| Wednesday,
July 2, 2003
Subject: Glimmerings of a clue.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/01/1056825375795.html
------- Roland Dobbins
Subject: Which is the tail, and which the dog?
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/030701/latu062a_1.html
------- Roland Dobbins
I suppose I should cheer about the next one, but
I have some mixed emotions.
Subject: You're covered!
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59424,00.html
----- Roland Dobbins
I will get into the whys of my misgivings another
time.
Subject: Martin rees and Man In Space
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/story.php?storyID=13790
Is it too wild to want to get into Space?
Mark Huth mhuth at coldswim.com
Indeed.
Subject: California borders and potential terrorists
Apparently, in addition to bringing in undocumented
laborers, criminal gangs in California have smuggled in dozens of Middle
Easterners in the past several years.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/
terencejeffrey/tj20030702.shtml
"Rather than stop illegal border crossings
generally, the government is trying to pick out the potential Middle
Eastern terrorists sneaking in among the Latin American jobseekers."
I feel so much safer already.
Steve Setzer
Don't we all?
And a new essay by Greg
Cochran:
How the Ashkenazi Got Their Smarts
Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any
ethnic group. They score 0.75 to 1.0 standard deviations above the general
European average, which corresponds to an IQ score around 112-115. . This
fact has social significance, because IQ (as measured by IQ tests) is a
good predictor of success in academic subjects and many jobs. Jews are
just as successful in such jobs as their tested IQ would predict, and are
hugely overrepresented in those jobs and accomplishments with the highest
cognitive demands. During the 20th century, they made up about 3% of the
US population, but won 27% of the US Nobel science prizes and 25% of the
ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of world chess
champions.
This is not exactly news. I'm telling you something
your grandmother knew. Popular opinion has held that Jews are smart for a
long time - although, interestingly, not in Classical times - and such
stereotypes are usually decent approximations of the truth.
Ashkenazi Jews have an unusual cognitive ability
profile, as well as higher-than-average IQ. They have high verbal and
mathematical scores, while their visuospatial abilities are typically
somewhat worse (by about half a standard deviation) than the European
average. Han Eysenck noted that "The correlation between verbal and
performance tests is about 0.77 in the general population, hut only 0.31
among Jewish children. Differences of 10-20 points have been found in
samples of Jewish children; there is no other group that shows anything
like this size difference. " Their pattern of success is what you
might expect from this ability distribution - great success in mathematics
and literature, more typical results in painting, sculpture, and
architecture.
Just as important, Sephardic and Oriental Jews do
_not_ have higher-than-average IQs, nor are they tremendously
overrepresented in cognitively demanding fields.
Any attempt at a causal explanation of Ashkenazi
cognitive abilities must explain high Ashkenazi IQ, the unusual structure
of their cognitive abilities, and the nonexistence of these traits among
Sephardic/Oriental Jews and among Jews as a whole in Classical times. It
must also be consistent with the neodarwinian synthesis, the historical
record, and genetic data.
The natural approach is to look for a historical
situation in which natural selection strongly favored this trait
constellation. Immediately, we see that conditions among Jews were
especially suitable for rapid evolutionary change. They lived in an
unusual ecological situation, and they were reproductively isolated.
Reproductive isolation means that there was very
little gene flow between the Jews and neighboring non-Jewish populations,
very little intermarriage. This is course what the historical record
indicates, but the genetic evidence is even stronger. We see that the
majority of Y-chromosomes among the Ashkenazi are associated with
Mideastern clades; this is enough to show that per-generation gene flow
from surrounding Europeans (from males, anyhow) averaged less than 0.5%
over many generations. Such reproduction isolation is almost a
prerequisite for strong natural selection: if a population undergoing
unusual selective pressures mixes heavily with a much larger population
experiencing typical selective pressures, nothing happens.
The other important point is that Jews lived unusual
lives, compared with most other population. By about 800 AD, almost all of
them lived in cities. The great majority of almost every other ethnic
group were farmers - they _had_ to be, since in premodern times farmers
did not produce much above their own requirements, and it took several
farmers to support one city-dweller. To the extent that the demands and
rewards of urban life differed from those of farmers, the selective
pressures experienced by Jews were unusual.
In earlier times, the great majority of Jews were
themselves farmers. This means that in Classical times, they had not yet
experienced unusual selective pressures, and in those days nobody thought
that they were especially smart. The process that eventually resulted in
high Ashkenazi IQ had not yet occurred.
For there to be strong selection for IQ, individuals
with high IQs must have had more surviving children than average. Today,
of course, that does not happen, but there is reason to think that it was
sometimes the case in premodern Europe. In those days, wealthy people had
quite a few more surviving children than average, so if high IQ increased
income, there could have been selection for IQ in some situations.
The strength of this trend depended very much on the
way an individual made a living. A dirt farmer with strong mathematical
and verbal talents probably didn't do much better than average, but a
merchant with such talents was likely to become wealthy and could raise a
large family. In other words, the fitness/IQ derivative (which we will
call the IQ elasticity) was not the same for all occupations.
This means that the occupational mix experienced by
a population group was very important in determining the selective forces
experienced by that population.
The Ashkenazi, in their beginnings in Western
Europe, were mostly moneylenders. After they migrated to the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, for a long time most were moneylenders,
tax farmers, toll-farmers, and estate managers. They had to manage complex
financial transactions, and those who did well made more money and had
more children. Prosperous Jews may have averaged twice as many surviving
children than poor Jews, and they made their money with their wits, rather
than by inheritance or fighting skills, as in most other European elites.
For hundreds of years, _most_ of the Ashkenazi had
jobs with high IQ elasticity, while at the same time experiencing very low
gene flow with neighboring populations. This situation was unique. There
were certainly non-Jewish groups in Europe that had occupations with high
IQ elasticity - merchants in Bristol or Rotterdam for example - but they
were not reproductively isolated. They kept marrying non-merchants. The
Jews of Islam, although reproductively isolated, seem not have had the
necessary concentration of occupations with high IQ elasticity. Some had
such jobs in some of the Arab world, in some periods, but it seems it was
never the case that _most_ did. In part this was because other minority
groups competed successfully for these jobs - Greek Christians, Armenians,
etc., in part because Moslems, at least some of the time, took many of
those jobs themselves, valuing non-warrior occupations more highly than
medieval Christians. In fact, to a large extent, and especially during the
last six or seven hundred years of relative Moslem decline, the Jews of
Islam tended to have 'dirty' jobs. These included such tasks as cleaning
cesspools and drying the contents for use as fuel - a common Jewish
occupation in Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and Central Asia. Jews were also
found as tanners, butchers, hangmen, and other disagreeable or despised
occupations. I think that such jobs had low IQ elasticity - probably
brilliant tanners did not get rich.
Only the Ashkenazi had low gene flow and a
preponderance of occupations with high IQ elasticity for hundreds of
years. That is enough to have caused the IQ increase that we observe. The
narrow-sense heritability of IQ is at least 0.3 - that means if the
parents of the next generation average 1 point above the current
population average, the next generation (with equal environments) will
average 0.3 point higher. Continue this process for 40 generations and you
get an increase of 12 points, just about what we see today.
It also explains the pattern of mental abilities we
see in Ashkenazi Jews. Verbal and mathematical talent helped medieval
businessmen succeed, while spatiovisual abilities were irrelevant.
There have been other causes suggested. One,
'winnowing through persecution", suggests that only the smartest Jews
survived persecution. Why this should be so is not clear, particularly
there was no similar outcome in other groups such as Gypsies that faced
frequent persecution. Another theory suggests that there was selective
breeding for Talmudic scholarship. The are two fatal problems with this
hypothesis: first, it was wealth that caused increased fertility, not
scholarship. Second, there weren't very many rabbis, certainly less than
one percent of the population.. A selective force that only affects a
fraction of a percent of the population can never be strong, can never
cause significant change in tens of generations. One that that affects the
top 10 or 20% of the population can.
Albert Einstein said "Things should be
described as simply as possible, but no simpler." The same principle
must invoked in explaining Einstein himself.
Gregory Cochran
A good bit to think about here, and we'll get
back to it. Comments below.
And it's about time, but I have no confidence:
Douglas M. Colbary
I & C
The Electric Plant
City of Painesville
440.392.5944
440.392.5938 FAX
dcr001@earthlink.net
"You Can't See Where you stand,
From Where You Sit"
unknown
=======================
To balance that possible good news:
Subject: ''The government doesn't want people to
take matters into their own hands . . . "
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/183/metro/
Jail_time_possible_for_killing_protected_hawk-.shtml
--- Roland Dobbins
But we were born free. The government only wants
to help, you understand. Compassion.
Clearly cooperation with the regime is dangerous;
one needs to assert freedoms in secret. If that isn't the lesson they
think they are teaching, is it not the one to learn? I only ask.
And here is a man with a
view:
The proper way to occupy Iraq?
It certainly isn't the way you suggest! i.e."The
proper way to occupy Iraq is to build a comfortable enclave with good
defences and secure perimeter, garrison that, then bring in a client army
to do the actual occupation."
Quite frankly, if that's the way most of you Yanks
think then no wonder you're in such trouble - I've never read such
nonsense in my life. You do what you suggest and you'll end up having two
enemies to deal with, and frankly you'll deserve it as a reward for your
stupidity. Haven't you learned the lessons of Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan,
Somalia etc etc yet? Obviously not.
You want to do it properly? You want to do it as it
should be done, rather than as your hugely bloated military-industrial
complex seems to compel you to do? Then do it as the Australian Army does.
Like we did in Cambodia. What we did in Laos. How we handled East Timor.
We've just successfully finished five years of peace making in
Bougainville - that's right, bloody, savage, armed to the teeth,
thoroughly screwed up Bougainville - the Hell of the South Pacific. And
how did our lads do it? Well, totally unarmed for one thing - not a weapon
in sight, or out of sight for that matter. Yep, that's right, no guns at
all. Total Australian casualties? None. Total Bougainvillian casualties?
None. Prior to our arrival over 50 people per week were being killed in
that nasty little civil war. By late 1998 we had a truce in place and in
2001 we helped negotiate a comprehensive peace agreement.
As our Defence Minister Robert Hill said the other
day "The fact that it was an unarmed group - perhaps the first ever
peacekeeping group to serve without access to weapons - is sometimes
overlooked. But the absence of arms was fundamental to winning the trust
of the local population.".
So how is it done? Very simple. When Australian
troops arrive in a foreign land the first thing they do is establish fresh
clean water supplies - for the locals. Then we build hospitals, provide
medical supplies and services and start training the locals. Then we build
schools for the local children, supply them and again start training the
locals. Then we get in our agriculture experts to see what we can do to
stabilise and enhance local food production. We get to know the
inhabitants - show them we're friendly, find out what their concerns are
and how we can help. That generally takes up most of the first month.
Getting the picture? We win because we win their hearts and minds. We make
ourselves useful rather than try to repress the locals - a loser strategy
if ever there was one. We make ourselves indispensable. We provide clean
water, healthcare, education, sanitation, agricultural services and
security - no wonder they love us. Countries are actually better off for
being occupied by Australia. We also use technology that is appropriate
for the local circumstances - there's no point in using technology that
can't be sustained by the locals. That would just be a waste.
Total bill to Oz so far? Oh, about the price of a
couple of cruise missiles. Sure, in Bougainville we used 3,500 troops and
300 civilians but hell, we pay them anyway... Oh, and the locals handed in
over 90% of the known weapons in Bougainville. That's right - they handed
them in. No stupid, dangerous, provocative house to house searches thanks
very much. Funny what happens when you ask people politely and point out
how it is in their best interests. No threats, just gentle, persistent
persuasion.
You Americans should try it some time. Our Defence
Force Chief is General Peter Cosgrove. He's a friendly bloke. Ask him.
He'll tell you how it's done. What you're doing now is just murder, plain
and simple. Unfortunately your strategy is also murdering at least one
young American every day. Not smart. Not smart at all. American arrogance
may yet be the death of us all.
All the best! Dave Barry
P.S. You think it's hot in Iraq? Try Australia some
time! Bloody fantastic - I love the heat! At least that's what I say every
Winter...
I am tempted to leave this
unanswered, but I suppose I should say a few words.
Of course what I was saying and have said all
along is that the proper way to occupy Iraq is not to be there at all; but
I suspect I was a bit too subtle for this reader. But I mean every word
about the logic of empire: an empire must look to the health and safety
and morale of its soldiers, first and foremost; then to its citizens; and
then to its clients. Of course I put my statement in as brutal a fashion
as I could; in the real world the language of diplomacy is employed, and
clients are given titles and privileges (or at least their rulers are). As
an essayist I can afford to be honest; were I really in charge of the
world I'd have to be a lot more careful about what I say.
And of course most people don't think as I do, or
I wouldn't have to write about it.
But the world is as it is, and soldiers are as
they are; and things have not changed since that Centurion wrote in the
3rd Century "If we find you have left our bones to bleach in this
desert for nothing, beware the fury of the Legions." Empires have to
worry about such things. Republics don't, but republics don't do a lot of
occupation of foreign lands, or nation building.
Finally, Mr. Barry, I am not in charge although
you seem to think we are. But I am certain the Australians are far better
people than we Yanks, and know far better how to run someone else's
country, and your friendly blokes will be glad to instruct us. And I
invite you to send your unarmed forces to Iraq. Better you than us.
You can then politely ask the Palestinians to
disarm, and Hezbollah and Hamas, and gollies, soon you will have the
Middle East a nice place with everyone being orderly and polite. Why
didn't we think of that?
I would, however, appreciate your views on the
lessons we should have learned but did not learn from Korea? Please tell
me what the Australians would have done, and done better that we did
there? As for me, I thought we ought to have come home when the Cold War
ended, and stop being involved in the territorial disputes of Asia as well
as Europe; I never thought that we had much reason for large standing
armies and a big missile establishment once there were not 26,000 warheads
aimed at us, and large armies poised to be on the Rhine in hours.
It's true that standing down from Korea would
have taken a few years, first to convince the South Koreans that we were
serious, then to give them time to look to their own defenses (and allow
the Japanese to consider their options as well); but had we begun in 1992
we would have all the troops home now.
The lesson of Viet Nam is simpler: don't entirely
abandon your allies. In 1972 the North Vietnamese sent 150,000 troops
south. Almost none returned alive. The US lost about 600 men in the entire
year. ARVN with US materiel support and US air support devastated an army
that came south with more armor than the Wehrmacht ever had during WW II.
I would say that lesson was that the US with allies can defeat damn near
anything. True, in 1975 the Democrats in Congress voted to abandon South
Viet Nam and send ARVN 20 cartridges and 2 hand grenades per man, and no
air support; once again an army with as much armor as the Wehrmacht ever
had and as many trucks as Patton ever had swept south. This time ARVN was
defeated, and Saigon became Ho Chi Minh city, and the Boat People began
their exodus to many places -- did any get to Australia? But the
lesson was that US clients without US support can't defeat Russian clients
with Russian support: a lesson that one might have thought we would
understood without running the experiment.
In any event I am sure you will enlighten me as
to the lessons we should have learned; those were the ones I thought we
had learned.
And see below.
And then we have
Subject: This is Outrageous
Dr. Pournelle: I came across this where a man was
sentenced to life in prison for spitting on a police officer.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/934094.asp?0dm=C229N
I feel that judges that impose these absurd
sentences need to be removed from the bench and have their law licenses
revoked. There is very little excuse for this type of sentence. If the man
had shot the police officer and wounded the officer he would have only
gotten 20 years. But spitting seems to be more of a deadly weapon.
And don't let the airline security people get a hold
on this information. They would probably find a way to search for spitters
in the security gates.
Interesting times indeed and I feel so much
safer.
Ray Thompson
Systems Administrator
When you "leave it to the
professionals" for your health and safety, and substitute
"expert" government for self government, you must expect your
new experts to protect themselves with utmost severity. Why are you
surprised?
But in fact this seems a simple application of
Three Strikes. Siwash laws used to be pretty common in the US. Three time
losers and all that... See below.
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