Recommended: The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking

Democratic presidential candidates are signing on to the “Green New Deal” and a number of municipal authorities have set the goal of running on 100% “green” energy by 2025 or 2030. It sure sounds nice, but is it real? I suggest reading Mark Mills’ paper The “New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking”. Mills is a physicist, and he argues, in excruciating detail,  that the laws of physics, let alone the realities of economics, make these blue sky promises just that - nothing more than empty promises.  

In fact, as I have argued before, the only possible way we could get to 100% “green” energy anytime in the next half century or so would be to vastly expand the number of nuclear power plants in the country, and given the American public’s irrational fear of nuclear power, that isn’t likely to happen. (Irrational? There have been less than 300 recorded deaths worldwide from nuclear accidents since nuclear power was invented half a century ago.  By contrast, the estimates are that between 7500 and 52,000 people A YEAR die in the USA alone from power plant pollution. Which should we really be worried about???)

On differing views

I belong to an informal group of about a dozen people, about half of each gender, most of whom meet once a week at a friend’s house for morning coffee and a free-flowing discussion about world events, local issues and anything else that comes up. A couple of people in this group live elsewhere and contribute via email. Everyone is highly educated, but apart from that we represent a wide diversity of national and cultural backgrounds, life experiences, subject specialties, political views, etc.

Now in the highly partisan, highly divisive, highly hostile and critical atmosphere of today’s American culture, this group is unusual in that we seem to have quite amicable and respectful explorations of differing views and opinions, in which many of us change our minds, modify our views, or come to a new understanding of others. It got me to thinking about how one approaches people with differing views.

A typical reaction in America today on meeting or reading the writings of someone with a different political or cultural view is to dismiss them at least as ignorant or uniformed or misinformed, if not outright evil. But if one thinks about it, the all-too-common statement “I can’t see why anyone would be so [dumb, ignorant, misinformed, etc] as to believe that” is really in fact a statement about our own ignorance. Clearly they do believe what they believe, and they believe it for reasons which seem perfectly sound to them, and if we can’t see why they believe what they believe then clearly that reflects some profound ignorance on our own part.

One can react to this basically in three different ways. One can dismiss them and their views out of hand. That is the most comfortable reaction and what most people seem to do and it just leaves us bound in our own ignorance, perhaps feeling falsely virtuous from our supposedly “superior” understanding of the world.

One can argue with them, but that just pits our own cultural and life experiences, assumptions and biases against theirs, and since each of us is arguing from within our own different cognitive and emotional framework, arguments seldom change anyone’s mind or accomplish anything useful. Still, many people seem to love the emotional high and virtuous feeling that arguments give them.

Or one can freely admit one’s ignorance and explore with them respectfully and with an open mind just why they believe what they believe. It is important to do this from a serious commitment on our own part of wanting to learn and understand the other’s views, rather than as just an exercise in gathering ammunition for our next assault on them. One needs to begin with the assumption (obviously true if one thinks about it) that they may well be right and it is we who are wrong because of our own ignorance or assumption or biases or cultural and life experiences.  It’s amazing what one can learn about other people’s lives, other people’s experiences, other people’s assumptions and biases, and other people’s cultures with this approach. And it is amazing how often that new understanding will modify one’s own views.

Of the three approaches, only the third is productive, only the third reduces our own ignorance. Too bad it is so rarely deployed.

Hopeless gestures

I see that Democrats are still having trouble letting go of their “Russian collusion” delusions about Trump, despite the special prosecutor declining to indict Trump or any of his associates on those charges, though he did snare a number of associates on other unrelated charges. Democrats in the House have embarked on two other hopeless efforts to prolong the agony though.

1.  House Democrats have demanded that the IRS supply them with copies of President Trump’s taxes for the past six years. This will of course fail, if for no other reason than that Trump can refuse and all Congress can do is hold him in contempt of Congress and ask the Department of Justice to prosecute him, which a Republican DOJ can simply choose not to do. And if they take him to court the legal process, including appeals, will stretch well beyond even a second term, and therefore be moot even if they won (which they might not). Democrats surely know this, so clearly this is just a base-pleasing media maneuver, not a serious attempt.

In any case, even if he provided them with copies of his tax returns, it would be illegal for the House to make any of the contents public, which of course would be the whole point of trying to get them in the first place.  Tax returns are by law confidential, and revealing any of the contents would subject the person who revealed them to prosecution. So this whole effort is just political theater.

2. House Democrats are demanding to see Muller’s entire un-redacted report.  They will fail, for a perfectly good reason.  By law grand jury testimony and materials are secret. Nothing a grand jury sees or hears can be made public unless it is embedded in an indictment. There is a perfectly good reason for this – if a prosecutor doesn’t think there is a crime, or at least a winnable case and chooses not to file an indictment, that prosecutor is not allowed to try to “get” the  person under investigation anyway by leaking dirty laundry from the grand jury hearings. By all accounts almost every page of Muller’s report contains information from the grand jury, so the House Democrats not going to get to see it, not least because everyone knows perfectly well that the Democrats will leak to the press, probably out of context, anything they think might hurt Trump.

Once again, Democrats understand this, so the attempt is nothing more than another piece of political theater.

I would like to see a resurgent Democratic party emerge to balance Trump’s excesses, but all I see from Democrats thus far is short-sighted, mean-spirited trench warfare and a lot of incompetence. Given that, I would give Trump better than even odds of being re-elected to a second term, not based on any brilliance on his part, but rather on the continuing incompetence and short-sightedness of the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi, I think, understands this, which is why she is trying – with only moderate success – to damp down the unrealistic proposals of her House members. But some of her fellow Democrats in the House are apparently so lost in their anti-Trump rage that they can’t think strategically about what is needed to win upcoming elections.

As near as I can tell, our political systems is just as dysfunctional as the British one right now.

More on intelligence

A few more comments on intelligence, prompted by various responses to my last post:

1. The more intelligent one is, the higher the probability on average of doing well. But the correlation is by no means perfect. There are lots of other attributes that matter – personality, persistence, willingness to work hard, willingness to take risks, etc, etc. Mensa is an organization that only accepts people who score in the top 2% of intelligence tests – yet not every Mensa member is highly successful. For some the only distinction in their lives is that they managed to qualify for Mensa.  On the other hand there are plenty of people who wouldn’t score especially high on an IQ test, but who are brilliant at what they do.

2. Intelligence is different than wisdom. There are plenty of people who are brilliant in some field, but not very wise. And there are people who are of average intelligence, but who are unusually wise. The intelligent know lots of things. The wise know what matters and what doesn’t. Of the the two wisdom is probably the more valuable, and also probably harder to find.

3. IQ tests are designed to make distinctions in the middle range, where most of the people fall. They are by design not very good at making distinctions out in the tails, where there are not many people and so not many samples. The difference, say, between an IQ score of 135 and 145 might just be one or two questions which the subject happened to get right or wrong, or a few seconds difference in completing a task. So people who compare their scores out in that range are on thin ice. It may be that all one can really say with confidence is that they are a lot brighter than average.

4. As I mentioned before, IQ tests are only a rough measure of intellectual ability. Human intelligence is multi-factor, meaning it has lots of parts. Everyone has met people who are brilliant in some field, say math, yet hopeless in other fields. Indeed, we are all that way – good at some things and hopeless at others. IQ tests take a sample across a few of these various factors and compute a rough measure of intelligence.  It’s enough to sort out army recruits effectively, which was its original purpose, but it is by no means a comprehensive assay of an individual’s mental abilities. We don’t know enough about human intelligence to build such a comprehensive test.

The uncomfortable reality of human intelligence

Intelligence tests were developed for the Army in World War I. The army had a problem: how to filter out those potential recruits who simply weren’t smart enough to do any useful job in the army, and how to do it before the army had wasted valuable time and money trying (unsuccessfully) to train them. In the intervening years considerable work has been done to improve and tune these tests. Of course they are only a rough measure of intelligence, since human intelligence is expressed in many subtle and individual ways, not all of which are captured by the tests. Nevertheless, as a gross measure of intelligence the tests are pretty good despite what some critics argue.

Now intelligence is “normally distributed” in the population. That means, measured over large groups of people, it tends to be distributed in a Gaussian or “bell shaped” curve, just like some other attributes, like height or weight.  Most people are clustered around the middle, with a diminishing proportion in the tails, either much less or much more intelligent.  

  

Intelligence tests are standardized so that the mean score (the middle) is 100. There is a measure (I won’t define it. You can look it up in Wikipedia if you want the details) called the “standard deviation” which divides the normal distribution, and intelligence tests are standardized to have a standard deviation of 15. Each colored bar above is 1 standard deviation.

The diagram shows what proportion of the population falls into each area. For example, 34% of people will have an IQ between 100 and 115, and 68% will have an IQ that falls somewhere between 85 and 115.  Similarly, only 2% of the population will be in the 130-145 range (the gifted range) , and only 0.1% above 145 (the genius range).

Now in World War I the American army found that potential recruits more than one standard deviation below the mean (IQ of 84 or less) simply were not useful in the army, and so were not accepted for service. These days the armed forces use the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) for the same purpose.

In general it takes an IQ of about 115 or above to successfully do demanding undergraduate level college work (not counting the dumbed-down courses some colleges have created for their more intellectually-challenged athletes). But no doubt a few people with lower IQs who are hard workers and persistent also make it – persistence and hard work is a great equalizer. A postgraduate degree in science or math may well take more than that.

Now when Bernie Sanders proposes “college for all” this is the reality his proposal faces – less than 20% the population has the intellectual capacity to do demanding college level academic work, and some of those probably aren't interested or temperamentally suited to academic work. We ought to have, as many European countries do, an alternate apprentice or trade school route, equally valued in society, for the other 80+ % of the population, many of whom would be excellent, and could earn a good living, at many non-academic trades. Unfortunately we have developed a snobbishness among our elite (including the media) which only values a college education.  Note that currently about 30% of Americans have at least a 4-year college degree, but then colleges have added a lot of less academically demanding courses, as well (under pressure from college administrators) as skewing grading standards to produce more graduations so that the college ranks higher.

Similarly, when one looks at some of the absurd things people will believe, especially from their politicians, keep in mind the curve above. Half the population, including roughly half the vote-eligible population, falls below the mean IQ of 100.

Now this is a touchy subject, probably politically incorrect in some liberal circles, but it is reality nonetheless, and it is a reality we badly need to come to terms with. In an increasingly technological world, where an increasing proportion of jobs require more than average intelligence, what is to become of the massive proportion of the population that cannot cope?  Once upon a time a less intelligent person could still get a job as, say, a ditch digger.  Have you seen ditches being dug today? The “ditch digger” will be a highly skilled machine operator sitting on top of a quarter-million dollar machine. Even the intellectually unchallenging (but not necessarily easy) assembly line jobs are now largely done by robots.

It’s clear we as a society need to do at least two things: (1) stop assuming that only college graduates are worth hiring, and (2) think hard about how the less intellectually endowed among us can find valued work that pays a living wage in an increasingly technological world.

Recommended: Unmasking the College-Admissions Fraud

Along the same lines as the previous post, I recommend the article today Unmasking the College-Admissions Fraud. It makes the point that there is a lot more wrong with the system that just this recent cheating scandal.

The emperor’s new clothes

In the current American anti-elitist and anti-intellectual political atmosphere, the ongoing college admissions cheating scandal makes great press, with wonderful villains. But in truth, there is nothing here that we all didn’t already know about the inequality and failings of the American higher education system.

We already knew that Ivy League colleges were big corporations that worried far more about building huge (tax free) endowments and lucrative salaries and posh offices for the administrators (more deans than professors in some cases) than about educating the students, despite their expensive marketing propaganda.

We already knew that donating a building or endowing a chair, or knowing a trustee or looking rich enough that one might be persuaded to make a donation, was a reliable way of getting a child into the college.  

We already knew that most college undergraduate education (and a good bit of postgraduate education) doesn’t prepare students for the world of work. Indeed, the so-called “distribution requirements” that for example required a math major to take English literature or foreign languages, supposedly to “broaden” their education, were really in place to ensure that the less popular English departments or foreign language departments got enough students to survive.

We already knew that SAT and ACT coaching schools existed to help the well-off do better on their admission tests (though few know that research shows that just taking the test several times is about as effective as an expensive coaching school).

We already knew that Ivy League students tend to do better on average than students from other schools, simply because they usually come from wealthier families who could afford better private k-12 education (not to mention better health care and nutrition) before college, and whose connections get them better jobs after graduation. On top of that, these schools have enough applicants that they can pick from among just the top 1% or less.  In fact there is little or no evidence that Ivy League school actually provide a better education than many state universities.

We already knew that the real point of going to an Ivy League school for many students, and for many parents, is simply to be able to say one went to that school – to get the “branding” of an Ivy League education.

Of course if one wants to work in one of the fields controlled by “old boys networks”, like high powered Manhattan legal firms, then attending the “right schools” matters, because one meets “the right people”. It than case the old saying fits: “ It’s not what you know but who you know that matters.”

So titillating as this story is, it doesn’t really tell us anything new about how the rich work the system to their advantage. Money always talks!