article of a few days ago:

Some partners say that the next generation may have to expect less from a legal career. “What has come to pass is that a law degree is not a ticket to a six-figure salary and a six-figure bonus,” said Matthew A. Feldman, a partner at Willkie Farr & Gallagher in New York.

A law degree was never a ticket to a six-figure salary and a six-figure bonus for graduates of non-Top Fourteen schools. What Mr. Feldman means is that now, even for graduates of the Top Fourteen, the law degree isn’t a ticket to a six-figure salary. (Mr. Feldman is completely blind to the majority of law school graduates who come from the bottom 200 or so of law schools.)

Medical school, however, still is a ticket to a six-figure salary. My advice for young people smart enough to get into medical school is to go to medical school.

Pay for the NY Times?

The New York Times intends to start charging frequent readers for access. Will people pay up, or will they switch to reading the Washington Post?

In other news, “The average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device, according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation.” At least they're not doing drugs or having sex (assuming cybersex doesn't count).

Republicans need to be a big white tent

In my recent post, I stated:

There’s a huge opportunity for Republicans to convert people over to the Republican side for more than just one election, but only if they stop being the party of Christian evangelists and start being the party of the middle class people, regardless of religious affiliation, who have been screwed over by rich Democrats.

This has elicited a lot of negative comments, so let me explain why I wrote it.

It is believed among most in the HBD community of blogs that the best hope for the Republican Party to win elections is to appeal to middle class whites. And this is what is already happening: in the 2008 presidential election, not only did Obama win the majority of the NAM vote, he also won the majority of the wealthy vote.

The problem for the Republican Party is that it has now become very strongly identified as the Christian party, but middle class whites can probably be broken up into two approximately equal groups: middle class whites are heavily into protestant Christianity, and middle class whites who are not heavily into protestant Christianity. Yes, even the Catholic vote is turned off by the Republican connection with evangelical Christians. And the Republican Party, which has traditionally been the party of the rich, is no longer the party of the rich after the 2008 election because rich people are less religious than middle class people.

White Christians are just not a big enough of a base to win elections on a national scale in a country where whites are a decreasing percentage of the population and where belief in Christianity is declining (but belief in Gaiaism is rising). According to the General Social Survey, the percent of whites who believe that the Bible is the literal word of God has been lower during the 00s then any previous decade. The Republican Party needs to become more of a big tent by being neutral on religious issues, otherwise the temporary gains will soon be lost.

The Republican Party also needs to stop blatantly being the party of the rich by being against estate taxes and other rich people taxes—those people voted for Obama, so Republicans should let Democrats champion their causes.

When the women earn more money

There’s a NY Times article about couples where the woman earns more money. In 1970, only 4% of women earned more than their husbands, but that’s now up to 22% in 2007. The number would be even higher if the marriage rate were not declining:

In 2007, the Pew report found, median household incomes of married men, married women and unmarried women were all about 60 percent higher than in 1970. But among unmarried men, median household income rose by only 16 percent. These days, men who marry typically gain another breadwinner.

In other words, men who make less money (relative to everyone else) than men used to make in 1970 is a contributing factor to the declining marriage rate. The article would have you believe it’s the men’s fault for being intimidated by successful women, but I think it’s more often that women are disgusted by men less successful than themselves.

While marriage rates have declined over all, women with college degrees are still more likely to marry today than less educated women.

Among the lower social classes, there’s no longer a stigma to having a kid out of wedlock.

“But, I think for me, it comes down to compatibility,” Ms. McFadden said. “Can you grow with me? Or as my genius friend the textile designer says, she asks on first dates or meeting men in bars, ‘Do you have a passport and a library card?’ ”

Sounds to me like the real point of that question is “are you rich enough to go on international vacations?” A lot of middle class people don’t have passports because they couldn’t afford to make use of one even if they had one.

It is my observation that international travel is the number one hobby for single women living in Manhattan. It’s a hobby of pure consumption, and one which partially explains why they are not married yet; the men they would date and marry live nearby and not in foreign countries.

* * *

Hopefully for those men who don't have good jobs and can't afford frequent international travel, there will soon be affordable sexbots (not the pathetically unrealistic sexbot featured in the recent news article, but quality sex robots like in the movie Blade Runner).

Holiday weekend update

Haiti: for HBD reasons, I’m not surprised that the Haitian government’s response to the crisis has been pretty disorganized. Even before the earthquake, the country wasn’t very organized. But Steve Sailer has pointed out that there hasn’t been as much violence as predicted by the racist media.

Massachusetts special election: I’m rooting for the Republican. If the Republican guy wins, I hope that conservatives and Republicans won’t get complacent about the victory. Voters simply blame the current party in power for the crappy economy. There’s a huge opportunity for Republicans to convert people over to the Republican side for more than just one election, but only if they stop being the party of Christian evangelists and start being the party of the middle class people, regardless of religious affiliation, who have been screwed over by rich Democrats.

Green religion in the NY Times: “As awareness of environmental concerns has grown, therapists say they are seeing a rise in bickering between couples and family members over the extent to which they should change their lives to save the planet.” Once upon a time, they might have bickered about how often to go to church, but green is the new religion. One guy in the article describes his girlfriend as being in a “high-priestess phase.”

What makes a great teacher?

There’s an Atlantic article on what makes a great teacher. Of course we are talking about people who are great at teaching poor children, because no one cares enough about children of the middle class or the rich enough to bother to do a study to see who is best at teaching them.

It turns out that conscientiousness (the article talks about a lot of traits which clearly fall under the conscientiousness rubric), IQ (Ivy League educated teachers tend to be better), and extroversion (teachers with a track record of leadership in extracurricular activities in college suggests extroversion plus conscientiousness to me) are the important factors. What’s unimportant is previous experience with poor children, and a master’s degree in education. (The purpose of credentials is that they help you get a job, not help you actually peform better at a job. A master's in education helps you get a job as a teacher, it doesn't make you a better teacher. It works this way in a lot of other fields as well.)

This also means that what makes a great teacher also makes for a great investment banker.

Conscientiousness and IQ are innate traits important for success in all jobs. Probably, the primary difference between jobs is whether they are better suited for introverts or extroverts. It should be obvious that performing in front of a group of people, even if they are children, is a job for extroverts.

The bad news here is that we need millions of teachers, and because the people who make the best teachers also make the best employees in higher paying careers, it's not likely that this research will have much of an impact on the overall quality of the teaching workforce. And it's not even clear to me why we should encourage the best people to forsake those other careers just so a bunch of at-risk kids can score a few percentage points higher on standardized tests, an effect which probably wears off after they leave the classroom.

The first sexbot

An early model sexbot.

Only a real hardcore weirdo could get off on this, but the technology will surely improve. I look forward to the day when I can buy my own Cherry 2000.

Stephen T. Asma says environmentalism is a post-Christian religion

Stephen T. Asma writes:

According to Nietzsche, we have historically needed an ideal God because we've needed to be cruel to ourselves, we've needed to feel guilty. And we've needed to feel guilty because we have instincts that cannot be discharged externally—we have to bottle them up.

Feeling unworthy is still a large part of Western religious culture, but many people, especially in multicultural urban centers, are less religious. There are still those who believe that God is watching them and judging them, so their feelings of guilt and moral indignation are couched in the traditional theological furniture. But increasing numbers, in the middle and upper classes, identify themselves as being secular or perhaps "spiritual" rather than religious.

Now the secular world still has to make sense out of its own invisible, psychological drama—in particular, its feelings of guilt and indignation. Environmentalism, as a substitute for religion, has come to the rescue.

Exactly, the Christian value system has been juxtaposed with the new religion of Gaiaism. Instead of God being perfect, in Gaiaism the planet is perfect, and humans by their very unworthy existence pollute it.

And like all religions, the key to spreading the religion is indoctrination of children:

Recently while I was brushing my teeth, my 6-year-old son scolded me for running the water too long. He severely reprimanded me, and at the end of his censure asked me, with real outrage, "Don't you love the earth?" And lately he has taken up the energy cause, scampering virtuously around the house turning off lights, even while I'm using them. He seems as stressed and anxious about the sins of environmentalism as I was about masturbation in the days of my Roman Catholic childhood.

Palin too stupid to be newscaster, part II

Lil' Barry Bailout writes:

I think too many have bought into the liberal media spin that Palin isn't smart; she may not be "quick on her feet" but that's not the same as being smart. From all accounts, Palin does the right thing policy-wise almost all the time, from a conservative perspective.

What's more important after all, being able to debate slobbering liberal (but quick on his feet) Barney Frank on TV, or developing common sense health care policy, for example?

Sorry “Barry,” but this has nothing to do with the “liberal media.” I was onto Palin’s stupidity the very same day she was nominated, before the liberal media even picked up on the story. I’ve written a more detailed analysis than you’d ever see in the MSM explaining why Palin’s estimated IQ is only 100, which is average.

If Republicans want the media to think their candidates are smart, then the Republicans have to select smart candidates to start with. No one ever accused Mitt of being stupid. This is because he’s not stupid.

Regarding her ability to attract viewers to Fox News, the average Fox News viewer is college educated and probably has an IQ of 115 (because only smarter people are interested in watching news), but the average Sarah Palin fan has an IQ of 100, so we are talking about two different audiences. Sarah Palin’s fans don’t watch the news. They may tune in once or twice to see their favorite politician, but then they will get bored very quickly and switch back to watching American Idol (or whatever it is that stupid people watch).

So yes, there will be an initial moderate ratings boost, but after the novelty wears off, Palin will have to be able to entertain news viewers who have a higher IQ than she does, and this she will not be able to do because she will not be able to offer any interesting extemporaneous commentary or ask the guest any interesting questions. No matter how much viewers like the idea of Sarah Palin, they will tune out when she starts boring them.

Prediction: Palin will flunk at Fox

So Palin is going to work for Fox News.

My prediction is that she’s going to suck, because she’s just not smart enough for the job. As a result, she will never have anything interesting to say, nor will she be able to ask the guests any interesting questions. Susan Molinari was also too stupid to be television journalist. Her claim to fame was also that she was a young Republican female, and she gave a good speech at a Republican convention, but being able to do a good job reading a speech that some else smarter wrote doesn’t mean you can say anything interesting when there’s no teleprompter. Palin's career as a journalist will not be much longer than Susan Molinari's.

How did Susan Molinari get elected to the House at such a young age if she was so stupid, you may ask? Well I know exactly how it happened because I was there in Staten Island when it happened. Staten Island is a Republican district. Her father, Guy Molinari, served many years as a U.S. Representative, and he was the biggest power-broker in the local Republican Party (along with Olga Igneri, the Republican County Committee chairwoman, who Guy put in power). Guy quit his job to run for Borough President and presented his daughter as the next candidate. In Staten Island, the name "Molinari" was as magical as the name "Kennedy" in Massachusetts. She didn't have to be smart. She wasn't even very good at politicking, she had the wrong personality.

If I knew as much about Alaska politics as I knew about Staten Island politics, I’m sure I could explain how Sarah Palin became governor without being very smart. I should point out that the population of Staten Island is about the same as the population of Alaska, so we are comparing the same thing. In fact, it’s easier to win a plum statewide office in Alaska, because Staten Island has only two good positions, Borough President and U.S. Representative, but Alaska has four: U.S. Representative, two U.S. Senators, and governor. So it’s easier to get elected to a prestigious office in Alaska because there are twice as many prestigious positions for the same population.

More evidence of Palin's low IQ

From the other Times:

Race of a Lifetime, a new book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin which is serialised in The Times this week, reveals that advisers to John McCain were taken aback by how little Mrs Palin knew about politics and history when she was confirmed as Mr McCain's Republican running mate after a cursory, 12-hour selection process.

"You guys have a lot of work to do," Steve Schmidt, Mr McCain's campaign chief, is said to have told the experts he had recruited to tutor her. "She doesn't know anything."

Heilemann and Halperin write: "Palin couldn't explain why North Korea and South Korea were separate nations. She didn't know what the Fed [the Federal Reserve] did. Asked who attacked America on 9/11, she suggested several times that it was Saddam Hussein. Asked to identify the enemy that her son would be fighting in Iraq, she drew a blank. Later, on the plane, Palin said to her team: 'I wish I'd paid more attention to this stuff'."

This is more evidence of Palin’s low IQ (as if there wasn’t enough already). Smart people pick up these facts over the course of their lives, dumb people don’t.

* * *

Outlaw josey wales writes:

I find her effect on a certain portion of the HBD community most amusing. We all know if she was any kind of minority (c.f. Sotomayor) her intellectual qualifications would be under constant challenge, and rightly so, because she is a poor-to-mediocre intellect at best. However, she is hot. Hotness mitigates a tremendous amount of deficiencies.

David Brooks writes about Jews and Israel

David Brooks has a new new NY Times op-ed about Jewish success and Israel.

After ticking off a summary of disproportionate Jewish success, he writes:

No single explanation can account for the record of Jewish achievement.

It’s not so mysterious David. The higher IQ of Ashkenazi Jews explains most of it. Jewish cultural emphasis on education and earning a good salary explains the rest.

The odd thing is that Israel has not traditionally been strongest where the Jews in the Diaspora were strongest.

I’ll have to go with the assumption that the average IQ of Jews in Israel isn’t as high as that of Jews in the United States. My explanations are (1) approximately half of the Jews in Israel are Sephardic/Mizrahi who don’t have as high IQs as Ashkenazi; and (2) moving to Israel is a religion choice for many Jews, and I’ve demonstrated before that being religious is inversely correlated with being smart, so it’s likely that Jews who voluntarily moved to Israel when they had a better option are not as smart as Jews who moved elsewhere.

Nevertheless, Israeli Jews are a lot smarter than their Arab neighbors:

For example, between 1980 and 2000, Egyptians registered 77 patents in the U.S. Saudis registered 171. Israelis registered 7,652.

The influx of Russian Jews is probably raising the average IQ of Israeli Jews, making Israel the only developed nation with eugenic immigration. Nevertheless, I still believe that Israel is a doomed nation, because the Russian immigration will stop eventually, and the higher Arab birthrate ensures that someday Jews will be a minority in their own country, and before that happens there will be a tipping point in which all the Israelis who are able to will leave. Israel is doomed to become the Zimbabwe of the Middle East.

Unconstitutional public school

A New York City public school devoted to teaching the religion of Gaiaism to impressionable young minds. Our tax dollars are being used for unconstitutional purposes; this government brainwashing violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Blondes and IQ?

At a “college” in the UK, some students did a project where they discovered that blondes were below average in IQ tests.

Apparently there’s no problem with printing this, but what would have happened if students discovered that blacks were below average in IQ tests? (Can you imagine a headline reading, "Yes, blacks are dumber"? I can't.)

* * *

It’s not clear from this whether dumb blondes are more likely to go to “college” than dumb brunettes, or if blondes didn’t try as hard on the test, or if dumb girls are more likely to bleach their hair, or if the genes which cause blondeness are correlated with lower IQ. The last explanation is the least likely, in my opinion.

* * *

A commenter asks:

Why is the last explanation least likely? Are you some kind of environmentalist Boasian liberal now, because you do not like the data?

Because blondeness is a desired trait in women, cross-assortative mating would tend to produce smarter blonde women rather than dumber ones.

It’s well known that the majority of blondes are not natural blondes, so the “study” is probably telling us that the lower IQ girls (among their classmates at college and not. the entire population) are more likely to bleach their hair. This coincides with my own observation that the best looking girls tend to be smart enough to attend college, but tend not to be the smartest college students—they cluster at mediocre state schools. At community colleges, physical attractiveness decreases. But the conventionally sort of attractiveness which is appealing in a Playboy Playmate also decreases at top level colleges.

A big component of female attractiveness is the desire to be attractive, and students at mediocre state schools are smart enough and motivated enough to figure out how to be attractive (such as spending a lot of time on their hair, working out, etc), while women smarter than that are more interested in their school work and other activities and less interested in devoting themselves to their appearance, especially in ways which seem low class such as bleaching their hair or wearing big hoop earrings and lots of makeup.

* * *

I believe in the UK, or some parts therof, “college” really means high school or junior high school.