Orton's Arm

Suppose an Axis of Evil nation were to launch a communications satellite, or to start getting involved in space tourism. Is Bush asserting the U.S. has the right to shoot this stuff down? I mean, what gives? I could see it if we were at war with a nation, or if the object we were shooting down was a spy satellite being used against us. But Bush's assertion clearly goes too far, and will correctly be interpreted as evidence of American imperialism and arrogance.

I clearly understood your question, and I felt I provided a sufficient answer. Where do you suppose identical twins got their genetics from, if not (partially) from their biological mother? In any case, there is widespread agreement that intelligence is largely inherited: The above statement was signed by 52 highly qualified people. It represents the voice of mainstram science; a voice which has gotten lost in the circus atmosphere of this thread. (By the way, I'm not blaming you at all for that circus atmosphere. The Monte Carlo simulation you're putting together is an adequate apology for far more flippant remarks than any I've seen you make here. It took guts to announce in advance what you thought your results will be like, though I feel this will turn out to be that 1% of the time when your confidence is misplaced.)

My statistics is a little rusty, I was feeling a little sleepy, and, well, I described r^2 when I should have been describing r. In any case, I found the following in a stats book: The book also states that an r value of 0 implies no linear relationship, and an r value of -1 implies "a perfect negative linear association." In the case of identical twins raised apart, we're looking at an r value of over 0.7, implying a very strong positive relationship. I should think this alone would be enough answer to your second question. If two genetically identical people, raised apart, generally have strongly correlated levels of intelligence, it's a pretty strong signal intelligence is primarily driven by genetics. But if that's not enough to satisfy you, I offer this quote from page 178 of The g factor: For additional information about the heritability of intelligence, I suggest reading the abstract paragraph of the following link: http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000085/#html

It's this form of population control I'm hoping to avoid. For one thing, it's inhumane. For another, it's not working: the Third World's population is rapidly expanding despite natural disasters and diseases. And thirdly, it's not a particularly powerful method of natural selection. The tsunami that recently hit parts of Asia was fairly random in whom it killed. Fourth, because the Third World's population is expanding so quickly, people need more farmland than they used to. It's really tough to tell someone to leave the rainforest alone when he needs to either cut some of it down, or watch his family starve.

I certainly don't like the tone of your last paragraph. I don't see why you've chosen to make light of the fact that the day will come when there won't be enough food to feed the Third World's rapidly expanding population. I will, however, respond to your point about a slippery slope. A slippery slope argument can be used to disprove just about everything. Once you give the government power to arrest criminals, how long will it be before it starts arresting anyone it feels like? In general, I don't put much stock in slippery slope arguments. Government programs and policies already affect people's reproductive choices, and these policies are negatively impacting the gene pool. I'm simply asking for government programs to have a positive influence on the gene pool, instead of a negative one.

There's truth to this. I'm convinced Green Bay's "smash for cash" player reward system played a big role in its most recent Super Bowl win. I'm surprised more teams don't implement this, even if the extra payments would count against the salary cap.

Correlation coefficients aren't as tricky a thing as they sound like. A correlation coefficient of 0.49 means that a given X variable explains about half the observed variation in your Y variable. Let me translate this into English. Suppose you have a population of children, who are in grades 5 - 8. Say you wanted to predict the height of these children. The first prediction you could make is this: the next child you come across will be of average height for the group. But there will be variation: one child might be three inches taller than average; another four inches shorter. You respond by saying, "Tell me the child's age in days, and then let me predict his or her height." You notice that whereas before your prediction was off by an average of 4 inches, now it's only off by an average of 2 inches. In this hypothetical example, age explains half the observed variation in height. This is the same thing as saying there's a correlation coefficient of about 0.5 between age and height. I've heard of two possible explanations of why people's intelligence levels vary: nature and nurture. Suppose nurture was usually a strong factor in determining why one person is smarter than another. If two unrelated children were raised in the same house, with the same parents reading to them, going to the same schools, living in the same neighborhood, enjoying the same level of wealth, you'd expect to see a strong correlation between their two levels of intelligence. That is, if you knew child A was smart, it would be a pretty clear sign that he or she grew up in a good environment. In this hypothetical example, another child who grew up in the same good environment--in the same house for crying out loud--should have a much better chance of being smart than a child selected at random. But the study I cited shows this isn't the case: by adulthood, there's no correlation between the intelligence levels of unrelated children who grew up in the same household. The study was set up in such a way as to detect just about any common environmentally-based variation in intelligence levels. The fact it detected no correlation is a very strong piece of evidence that the usual differences in environment aren't big enough to seriously impact intelligence levels. Well, you might be tempted to ask, if the environment explains none of the variation in intelligence levels, why then is the correlation between siblings only 0.49? Why does it only explain about 49% of the variation, instead of 100%? Were the siblings identical twins, we would in fact expect a much higher level of correlation. A study by Toga and Thompson, done in 2005, showed that idential twins raised in separate environments have intelligence levels corrrelated at 0.72. Other studies have demonstrated even higher correlations. Typically, the effect of environmental influences fade as children get older; so siblings raised apart will have a stronger correlation at the age of 20 than at the age of 10. In any case, let's take that 0.72 correlation as a starting point. Based on that, environment would seem to explain 28% of the observed variation in intelligence levels. Based on the study of unrelated children raised together, environment would seem to explain 0% of variation in intelligence. But whether environment explains as little as 0% of intellectual variation, or as much as 28%, the fact of the matter remains that genetics clearly determine the lion's share. This is why a eugenics program has a much stronger potential to benefit a nation than an improved education system could.

A fair question, but one I answered earlier. Here's the answer again: By adulthood, there's a strong correlation between the intelligence of biological siblings reared apart, but zero correlation for the intelligence of step siblings reared together. This isn't directed against you in particular, but I find it sad that so many people respond with such hostility or ridicule to something that's actually a quite reasonable, academically supported truth.

Yes, it's eugenics. It was espoused by a number of leading American intellectuals. But in the wake of the Nuremberg Trials, it became socially unacceptable to advocate such policies any more. But the underlying scientific basis was still there, especially the correlation between genetics and intelligence. If anything, that evidence is even stronger now than it was back when Leland Stanford (founder of Stanford University) advocated eugenics. Do the Nuremberg Trials represent a legitimate, intellectually credible refutation of eugenics? I don't believe they do. To examine the root causes of genocide, I'll mention four examples: tribally-based killings in Rwanda, the Ukrainian famine, communist China's treatment of the Tibetans, and the Eskimos' forcible expulsion of the Vikings from Greenland. These governments weren't guided by eugenic theories. On the contrary, communist China and the Soviet Union explicitly rejected, on ideological grounds, the concept that heredity could help determine a person's intellectual potential. I strongly doubt that the Eskimos or the Rwandan tribes had any particular guiding theory about the connection between genetics and intelligence. The common thread between these four genocides/ethnic cleansings is that, in each case, a given government formed hostile intentions toward the members of a specific ethnic or racial group. Nazi war crimes can be explained by this also. There's no need to reflexively reject something simply because the Nazis advocated it. Otherwise, we'd be rejecting concepts like hard work, self-sacrifice, idealism, environmentalism, the family, physical exercise, courage, and nationalism.

I respect your hard-working roommate. He took full advantage of the talent with which he was blessed. It's too bad your other roommate let his talent go to waste. In a perfect world, you'd be able to measure the desire inside a person. Yes you can sort of do it on an individual level, because you knew your two roommates. But I don't see a way for an institution to gain this awareness. I think it's fairly safe to assume the average smart person is neither harder working nor lazier than the average stupid person. So the eugenics program I'm suggesting would increase the average level of intelligence, without really affecting the average level of work ethic. Yes you'd like to be able to increase both things, but it's a lot easier to measure intelligence than it is to measure desire. Increasing one, while leaving the other alone, is better than nothing. In any case, all I'm offering is encouragement. Take a smart woman who stayed in school until she was nearly 30, in order to get her PhD. Maybe she's buried under a pile of debt, maybe the job prospects aren't as good as what she'd been expecting. Without a eugenics program, she might decide it was financial suicide to take on the added expense of having children. On the other hand, consider a less intelligent woman who was thinking of having kids. She knows there's a check waiting for her if she gets her tubes tied. But if children are important to her, she'll walk away from that check. I could be wrong, but I'm guessing the mother of your hard-working roommate would have walked away from that check.

They base their acceptance on things which result from intelligence. I find it very difficult to believe someone with an I.Q. of 70 could write a Stanford quality admissions essay, or could score well enough on the SAT to get into Stanford. So they're doing a fairly effective job of weeding out people of average or below average intelligence. Maybe some of the participants in this thread could help Stanford make its admissions process better. The Stanford board of trustees would open a letter, courtesy of the Stadium Wall. They'd find references to entrenching tools, blow-up dolls, master races, and (appropriately) sliced baloney. These comments would be about as useful for setting Stanford admissions policy as they are for setting U.S. policy.

If you base childbearing incentives on intelligence, you're helping the U.S. fill its economic need for a smarter workforce. You seem to feel that a national preference for a high level of intelligence is the same as creating a master race. Does this apply on a more local level too? Is Stanford, for example, trying to create a master race by accepting intelligent applicants while rejecting the others?

I went back through this thread, and you've made 11 separate misinterpretations of what I'm proposing. I'll correct the above misinterpretation, but the number of times I'm willing to do this is limited. What I'm proposing is to provide financial incentives for smart women to have more kids, while also providing incentives for less intelligent women to have fewer children. Economic status doesn't matter to me. I don't care if a Mensa member is on welfare or lives in Beverly Hills; she should have a financial incentive to have children. The problem I have with misguided liberal social policies is that, on average, the women who were encouraged to have kids were less intelligent than the average woman who was discouraged from having children.

There are more straw men on this thread than there are in Kansas! For the umpteenth time, I'm not saying all welfare women, or all unwed mothers, or all of [insert category of the day here] women are stupid. Bear with me here. You'll agree that the average Harvard student is probably smarter than your average community college student, right? But at the same time, not all Harvard students or graduates are smart. Some were let in based on family connections, and despite a mediocre level of intelligence. Our current president is a case in point. Nor are all community college students stupid--there are very smart people who, for various reasons, choose community college. Now imagine a government program which encouraged community college graduates to have as many children as possible, while discouraging Harvard graduates from doing so. Some of the community college students having children would be very, very smart. Some of the Harvard students who'd been discouraged from having children wouldn't be all that bright. But, on average, the population which had been discouraged from having kids has a higher I.Q. than the population which is being encouraged to have them. This is also the case with failed liberal social policies.

Point production understates the dominance of those Cowboys offensive units. That offense liked to eat up the clock. So they'd march down the field, take 7 or ten minutes off the clock, and settle for a field goal. Their goal wasn't to score as many points as possible, it was to shorten games and to keep their defense off the field. Which they did. If you look at the Cowboys' offensive line, it was significantly more dominant than the Raiders' was. Nobody pushed the Cowboys' offensive line around the way Tampa Bay pushed around the Raiders' line. Emmitt Smith was a better RB than any the Raiders had that year. The Cowboys also were better at FB and TE. The Raiders were better at #3 WR, and maybe even at #2 WR, but that's about it.

Imagine a hypothetical, slightly below average starting QB. How much better off are you with your starter in there than you'd be with this guy? If the answer is "not much" then your starter doesn't have "it." But if your starter gives your team a significantly better chance to win the game than a mediocre QB would have, your starter has "it." That's what Elway did for the Broncos.

At first glance the Patriots would seem to be an exception to the rule that you need to achieve greatness somewhere. Maybe they are. But maybe the reason they won those Super Bowls was because parts of the team could achieve greatness for a time. One week Tom Brady might look like Joe Montana, and their defense would be above average. The next week their defense might look like the '85 Bears, with Tom Brady being above average. Their special teams were always clutch.

I've lost track of the number of straw man arguments which have been thrown my way, but your statement about "all poor women" is certainly one of them. The Great Society Program paid welfare women in general to have more kids. Yes, a few such women were smart, but on average such women were less intelligent than women who weren't on welfare. So the overall effect of the policy on the gene pool was a negative one. Moreover, a number of welfare women were and are the drug addicts I described, and these women were paid to have kids! I shouldn't have to work this hard to convince you there's a problem there.

I'm not sure I agree with you there, buddy. I watched John Elway play, and I saw him have a lot of 7-9 and 8-8 type seasons. But despite that mediocre win/loss record, it was clear as day Elway had "it."

Had I been the Bills' GM, I would have used my first round pick either on Cutler/Leinart, or I'd have traded down to take Mangold at center. All three players have gotten off to a promising start, so I don't know you can argue that the offensive talent wasn't there. Nor has Fowler been such a godsend that the Bills can afford to ignore a talent like Mangold. So there were opportunities to fix the offense via the draft. It would be very hard to argue with the fact the offense needed fixing. But Marv chose to focus on the defense instead. I personally would have done things differently. On the other hand, maybe the players Marv drafted will work out well, and maybe he'll address the offense in a commanding way next draft. But Bill is right--the biggest problem on the team is in the trenches, and you're not going to fix that by using your early picks on defensive backs.

Bill from NYC had an outstanding response to this, but I may as well add a little myself. In my opinion, greatness wins championships, whether that greatness is on offense or defense. Typically, you need to be truly great on one side of the ball, and at least above-average on the other. Take the Super Bowl wins of the 49ers in the '80s. That team's passing game was one of the best ever. Its defense was considerably above-average. The result? Four Super Bowl wins. Or take the Ravens of 2000. That team had a great defense, and a very solid offensive line and running game. Its passing game could, um, at least do something, but it was first and foremost the greatness on defense which won it that Super Bowl. You point to what the Bucs defense did to the Raiders offense in the Super Bowl. But was the Raiders' offense really that great? It was good, certainly, but clearly inferior to, say, the Troy Aikman/Michael Irvin offense the Cowboys once had. Since you brought up the Rams, their red hot offense did in fact lead them to a Super Bowl win. The second time around, the Rams' attack had cooled a little, and they faced a team with Tom Brady. The Colts have fallen short in part because their offense isn't the elite unit it's portrayed as. I remember a playoff loss a few years back to New England, where the Colts were held to something like 3 points. I see three differences between the Colts and the Rams team that won the Super Bowl: 1. The Rams had a better defense, 2. The Rams had a significantly better offensive line, and 3. The Rams' skill position players achieved something magnificent that year. The Colts' skill position players are very good too, but typically play at a notch or two below what the Rams' skill players did that particular year.

Yes, Losman can make something out of nothing. He's also good at making nothing out of something.

For a guy with only 16 posts, you're sure doing a good job. Keep up the good work.

You're working very hard to try my patience. I'll do my best not to become frustrated, but it sometimes seems like communicating a non-liberal point of view to a liberal requires the patience of a saint. I'm guided by several principles: - Children are more important than are adults - The next generation is more important than is this one - People should have the discipline to see things as they are. - We should be humane, especially to children, but also to non-criminal adults - Humanity should strive for greatness If a woman lives in the ghetto, if she's unmarried, if she's addicted to drugs, it's not a humane act to encourage her to have children. No, the humane approach is to pay her to get her tubes tied, so that there will be fewer crack babies in the world. Yes, she'll take that check and spend the money on drugs, but you know what? At least she didn't inflict the misery of her own life on children yet to be born. At least the problem ends with her, and doesn't get passed onto the next generation. This is how to go about breaking the cycle of poverty. This will work. Liberal ideas about how to get rid of poverty haven't worked, and won't work in the future. To cling to misguided ideas about fighting poverty in the face of disasterous results is an act of cruelty to children yet unborn. U.S. immigration policy consists of two parts. There's general immigration, which basically amounts to allowing Third World nations to send their surplus people here. Then there's H-1B visa immigration, which basically amounts to the U.S. siphoning off the intellectual talent of other nations. I oppose the first form of immigration on the grounds that, instead of absorbing Third World nations' excess population via immigration, the U.S. should be helping these nations with birth control. I also oppose H-1B visa immigration, because the U.S. should be working harder to develop our own talent, instead of robbing other countries of the talent they need to emerge from Third World status. The policies I'm suggesting are better in the long term for both the U.S. and for the Third World. With a little help in population control, it would be much easier for Third World nations to emerge from poverty. The less talent Third World nations lose to the H-1B visa program, the more they'll have left with which to build wealth. The U.S. will also be better off. Instead of being absorbed by the Third World (which is what will happen if we don't change our ways), the U.S. can raise the average standard of living, reduce poverty, and ensure that far more children are given the chance to succeed.

I'm not going to try to count the chromosomes of other posters, but you do bring up a good point about football being a team game. A quarterback should be evaluated based on his own performance, and not on the quality of his supporting cast. Take Trent Dilfer back in 2000. Great team, mediocre QB, great W/L record. Or take John Elway for most of his career: elite QB, substandard team, and lots of 8-8 and 9-7 seasons. Few would accuse me of seeing Losman through rose colored glasses, but it's a mistake to put all or even most of the blame for the loss on him. At the same time, I do feel he could have played a lot better, even given the circumstances with which he was faced.