Category: Intelligence – Personality – Psychology

What’s Your Political Flavor?

I’ve come across three political quizzes that “place” you on various scales: left-right, authoritarian-libertarian, pragmatic-idealistic, etc. The three quizzes are Political Compass, Political Survey, and World’s Smallest Political Quiz.

Political Compass comprises about 40 questions, many of them ambiguously worded. Your score places you on a two-dimensional scale: economic left-right and libertarian-authoritarian. The labels are misleading because libertarianism, in this case, is something akin to anarchism. The author considers those whose scores place them in the lower-left quadrant (libertarian-economic left) to be libertarians, whereas they are in fact pot-smoking, pro-abortion, anti-war adherents of the welfare state — socialist-anarchist-libertines, if you will. My score, in the upper-right quadrant, makes me “right authoritarian” — which puts me in some pretty good company with the likes of Dean Esmay, Stephen Bainbridge, Michael Rappaport, Daniel Drezner, and Timothy Sandefur. What it really makes me is a personally conservative free-market capitalist libertarian who believes in a minimal state to protect Americans from force and fraud.

Political Survey comprises 75 questions, which are sharply worded. Your score places you on a two-dimensional scale: left-right and pragmatic-idealistic. The labels of the Political Compass survey would do as well. The scores are distributed similarly, with a strong bias toward the lower-left quadrant. I am, again, in the upper-right quadrant, this time surrounded by a lot of names I don’t recognize. (Political Survey has drawn far fewer participants than Political Compass.)

World’s Smallest Political Quiz, which is touted on the Libertarian Party’s home page, comprises 10 unambiguous questions, five about personal issues and five about economic issues. Your score places you on a two-dimensional grid with two axes: personal issues and economic issues. The surface of the grid is subdivided into five areas: libertarian, conservative, statist, liberal, and centrist. Which of the five areas you land in depends on your score. I’ve taken the quiz several times and always come out in the libertarian part of the grid. In fact, I took the quiz today and came out “pure” libertarian because there’s no longer a question about immigration, which I always got “wrong” in the past.

World’s Smallest Political Quiz is the easiest to take, and it places you accurately on a nuanced scale of political persuasions. Try it and see what political flavor you are.

An Old Whine in a New Editorial

Now my local rag editorializes about the new SAT, in which the old “verbal” section “will be longer and count twice as much, upping a perfect score to 2400. The most significant change will be the addition of a 25-minute essay, previously used on the SAT II Writing subject test.” That’s bad news to the egalitarian editorialist, who makes these points (my comments are interspersed in brackets):

…Most universities already require essays on the application for admission. [But those essays aren’t written against the clock under the eye of a proctor.] Adding the essay to the SAT significantly weights the process toward strong writers, and against those for whom English is a second language. [So what? The purpose of the SAT is to determine who has the skills required to do well in college. Command of English is one of those skills.] And it doesn’t help raise the scores for African Americans, who on average scored 80 points lower than white students on the SAT II Writing subject test, on which the essay section is based. [See previous comment.]

While it is important for students to be able to write well, the essay component is a poor gauge of how students will perform in college. They will rarely be in a situation in which they will have to put together an unresearched page-and-a-half essay in 25 minutes…. [But it’s a gauge of quickly they can marshal their thoughts and how coherently they can put those thoughts on paper. Therefore, it complements the multiple-choice portions of the SAT as a test of intelligence and communication skill.]

The College Board is encouraging students to take both versions, which can be expensive and time-consuming….

The new version of the SAT has the same problems as the old. With the addition of an essay component, it will be more subjective and unfair, widening the gap between wealthy and poor students, whites and minorities…. [Actually, it will be more comprehensive than the old SAT, which is a plus. The purpose of the SAT is to weed out those who are unfit to clutter the halls of ivy, not to assign handicaps based on wealth and race.]

I Used to Be Too Smart to Understand This

When I arrived in college (eons ago) I soon discovered that learning is more than memorization, which had served me well through the 12th grade. I therefore began to denigrate memorization. It took me years to understand that it’s just as important as the skeptical and logical traits that I began to cultivate as a college student. Now, from
City Journal, comes this:

In Defense of Memorization

Michael Knox Beran

If there’s one thing progressive educators don’t like it’s rote learning. As a result, we now have several generations of Americans who’ve never memorized much of anything. Even highly educated people in their thirties and forties are often unable to recite half a dozen lines of classic poetry or prose.

Yet it wasn’t so long ago that kids in public schools from Boston to San Francisco committed poems like Shelley’s “To a Skylark” and Tennyson’s “Ulysses” to memory. They declaimed passages from Shakespeare and Wordsworth, the Psalms and the Declaration of Independence. Even in the earliest grades they got by heart snippets of “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” or “Abou Ben Adhem.” By 1970, however, this tradition was largely dead.

Should we care? Aren’t exercises in memorizing and reciting poetry and passages of prose an archaic curiosity, without educative value?

That too-common view is sadly wrong. Kids need both the poetry and the memorization. As educators have known for centuries, these exercises deliver unique cognitive benefits, benefits that are of special importance for kids who come from homes where books are scarce and the level of literacy low. In addition, such exercises etch the ideals of their civilization on children’s minds and hearts….

What the child discovers, in other words, is not only aesthetically pleasing, but important to cognitive development. Classic verse teaches children an enormous amount about order, measure, proportion, correspondence, balance, symmetry, agreement, temporal relation (tense), and contingent possibility (mood). Mastering these concepts involves the most fundamental kind of learning, for these are the basic categories of thought and the framework in which we organize sensory experience….

No less important, memorizing poetry turns on kids’ language capability. It not only teaches them to articulate English words; it heightens their feel for the intricacies and complexities of the English language—an indispensable attainment if they are to go on to speak, write, and read English with ease. Susan Wise Bauer, author of The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, argues that memorization “builds into children’s minds an ability to use complex English syntax.” The student “who memorizes poetry will internalize” the “rhythmic, beautiful patterns” of the English language. These patterns then become “part of the student’s ‘language store,’ those wells that we all use every day in writing and speaking.” Without memorization, the student’s “language store,” Bauer says, will be limited: memorization stocks “the language store with a whole new set of language patterns.”

It also stocks those bins with a generous supply of the English language’s rich accumulation of words. Research suggests that the size of a child’s vocabulary plays an important part in determining the quality of his language-comprehension skills. “The greater and wider the vocabulary,” says education historian [Diane] Ravitch, “the greater one’s comprehension of increasingly difficult material.” Bauer points out that if “a student reads a word in a novel, she might or might not remember it for later use. But when she commits it to memory in proper context (as the memorization of lines of poetry requires), she is much more likely to have it at her ‘mental fingertips’ for use in her own speaking and writing.”

All these benefits are especially important for inner-city kids. Bill Cosby recently pointed to the tragedy of the black kids he sees “standing on the corner” who “can’t speak English.” “I can’t even talk the way these people talk,” Cosby said: “ ‘Why you ain’t. Where you is.’ ” To kids who have never known anything but demotic English, literary English is bound to seem an alien, all but incomprehensible dialect. Kids who haven’t been exposed to the King’s English in primary school or at home will have a hard time, if they get to college, with works like Pride and Prejudice and Moby Dick. In too many cases, they will give up entirely, unable to enter the community of literate citizens—and as a result will live in a world of constricted opportunity….

Today’s public-school educators, of course, aren’t allowed to teach the true ideals of our civilization. (MLK is okay, but GW and TJ were just slave-owning honkies.) Perhaps those so-called educators would be willing to allow their students to memorize comic books. That might be better than nothing.

The Physics of John Kerry

Jay Tea at Wizbang calls it the “Kerry Uncertainty Principle”:

Werner Heisenberg was a quantum physicist of the early and mid 20th Century. He’s probably best well known for his Uncertainty Principle, which states that one can know the exact position of a particle or its exact speed, but not both simultaneously. Heisenberg pointed out that the mere fact of observing such particles changes them, and renders prior observations moot.

Were Heisenberg alive today, and were he more interested in politics than subatomic particles, he would have made the same discovery by observing John Kerry’s positions on issues. It seems the more one examines where the Democratic nominee stands on an issue, the less you actually know.

My comment:

I think Kerry’s mind exhibits the qualities of Schrodinger’s cat; his state of mind is an unpredictable, random event. Wikipedia explains the concept:

A cat [Kerry’s mind] is placed in a sealed box [his head]. Attached to the box is an apparatus containing a radioactive nucleus and a canister of poison gas [his thought processes]. There…is a 50% chance of the nucleus decaying in one hour. If the nucleus decays, it will emit a particle that triggers the apparatus, which opens the canister and kills the cat…However, when the box is opened [Kerry speaks] the experimenter sees only a “…dead cat” or a “…living cat [whatever happens to come into Kerry’s mind at the moment].”

With Apologies to a Female INTJ

In “IQ and Personality” (March 14, 2004), I said “if you encounter an INTJ (Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judging), there is a 37% probability that his IQ places him in the top 2 percent of the population.” That is, among the 16 personality types in the Myers-Briggs taxonomy, INTJs are the most likely (by a large margin) to have a very high IQ.

A reader has commented on my use of the masculine pronoun in the passage quoted above: “Just letting you know that I am an INTJ and I am a female.”

I’m guilty of lazy writing, for which I apologize. Even though I’m a type-proud, male INTJ, I don’t assume that all INTJs are males.

His Life As a Victim

The New York Times has posted a piece about Bill Clinton’s memoir, My Life. Should we laugh, cry, or scream at Weeping Willie’s latest outrage? You be the judge.

Let’s start with the Jones case, which led to Clinton’s impeachment. The Times says that Clinton

takes the whip to [among others] the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously in 1997 that Paula Jones’s sexual harassment case against him could go forward while he was in office. He called that one of the most politically naive and damaging court decisions in years.

Of course, he would place himself above the course of justice. You know, the person who holds the presidency is only holding a job temporarily. He’s not indispensible; in fact, he’s rather easily replaced. It was Clinton’s fault that he was sued for sexual harassment. If he couldn’t defend the suit and do his job at the same time, he had two options: resign the presidency or step down temporarily under the provisions of Amendment XXV of the Constitution.

Then there’s this compelling bit about terrorism:

Mr. Clinton defends his record on terrorism, arguing that he pressed the allies for more of a focus on counterterrorism and citing speeches in which he called terror “the enemy of our generation.”

He also notes that in 1996 he signed two directives on terrorism and appointed Richard A. Clarke to be the administration’s terrorism coordinator.

That’s telling ’em, boy. But I guess bin Laden wasn’t listening to Bill’s speeches or reading his directives. Osama damn sure wasn’t impressed by Dick Clarke.

Whitewater? Oh, that:

[Clinton] explained the sudden appearance of Mrs. Clinton’s legal billing records in the White House residence as the product merely of sloppy record-keeping in Arkansas.

Huh?

Finally, we come to the “new, new, new” Clinton:

Mr. Clinton closes the book with a short meditation on the lessons he has learned about accepting personal responsibility, letting go of anger and granting forgiveness. He said that in the many black churches he had visited he had heard funerals referred to as “homegoings.”

“We’re all going home,” he wrote, “and I want to be ready.”

Well, he ain’t ready yet, as these snippets from the Times article attest:

[the] autobiography…is by turns painfully candid about his personal flaws and gleefully vindictive about what he calls the hypocrisy of his enemies….The book’s length gives the former president plenty of room to settle scores, and he does so with his customary elan….He reserved special venom for Kenneth W. Starr….

Of course he did. Starr’s determined effort to uphold the rule of law finally resulted in a small measure of justice when Clinton was disbarred by the State of Arkansas and the U.S. Supreme Court. Such is Clinton’s “legacy”.

More about the Worrying Classes

I wrote recently about the worrying classes. Worriers are the many among us who cannot be convinced that people would be better off with less regulation, with private Social Security accounts, with even fewer restraints on international trade, and on, and on. Worriers seem incapable of envisioning the greater good that economic freedom brings to most people. There are several worrying classes.

In my previous post I wrote about the the jabberers. They are the denizens of Capitol Hill, the media, universities, and so-called knowledge professions whose main task is to promote the worriers’ agenda.

The other worrying classes are the activists, the entrenched, the “engineers”, and the romantics. Activists are represented by such organizations as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and other irresponsibly luddite groups. Then there are all the groups that represent outraged feminists, homosexuals, persons of color, and their sympathizers. To top it off, there are the groups that want to spend your tax dollars for their pet diseases and disabilities.

The entrenched class includes labor unions, regulated industries, and various professions (notably medicine and law). They promote laws and regulations to shelter themselves from competition by playing on the fears of the worrying masses.

“Engineers” are those physical and social scientists who try to out-think free markets. They’re smarter than the rest of us, you see.

Romantics simply want a better world. Their tenuous grasp of reality causes them to believe in peace through surrender and prosperity through socialism. Many of them are activists. Those who are not activists constitute a large fraction of the worrying masses — those who lend their votes, money, and sympathy to the worrying classes.

The Worriers

The worrying classes got hold of government in the 1930s. Then the worrying masses got in the habit of looking to government to solve every problem — no, to anticipate every problem so that nothing bad ever happens to anyone.

Rational people — libertarians, thinking conservatives, and free-market economists — can talk until their throats go dry, but it won’t sway the worriers. Worriers cannot be convinced that people would be better off with less regulation, with private Social Security accounts, with even fewer restraints on international trade, and on, and on. Worriers seem incapable of envisioning the greater good that economic freedom brings to most people. And having lost the habit of private charity, they cannot imagine that the many who profit by economic freedom will help the few who do not.

Ironically, FDR said it best: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself–nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” But FDR, as usual, did exactly the wrong thing. He turned government over to the worrying classes and seduced the worrying masses into dependence on government. The cycle of power and dependence remains unbroken.

Why Not Just Use SAT Scores?

Here’s what happens when universities insist on having a “diverse” student body (from the New York Times online):

Diversity Plan Shaped in Texas Is Under Attack
By JONATHAN D. GLATER

AUSTIN, Tex., June 8 — Texas lawmakers thought they had found the ideal alternative to race-based affirmative action.

Seven years ago, after a federal court outlawed the use of race in the admissions policies of the state’s public universities, the Legislature came up with an answer: It passed a law guaranteeing admission to the top 10 percent of the graduating class from any public or private high school. After a few years of hard work, diversity was restored and other states, including California and Florida, adopted similar approaches. The law looked like a success.

But the 10 percent rule, which seemed to skirt the tricky issue of race so deftly, is coming under increasing attack these days as many wealthy parents complain that their children are not getting a fair shake. A consensus seems to be building that some change is necessary.

Parents whose children have been denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin, the crown jewel of Texas higher education, argue that some high schools are better than others, and that managing to stay in the top 25 percent at a demanding school should mean more than landing in the top 10 percent at a less rigorous one. The dispute shows how hard it is to come up with a system for doling out precious but scarce spots in elite universities without angering someone.

Of course, the Times had to work in a gratuitous reference to “wealthy parents.” The real question is whether the 10-percent rule discriminates against the more intelligent high school grads in Texas. The answer is: It must.

The amount of money a school district has to spend per student depends on the average income of households in the school district. Income depends, to a large degree, on intelligence. And intelligence is a heritable trait. Thus, students from “wealthier” school districts are generally more intelligent than students from “poorer” school districts — because they were born smarter, not because of their more expensive schooling.

The 10-percent rule thus has the same effect as old-fashioned affirmative action. It discriminates against brighter students.

Favorite Posts: Affirmative Action and Race

The Right Is Smarter Than the Left

This content of this post is now incorporated in “Intelligence, Personality, Politics, and Happiness.”

Libertarian-Conservatives Are from the Earth, Liberals Are from the Moon

A post by Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution points to George Lakoff’s book, Moral Politics. Lakoff thinks he has an explanation for the difference between conservatives (who hew to a “Strict Father” model) and liberals (a “Nurturant Parent” model):

What we have here are two different forms of family-based morality. What links them to politics is a common understanding of the nation as a family, with the government as parent. Thus, it is natural for liberals to see it as the function of the government to help people in need and hence to support social programs, while it is equally natural for conservatives to see the function of the government as requiring citizens to be self-disciplined and self-reliant and, therefore, to help themselves.

Lakoff is probably wrong about liberals, and he’s certainly wrong about most conservatives — and about libertarians, whom he doesn’t seem to acknowledge.

Liberals, in my observation, don’t think of the nation as a family. They think of it as a playground full of unruly children, needing someone (government) to enforce the rules (liberal rules, of course). A liberal’s candid thoughts would run something like this:

Well, here we are all on the same playground. Well, if we’re going to be here, we might as well get along together. I’m sure we’ll do just fine, and you’ll all be happy, if you do as I say. Now, if we all share, there won’t be any fights. Johnny, you have more toys than Billy, you have to give him some of your toys. Susie, no fair hanging around with your friends, you have to hang around with people you’ve never met; it’ll be good for you.

In other words, the liberal mindset is more like that of a bossy child trying to control her playmates than that of a “nuturant parent.”

Conservatives (those who think about such things, anyway) and libertarians don’t see “the nation as a family, with government as parent.” They see the nation as parent whose role is to guarantee a form of government that exists not to require citizens to be self-disciplined and self-reliant but to allow citizens to realize the fruits of whatever self-discipline and self-reliance they can muster.

It is not surprising, therefore, to find that conservatives and libertarians are generally more patriotic than liberals. Conservatives and libertarians put nationhood above government, realizing that without the nation our enemies (without and within) would rob us of our ability to enjoy the fruits of our self-discipline and self-reliance. Liberals, on the other hand, put government first and seem embarrassed by patriotism.

Thomas Sowell, in A Conflict of Visions, has a much better explanation of the dichotomy between the liberal and conservative-libertarian perspectives. He posits two opposing visions: the unconstrained vision (I would call it the idealistic vision) and the constrained vision (which I would call the realistic vision). As Sowell explains, at the end of chapter 2:

The dichotomy between constrained and unconstrained visions is based on whether or not inherent limitations of man are among the key elements included in each vision….These different ways of conceiving man and the world lead not merely to different conclusions but to sharply divergent, often diametrically opposed, conclusions on issues ranging from justice to war.

Thus, in chapter 5, Sowell writes:

The enormous importance of evolved systemic interactions in the constrained vision does not make it a vision of collective choice, for the end results are not chosen at all — the prices, output, employment, and interest rates emerging from competition under laissez-faire economics being the classic example. Judges adhering closely to the written law — avoiding the choosing of results per se — would be the analogue in law. Laissez-faire economics and “black letter” law are essentially frameworks, with the locus of substantive discretion being innumerable individuals.

By contrast,

those in the tradition of the unconstrained vision almost invariably assume that some intellectual and moral pioneers advance far beyond their contemporaries, and in one way or another lead them toward ever-higher levels of understanding and practice. These intellectual and moral pioneers become the surrogate decision-makers, pending the eventual progress of mankind to the point where all can make moral decisions.

Sowell has nailed it. Equality is a state that we will reach when liberals tell us we’ve reached it. Until then, we must do as they say — or else.

The Cost of Affirmative Action

La Griffe du Lion, in “Affirmative Action: The Robin Hood Effect”, assesses the redistributive effects of affirmative action:

[O]n average a black worker between the ages of 25 and 64 earns an extra $9,400 a year because of affirmative action. Hispanics also benefit to the tune of almost $4,000 a year. However, being a zero-sum game, white workers pay an average of about $1,900 annually to foot the bill.

Working from data for 1999, La Griffe estimates that affirmative action cost white workers a total of $192 billion. But there’s more to it than that.

Because of affirmative action — and legal actions brought and threatened under its rubric — employers do not always fill every job with the person best qualified for the job. The result is that the economy produces less than it would in the absence of affirmative action.

GDP in 1999 was $9.3 trillion. Taking $192 billion as an approximation of the economic cost of affirmative action in that year, it’s reasonable to say that affirmative action reduces GDP by about 2 percent. That’s not a trivial amount. In fact, it’s just about what the federal government spends on all civilian agencies and their activities — including affirmative action, among many other things.

Favorite Posts: Affirmative Action and Race

I Hate to Say It…

…but some families of 9/11 victims are sounding like typical liberal whiners. Why didn’t the government prevent the attack? Who’s to blame?

Well, the government that can’t prevent you from dying of old age is the same government that can’t protect you from every possible peril in the universe. When did government become our omniscient, omnipresent guardian angel?

But the whiners don’t get it. They can’t accept the hard fact that stuff happens. In this case, a brutally horrific act that was years in the planning by evil men who took advantage of the broad freedom of movement and action the U.S. grants to those within its borders, even non-citizens.

Who to blame? The answer is obvious, but the whiners can’t — or won’t — grasp it. The blame lies with al Qaeda, its allies, and its supporters.

IQ and Politics

This content of this post is now incorporated in “Intelligence, Personality, Politics, and Happiness.”

IQ and Personality

This content of this post is now incorporated in “Intelligence, Personality, Politics, and Happiness.”