| Tuesday, June
23, 2009
You will find
http://www.nytimes.com/
2009/06/21/nyregion/21about.html?
_r=3&ref=nyregion
interesting in many ways.
=====================
The Iranian Election and the Revolution Test,
Jerry
Based on what we're seeing and hearing from Iran - and
more importantly, what we're not seeing and hearing from Iran - I believe
this analysis is more likely correct than what we're getting from the MSM:
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/
20090622_iranian_election_and_revolution_test
Ed
This is pretty well my analysis. I thought of
the analogy to China when it first began. Now a number of Obama critics are
berating the president for not doing more in support of the uprising. I'm
not sure what he could have done. The United States is not popular in Iran
even among those who have smart phones. Injecting the US into Iranian
politics would probably be counter productive. Encouraging an uprising we
are not willing to support with blood and treasure is not often a good
policy: look where that got us after the First Gulf War when we encouraged
uprising in Iraq but then did nothing to support them.
The United States is not omnipotent, nor are we all wise.
Iran is not Iraq, and the government there has a far different relationship
to its people than Saddam Hussein and the Baathists had to the people of
Iraq. Is democracy the answer to all foreign relations questions? At one
time that was assumed. Democracies don't make war on each other. Liberal
democracy is the end of history. So we were once taught during the heady
years after the collapse of the USSR. I questioned that premise then, and it
seems even less obvious now.
I believe there may be a democracy in the Middle East (other
than Israel). It appears to be Gaza. It would certainly make war on Israel
given the means.
The world is a dangerous place.
==========
And if that isn't enough to think about
this morning:
Moore's Law is coming to an end - because of finance:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/
2009/06/21/isuppli_semi_process_forecast/
It reminds me of the trends noted long ago about the
high cost of fighters driving down the numbers bought. Makes sense.
Ed
===================
I put this in View rather than Mail because
it raises a fundamental question:
Indicator of Success:
IQ is not the most reliable indicator of success; far
from it. I believe that privilege is the single most reliable indicator of
success. The higher the level of priviledge to which one is born, the
greater the odds for one's success in life.
Given two prospects of equal IQ, one common born and
the other born to privilege, which will be the more likely to succeed? Even
if we extend that field to ten or even a hundred prospects of equal IQ, one
of whom is born to privilege, the expanded field might change the odds, but
not likely the outcome.
Bruce
My correspondent says "indicator" rather than "predictor".
When we discuss the utility of IQ, we generally mean as a predictor. There
is a difference.
There are a number of knotty problems raised in this common
sense observation. Most of us would agree with the general proposition that
privileged people do better in life than those not privileged; so what do we
mean when it is said that IQ is the best single indicator of success? In
what context is this true?
The classis example is grade prediction. The University of
Washington grade prediction program, funded by the Navy Electronics Lab back
when funding such studies was not so politically incorrect, took measures of
all the students coming into the University and gave them batteries of tests
as well as gathered a great deal of information about such matters as high
school grades, what school they went to, high school class standing (which
turned out to be more useful than high school grade, incidentally) and other
such measures. Then four years later we took the grade point average as well
as the major. We also had GPA in classes in the major. All this went into a
huge matrix and ended up with a multi-factor program that predicted the
grades of incoming students in a number of majors. This was supplied to the
student and various counselors.
The program worked pretty well. It wasn't exact, of course,
but if it predicted that you'd flunk out of pre-med, the odds that you'd get
grades good enough to get into medical school were way low.
Note that we had a very narrow definition of "success": what
GPA did you get after four years at the UW? Note also that while there was
some theory involved in selecting the predictor variables, none of that went
into generating the prediction equations. The formula fell out of the matrix
algebra manipulations of the data.
Similar studies elsewhere have got the same results. Most of
these have been academic and "success" was generally defined by grades, but
there have been other studies in other fields. The general proposition is
that if you take a group of people -- bank tellers, machinists, preachers,
officer candidates, gardeners -- and form a committee of experts to rank
order those people on their "success" in what they are doing, then what
measure might be used to predict how successful a single individual would
be? And the answer to that is almost IQ or some other measure of "g". This
doesn't mean that g will be a very good measure, but for most non-sports
activities g will be the best single predictor. Note, though, how we have
defined success here.
As to general success in life, I don't know how to define
that. We could I suppose use a committee of experts (although who is an
expert on life success?) to rank order a bunch of people, then look at IQ
vs. "privilege" to see which does a better job of such prediction. We'd need
a defined measure of "privilege", which I presume would be some measure of
parental socio-economic status. I'm not sure what the result of that
experiment would be (it may have been done; there have been a lot of such
studies).
We certainly have done studies of parental SES and IQ as
predictors of GPA in many schools and in many trades. Parental SES isn't as
good a predictor of success as a plumber or welder (I'm pretty sure I recall
those two studies, done a long time ago of course). IQ was better in those.
The point here is that "privilege" certainly helps. Among
other things, privileged children are likely to have better educations
because their parents have many more choices. If, however, you are trying to
make predictions about a group of privileged kids -- say the incoming class
to an exclusive prep school -- you'll find by and large that IQ does a
better job than parental SES. I wouldn't care to speculate about predicting
success at being, say, a stock broker, where parental SES would have a lot
of influence over whom you know and whom you meet. Clearly we all know
stories of successful privileged but stupid aristocrats. IQ or "g" is a
powerful predictor, but one does need to qualify generalizations with the
usual "other things being equal."
Tuesday TOP
Current Mail
|
