Question for the day

Is it sick to find this amusing?

Via Steve Sailer:

"[M]ore Baghdadites were killed by falling bullets during peace celebrations at the end of the Iran-Iraq war than were killed by Iranian missile attacks during the eight year war."

IQ and arrogance

The third installment of Charles Murray's IQ series from the Wall Street Journal is up. (I weighed in extensively on the first here).

The new piece gets a little into the "we should read Plato and Aristotle and lead high-minded lives" philosophical blah-blah Murray is prone to, but I love this point:

"We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones."

It's amazing how political correctness sometimes draws attention to human differences and even exaggerates them. It's also interesting how people see intelligence and merit as the same thing. Since genetic IQ differences are out of the question, those in the most demanding occupations must have worked harder.

MySpace faces lawsuits over child predators

For the last few months I've been pretty critical of MySpace. I love the concept of the site, especially in that aspiring musicians (like myself) get a free audience to share songs with, but I see some real problems with the stated policy of allowing 14-year-olds to post personal information.

Given that many predators have used the site to find victims, I've argued that to protect children, the government might take some action to stop underage information-sharing (though this could face First Amendment challenges).

MySpace's policy isn't illegal, but it might cost them via a civil suit:

"The law firms...said families from New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and South Carolina filed separate suits Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging negligence, recklessness, fraud and negligent misrepresentation by the companies.

"'In our view, MySpace waited entirely too long to attempt to institute meaningful security measures that effectively increase the safety of their underage users,' said Jason A. Itkin, an Arnold & Itkin lawyer."

As much as I'd like to see improvements to MySpace safety, this is not the way it should happen. Unfortunately, there's a big gap between what I think is right and what very well could result from this lawsuit.

Some background on the cases, from the story:

"The lawyers...said the plaintiffs include a 15-year-old girl from Texas who was lured to a meeting, drugged and assaulted in 2006 by an adult MySpace user, who is currently serving a 10-year sentence in Texas after pleading guilty to sexual assault.

"The others are a 15-year-old girl from Pennsylvania, a 14-year-old from New York and two South Carolina sisters, ages 14 and 15.

"Last June, the mother of a 14-year-old who says she was sexually assaulted by a 19-year-old user sued MySpace and News Corp., seeking $30 million in damages. That lawsuit, filed in a Texas state court, claims the 19-year-old lied about being a senior in high school to gain her trust and phone number."

First of all, in a right-and-wrong sense, this lawsuit is bunk. The parents' audacity is especially offensive -- at the least they were unable to detect their children's lies, and at the worst they didn't bother to find out where their kids were and who the kids were with. If MySpace is allowing 14-year-olds on the site, the companies should keep it clean enough for 14-year-old eyes. But once a kid logs off and goes to meet a guy she found online, it's no longer the Web site's fault.

That said, the legal aspect to the case could pose problems for MySpace. The main complaint is negligence; the other three look harder to prove, though I'm no lawyer.

According to WIkipedia, a negligence claim requires duty, breach of duty, causation and damage. The causation and damage are about given -- the MySpace meetings caused the assaults, and assaults, well, cause damage.

The big questions are (A) whether MySpace has a duty to users once they log off and (B) whether MySpace did not meet that duty.

Again, I think a Web site's duty ends at log-off. But the law looks at "reasonably foreseeable harm" (a notion most annoying in the "attractive nuisance" principle, which holds that if a child trespasses on my property and gets hurt, I can be sued, presuming my property contained a pool or something else a child might like).

Is it reasonably foreseeable that a huge, well-funded Web site might attract some pedophiles to prey on the 14-year-olds it explicitly invites? Yes. By law, then, said Web site should take steps to stop that, just like I have to take steps to stop trespassing kids from drowning in my pool.

The question turns to, did MySpace breach that duty? It's true that the site has made some efforts to protect users. From the story:

"MySpace has...added educational efforts and partnerships with law enforcement. The company has also placed restrictions on how adults may contact younger users on MySpace, while developing technologies such as one announced Wednesday to let parents see some aspects of their child's online profile, including the stated age. That tool is expected this summer."

Too little, too late? A subjective call, and sexually assaulted young teens make compelling witnesses.

The bottom line is that the parents failed in their duty to watch their kids. MySpace is a business, not a parent, and as such shouldn't have to worry about anything but making a great site. But years and years of American law hold that everyone has a duty to actively protect children, even when said children are doing things they shouldn't be.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://www.therationale.com.

Duke faculty refuses to back down from response to lacrosse case

Ah, the Dan Rather argument returns. The whole whites-rape-blacks-a-lot-out-of-racism thing proved false -- both in the Duke case and in the country at large -- but the comments 88 professors made in an ad months ago were true in spirit!

Here's what the professors originally said. I should note that it doesn't say the players are guilty, but it's certainly a response to that incident and an assumption that those evil white people just might do something like that:

"Regardless of the results of the police investigation, what is apparent everyday now is the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism, who see illuminated in this moment’s extraordinary spotlight what they live with everyday. They know that it isn’t just Duke, it isn’t everybody, and it isn’t just individuals making this disaster."

Right from the get-go, then, it was a cop-out argument. Even if nothing happened, these things happen all the time, so let's use this opportunity to protest, the logic goes.

And they didn't hesitate to include comments from students in the ad -- students who basically assumed guilt:

"This is not a different experience for us here at Duke University. We go to class with racist classmates, we go to gym with people who are racists....It’s part of the experience."

Yeah, racism to the degree of ultraviolent white-on-black rape happens all the time at elite universities; we just never hear about it.

The professors decided:

"The students know that the disaster didn’t begin on March 13th and won’t end with what the police say or the court decides. Like all disasters, this one has a history. And what lies beneath what we’re hearing from our students are questions about the future."

And here's what they're saying now:

"The ad has been read as a comment on the alleged rape, the team party, or the specific students accused. Worse, it has been read as rendering a judgment in the case. We understand the ad instead as a call to action on important, longstanding issues on and around our campus, an attempt to channel the attention generated by the incident to addressing these. We reject all attempts to try the case outside the courts, and stand firmly by the principle of the presumption of innocence."

The bottom line is that, whatever harm white racism does, that harm does not include rape. Blacks rape whites more than the reverse happens, even accounting for demographic trends. If the professors wanted an "even if it's not true, it shows underlying trends" case, they shouldn't have picked a rape.

Great summary of the Duke case here.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://www.therationale.com.

WSJ op-ed: Because of IQ, US schools can't improve

I find this Wall Street Journal piece fascinating. Charles Murray's thesis is that (A) American education can't be markedly improved and (B) IQ sets an upper threshold for what students can understand.

The second part is pretty much just plain true. The first part, however, was shocking to me -- after all, Murray himself has argued that school vouchers could drastically improve education, but now he's saying nothing can. And we always hear about how US students placed such-and-such in a ranking of so many countries on this or that skill.

I set out to test the idea, because Murray provides little in the way of data. The first thing I found is that, while the Flynn Effect was making IQ rise, US academic test scores dropped in the two decades starting in the mid-60s. Part of this was due to more kids taking the tests, but the government also found these things made a difference:

"[D]ecreases in the quantity of schooling which students experience, curriculum changes, declines in student motivation, and deterioration of the family system and social environment."

So, IQ isn't everything. Better education can improve test scores -- after all, if no one teaches you the information that's on the test, all the IQ in the world won't pick the answers out of thin air. How well is the US using its IQ assets?

First of all, things have improved since the 20-year problem the '60s caused. A 2000 report found:

"Standardized achievement tests attained record high levels in the mid- to late 1980’s and remain there.

"Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have risen to all-time highs. Gains have been especially dramatic for blacks and Hispanics.

"The proportion of students scoring above 650 on the SAT mathematics section attained record levels around 1995 and has remained at the all-time high. This cannot be accounted for by Asian-American students who are too few in number, constituting some 9% of all SAT test-takers. Of the 75% increase between 1981 and 1995, black, white, Hispanic and Native Americans accounted for 57%.

"The number of students taking Advanced Placement examinations his risen from just over 1000 in 1961 to over 1,000,000 currently.

"American students are second in the world in reading."

Great news, but just because the US improved since its fall doesn't mean it's measuring up. Using a list of countries' IQs from IQ and the Wealth of Nations (data here and here), along with a list of reading and math PISA scores for OECD countries' students, I ran some numbers.

The data is on Google Spreadsheets here. I excluded countries for which there was no IQ data.

The first thing that struck me was the correlation between test scores and IQ, r=.73 for reading and .82 for math. Clearly, there's a link there.

But what I found more fascinating was that the correlation between math test scores and reading test scores, r=.94, was even higher. This is odd, because IQ includes both verbal and spatial components -- it should predict the two tests better than they predict each other.

There are a variety of possible reasons for this, including the fact that the reading and math numbers were collected by the same organization, while the IQ numbers are estimated from a wide range of studies. But I think there's something else going on, education. Education prepares people for both reading and math tests. If a country has a high average IQ, its students will do better. But if they augment that high IQ with good education, the students will truly stand out. The reading and math tests pick up on that effort, while the IQ tests are designed not to (IQ doesn't change after about age 5, before most of the educating takes place).

So the money question: How does the US measure up? Our IQ is 98 (normed to the UK at 100), our reading score is 495.18 and our math score is 482.89. The countries I looked at had averages of 97.45, 482.97 and 486.59 respectively. The standard deviations are 4.99, 39.98 and 52.08.

So, the US has a slightly above-average IQ for this sample of OECD countries. We're .11 standard deviations above the mean. We've done well with it in reading, where our kids score 12.21 points (.31 standard deviations) above the average. (We're far from second in the world, though, in the PISA data.) Where we're not doing so well is in math, where our above-average IQ gets us below average (albeit slightly, .07 standard deviations) results.

Murray himself admits that some schools, particularly in the inner cities, are terrible. Improving these schools, no doubt, could boost performance. Where he's shockingly right, however, is in that US schools are about where they should be, given the country's IQ.

Hat tip Steve Sailer.

I reviewed Murray's latest book here.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://www.therationale.com/.

UPDATE: I've re-uploaded the spreadsheet and changed the link. I added what I call the IQ utilization score -- calculated by averaging a country's math and reading performances in deviation from the mean. Then, I subtracted the country's IQ advantage, also in standard deviations. Essentially, it's a way of asking, given a country's intellectual abilities, how much is the culture and school system getting?

Finland, Canada and Ireland fared quite well. Italy and Uruguay, not so much. The US had a very slightly positive score, meaning we're outperforming our IQ just a little.

UPDATE II: I found an interesting thing about my IUS measure. While two of the worst-performing countries, Italy and Uruguay, aren't high-IQ states, there is a correlation of -.344 between IQ and IUS. In theory there should be no tie -- by and large, if a country is X standard deviations above the mean, its students should be too.

There are two reasons I can think of. One is that countries simply aren't getting the mileage they should out of smart kids, even in countries with lots of smart kids.

The other is the Asian phenomenon. As an ethnicity, Asians do very well on math tests, but not so much on language ones. It's possible the IQ scores pick up on the math, but the performance measure picks up more reading. This would make high-IQ Asian states have low IUS's.

UPDATE III: I found some slight corroboration to the Asian thesis. I calculated separate math and reading IUDs, and the math one correlated better with IQ (r=-.37) than the reading one did (-.29). However, the reading one still correlates quite highly with IQ, so that's not the whole story. For some reason, countries with high IQ don't get as high of test scores as they should. Some sort of regression-to-the-mean-like phenomenon?

I suppose it would have been ideal to compare the reading scores to the verbal portion of an IQ test, but I don't have that data.

UPDATE IV: I wanted to figure out where, exactly, the IUS-IQ correlation was coming from, so I divided the countries into the top half and bottom half of IQ. Those in the top half had an r of -.73 (!); the bottom, POSITIVE .31. It seems that the further above average your country's IQ gets, the less good it does in increasing school performance. Diminishing returns, if you will. Meanwhile, if your country has a below-average IQ, the closer it gets to average, the more good it does.

In other words, increasing average IQ from 98 to 99 does more good than increasing it from 92 from 93 -- but it also does more good than increasing it from 105 to 106.

More on The Joyce Foundation

Instapundit has a new blurb about the Harvard study I blogged about yesterday. It links to yet more details about the funding group, The Joyce Foundation, and its anti-gun bias.

The post makes the point that, if the NRA funded such research, all hell would break loose.

As I wrote in an e-mail to Instapundit:

"The notion has a historical precedent.

"John Lott's more guns/less crime study was paid for with a grant he earned -- and people attacked him because one of the funders (the John M. Olin Foundation) was loosely linked to a gun manufacturer (the Olin Corporation, which makes ammunition). The university faculty, not the foundation or the corporation, chose Lott to receive the grant. And as Reason pointed out, the Olin Foundation is to the gun industry as the Ford Foundation is to auto manufacturers."

Note to Doug Giles

Before you challenge the notion that Southerners are dumb, learn the word "majority":

"Dasypygals on the left who incessantly bash the South and hate everything sweet home Alabama stands for ought to eat a little sautéed crow tonight and send the South a thank you card in the morning, as the South makes up the overwhelming majority of the armed forces who [sic] protect our country and are willing to take a bullet for these ungrateful and derisive jackasses. The South accounts for 35% of the population, but 41% of the military recruits."

And after realizing that 41 percent is less than 50 percent, try figuring out that 33 percent is lower than 35 percent:

"Also, note to single guys: from Georgia peaches to Mississippi belles, there’s no doubt about it: southern women are prettier. Since the first Miss America pageant in 1921, one-third of the winners have been Southern."

Then try picking up some grammar:

"The fact that we haven’t flushed God and Christ down the toilet, as the anti-Christ secularists want us to do, has made the liberal, tassel-shoed Nancy’s [sic] have a hissy. When other sectors of our society are shamefully caving to the godless cabal’s secular agenda and keeping quite [sic] about their convictions, the South sits back, yawns, scratches its belly, and then shoots these glib sisters a defiant rebel finger... And here’s [sic] a few more things...You will not here [sic] this stuff within the haggard halls of revisionist universities."

I totally deserve a syndicated column more than this guy does.

Trump bashes Condi, praises Hillary

These comments Trump made, praising Hillary Clinton, got me curious. So, I looked up the guy's campaign contributions online.

He seems to like helping politicians out, across party and state lines:

Total Contributions: 137200.00
Total Soft Money: 87000.00
Total Joint Fundraising: 21000.00

And regarding Hillary, he's put his money where his mouth is:

TRUMP, DONALD
NEW YORK, NY 10022
THE TRUMP ORGANIZATION

...

CLINTON, HILLARY RODHAM
VIA FRIENDS OF HILLARY
05/01/2002 1000.00 22020552886

...

CLINTON, HILLARY RODHAM
VIA FRIENDS OF HILLARY
03/23/2005 1000.00 25020181197

...

CLINTON, HILLARY RODHAM
VIA FRIENDS OF HILLARY
09/30/2005 900.00 25020441837
12/02/2005 1000.00 26020092466

...

CLINTON, HILLARY RODHAM
VIA FRIENDS OF HILLARY
11/01/2006 200.00 26021042422

His kid likes her too:

TRUMP, DONALD J JR
NEW YORK, NY 10022
TRUMP ENTERPRISES/VICE PRESIDENT

CLINTON, HILLARY RODHAM
VIA FRIENDS OF HILLARY
11/01/2006 2100.00 26021042423

Final interesting tidbit -- he was quite the fan of our boy Mark Foley:

TRUMP, DONALD
NEW YORK, NY 10022
INVESTMENTS

FOLEY, MARK
VIA FRIENDS OF MARK FOLEY
12/30/1997 500.00 98032720033
05/08/1998 500.00 98033371334
05/08/1998 500.00 98033371335
02/18/1999 1000.00 99034730470
11/28/2000 1000.00 21036894941

...

FOLEY, MARK
VIA FRIENDS OF MARK FOLEY
10/30/2002 1000.00 23990712395
05/29/2003 2000.00 23991355850

...

FOLEY, MARK
VIA FRIENDS OF MARK FOLEY
09/27/2005 1000.00 25971137347
05/25/2006 1000.00 26930237821

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://www.therationale.com.

The Duke case and interracial rape

Nicholas Stix has an extensive article on VDARE about the Duke lacrosse rape hoax. Definitely worth a read.

I have to take issue with these comments on interracial rape, however:

"As the U.S. Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Study (NCVS) has shown, between 2001 and 2003, there were, on average, 15,400 black-on-white rapes per year, while whites averaged only 900 white-on-black rapes per year (a black-white ratio of 17.1:1). As Parker noted, the proportion of single-attacker white-on-black rape is so rare as to be statistically non-existent (less than one-half of one percent).

"Since there are five-and-one-half times as many whites as blacks in America, that means that blacks rape whites over ninety times as frequently as whites rape blacks. Except that the black-white interracial gap is actually much higher. The 'white' figure (900) is inflated by Hispanic offenders being counted as white. And no reliable statistics for interracial prison rape were included in the NCVS. Thus, the real black-white ratio is likely 200:1 or higher."

Now, it's true that a random black is, by these numbers, 200 times more likely to rape a white than a random white is to rape a black. But shocking as it is, 200:1 is not a useful ratio.

I'd like to draw attention to the five-and-one-half number. Stix assumes that because there are more whites than blacks, there should be more whites raping blacks. This makes sense on its face.

But the problem is this: Blacks are a minority, so blacks will make up a minority of potential victims for a white rapist. And whites are a majority, so they represent a majority of potential victims for a black rapist.

Let's figure out what the statistically "neutral" ratio would be, and compare it to 17.1:1. According to Wikipedia, the U.S. is 75 percent white/Hispanic and 12 percent black. That's 87 percent of the population. So out of every 87 rapes within the black and white/Hispanic communities, whites "should" commit 75 and blacks 12.

Of the whites' 75 rapes, 13.7 percent of them (12/87) "should" be of blacks. That's 10.3 white-on-black rapes.

Of the blacks' 12 rapes, 86.3 percent (75/87) will be of whites. That's also 10.3 rapes -- statistically, the fact there are more whites than blacks in America means nothing. More whites may mean more white rapists, but it also means more white victims, and the two cancel. Stix assumes there should be five-and-one-half white-on-black rapes for every black-on-white rape, but in reality there would be a one-for-one swap in a statistically "fair" world.

1:1 is, of course, still a far cry from the 17.1:1 Stix reports. Is this because blacks target whites, or simply because blacks rape more?

Blacks indeed are three to four times more likely than whites to rape. Even using the higher estimate, we "should" have a 4:1 interracial rape ratio. The fact there's a 17.1:1 ratio implies that in addition to raping more in general, blacks choose whites as victims more often than the reverse happens.

So, Stix's broader point -- that black-on-white rape is more common than white-on-black rape, both in absolute numbers and in proportion -- stands. The media is out of line to imply otherwise. But a 200:1 ratio, even counting prison rape and the conflation of white and Hispanic racial categories, seems out of the question.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://www.therationale.com.

Very brief review of The Good Shepherd

Two words: too much.

The thing is two hours and forty minutes long, and that still isn't enough time to develop all the separate plots and familiarize the audience with a zillion characters. If you've already seen it, this Wikipedia summary might let you in on what the hell happened.

It's loosely anti-CIA, though not quite the screed I'd expect from an Alec Baldwin project.

Finally, the timeline bounces around constantly. Wikipedia unfortunately/fortunately doesn't do this justice, rearranging the events so they actually make sense. If I can find a different summary that will let me map out the timeline, I'll post it.

UPDATE: I just noticed this -- even the lengthy Wikipedia summary leaves out an entire subplot, that of a CIA-arranged mission to drop hostile bugs on a Latin American coffee field. I presume this was to stop the spread of communism, but I'm not real clear on why a CIA officer's finger got sent back in a jar.