Assorted Links

Stanley Kurtz on Pinkerwashing Harvard; John D. Sailer on how to take over higher ed; Allison Schrager on separating universities; my review of "Who needs college anymore?" and more

Education

Stanley Kurtz writes,

If Pinker’s relatively small Academic Freedom Council alone were in charge of selecting new faculty, I might believe that a change could come from strictly internal forces. Yet trusting the much larger left-dominated faculty that has purged conservatives and consolidated its monopoly for decades is folly. Pinker can float his suggestions for achieving intellectual diversity. The faculty will ignore them.

With President Trump attacking Harvard, Pinker rallied to its defense with a New York Times op-ed. Suppose you are a fan of Pinker and his ideals for a university. Apart from mood affiliation, is there any reason to be cheered up by his op-ed?

I think that Kurtz is right. The Marxists on elite college campuses outnumber conservatives and overpower liberals. Harvard is not going to reform itself.

John D. Sailer writes,

Over the past decade, universities invested heavily in ideologically charged hiring schemes…

These professors will edit academic journals, weigh in on contemporary issues, hire colleagues, and sit on tenure committees…

Many faculty members hired through these programs espouse views on the fringe of progressive politics.

His solution is to try to fix the hiring pipeline in order to bring in professors who are dedicated to old-fashioned academic values, rather than activism. I’m all for it, but I see it as a lost cause.

Allison Schrager writes,

I think we should consider breaking them up. Take Columbia (where I have multiple degrees): the medical, engineering, and business schools could form a new entity and keep doing important government-supported research, and let the college, arts and humanities and social work school do their activism thing on their own. If research is so important—why are we letting them run things?

I need to think through the consequences of doing that, both intended and unintended.

In my review of Who Needs College Anymore?, I write,

A question that lingers is whether higher education will adapt or be replaced. I came away from this book thinking that without the lavish government support that colleges and universities currently enjoy, replacement would be the more likely scenario.

Obviously a timely book.

Peter Berkowitz writes,

Pinker underestimates the cumulative damage Harvard has inflicted on itself over many years by sidelining merit, censoring speech, admitting students unprepared to grapple with moral and historical complexity, and hiring and retaining faculty and administrators indifferent or ill-disposed to academic freedom.

Berkowitz has an excellent takedown of Steven Pinker’s much-ballyhooed op-ed in the New York Times. How much courage did that take for Pinker? Maybe only 98 percent of the readers are on his side? Since I don’t subscribe, I’ll pick one of the quotes cited by Steve Stewart-Williams, who praises Pinker.

Pinker writes,

And if you’re still skeptical that universities are worth supporting, consider these questions: Do you think that the number of children who die every year from cancer is just about right? Are you content with your current chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease? Do you feel our current understanding of which government policies are effective and which ones are wasteful is perfect? Are you happy with the way the climate is going, given our current energy technology?

Oh, so if I’m against Alzheimer’s or childhood cancer, then I must support Harvard? Sorry. That is nothing but a rhetorical swindle, and I am not falling for it.

Harvard and other “elite” universities are major recipients of taxpayer subsidies. And they have engaged in discriminatory practices in admissions and hiring. On the faculty, Republicans are outnumbered not just by Democrats, but by Marxists, who intimidate the liberals and heavily influence the schools of education that train K-12 teachers.

Where are the signs that Harvard is implementing changes? Show me the big increase in Asian-American students being admitted. Show me the administrators and departments that have been dropped for harboring anti-intellectual activists. Show me the surveys demonstrating that conservatives feel that they enjoy freedom of speech.

My understanding of which government programs are effective and which are wasteful may not be perfect, but I know for sure that if your colleagues were in charge, their socialism would prove disastrous. So cut the demagoguery. Don’t claim that Harvard is mostly fine. It isn’t.

Social Learning

Ted Gioia writes

Let’s call it: The Collapse of the Knowledge System.

We could also define it as the emergence of a new knowledge system.

In this regard, it resembles other massive shifts in Western history—specifically the rebirth of humanistic thinking in the early Renaissance, or the rise of Romanticism in the nineteenth century.

In these volatile situations, the whole entrenched hierarchy of truth and authority gets totally reversed. The old experts and their systems are discredited, and completely new values take their place. The newcomers bring more than just a new attitude—they turn everything on its head.

That’s happening right now.

Noah Smith on econtalk on how he might have underrated libertarianism. Self-recommending.

Dan Williams writes,

the populist celebration of “common sense” over expert authority also enacts an exhilarating status reversal. It frames ordinary people—those without educational credentials—as the real source of knowledge and wisdom. It creates the conditions for epistemic equality. It says that there is no need to accept assistance from fancy intellectuals with fancy degrees—and so no need to grant them status.

…You cannot fact-check your way out of status competition. And as long as the acceptance of expert guidance is experienced as an admission of social inferiority, there will be a lucrative market for demagogues and bullshitters who produce more status-affirming narratives.

Virginia Postrel and I discuss The Technological Republic. It was a mediocre book, but we had an outstanding discussion, because her classic The Future and its Enemies is so relevant right now.

On a recent book that is now old news, Megan McArdle wrote a column about Original Sin, the new book that offers some inside dirt on the cover-up of Mr. Biden’s mental infirmity. She expresses justifiable anger.

Biden’s staff knew he wasn’t up to those demands, because they didn’t even trust him to handle a small fundraiser without a teleprompter. Yet instead of persuading him to step aside, or going public about this dangerous situation, they hid his condition from the nation. It was a near-treasonous dereliction of duty to their country.

About journalists, McArdle writes,

as a group, we didn’t just drop the ball. We flung it down with great vigor, even as video evidence of the president’s incapacity kept handing it back to us. As the president stumbled in public, we quoted aging experts who downplayed Biden’s increasingly worrying slips, credulously repeated implausible White House spin about “cheap fakes,” and treated the president’s condition as something voters were worried about rather than something the country should be worried about.

…The president was not fine, was not even within shouting distance of fine — and until we examine our own failure to report that fact, neither are we.

Indeed. In terms of credibility, journalists are dead people walking. But as far as I can tell, the “misinformation experts” continue to raise alarms about right-wing “influencers” and social media, while being silent about the Biden entourage and its legacy-media lapdogs.

Psychology

Christopher J. Ferguson writes,

Two major meta-analyses—studies that aggregate many experiments—have concluded that cutting back on social media use does not conclusively lead to meaningful improvements in youth mental health.

Madeleine A. Fugere writes,

The researchers found that men’s intelligence in general, and their performance on the fluid reasoning task in particular, was associated with fewer negative behaviors toward their romantic partners. For example, more intelligent men were less likely to report insulting their partners or using coercive techniques to pressure their partners into sex. Men’s intelligence was also negatively related to their self-reports of erectile dysfunction. Furthermore, men’s intelligence was positively associated with more favorable treatment of their partners.

pointer from Rob Henderson. But women will still set their dating app filters for height.

Also, Henderson points to a post by “DeepLeftAnalysis.”

If you adjust for socio-economic status, the dumbest possible person is the ruralite who remains in a rural area, and the smartest possible person is someone who grows up in the “central city” and moves to a rural area.

This is a long post, featuring one misanthropic assertion after another. You’ll have to decide for yourself which ones are astute, which ones are funny, which ones are obnoxious, and whether any of them are true.

Yascha Mounk writes,

The idea that being extroverted is all about being outgoing probably remains, just about, the conventional wisdom. But the idea that really it’s all about whether socializing charges or drains your social battery has quickly become nearly equally widespread

He points out that the Big Five personality measures that are popular in academic psychology defines and tests for extraversion in a way that corresponds to the older definition of “outgoing” or seeking stimulus from the outer world. It is the less-respected (among academics) Myers-Briggs system that describes the extravert-introvert dichotomy in terms of the former needing to go to a party to “recharge the battery” after being alone and the other having the opposite need.

Mounk wants to integrate the two ways of thinking about extraversion. He points out that “how do you recharge your battery?” is an interesting question. But my guess is that an academic personality psychologist would say that there is no personality type that reliably predicts your answer to that question.

Statistical Methods

Nick McGreivy writes,

Because AI research, in the words of one researcher, has “nearly complete non-publication of negative results,” we usually only see the successes of AI in science and not the failures. But without negative results, our attempts to evaluate the impacts of AI in science typically get distorted.

Lyman Stone writes,

Twins-reared-apart studies do not adequately capture the range of GxE because GxE is not about nebulous general environments but highly specific environmental traits which are often low-variance within samples. For example, “the existence of eyeglasses” is invariant within same-country-and-era samples. “The existence of vaccines” is invariant within same-country-and-era samples. But these are huge GxE factors! Likewise, “the guidance given to parents about what things kids should be exposed to” tends to be invariant, and “curricula used in schools” tends to be low-variance, etc, etc.

GxE = gene/environment interactions. If you compare twins raised apart to twins raised together and do not see a difference, you shout “it’s totally heritable!” But the implicit assumption is that the twins raised apart truly experience different environments.

I think I get the criticism. But I am not sure it invalidates every twin study the way that Stone claims it does.

Steve Stewart-Williams writes,

A recent study found that physical fitness is associated with lower mortality due not only to cardiovascular disease and cancer but also to accidents - something we wouldn’t expect physical fitness to directly affect. This suggests that the link between physical fitness and longevity is at least partly due to factors correlated with physical fitness, as opposed to physical fitness itself. Likely culprits include socioeconomic status and risk-taking.

Or conscientiousness and IQ.

Fertility

Rachel Lu writes,

Technology has been advancing rapidly in the area of human reproduction. Things that a generation ago were still in the realm of lurid laboratory experiments are now touted by many as “rights.” Political pressure is mounting to throw substantial public money into subsidizing artificial reproduction, even as further breakthroughs loom on the horizon. No matter how one views IVF, surrogacy, genetic screening of embryos, artificial wombs, or a range of possible transhumanist innovations, it would be ludicrous not to acknowledge the moral and social gravity of these developments. No one should be indifferent to the question of where babies come from.

…When rapidly advancing technology combines with unrestrained social zeal and state power, things can go wrong. Sometimes very badly wrong

Hollis Robbins writes,

The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) First-Destination Survey measures outcomes within six months of graduation in categories such as “employed full-time,” “continuing education,” and even “still seeking.” “Forming a family” is not a legitimate post-graduation path.

She points out that these metrics, and in some states funding, penalize colleges that graduate women who do not immediately opt for full-time employment.

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Stop being polite and start getting real