Identity Whistling

I’ve seen a few editorials along the lines of this one or this one:

An expanding working class may have dealt the final blow to the Kathleen Wynne Liberals, whose support has now become concentrated among upper class Ontarians and a shrinking middle class. For now, Doug Ford’s PCs hold a strong hand with working class voters—nearly double the support of either the Liberals or NDP. If Ford can sustain his working class support until June 7, he will sweep to a majority government.

It’s eerily similar to what we were hearing about Trump, isn’t it? And in Trump’s case, we’ve got a growing body of evidence that it wasn’t about economics, it was really about identity threat.

Donald Trump’s success in the 2016 campaign for the U.S. presidential election has defied the expectations of many Americans. This study is the first to demonstrate experimentally that the changing racial demographics of America are directly contributing to Trump’s success among Whites by increasing perceived threats to their group’s status. It is also the first to show that White Americans’ responses to increasing racial diversity depend on how identified they are with their ethnic group.

Major, Brenda, Alison Blodorn, and Gregory Major Blascovich. “The threat of increasing diversity: Why many White Americans support Trump in the 2016 presidential election.” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations (2016): 1368430216677304.

The most obvious finding in Table 1 is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there is little to no evidence that those whose incomes declined or whose incomes increased to a lesser extent than others’ incomes were more likely to support Trump. Even change in subjective assessment of one’s own personal financial situation had no discernible impact on evaluations of Trump or on change in vote choice. Likewise, those who lost a job between 2012 and 2016 were no more likely to support Trump. […]

Mass opinion changes on status threat-related issues were not, by themselves, the driving force in increasing affinity for the Republican candidate. Instead, increasing relative distance from the Democratic candidate on threat-related issues, such as immigration and China, consistently predicted Trump support in a positive direction, whereas decreasing relative distance from the Republican candidate on trade and China also predicted change in the direction of voting for Trump. These consistently significant coefficients indicate that change over time in the candi dates’ perceived positions relative to those of individual respondents had a significant impact in increasing support for Trump. The pattern in Table 1 makes it clear that it was change in how the candidates positioned themselves on status threat-related issues combined with smaller changes in public issue opinions that predicted increasing support for the Republican candidate in 2016.

Mutz, Diana C. “Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship, Explains the 2016 Presidential Vote.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, April 19, 2018, 201718155. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1718155115.

Ironically, a lot of the people banging on about the evils of “identity politics” are engaging in it themselves; people who identify with a privileged group are paranoid about losing those privileges, and will lash out at anyone who’s arguing for a more level playing field. But they recognize that “white people are inherently superior” and similar assertions are monstrous, so they need to hide behind some sort of coded language or flimsy argument. They aren’t part of an identity, oh no, so they can’t be engaging in identity politics! It’s not about a loss of privilege, oh no, it’s about working class voters feeling disenfranchised! It’s not about racism, oh no, it’s about immigrants taking our jobs!

You can see how this could explain the Ontario election: Ford was a horrifically unfit candidate, but identity-threat dog whistles could make him highly valued by a white majority that felt they were under threat, valued enough to transcend his flaws. The missing piece is whether he actually blew those whistles.

Earlier this month, the leader of the Ontario PCs generated significant controversy when he brought up the issue of immigration on the campaign trail, suggesting Ontario should “take care of our own” before worrying about immigrants. On a Google Hangout recently streamed by figures on the far-right linked to several Canadian hate groups, white nationalists appeared thrilled at the prospect of Doug Ford becoming Premier of Ontario. One avowed white nationalist even bragged that Ford was directly communicating with white nationalists using a “dog whistle” – ‘dog whistling’ refers to the use of coded language to disguise racist ideas to a general audience while signalling to racists themselves.

His recent attacks on Toronto “elites” and the media seem like conscious evocations of the bully-boy rhetoric Trump used to great advantage in his 2016 campaign. And his crude style – he once pledged to give his own party an “enema” – hasn’t backfired on him, yet. […]

In recent days, for example, he went out of his way to shun a planned leaders’ debate hosted by a Toronto-area black organization. Over the weekend, he drew boos during a speech to a Somali group during which he promised to reinstate an anti-gang police task force that had been intensely criticized for over-policing poor neighborhoods with large black populations (the Liberal government had pulled the plug on the task force).

Roger Keil, a York University urban geographer who studies politics and planning in Toronto’s suburbs, adds that when Ford was running for mayor, he didn’t exactly race to defend an opponent, a longtime local and federal politician named Olivia Chow, who came in for nasty racial attacks – just one of several that marred that election.“He never made an attempt to put himself between the racist and sexist overtones,” says Keil. “The real Doug Ford is a mean, clever strategist who has demonstrated time and again that he knows exactly what he’s doing.”

All signs point to yes. The best counter-argument isn’t to deny he made those whistles, it’s to argue Canadians are too savvy to fall for them. Click through on that last link and you’ll see what I mean; it goes to great lengths to point out that Toronto is very diverse, and that other conservative groups who used identity-threat dog whistles have been punished for it in the polls. All of them happened before Donald Trump, though. Trump may have shoved the Overton window so far that we’ve grown tolerant of certain whistles. Ford was also one of the first Canadian politicians to have a major press organization blast out and legitimize his whistles, much as Fox News did for Trump.

We need more data up here to be sure, but I suspect identity-threat dog whistles were enough to push Doug Ford over the top. Either way, they’ve become a major player in the North American political landscape.

Ugh.

Remember that post about the Ontario election? That trend in the polls continued, putting the NDP and PC’s in a dead heat. Meanwhile, Doug Ford was sued by his late brother’s wife, was recorded trying to sell fake party memberships to guarantee he’d become the PC leader, broke election law while fundraising, and on and on. Between all the lying and even promises of a blind trust to hold off allegations of nepotism, he’s about as close as Canada gets to a Donald Trump, which should have made an NDP minority a slam-dunk.

Led by Doug Ford, Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives have secured a majority government, ending nearly 15 years of Liberal power in the province. The NDP will form the province’s Official Opposition, while the embattled Liberals were handed a substantial rebuke from voters, losing the vast majority of their seats at Queen’s Park.

“Dead heat” in the polls, alas, didn’t take into account our first-past-the-post system; the vote distribution ensured the PCs held a seat advantage, though unlike the US this wasn’t due to gerrymandering. And there was a last-minute surge in support for the PC’s, so what was originally a 36-37% share of the vote grew to 40%. Ontarians just didn’t see the problem with electing a Trump clone.

On the plus side, Ford doesn’t have access to nuclear weapons and a military.

Yes, I’m reaching. *sigh*

Dispatches from “Enlightenment Now:” Poverty

Gawd, Enlightenment Now is turning into a slog. Let’s take one passage as an example:

Most surprises in history are unpleasant surprises, but this news came as a pleasant shock even to the optimists. In 2000 the United Nations laid out eight Millennium Development Goals, their starting lines backdated to 1990. At the time, cynical observers of that underperforming organization dismissed the targets as aspirational boilerplate. Cut the global poverty rate in half, lifting a billion people out of poverty, in twenty-five years? Yeah, yeah. But the world reached the goal five years ahead of schedule. Development experts are still rubbing their eyes. [Angus] Deaton writes, “This is perhaps the most important fact about wellbeing in the world since World War II.” [pg. 94]

That smelled like something worth researching, so I dug in. After plotting a counter-argument involving how that progress has been made, I read ahead to make sure I wasn’t taking Pinker out of context or missing something, and guess what?

Hundreds of millions of people remain in extreme poverty, and getting to zero will require a greater effort than just extrapolating along a ruler. Though the numbers are dwindling in countries like India and Indonesia, they are increasing in the poorest of the poor countries, like Congo, Haiti, and Sudan, and the last pockets of poverty will be the hardest to eliminate. Also, as we approach the goal we should move the goalposts, since not-so-extreme poverty is still poverty. In introducing the concept of progress I warned against confusing hard-won headway with a process that magically takes place by itself. The point of calling attention to progress is not self-congratulation but identifying the causes so we can do more of what works. [pg. 94]

Pinker admits that progress towards the Millennium goal of reducing poverty has been uneven, stepping on the argument I was going to make! Here’s what the UN’s official report has to say about that, in fact:

The world’s most populous countries, China and India, played a central role in the global reduction of poverty. As a result of progress in China, the extreme poverty rate in Eastern Asia has dropped from 61 per cent in 1990 to only 4 per cent in 2015. Southern Asia’s progress is almost as impressive—a decline from 52 per cent to 17 per cent for the same period—and its rate of reduction has accelerated since 2008.
In contrast, sub-Saharan Africa’s poverty rate did not fall below its 1990 level until after 2002. Even though the decline of poverty has accelerated in the past decade, the region continues to lag behind. More than 40 per cent of the population in sub-Saharan Africa still lives in extreme poverty in 2015. In Western Asia, the extreme poverty rate is expected to increase between 2011 and 2015.

I keep tripping across similar situations. I’ll see Pinker make a point, run off to do research on it, then find he’s undercut his own point later. Which one sticks in your mind depends on your biases: if you think that we’ve made remarkable progress and can sit on the status quo, you’ll remember the part about cutting poverty and downplay the recognition that things have been uneven; if you think we’ve done well but can improve further, you’ll be thankful for the recognition that things could improve and might be tempted to forgive his fanciful flights.

But this can lull you from looking at the whole picture. That $1.25 a day was based on the poverty rates of the poorest 10-20 countries, yet the median poverty line in developing countries was $2 a day at the time. Standards of living are different in different countries, so while the UN may declare $13 a day “middle class” in the developed world, $4,748 a year doesn’t come close to the $7,320 you’d need for one bedroom in shared accommodations in Calgary. It’s nonsensical to use a single metric across the entire globe, and to be fair the UN probably realized this; the real goal was less about hitting specific targets and more of an effort to change hearts and minds, as well as open up wallets that were beginning to shut.

Nor were the results all that surprising. Pinker never considers why a set of goals agreed to in September 2000 could be so easily back-dated to 1990. In reality, the Millennium Development Goals were based on ideas that have been floating since the 1990’s, and their basic framework existed as early as 1996. The MDGs were developed by a broad coalition of organizations, and voluntarily agreed to by 189 countries. You wouldn’t have gotten that level of consensus had you proposed bold, risky targets to hit; the MDGs were designed to be achievable, from the very start. They were a PR stunt, albeit one that also saved lives and reduced misery.

Pinker almost leaves China out of the picture, but manages to sneak in this passage:

Cynical explanations, such as that the enrichment is a one-time dividend of a surge in the price of oil and other commodities, or that the statistics are inflated by the rise of populous China, have been examined and dismissed. [pg. 94]

Except, as I quoted earlier, the UN themselves admit that China’s progress was instrumental in reaching the Millennium goal for poverty. Pinker’s citation which tackles this head-on sets up a straw-person – “The global decline of extreme poverty – was it only China?” – then easily knocks that down by showing that China merely played a significant role in reducing the global poverty numbers.

World Bank data on "extreme poverty," with and without China included.If we’re to look at the two biggest successes for clues in reducing poverty, as Pinker suggests we do, we should then focus on becoming more autocratic and more liberal, more protectionist and more free-trade, plus more censorious and more censorious. Reality is much more complicated than he presents, and even the shades of gray he injects are less about honestly reflecting the real world than an attempt to distract and frustrate his critics. His grandiose pronouncements and simplistic graphs are proof of the latter. I mean, just look at this:

The Gross World Product, spanning two thousand years.

To generate that graph, you need to estimate the annual output of all human activity across two thousand years, then you need to correct it for differences in purchasing power and inflation. I’m surprised Pinker didn’t quote the guy who spanned a million years with similar techniques instead, he seems less cautious than the source Pinker used.

Limitations to data quality also means that estimating the growth of GDP per capita over many decades, or even centuries, is a hazardous undertaking that, despite the best effort of statisticians and researchers, will always be surrounded by a degree of uncertainty. As a result, earlier estimates of relative income levels diverge substantially from standalone benchmark comparisons or independent estimates of relative income for those early periods.

Income for pre-1500 populations were estimated by figuring out how many people were in extreme poverty, then assigning them an income of $1.25 a day. As Pinker himself notes, purchasing power adjustments are done by assuming things like loaves of bread and beer have a fixed value over all times and places. The global GDP was calculated by estimating the growth of GDP per capita per year, converting that into GDP per capita, then multiplying by world population estimates, a method the Maddison Project acknowledges can lead to “implausible results.”

The graph has so many assumptions built in it’s not worth the photons. Yet Pinker puts it in the front of his chapter on wealth, calling the chart “simple but stunning” and spending three paragraphs hyping it up. He then turns around and spends three paragraphs pointing out some (but not all) of its limitations, and concludes “A person whose wallet contains the cash equivalent of a hundred 2011 international dollars today is fantastically richer than her ancestor with the equivalent wallet’s worth two hundred years ago.” The 1818 equivalent of $100 is substantially less than the 2018 equivalent of that same $100?

An honest inquiry into poverty wouldn’t have featured that graph. But attempting to show that demands a helluva lot of research and dead ends, in Pinker’s case. Ugh.

This Could Get Me Interested In Sports

South Korea has been a powerhouse in eSports. They’ve been running StarCraft tournaments since 2002, handed out most of the prize money, and as a consequence dominate the player rankings.

While distracting myself from a blog post, a video of a February 2018 StarCraft II caught my eye: a top South Korea player was playing… a Canadian woman? Huh? This sounded historic, so I tuned in to parts one and two, intending to keep it in the background while tapping away.

It pretty soon became the foreground. No spoilers for how the tournament turned out (the announcers totally sell it, anyway), but it was indeed a historic set of games. Non-Korean players rarely make it to the finals of a world championship, this tourney was a preview for eSports joining the Winter Olympics, and… I may not be much of a StarCraft player, but it looked like a damn fine round. Once you’re ready to be spoiled, no less than Rolling Stone explains several other ways those games were amazing.

pseudo-Socratic Politics

Read that Atlantic profile of Stephen Miller yet? This part in particular jumped out at me:

That night was the culmination of a well-organized campaign of campus disruption. It had begun when Miller formed a chapter of Students for Academic Freedom—a national conservative pressure group [David] Horowitz had launched to expose the leftist “indoctrination” taking place at America’s universities. As the head of the Duke chapter, Miller was sent a 70-page handbook that provided detailed instructions for orchestrating a campus controversy. It included guidance on how to investigate faculty members’ partisan biases (special attention should be paid to professors of women’s studies and African American studies, the handbook noted); tips for identifying “classroom abuses” (“Did your professor make a politically-biased comment in class about the war in Iraq?”); and advice for drumming up publicity (“Appearing as a guest on your local talk radio station is probably easier than you think”). The handbook also urged students to invite controversial speakers to their schools, adding that if the administration declined to fund such visits, students should “issue a press release … questioning why they have refused your request to increase the scope of intellectual diversity on campus.”

The playbook was in many ways ahead of its time, but Miller recognized its merits—and executed flawlessly. After inviting Horowitz to speak at Duke, he seized on the pushback from some professors as evidence that the university was trying to stifle free speech. He wrote an incendiary op-ed in the student newspaper, The Chronicle, titled “Betrayal,” in which he claimed that “a large number of Duke professors” were determined to “indoctrinate students in their personal ideologies and prejudices”—and then presented a series of anonymous student testimonials as proof.

Amazingly enough, you can grab a later edition of that document for yourself. On the surface it seems quite innocuous:

Students for Academic Freedom is exclusively dedicated to the following goals:

  • To promote intellectual diversity on campus.
  • To defend the right of students to be treated with respect by faculty and administrators, regardless of their political or religious beliefs.
  • To promote fairness, civility and inclusion in student affairs.
  • To secure the adoption of the Academic Bill of Rights as official university policy, and the Student Bill of Rights as a resolution in student governments.

For a thorough treatment of our mission, please see the red Students for Academic Freedom booklet, pages 4-12.

That resembles the language of contemporary progressives, right? If you dig into the history and context, however, a sinister side starts to appear.

The proposed Academic Bill of Rights directs universities to enact guidelines implementing the principle of neutrality, in particular by requiring that colleges and universities appoint faculty “with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives.” The danger of such guidelines is that they invite diversity to be measured by political standards that diverge from the academic criteria of the scholarly profession. Measured in this way, diversity can easily become contradictory to academic ends. So, for example, no department of political theory ought to be obligated to establish “a plurality of methodologies and perspectives” by appointing a professor of Nazi political philosophy, if that philosophy is not deemed a reasonable scholarly option within the discipline of political theory. No department of chemistry ought to be obligated to pursue “a plurality of methodologies and perspectives” by appointing a professor who teaches the phlogiston theory of heat, if that theory is not deemed a reasonable perspective within the discipline of chemistry.

These examples illustrate that the appropriate diversity of a university faculty must ultimately be conceived as a question of academic judgment, to be determined by the quality and range of pluralism deemed reasonable by relevant disciplinary standards, as interpreted and applied by college and university faculty. Advocates for the Academic Bill of Rights, however, make clear that they seek to enforce a kind of diversity that is instead determined by essentially political categories, like the number of Republicans or Democrats on a faculty, or the number of conservatives or liberals. Because there is in fact little correlation between these political categories and disciplinary standing, the assessment of faculty by such explicitly political criteria, whether used by faculty, university administration, or the state, would profoundly corrupt the academic integrity of universities. Indeed, it would violate the neutrality principle itself.

The first attempts at pushing the “academic freedom” line were clumsy and gave the game away too easily; for instance, Rick Santorum’s attempt in 2001 used much of the same language but mentioned “biological evolution” as a topic of controversy. But by 2003 it was clear that basic tactic of appropriating progressive language and concepts to push regressive ideas was powerful, the American far-Right just had to tune the messaging to appear as neutral as possible. By 2010, the date of the revised handbook, you either have to be quite adept at decoding dog-whistles or the patience to dig in deep to spot what was really going on. On page 31, well away from the lofty goals, you’ll find the giveaway alluded to above:

As you complete this process, you may begin to get a sense of which professors are particularly partisan in their teaching. If you know that a student is taking a class with one of these professors, make sure to ask whether they have encountered abusive actions in the classroom. Some departments are known for their ideological and partisan leanings. These include Cultural Studies, American Studies, English Literature, Women‘s Studies, African-American (or Black) Studies, Chicano/Latino/Hispanic Studies, Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Studies, American-Indian Studies, and Asian-American Studies. Fertile ground is also found in the Political Science, Sociology and History departments, although to a lesser degree than the departments mentioned above.

The end goal of all this is confusion and frustration. They want progressives arguing with one another about what “diversity” and “inclusion” means, as it makes them susceptible to a re-framing of those terms via emotional pleas, conspiracy theories, and well-funded think tanks. The messaging has become so finely crafted that without the history you’d have no idea it was created to teach Young-Earth Creationism in schools.

Universities ought to be the arena in which political prejudice is set aside and open-minded investigation reveals the way the world works. But just when we need this disinterested forum the most, academia has become more politicized as well – not more polarized, but more left-wing. Colleges have always been more liberal than the American population, but the skew has been increasing. … The proportions vary by field: departments of business, computer science, engineering, and health science are evenly split, while the humanities and social sciences are decidedly on the left: the proportion of conservatives is in the single digits, and they are outnumbered by Marxists two to one. Professors in the physical and biological sciences are in between, with few radicals and Virtually no Marxists, but liberals outnumber conservatives by a wide margin.

The liberal tilt of academia (and of journalism, commentary and intellectual life) is in some ways natural. … A liberal tilt is also, in moderation, desirable. Intellectual liberalism was at the forefront of many forms of progress that almost everyone has come to accept, such as democracy, social insurance, religious tolerance, the abolition of slavery and judicial torture, the decline of war, and the expansion of human and civil rights. In many ways we are (almost) all liberals now.

But we have seen that when a creed becomes attached to an in-group, the critical faculties of its members can be disabled, and there are reasons to think that has happened within swaths of academia. In The Blank Slate (updated in 2016) I showed how leftist politics had distorted the study of human nature, including sex, violence, gender, childrearing, personality, and intelligence. In a recent manifesto, Tetlock, together with the psychologists Jose Duarte, Jarret Crawford, Charlotta Stern, Jonathan Haidt, and Lee Jussirn, documented the leftward swing of social psychology and showed how it has compromised the quality of research. Quoting John Stuart Mill – “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that” – they called for greater political diversity in psychology the version of diversity that matters the most (as opposed to the version commonly pursued, namely people who look different but think alike).

Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Penguin, 2018. pg. 377-378.

In practice, the tactic comes across as a pseudo-Socratic politic: on the surface it advances no unique ideas of its own, instead borrowing from other movements in an attempt to embrace, extend, and extinguish, but the “extinguish” bit gives away that there actually is a unique vision buried under layers of obfuscation and plausible deniability. Read the section on tabling on pages 43 to 46, for instance, and you’ll find the SAF advises their student groups to avoid debate, and instead focus on pushing a standardized message to recruit new members.

The tactic has a strong resemblance to trolling, hence why that Atlantic piece was subtitled “Trump’s Right-wing Troll.” And unfortunately, it’s just as effective.

 

Dispatches from “Enlightenment Now:” Intellectuals

One of the blog posts I’m working on demands that I give Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now an in-depth skim, and it’s dredging up all sorts of secondary things. I might as well take advantage of that, and spread the misery around.

For instance, are we sure Pinker isn’t a secret far-Right plant?

Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves “progressive” really hate progress. It’s not that they hate the fruits of progress, mind you: most pundits, critics, and their bienpensant readers use computers rather than quills and inkwells, and they prefer to have their surgery with anesthesia rather than without it. It’s the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class — the Enlightenment belief that by understanding the world we can improve the human condition.

Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Penguin, 2018. pg. 43.

His hatred for “intellectuals” is astonishing, especially since the blurb for Enlightenment Now calls him one. Isn’t the whole thesis of the book that we should all become more enlightened, more intellectual? And yet it contains an endless parade of scorn for those who are known for their intelligence.

At various times Western intellectuals have also sung the praises of Ho Chi Minh, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Kim II-sung, Pol Pot, Julius Nyerere, Omar Torrijos, Slobodan Milogevié, and Hugo Chavez.

Why should intellectuals and artists, of all people, kiss up to murderous dictators? One might think that intellectuals would be the first to deconstruct the pretexts of power, and artists to expand the scope of human compassion. (Thankfully, many have done just that.) One explanation, offered by the economist Thomas Sowell and the sociologist Paul Hollander, is professional narcissism. Intellectuals and artists may feel unappreciated in liberal democracies, which allow their citizens to tend to their own needs in markets and civic organizations. Dictators implement theories from the top down, assigning a role to intellectuals that they feel is commensurate with their worth. But tyrannophilia is also fed by a Nietzschean disdain for the common man, who annoyingly prefers schlock to fine art and culture, and by an admiration of the superman who transcends the messy compromises of democracy and heroically implements a vision of the good society.

pg. 451

Though intellectuals are apt to do a spit take when they read a defense of capitalism, its economic benefits are so obvious that they don’t need to be shown with numbers. They can literally be seen from space. A satellite photograph of Korea showing the capitalist South aglow in light and the Communist North a pit of darkness vividly illustrates the contrast in the wealth-generating capability between the two economic systems, holding geography, history, and culture constant. Other matched pairs with an experimental group and a control group lead to the same conclusion: West and East Germany when they were divided by the Iron Curtain; Botswana versus Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe; Chile versus Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro — the latter a once-wealthy, oil-rich country now suffering from widespread hunger and a critical shortage of medical care.

pg. 95

This evidence-based take on the Enlightenment project reveals that it was not a naive hope. The Enlightenment has worked — perhaps the greatest story seldom told. And because this triumph is so unsung, the underlying ideals of reason, science, and humanism are unappreciated as well. Far from being an insipid consensus, these ideals are treated by today’s intellectuals with indifference, skepticism, and sometimes contempt. When properly appreciated, I will suggest, the ideals of the Enlightenment are in fact stirring, inspiring, noble — a reason to live.

pg. 11

In 2016, a majority of Americans named terrorism as the most important issue facing the country, said they were worried that they or a family member would be a victim, and identified ISIS as a threat to the existence or survival of the United States. The fear has addled not just ordinary citizens trying to get a pollster off the phone but public intellectuals, especially cultural pessimists perennially hungry for signs that Western civilization is (as always) on the verge of collapse.

pg. 196

Intellectual culture should strive to counteract our cognitive biases, but all too often it reinforces them.

pg. 53

(The myth, still popular among leftist intellectuals, that IQ doesn’t exist or cannot be reliably measured was refuted decades ago.)

pg. 248

I used to think that Trumpism was pure id, an upwelling of tribalism and authoritarianism from the dark recesses of the psyche. But madmen in authority distill their frenzy from academic scribblers of a few years back, and the phrase “intellectual roots of Trumpism” is not oxymoronic. Trump was endorsed in the 2016 election by 136 “Scholars and Writers for America” in a manifesto called “Statement of Unity.” Some are connected to the Claremont Institute, a think tank that has been called “the academic home of Trumpism.” And Trump has been closely advised by two men, Stephen Bannon and Michael Anton, who are reputed to be widely read and who consider themselves serious intellectuals. Anyone who wants to go beyond personality in understanding authoritarian populism must appreciate the two ideologies behind them, both of them militantly opposed to Enlightenment humanism and each influenced, in different ways, by Nietzsche. One is fascist, the other reactionary — not in the common left-wing sense of “anyone who is more conservative than me,” but in their original, technical senses.

pg. 452

Pinker is apparently unaware of the right-wing think tank machine, which props up shady characters as “intellectuals” in order to advance the interests of wealthy donors. Those 136 “scholars and writers” include Newt Gingrich and Peter Thiel, FYI. The organizer of the manifesto is F.H. Buckley, a member of the Heartland Institute, and said Institute is notorious for promoting climate change denial. Steve Bannon may consider himself an intellectual, but belief is not the same as reality, and Michael Anton is arguably more ridiculous.

I know, I know, you could argue that Pinker’s focusing just on the “literary intellectuals” as per C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures.” Sorry, that’s not plausible. Notice the lack of any qualifiers for some of these quotes, as well; Pinker is including a significant majority of all intellectuals in his tirades, at minimum.

[feels a tap on his shoulder]

Er, uh what-

What makes one person more intellectually able than another? Can the entire distribution of human intelligence be accounted for by just one general factor? Is intelligence supported by a single neural system? Here, we provide a perspective on human intelligence that takes into account how general abilities or ‘‘factors’’ reflect the functional organization of the brain. By comparing factor models of individual differences in performance with factor models of brain functional organization, we demonstrate that different components of intelligence have their analogs in distinct brain networks. Using simulations based on neuroimaging data, we show that the higher-order factor ‘‘g’’ is accounted for by cognitive tasks corecruiting multiple networks. Finally, we confirm the independence of these components of intelligence by dissociating them using questionnaire variables. We propose that intelligence is an emergent property of anatomically distinct cognitive systems, each of which has its own capacity.

Hampshire, Adam, et al. “Fractionating human intelligence.” Neuron 76.6 (2012): 1225-1237.

Whoa whoa whoa, what’s a study that refutes the idea of a single-factor measure of intelligence doing here?! Shoo! Go away, you’re off topic!

[hears something scamper away]

That’s better.

Howard Gardner’s brilliant conception of individual competence has changed the face of education in the twenty-three years since the publication of his classic work, Frames of Mind. Since then thousands of educators, parents, and researchers have explored the practical implications and applications of Multiple Intelligences theory–the powerful notion that there are separate human capacities, ranging from musical intelligence to the intelligence involved in self-understanding. The first decade of research on MI theory and practice was reported in the 1993 edition of Multiple Intelligences. This new edition covers all developments since then and stands as the most thorough and up-to-date account of MI available anywhere. Completely revised throughout, it features new material on global applications and on MI in the workplace, an assessment of MI practice in the current conservative educational climate, new evidence about brain functioning, and much more.

Gardner, Howard E. Multiple intelligences: New horizons in theory and practice. Basic books, 2008.

THAT’S IT!! I’m ending this blog post right now!

NOW You Can Celebrate

I’ve seen a lot of people jumping for joy about Ireland’s referendum, such as PZ Myers and Marcus Ranum. Problem is, the initial results were based on exit polling data, and they’re not always reliable. The people most likely to respond are the people most passionate about a subject, for instance. They also miss out on early voters, who don’t necessarily visit the polling booth, and voters that show up late. Nate Silver cribbed some excellent discussion of exit polls from Mark Bluemthnal, and while that info dates from 2008 and 2004, respectively, exit polls are routinely argued over well after the election itself. Hence why I sat on my hands.

The Eighth Amendment, which grants an equal right to life to the mother and unborn, will be replaced. The declaration was made at at Dublin Castle at 18:13 local time. The only constituency to vote against repealing the Eight amendment was Donegal, with 51.9% voting against the change. […]

Reacting to the result, the taoiseach (prime minister) Leo Varadkar, who campaigned in favour of liberalisation, said it was “a historic day for Ireland,” and that a “quiet revolution” had taken place. Mr Varadkar told crowds at Dublin Castle the result showed the Irish public “trust and respect women to make their own decision and choices.” He added: “It’s also a day when we say no more. No more to doctors telling their patients there’s nothing can be done for them in their own country, no more lonely journeys across the Irish Sea, no more stigma as the veil of secrecy is lifted and no more isolation as the burden of shame is gone.” […]

Mr Varadkar said he understood that those who had voted against repeal would be unhappy. He said he had a message for them: “I know today is not welcome and you may feel this country has taken the wrong turn, that this country is not one you no longer recognise. “I want to reassure you that Ireland today is the same as it was last week, but more tolerant, open and respectful.”

OK, NOW it’s time to raise my hands. I’m a bit puzzled why declaring mothers and fetuses to have equal rights was considered an argument against abortion, given that we live in a universe where the Violinist argument exists, but no matter: this is a solid victory for human health, and a boon for the impoverished and/or unlucky.