I think it would be highly worthwhile to specify what we all mean by the term "the elites." Both sides consider them the enemy, but they clearly mean opposite things to each. To the Woke left it seems to mean "anyone in the 1% who either inherited their wealth or earned it by working in the private sector (celebrities are excluded.)" To MAGA folks it seems to mean "any college professor, media worker, or east / west coast city dweller who has not named Jesus Christ as their personal savior." This is just nuts. Why is it so important to feel victimized by such an amorphous, arbitrary, fictional group.
High IQ, like beauty, is not fair. Life is not fair, whether by God or impersonal genetic evolutionary forces.
There is no just solution to inevitable unfairness in life.
Lotteries of those with 1400+ SAT scores for HYPS Ivy + colleges would be a big improvement, and be far more fair to quality/ high IQ poor folk, so it would be a good requirement to have on colleges with big endowments, like >10mln or >$100mln, to maintain tax exemptions.
But it’s not, and can’t be, cosmically Fair.
Common core doesn’t fail to find the high IQ kids, it fails to create high IQ kids from average kids. As every policy will fail—and it is the terrible social expectation of schools to do the impossible which is the bigger failure. Half the 18 yo kids will be below avg.
Society needs to honestly accept that, and do more to prepare below avg kids to have happy & productive lives. And avoid the pressure to “do the best we can” on nearly useless studies that are also not fun, yet difficult. As so many school subjects are to most normal kids. (Seldom so difficult for the high IQ kids)
Following both JD Vance, and Rob Henderson, the poverty/ unstable home leading to first the US military and then college, should be a far more supported track for the poor kids with good thinking abilities. Especially for boys/ young men.
Real life is not like we all get 50 points to distribute over traits. Some get 100, rich, smart, good looking, funny; some get only 20, below average in just about everything. Life is unfair.)
Re: Charles Murray on admission to elite (highly selective) universities.
Two questions arise:
1) What fraction of youths, who are in the the top half of the top percentile of cognitive ability and are blessed also with conscientiousness, land at elite universities despite the pretense and practice of holistic admissions?
2) Do the most talented-and-conscientious, among those who gain admission to elite universities, then self-sort into STEM and other hard majors?
My intuition — perhaps mistaken — is that there is excess capacity at elite universities to train the most talented and motivated students.
In previous work, Charles Murray showed (and in a way lamented) that the U.S. had become a ruthlessly efficient cognitive-sorting machine.
I concur with Arnold's prescription for selective admission — to increase clarity, integrity, humility. But I am skeptical that inadequate cognitive sorting into elite universities and into hard Majors is a crucial problem.
"My intuition — perhaps mistaken — is that there is excess capacity at elite universities to train the most talented and motivated students."
True if the cut off really is the top 0.5%- but it's not. It is more like top 2-5% for the Ivies and the Ivy-like schools just below. For a place like Cal Tech or MIT it probably is top 0.5%.
My impression is that the top 0.5% (cognitive ability + conscientiousness) do land at one elite college or another. If perchance the cutoff is 2-5%, the top 0.5% nonetheless gravitate to hard Majors and gain access to facilities (labs etc), instruction by top scientists, and a suitably motivated peer group. This is because elite universities have more resources and opportunities than even the top 0.5% can exhaust, if the student is conscientious. If I'm correct, the gargantuan resources suffice to stimulate and nourish the top 0.5%, as well as to cater in other ways to the 2-5% — and the presence of the 2-5% doesn't undermine options for the 0.5%
But I might be wrong! After decades at a college that doesn't enroll the 0.5%, I'm a visiting scholar at an Ivy+ university this year, and will keep my eyes and mind open about this.
My larger point is that the problems that afflict elite universities involve institutional culture much more than inadequacy of cognitive sorting.
"Maybe the absence of guardrails—unrestrained freedom—can work if you're a very smart young person from an upper-middle-class family and there aren't a lot of opportunities around you for your life to go in a catastrophic direction."
I think it is a mistake to correlate the lack of bad opportunities with economic class or success. I expect all three have a different cause, such as growing up in a stable household with two parents or just having parents capable of such a relationship.
I can't read the wsj article and don't know where Murray was going but I can guess some special treatment for the 0.5%. I would question why.
I would bet anyone in that group can overcome early education and grooming deficits.
I would bet many people above a much lower standard need "perfect" preparation far more in order to do great things or just do difficult things better.
Of course there are many exceptional candidates who aren't interested in stem.
I see benefit in separating high performing from low performing but I think it can help easily go too far. At young ages maybe just two or three groupings, a few more towards high school and lots more in college. Anyway, I'd be very hesitant of anything more than minimal at young ages.
"have each college set minimum standards for admission, and select qualified applicants by lottery"
What would these minimum standards be, other than test scores? Are GPAs from Phillips Academy, a rich suburb, an inner city, and rural schools comparable? Do you have the same standards for the humanities, arts, stem, and professional degrees? ... Two high school girls came up with new trigonometric proofs of Pythagorean theorem. Would they need to meet the same minimum?
650,000 is correct. It is 0.5% of 130 million. You are correct that 18 year olds would be slightly more than 1/30th of this but that's not what his number refers to.
“One goal of a decent society is to ensure that such people can live with dignity and feel valued in their community, regardless of their endowments. Social guardrails used to help with this”
I think this needs to be fleshed out by Henderson. Social guardrails help people maintain propriety, avoid blame, but it is entirely unclear how they help people win approval or gratitude. If run of the mill people doing run of the mill work are not held in the proper esteem as the backbone of society, how do guardrails help that?
When you have an insecure poorly educated (even in elite institutions) ruling class of dubious character and ability whose undeserved sense of status depends on deprecating average people, it is not surprising that the objects of their condescension should come to reject their values.
That’s not the question at hand. Why can’t average people live with dignity and feel valued in their community, and how do social guardrails fix that? That’s the question at hand.
Biggest guardrail is the presumption that any decent person can, and should, get a job and get married. Failure at either was evidence of bad morality/ character.
Because there were failures, low IQ guys (like Gump) could get and keep a low paying job, and find some woman willing to marry them if they were willing to promise fidelity.
Those norms, guardrails, are gone for the poor.
—-
I advocate using govt cash to reward those good behaviors, especially in school districts of kids whose parents are not married.
I agree on the “should get a job” part. The marriage point is too broadly made; not getting married wasn’t a sign of bad moral character, but having kids without being married was.
However, that still doesn’t address the “feel valued in their community” part, or really even the dignity part. I agree that having a job helps with dignity more than people often think, but if others still regard having a menial job as undignified it won’t help much.
“Of course, the fair thing to do would be abolish admissions offices, have each college set minimum standards for admission, and select qualified applicants by lottery.” Silly. Imagine trying to run a business with this level of uncertainty. People like stability and assurance about their future. Tell me what I need to do to get in, so I can plan out my life. Lotteries are no way to live.
True. But would a system of having a lottery from a small pool of those who had demonstrated a certain level of achievement be better or worse than a system that picked Olympic team members on the basis of "the whole person"?
I think it would be highly worthwhile to specify what we all mean by the term "the elites." Both sides consider them the enemy, but they clearly mean opposite things to each. To the Woke left it seems to mean "anyone in the 1% who either inherited their wealth or earned it by working in the private sector (celebrities are excluded.)" To MAGA folks it seems to mean "any college professor, media worker, or east / west coast city dweller who has not named Jesus Christ as their personal savior." This is just nuts. Why is it so important to feel victimized by such an amorphous, arbitrary, fictional group.
High IQ, like beauty, is not fair. Life is not fair, whether by God or impersonal genetic evolutionary forces.
There is no just solution to inevitable unfairness in life.
Lotteries of those with 1400+ SAT scores for HYPS Ivy + colleges would be a big improvement, and be far more fair to quality/ high IQ poor folk, so it would be a good requirement to have on colleges with big endowments, like >10mln or >$100mln, to maintain tax exemptions.
But it’s not, and can’t be, cosmically Fair.
Common core doesn’t fail to find the high IQ kids, it fails to create high IQ kids from average kids. As every policy will fail—and it is the terrible social expectation of schools to do the impossible which is the bigger failure. Half the 18 yo kids will be below avg.
Society needs to honestly accept that, and do more to prepare below avg kids to have happy & productive lives. And avoid the pressure to “do the best we can” on nearly useless studies that are also not fun, yet difficult. As so many school subjects are to most normal kids. (Seldom so difficult for the high IQ kids)
Following both JD Vance, and Rob Henderson, the poverty/ unstable home leading to first the US military and then college, should be a far more supported track for the poor kids with good thinking abilities. Especially for boys/ young men.
(Add link to Rob from 1-2023 https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/it-would-seem-that-some-socially
Real life is not like we all get 50 points to distribute over traits. Some get 100, rich, smart, good looking, funny; some get only 20, below average in just about everything. Life is unfair.)
Re: Charles Murray on admission to elite (highly selective) universities.
Two questions arise:
1) What fraction of youths, who are in the the top half of the top percentile of cognitive ability and are blessed also with conscientiousness, land at elite universities despite the pretense and practice of holistic admissions?
2) Do the most talented-and-conscientious, among those who gain admission to elite universities, then self-sort into STEM and other hard majors?
My intuition — perhaps mistaken — is that there is excess capacity at elite universities to train the most talented and motivated students.
In previous work, Charles Murray showed (and in a way lamented) that the U.S. had become a ruthlessly efficient cognitive-sorting machine.
I concur with Arnold's prescription for selective admission — to increase clarity, integrity, humility. But I am skeptical that inadequate cognitive sorting into elite universities and into hard Majors is a crucial problem.
"My intuition — perhaps mistaken — is that there is excess capacity at elite universities to train the most talented and motivated students."
True if the cut off really is the top 0.5%- but it's not. It is more like top 2-5% for the Ivies and the Ivy-like schools just below. For a place like Cal Tech or MIT it probably is top 0.5%.
My impression is that the top 0.5% (cognitive ability + conscientiousness) do land at one elite college or another. If perchance the cutoff is 2-5%, the top 0.5% nonetheless gravitate to hard Majors and gain access to facilities (labs etc), instruction by top scientists, and a suitably motivated peer group. This is because elite universities have more resources and opportunities than even the top 0.5% can exhaust, if the student is conscientious. If I'm correct, the gargantuan resources suffice to stimulate and nourish the top 0.5%, as well as to cater in other ways to the 2-5% — and the presence of the 2-5% doesn't undermine options for the 0.5%
But I might be wrong! After decades at a college that doesn't enroll the 0.5%, I'm a visiting scholar at an Ivy+ university this year, and will keep my eyes and mind open about this.
My larger point is that the problems that afflict elite universities involve institutional culture much more than inadequacy of cognitive sorting.
"Think of this through the group-status lens " Why? How about thinking about it in the terms in which it is actually cast... basic/core values.
I would hope that the group status lens then looks at exactly what the different group's values are, and what their effects can be expected to be.
Agreed.
We have admissions offices for the same reason that we don’t have surge pricing and that we do have rent control.
"Maybe the absence of guardrails—unrestrained freedom—can work if you're a very smart young person from an upper-middle-class family and there aren't a lot of opportunities around you for your life to go in a catastrophic direction."
I think it is a mistake to correlate the lack of bad opportunities with economic class or success. I expect all three have a different cause, such as growing up in a stable household with two parents or just having parents capable of such a relationship.
I can't read the wsj article and don't know where Murray was going but I can guess some special treatment for the 0.5%. I would question why.
I would bet anyone in that group can overcome early education and grooming deficits.
I would bet many people above a much lower standard need "perfect" preparation far more in order to do great things or just do difficult things better.
Of course there are many exceptional candidates who aren't interested in stem.
I see benefit in separating high performing from low performing but I think it can help easily go too far. At young ages maybe just two or three groupings, a few more towards high school and lots more in college. Anyway, I'd be very hesitant of anything more than minimal at young ages.
"have each college set minimum standards for admission, and select qualified applicants by lottery"
What would these minimum standards be, other than test scores? Are GPAs from Phillips Academy, a rich suburb, an inner city, and rural schools comparable? Do you have the same standards for the humanities, arts, stem, and professional degrees? ... Two high school girls came up with new trigonometric proofs of Pythagorean theorem. Would they need to meet the same minimum?
650,000 is correct. It is 0.5% of 130 million. You are correct that 18 year olds would be slightly more than 1/30th of this but that's not what his number refers to.
“One goal of a decent society is to ensure that such people can live with dignity and feel valued in their community, regardless of their endowments. Social guardrails used to help with this”
I think this needs to be fleshed out by Henderson. Social guardrails help people maintain propriety, avoid blame, but it is entirely unclear how they help people win approval or gratitude. If run of the mill people doing run of the mill work are not held in the proper esteem as the backbone of society, how do guardrails help that?
When you have an insecure poorly educated (even in elite institutions) ruling class of dubious character and ability whose undeserved sense of status depends on deprecating average people, it is not surprising that the objects of their condescension should come to reject their values.
That’s not the question at hand. Why can’t average people live with dignity and feel valued in their community, and how do social guardrails fix that? That’s the question at hand.
Biggest guardrail is the presumption that any decent person can, and should, get a job and get married. Failure at either was evidence of bad morality/ character.
Because there were failures, low IQ guys (like Gump) could get and keep a low paying job, and find some woman willing to marry them if they were willing to promise fidelity.
Those norms, guardrails, are gone for the poor.
—-
I advocate using govt cash to reward those good behaviors, especially in school districts of kids whose parents are not married.
I agree on the “should get a job” part. The marriage point is too broadly made; not getting married wasn’t a sign of bad moral character, but having kids without being married was.
However, that still doesn’t address the “feel valued in their community” part, or really even the dignity part. I agree that having a job helps with dignity more than people often think, but if others still regard having a menial job as undignified it won’t help much.
I guess Henderson cold be right hypothetically, but does "unrestricted freedom" describe the opportunities of the teenager in Red Bluff?
Certainly not, but if unrestricted freedom means freedom to sleep under the bridges and there are good drugs under the bridges ...
“Of course, the fair thing to do would be abolish admissions offices, have each college set minimum standards for admission, and select qualified applicants by lottery.” Silly. Imagine trying to run a business with this level of uncertainty. People like stability and assurance about their future. Tell me what I need to do to get in, so I can plan out my life. Lotteries are no way to live.
Perhaps more to Murray's point, you won't get the top half-percent that way, either.
True. But would a system of having a lottery from a small pool of those who had demonstrated a certain level of achievement be better or worse than a system that picked Olympic team members on the basis of "the whole person"?