Orton's Arm

Suppose both you and CTM are right about this. Maybe Stalin issued some directive which called for Soviet soldiers to kill German women and children. Ehrenberg would have spread the word of this to Soviet soldiers, while making the language more detailed and lively. But once the killings began, the German soldiers might well have responded by fighting even harder. At that point it would be time for a new policy. There's no way any official Soviet organization was going to say that Stalin had messed up. But the policy change could be communicated by announcing Ehrenberg had made a mistake. Hence the condemnation of his behavior CTM read about. The Soviets would postpone their genocide against the Germans until after the war. I figured I'd throw this idea out there in case someone knew of information which would confirm or disprove it.

I agree with the spirit of this post, which is to press on until we overcome all our difficulties. The same spirit applies to athletics. At the same time, if you're born skinny and slow, you're never going to become the next Bruce Smith. It doesn't matter how well you eat, or how hard you work in the weight room, or how badly you want to taste the NFL. Unless you have the right genetics, NFL dreams will never become reality. By the same token, unless you have the right genes, you're never going to be the next vos Savant. As the subject matter becomes harder, fewer and fewer people will find themselves with the genetic potential to truly learn it. People may think of themselves as lazy or losers if they find they can't master, say, calculus. But these self-accusations are unfair--they may be just as determined and just as hard-working as those who have mastered the subject.

Bill, it's like this: I wanted Marv to take a long, hard look at Cutler. But based on Marv's comments, he was opposed to taking a quarterback in the first round of the draft. I felt that if a guy like Cutler was the right quarterback, then after taking him you could ignore the position for at least the next ten years. Now there's a little evidence that Cutler may be the real thing, so it's frustrating. I experienced similar emotions whenever TD would pass up an offensive lineman to take a skill position player. Later on you might notice the offensive lineman who got passed up was quietly having a good career, while the skill position player TD took had yet to really do anything. Maybe you think quarterback is just another offensive skill position like all the others. I disagree with this view. If you have a bad WR, you can simply avoid throwing to the guy. At least the defense will be forced to use up a CB to cover him. If you have a mediocre RB, he'll still get pretty good yardage if he's running behind the right offensive line. But a bad quarterback will kill you with his interceptions and other mistakes. On the other hand, a good quarterback gives you another way to win. Take the Steelers. Typically, plan A was to win with defense and the running game. But if the other team ganged up to stop the run, Roethlisberger could win the game with his arm. The Steelers had a good defense and a good offensive line throughout the '90s and 2000s. But until they got Roethlisberger, those defenses and offensive lines didn't translate into Super Bowl wins. Not that Roethlisberger did much to help them win the Super Bowl itself, but his performance in the regular season and the playoffs was magnificent.

Hey, why not call my view a tautology ten more times? Then maybe people will forget the fact you've provided absolutely no evidence or reasoning whatsoever to support this claim. I don't mind having intelligent conversations with reasonable people. But right now, you're acting as though your intelligence excuses you from the duty to be reasonable.

1. I'm not familiar with Mike D'ohopp, but the Mensa people I have met have all seemed quite intelligent. Without knowing anything at all about Mike D'ohopp, I'm guessing that he's loud and opinionated, and that his opinions are usually different from yours. His may be a case of a smart person saying foolish things, or it may be that there's sense behind his beliefs that gets lost because of his style. 2a. If you wanted to measure the knack for one skill in particular, you probably could do it. But even that's not always true. I've heard that they're trying to develop an aptitude test to see who would make the best computer programmers, thus far with little success. I know a company like Microsoft or Google would pay big bucks for a test like that, so the failure to find one indicates real difficulties. But even after you've developed a list of all the possible knacks people might have, and after you've developed aptitude tests for each possible knack, you still have to decide what weight to give each test. Should someone who scores in the 99th percentile on the sewing aptitude test be given more or fewer points than someone who scores in the 95th percentile on the computer programming test? Should someone who scored in the 80th percentile on five different knack tests be given more or less credit than someone who scored in the 99th percentile on one test? 2b. My aside about social skills was intended to deal with a possible objection to eugenics policies. Many feel that very brilliant people often tend to be less socially skilled than average. Despite this, I feel these brilliant people should be encouraged to have large families. The next generation will benefit from the efforts of these brilliant people's children, even if they turn out to be wallflowers at parties. 3. At least in the U.S., whites tend to do better on aptitude tests than blacks or Hispanics. But there are many exceptions: my sister is friends with a black woman who has an I.Q. above 160. That's Einstein territory. The policies I suggest would encourage women like my sister's friend to have as many children as possible. Maybe one of these children would grow up to help fill the leadership void that currently exists in the black community. Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton are considerably below the level of Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Giving up a John Elway to acquire a Ronnie Lott is something worth losing sleep over. There's no way the Broncos would have traded away Elway to get Lott.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Thanks for the quick action.

I just checked, and this thread is on the football board. If I put this on the politics board, and if a mod was this quick to fix the error, then that's awfully efficient modding!

Link I know it's only one preseason game. I know even Ryan Leaf sometimes showed flashes of brilliance. But if Cutler turns out to be the next Elway, how will Marv feel about passing him up to take a safety?

You ask two very good questions. 1. Is there such a thing as generic intelligence? Every language in the world has a word which means "smart" or "intelligent" or something similar. How do you go about quantifying this thing? Mensa has developed expertise in determining which tests are generic aptitude tests, because such expertise is required for their admissions process. The group is apolitical, so I'd trust them more than I'd trust someone with an ideological agenda they want to prove. What about someone who scores poorly on the general aptitude test, yet has a special knack for, say, carpentry? Wouldn't this person's genes be at least as useful to the next generation as those of someone who did a little better on the test, yet lacks this special gift? Perhaps so. But attempting to measure such specific things is impractical. Assuming the gift of carpentry isn't correlated with intelligence, the measures I propose would neither increase nor decrease the proportion of people who have that carpentry knack. But, some might say, certain gifts seem negatively correlated with intelligence. Many believe exceptionally smart people often lack social skills or street smarts. While this may well be true, a brilliant scientist or engineer is exceptionally useful even if he lacks social skills or street smarts. In any case, equally brilliant engineers with social skills will do a better job of attracting mates and having children than engineers who lack social awareness. 2. You ask me how I'd explain my eugenics plan to groups who tend to do poorly on standardized aptitude tests. In, say, an all-black nation, the measures I've described would increase the intelligence level without affecting the country's racial composition. The same is true with an all-Hispanic nation or an all-white nation. The problem, as you point out, is that in a mixed-race nation, groups that tend to do worse on aptitude tests may not like a government program that would decrease their share of the overall population. On the other hand, white people aren't allowed to voice similar complaints. Pat Buchanan, for example, made the comment that the U.S. needed to reform its immigration policy if it intended to remain a white nation. His opponents were quick to label him an extremist and a Nazi. In the U.S., government policies which tend to increase the proportion of whites (as my eugenics program would) can be objected to on racial grounds. Policies which tend to decrease the proportion of whites (such as the way we handle immigration) cannot be objected to on racial grounds. Having different standards for different races is unjust. Either the government should avoid all policies which change this nation's racial composition, or it should adopt policies without regards to how these policies would affect racial composition. If the first is the case, people of all races should join Buchanan in his racially-based objections to U.S. immigration policy. If the latter is the case, the eugenics programs I suggest shouldn't be objected to on racial grounds.

Thanks for the kind words. I'm looking forward to the thread!

It's been a few posts since you last used the icon. I was wondering how long you'd be able to abstain. The refutation you made--that my post was a tautology--falls well below your usual standards. My post overviewed basic facts about intelligence, then went on to provide a credible explanation about the underlying factors which may be causing what we observe. I invited you to provide an alternative explanation for these facts; one which makes attention to the gene pool unnecessary. While I may have made mistakes in that post, I assure you falling into the tautology trap wasn't one of them. Is there a way in which my explanation of regression toward the mean fails to fit the facts? You have not mentioned any. Do you have an alternative, non-genetically based way to explain the regression toward the mean? You have not mentioned any such explanation. I knew going into this I wasn't going to convince you. Your characterization of my views as "Nazi" tells me that maybe you weren't listening with a fully open mind. I suspect that regardless of what I write, you'll go on believing government policies can't help or harm the quality of the gene pool. To believe otherwise would lead you down a road you just don't want to travel. I respect your right to believe as you choose. If you no longer want to discuss this issue seriously, I'm okay with moving on to the next topic. On the other hand, I'm still willing to respond to any substansive comments you or others might make.

Your argument hinges on cause versus effect. What causes regression toward the mean in the first place? The facts as we know them are these: - For Americans, environment is generally good enough to not affect intelligence. - A person's intelligence is strongly predicted by two factors: the intelligence of his or her parents, and the average intelligence of the population group to which the parents belong. What underlying forces could create these phenomena? It took me a while, but I arrived at an explanation which fits the facts as we know them. Take Marilyn vos Savant. In what I'll call column 1 are the intelligence-related genes that are expressed--the ones which give her her >200 I.Q. In column 2 are the intelligence-related genes which aren't expressed. Because the column 2 genes aren't expressed, her amazing I.Q. tells us nothing about what these genes are actually like. The only piece of information we have is the average intelligence level of the population group to which vos Savant belongs. While these column 2 genes could be anything, on average they will be the same as the population group to which the smart woman belongs. Now suppose vos Savant has kids. These kids will get a mixture of her column 1 genes (which will make them smart) and her column 2 genes (which will usually be genes associated with average intelligence). The expected value of her kids' intelligence is halfway between vos Savant's and the population mean--exactly as regression toward the mean indicates. Will vos Savant's descendents create a long-term increase in the average level of intelligence? Yes. On average, a smart woman's column 2 genes will create neither an increase or decrease in the average level of intelligence, but her column 1 genes will increase it. After averaging the two, you still have an increase, albeit not as big an increase as would have been the case had everything been driven by column 1 alone. In a world where smart women had the most kids, the intelligence-related genes in column 2 would gradually improve, thereby creating the effects I described in that earlier post. I'd like to end by making one final point. To the best of my knowledge, the column 1/column 2 idea I've proposed hasn't been proven. It is, however, an explanation that fits the facts as we know them. Under this explanation, a eugenics program would improve the gene pool. I know it will be tempting for you to dwell on the fact my idea hasn't been proven. But before doing so, please consider whether there is an alternative explanation that a) also fits all the facts, and b) makes attention to the gene pool unnecessary. I personally doubt such an explanation exists, but I'm willing to listen if you think I've overlooked something.

Interesting links. You're tempting me to start an education thread.

It looks like it's time for me to revisit CTM's analysis of the subject. (@CTM: would it offend you if I called you Monkey?) His argument consisted of several points: 1. The connection between genetics and intelligence is poorly understood. There's some truth to this. At the same time, we know that for American adults, the strongest predictor of intelligence is the intelligence of their parents. 2. Regression towards the mean. Few people are aware of this phenomenon. The fact CTM is one of these people increases his credibility in my eyes. Basically, regression toward the mean indicates the following. Suppose a woman with an IQ of 140 were to have children. Also suppose she was part of a population group with an average IQ of 100. This woman should expect her children to have IQs halfway between her 140 IQ and the average IQ of 100. Also, these IQs will be normally distributed, which means her children are likely to vary in intelligence. The next generation, when the child with the 120 IQ marries, regression towards the mean will cause this person's children to have an expected IQ of 110. CTM's contention is that over time, regression towards the mean will cause any given eugenics program to fail; as each succeeding generation becomes more like the overall average. A eugenics program would address this problem in two ways: it would overcome regression toward the mean through sheer numbers, and it would raise the overall average. I don't want this paragraph to get too technical, so I've put all the stats stuff in parentheses. Suppose a woman was smarter than 739 out of every 740. (Three standard deviations above the mean.) Her children would, on average, be smarter than roughly 933 people out of every 1000 (1.5 standard devitions above the mean). However, these kids would vary in intelligence (because their intelligence is normally distributed). If the woman had 15 children, the expected outcome would be for one of those children to be at least as smart as her. If a woman of average intelligence wanted to have an equally intelligent child, she would need to have 740 children. In this example, the brilliant woman would actually need to have 30 children so that there would be two kids as smart as her. Obviously, expecting her to have that many children is unrealistic. That's where the second force comes in--raising the average level of intelligence. For example, say that this woman's IQ was 145, and the average population's was 100. Suppose you were to increase the population's average IQ level by 15 points. Now the woman doesn't need to have 30 kids to ensure two will be as smart as herself. She only needs 12. But suppose this woman only has ten kids. Will the overall number of really smart people decline from one generation to the next? Not necessarily. Because the average person is now smarter, one child out of every 44 born to a woman of average intelligence will have an I.Q. of 145 or better. It's not great, but it's sure better than the 1 out of 740 situation that existed earlier. A 1 out of 44 chance may not sound like much, but there are a lot of women of roughly average intelligence. They'll do their share to ensure the next generation has really smart people. If a woman of average intelligence can have a child with a 145 IQ, why have a eugenics program? Because her chances of having such a child are nearly 17 times better if you can increase the average level of intelligence from 100 to 115. The smarter someone is, the more their children will help create that increase. Conversely, the less intelligent someone is, the more their children tend to hold this increase back. I'd also like to illustrate the danger of a falling IQ. Suppose the U.S.'s average IQ fell from 100 to 85. If the average IQ is 100, a woman of average intelligence has a 1 in 740 chance of producing someone with a 145 IQ or better. If the average level of intelligence falls to 85, a woman of average intelligence will need to have over 31,000 children to produce just one child with an IQ over 145. Moreover, a woman with an IQ of 145 will need to have 44 children in order for just one of them to be as smart as herself. This is because regression toward the mean produces progressively harsher effects as the average level of intelligence declines.

You remind me a little of myself, especially that rebellious streak when it comes to overly dictatorial teachers. Your suggestion about a nutrition and education thread is interesting. I'm not what you'd call a nutrition expert, but I'd certainly welcome the chance to read the opinions of those who are. I tend to have strong opinions about certain aspects of education, which is totally out of character for me. I may start a thread about the topic once this discussion has run its natural course.

There's truth to this. A woman who starts having kids at age 20, and who has a large family, will find most of her adult life consumed by this task. To some extent this burden could be eased by free daycare, but even with that she will probably need to put her career on hold for a while. This would create short-term pain for the U.S., as intelligent women took time away from their careers to raise large families. The long-term benefits from these families would be experienced by future generations. The second point you raised is that my suggestions would take away people's freedom. I don't feel the government should forbid less intelligent couples from having children, nor do I feel the government should force smart people to have kids. I just want to see financial incentives to encourage specific types of behavior. The U.S. government freely uses financial incentives to encourage all sorts of behavior anyway, so it's not like the programs I'm advocating would reduce the level of freedom. I just feel that if you're using financial incentives, you may as well use them to achieve something constructive for a change. As for how I'd feel if I didn't make the cutoff--it would be a tough break, and I'd feel bad about it. But I've dealt with worse things than blows to my ego or a government's refusal to provide subsidies for my kids. I'd liken the experience to getting rejected by the college you really wanted to go to. Yes, your feelings are hurt, and yes, it may well affect the future course of your life. It's a tough break, but you move on. Edit: I'd like to address your point about curing cancer. You're right to say you need more than just smart people--it takes work, luck, etc. In my list of government responsibilities, I mentioned improving the gene pool, which gives you the smart people you need as a starting point. I also mentioned the government should be doing a good job with education, and that it should fund publicly beneficial projects such as basic scientific research. So if you give yourself a pool of really smart people, educate them in a school system which actually cares about education, and then proceed to fund their cancer research efforts, you're doing everything you can to maximize the chance of a cure for cancer. The hard work and luck are up to them.

Now that was a good post! Your father in particular really sounds like a man I can respect, and many members of your family have really shined in some adverse circumstances. And even though you dropped out of highschool, you seem a lot smarter than most college graduates I know. As you intended, your example points to the value of a strong work ethic and good character. If there was a way to encourage people with these traits to have more kids than those who lacked them, I'd be in favor of it. I don't really know how the government can go about measuring these traits. On the other hand, intelligence can be measured. I don't feel intelligent people are any less hard-working or honest than less intelligent people are. The programs I favor would increase the average level of intelligence without doing very much to help or harm the average character level and work ethic of the American people. While I'd like to have all three issues addressed (character, work ethic, and intelligence), improving the intelligence of the population is better than not improving anything at all.

Hmmm . . . are you joking around here, or do you really believe yourself genetically superior to me? The point you made about malnutrition during childhood years is more relevant to Third World nations than to the U.S. According to Jensen (A.R. 1980, Bias in mental testing. New York: Free Press. P. 178]), correlations between siblings are as follows: Adult IQ correlations full siblings reared together, r = +.49 full siblings reared apart, r = +.47 unrelated persons reared together (adoption), r = -.01 "By adulthood, all of the IQ correlation between biologically related persons is genetic." While terrible living conditions can and do affect I.Q., such conditons aren't common enough in the U.S. to affect the correlations Jensen observed. You raised a strong point by mentioning regression towards the mean. The accepted term, by the way, is regression toward the mean, not deviation toward the mean. In any case, your description of the phenomenon itself was correct as far as it went. I'm not happy about the phenomenon, but its eftects can be softened by raising the average level of intelligence. Conversely, a social policy which lowers the average level of intelligence will make the problem worse than it otherwise would have been.

You bring up a valid point. To add to that, living in poverty may inspire people to become harder-working or more ambitious than they would have been had they had everything handed to them on a platter. The points you raised are why I don't favor basing reproduction incentives on economic status. I don't want to tell an intelligent, poor woman she shouldn't have kids. Nor do I want to create financial incentives for a stupid, rich woman to populate the next generation as much as possible. The incentives I favor are based on intelligence, not economic status. My problem with present government programs is that, on average, they encourage the wrong people to have kids. The smartest and most ambitious people tend to get off the welfare rolls and out of the ghetto; leaving behind those who tend not to have the same work ethic or intelligence. The very people you admire--those who got themselves out of poverty--are affected by the disincentives to have children I mentioned earlier. The innovators and entrepreneurs you described will tend to have fewer children and fewer grandchildren than those who lacked the ability or the ambition needed to leave welfare behind.

For someone as smart as you, that was a very shallow response. The only specific objection you've offered is that KurtGodel77 apparently believes in eugenics as well. To help move this discussion forward, it would help if you advanced whatever specific, meaningful objections you may have. I can think of several off the top of my head: 1. The belief that genes don't determine potential. (It's been discredited, but many still believe it.) 2. The belief that if left alone, the gene pool will take care of itself. I see no evidence in favor of this, and a lot against. Maybe you see things differently. 3. The belief the government shouldn't do anything to combat the genetic decline we're experiencing. If you believe this, paint a picture of the alternative you envision; while fully taking into account the effects the declining gene pool will have.

I'll deal with your second point first. For whatever reason, I've fallen in love with the search for objective truth. Sometimes by stating things I think are true, some people may think I'm arrogant. To me, that's just the price of doing business. Is it arrogant to suppose that any children Marilyn vos Savant might have would be more likely to find a cure for cancer than O.J. Simpson's kids? Or that the world would be better off with a cure for cancer than it is without one? I don't want to spend time in bars getting fat chicks pregnant; I want that cure for cancer. I want clean fuels, solar power satellites, maglev trains, and other things only smart people can provide. Everyone else wants a brighter future too; but often people let their emotions get in the way of exploring cause and effect relationships. Only by understanding such relationships can we turn our hopes for a brighter future into a living reality. The two forces JSP mentioned--feminism and liberalism--have really messed up how we procreate. It used to be that intelligent women had as many children as less intelligent women. Thanks to feminism, there are now myriad ways for smart women to spend their time that have nothing to do with having kids. A woman is 22 by the time she finished college, 24 by the time she gets her master's, and 29 by the time she gets her PhD. By then, her reproductive years are more than half over, she's buried under a pile of debt, and she needs to keep busy at some demanding job to pay off this debt. Under these circumstances, it's extremely difficult for a woman to have more than one or two children. You say the government shouldn't get involved with how we procreate. Too late. Liberals instituted social programs which gave welfare women financial incentives to have as many children as possible. To pay for these expensive social programs, they raised taxes on working people. As a result of these tax increases, couples found that both people had to work to maintain a middle class lifestyle. Understandably, this made it more difficult to have children. On the other hand, welfare women could have children quite easily, because they didn't work, there were financial incentives for them to have children, and because their standards for child-rearing were generally low. This system used the government's power to transfer reproductive potential out of middle class homes and into welfare homes. Obviously, not all middle class women are intelligent, nor are all welfare women stupid. But the average middle class woman is smarter than the average welfare woman. So government policies created massive damage to the gene pool. But as this discussion has shown, you can't bring up this damage without being called a Nazi, arrogant, or an extremist. These accusations are the result of a highly politicized, anti-scientific climate. In the far East, there's a saying that the nail that sticks out gets the hammer. Unfortunately, a lot of that mentality exists in the U.S. as well; and many people feel an instinctive urge to hammer down anyone who has risen above the common level. This urge is the enemy of greatness. The desire to hammer down the best and the brightest is why the U.S. education system is a failure. The desire to create equality by hammering down the best is deeply destructive, and is the root of much of the evil in this world.

I suppose so. In any case, my sig is merely one of a series of sigs that explore the reasons for TD's failure. In earlier sigs, I've mentioned the lack of success TD experienced in the first and second rounds. Bills: current starters chosen in rounds 1 - 2 (2001 - 2005) Lee Evans (WR) Willis McGahee (RB) Nate Clements (CB) Aaron Schobel (DE) Chris Kelsay (DE) Patriots: current starters chosen in rounds 1 - 2 (2001 - 2005) Deion Branch (WR) Richard Seymour (DE) Matt Light (LT) Ty Warren (DE) Eugene Wilson (FS) Vince Wilfork (DT) Ben Watson (TE) Logan Mankins (OG) Notice TD's list has only five names to the Patriots' 8. Also, TD only found one quality lineman (Aaron Schobel); whereas the Patriots found four or five. Which team do you think will win the battle of the trenches?

Your response is even more irrelevant than usual. Didn't think that was possible. In any case, you're comparing apples to oranges. To be a starter on the Patriots, you have to beat out players like Matt Light or Tom Brady. To start for the Bills, you need only be better than Jeff Posey or Bennie Anderson.