Marcia Coyle has been covering the Supreme Court for several decades now as the chief Washington correspondent for the National Law Journal. She often appears on PBS’s The News Hour to explain Supreme Court rulings, and makes the most complex decisions easy to understand.
In her new book The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution she weaves a fascinating tale of personalities, legal precedents, and Supreme Court protocol to give a wonderful flavor of what goes on in legal cases going before the Supreme Court. The book is organized around four landmark decisions the Roberts Court has produced since John Roberts became Chief Justice, the 2007 challenge to race-based public school assignments in Louisville and Seattle, the Washington DC handgun ban in District of Columbia vs Heller, the Citizens United campaign finance case, and the 2012 challenge to the Affordable Health Care act (Obamacare).
This is a wonderful book, not only because it is free from the usual partisan bias discussions about such issues usually engender, but also because she makes it clear how difficult such decisions are where there are rights in conflict. She also is at pains to help us understand the judicial outlook of each of the justices, the "world view" which shapes the way each looks at the Constitution and the law. Many people feel the Supreme Court is partisan in the small sense (adhering to one current political party or another). Coyle shows that they are not partisan in that sense, but do differ in fundamental ways in their views of how to properly interpret the Constitution.
Friday, June 14, 2013
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
About cyber warfare
There has been much anguish and hard words recently from the US administration about Chinese hackers stealing commercial secrets from US companies and infiltrating our military and infrastructure systems. But frankly I think the anguish is misplaced.
The world will always have hackers and gangsters and con men and anarchists who want to penetrate companies and governments for profit or political agendas. The Chinese are hacking our systems simply because they can. Actually, the French, supposed allies, have been doing it to us for a decade or more, and so have other countries.
No, the real culprit here is our own US government and US corporations, who for whatever reason have been remiss in not producing an internet infrastructure that is more resistant to this sort of penetration. It is frankly ludicrous that a nation with as much intellectual power as ours can't build an internet structure that is more secure. It is not easy to do, but it certainly can be done.
In fact, the existing systems, properly implemented and used, are not too bad. The problem is that far too many companies and government agencies aren't implementing them correctly, aren't thinking through the security issues well enough, don't have and enforce good enough procedures, aren't willing to pay enough to get good enough security experts, etc, etc.
It's like the coastal cities that ignore rising seas and deny global warming, and then are surprised when a storm surge inundates them. Duh! Getting mad at the storm is useless. Getting mad at hackers and nations that practice cyber warfare is useless and meaningless. The solution in both cases is to get real and build levees and walls and protection that works against the real threats.
The world will always have hackers and gangsters and con men and anarchists who want to penetrate companies and governments for profit or political agendas. The Chinese are hacking our systems simply because they can. Actually, the French, supposed allies, have been doing it to us for a decade or more, and so have other countries.
No, the real culprit here is our own US government and US corporations, who for whatever reason have been remiss in not producing an internet infrastructure that is more resistant to this sort of penetration. It is frankly ludicrous that a nation with as much intellectual power as ours can't build an internet structure that is more secure. It is not easy to do, but it certainly can be done.
In fact, the existing systems, properly implemented and used, are not too bad. The problem is that far too many companies and government agencies aren't implementing them correctly, aren't thinking through the security issues well enough, don't have and enforce good enough procedures, aren't willing to pay enough to get good enough security experts, etc, etc.
It's like the coastal cities that ignore rising seas and deny global warming, and then are surprised when a storm surge inundates them. Duh! Getting mad at the storm is useless. Getting mad at hackers and nations that practice cyber warfare is useless and meaningless. The solution in both cases is to get real and build levees and walls and protection that works against the real threats.
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
The real “yellow peril”
It was fashionable several decades ago in America to worry about China, about the “yellow peril”. The joke at the time was that optimists were learning Russian, while pessimists were learning Chinese. It was reported that if there was a bridge from China to the US and the Chinese were to run across that bridge onto our shores at full speed, ten abreast, the birthrate in China would keep up with the flow. America military leaders worried that China would shortly replace the Soviet Union as the real military threat to the Western world.
In more recent decades that xenophobia seems to have abated somewhat, but in fact there really is a “yellow peril” we ought to worry about in this nation, though in fact it includes India as well as China, and to a lesser extent other Asian nations.
Here is the logic. Human intelligence, as near as anyone can tell, is pretty evenly distributed around the world. At the moment, it is our pool of bright, innovative minds that is keeping America top dog in the world, a major economic powerhouse. Several studies have shown that a small proportion of the work force, in a relatively small number of sectors, accounts for a major share of US productivity. That isn’t surprising. One Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Henry Ford or Thomas Edison can produce thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in wealth. It is the few bright, innovative, driven entrepreneurs among us that are keeping the nation afloat, not the great mass of 9-5 workers. That may be politically incorrect to say, but it is true nonetheless.
Let’s say we look at just the pool of Americans (including recent immigrants) bright enough on average to get an undergraduate degree – say about one standard deviation above the mean intelligence of 100, or IQ of about 115. In a normal distribution that represents just under 16% of the population – let’s round it to an even 16%. US population currently stands at just about 314 million, so we have just about 50 million Americans in that bright group.
China’s current population is about 1.3 billion (1,343 million), and India adds another 1.2 billion (1,205 million) for a total between them of about 2.5 billion. Now neither of these nations is anywhere near as prosperous as the US, but at a first approximation the intelligence of their people is probably distributed normally just as it is in the US. That means they have some 16% of 2.5 billion = 400 million pretty bright people, or about eight times the number of bright people that we have.
Now up until recent times all those bright people on the other side of the world mostly got little or no education, and few opportunities to really make use of their talent, but that has changed over the past decade or so, so that places like Silicon Valley are full of very bright, very well educated, technologically savvy Indians and Chinese and other Asians. And of course now with the internet, and with major US universities increasingly offering technical courses free over the internet, the pool of well educated people in that part of the world will expand rapidly. Moreover, both the Indian and the Chinese cultures produce energetic, pragmatic, hard-working people.
China alone reportedly graduates over 600,000 engineers each year, and India another 350,000. In recent years the US has graduated about 125,000 a year. The same ratios hold in most other high technology and science fields. Yes, their education may not be quite as good as ours (yet), but the weight of numbers alone makes up for that. And their schools are rapidly improving, while ours are not.
So what is the message here? It is that America can’t afford to squander ANY of its bright, high potential people by giving them poor educations, discriminating against them, diverting them to high-paying but unproductive careers (like Wall Street trading) or in any way failing to make the very best use possible of our limited quota of such people. We are, to put it bluntly, outnumbered in bright people at least 8 to 1 just by China and India, not even counting the rest of the world. And we in America have gotten intellectually soft and lazy, while they still have the unrelenting drive to work hard and succeeded that our immigrant ancestors had.
More than that, we cannot afford to turn away ANY of those bright immigrants who want to come and live here and start businesses here and create innovations here. WE NEED THEM. If they aren’t here in America, working to keep America’s economy healthy, they will be back in India or China competing with us. THAT is the real “yellow peril”. The term may be insensitive, but the threat is very real.
In more recent decades that xenophobia seems to have abated somewhat, but in fact there really is a “yellow peril” we ought to worry about in this nation, though in fact it includes India as well as China, and to a lesser extent other Asian nations.
Here is the logic. Human intelligence, as near as anyone can tell, is pretty evenly distributed around the world. At the moment, it is our pool of bright, innovative minds that is keeping America top dog in the world, a major economic powerhouse. Several studies have shown that a small proportion of the work force, in a relatively small number of sectors, accounts for a major share of US productivity. That isn’t surprising. One Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Henry Ford or Thomas Edison can produce thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in wealth. It is the few bright, innovative, driven entrepreneurs among us that are keeping the nation afloat, not the great mass of 9-5 workers. That may be politically incorrect to say, but it is true nonetheless.
Let’s say we look at just the pool of Americans (including recent immigrants) bright enough on average to get an undergraduate degree – say about one standard deviation above the mean intelligence of 100, or IQ of about 115. In a normal distribution that represents just under 16% of the population – let’s round it to an even 16%. US population currently stands at just about 314 million, so we have just about 50 million Americans in that bright group.
China’s current population is about 1.3 billion (1,343 million), and India adds another 1.2 billion (1,205 million) for a total between them of about 2.5 billion. Now neither of these nations is anywhere near as prosperous as the US, but at a first approximation the intelligence of their people is probably distributed normally just as it is in the US. That means they have some 16% of 2.5 billion = 400 million pretty bright people, or about eight times the number of bright people that we have.
Now up until recent times all those bright people on the other side of the world mostly got little or no education, and few opportunities to really make use of their talent, but that has changed over the past decade or so, so that places like Silicon Valley are full of very bright, very well educated, technologically savvy Indians and Chinese and other Asians. And of course now with the internet, and with major US universities increasingly offering technical courses free over the internet, the pool of well educated people in that part of the world will expand rapidly. Moreover, both the Indian and the Chinese cultures produce energetic, pragmatic, hard-working people.
China alone reportedly graduates over 600,000 engineers each year, and India another 350,000. In recent years the US has graduated about 125,000 a year. The same ratios hold in most other high technology and science fields. Yes, their education may not be quite as good as ours (yet), but the weight of numbers alone makes up for that. And their schools are rapidly improving, while ours are not.
So what is the message here? It is that America can’t afford to squander ANY of its bright, high potential people by giving them poor educations, discriminating against them, diverting them to high-paying but unproductive careers (like Wall Street trading) or in any way failing to make the very best use possible of our limited quota of such people. We are, to put it bluntly, outnumbered in bright people at least 8 to 1 just by China and India, not even counting the rest of the world. And we in America have gotten intellectually soft and lazy, while they still have the unrelenting drive to work hard and succeeded that our immigrant ancestors had.
More than that, we cannot afford to turn away ANY of those bright immigrants who want to come and live here and start businesses here and create innovations here. WE NEED THEM. If they aren’t here in America, working to keep America’s economy healthy, they will be back in India or China competing with us. THAT is the real “yellow peril”. The term may be insensitive, but the threat is very real.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
The liberal problem
Liberals and conservative political positions these days both have serious problems.
The conservative problem is simple: conservatives these days are simply inconsistent. They want the federal government out of our lives, and at the same time they want the federal government to enforce their own religious and cultural views on issues like abortion and gay marriage. They want the federal budget cut, but not at the expense of military spending, Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security, the things that account for most of the federal budget. They want a simplified tax system, yet they want to preserve lots of special interest deductions and loopholes for businesses. But then, the conservative movement is in some crisis right now. With luck and time they may manage to get their act together and create a consistent set of policies.
The liberal problem is more subtle. Fundamentally liberals want more social and economic equality in the nation, which is a reasonable aspiration. But they are faced with the uncomfortable fact that people simply aren’t equal. Some are smarter than others. Some are willing to work harder than others. Some are more willing to educate themselves than others. Some are more willing than others to take risks and start new businesses. Some are more willing than others to retrain themselves if their jobs disappear. Some of these differences are inherent (genetic), some are environmental or cultural. But these differences are there, and they are real.
Faced with this, liberals often confuse equality of opportunity with equality of outcome, and end up supporting policies that try to make the outcomes more equal for everyone, rather than the opportunities. As Winston Churchill once said “Capitalism is the unequal distribution of blessings, Socialism is the equal distribution of misery.”
The lesson of the socialist/communist systems that prospered over the past half century and then mostly crumbled is that incentives matter. Systems that remove the incentives by assuring everyone of a job and a wage whether they work hard or not lead inevitably to an inefficient, even moribund, economy. Or as the old Soviet joke goes “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”.
In fact one of the main reasons America has prospered over the past couple of centuries is because, by a process of self-selection, the nation was populated early with a lot of people with more than average initiative. It takes more than average initiative to uproot oneself from one’s culture and family, undertake a dangerous sea journey followed perhaps by a dangerous land journey, and then try to carve out a new life in a hostile wilderness. Or even in later times to immigrate to a city in a new country with a different language, different culture and different customs. Couch potatoes generally don’t do this.
Unfortunately this sort of initiative isn’t reliably passed down to one’s children and grandchildren, so that now, generations later when life is more comfortable, not so many of our people have this sort of initiative and drive. That is perhaps why these days new immigrants are twice as likely to start a new business as native Americans.
Liberal attempts to rectify this by focusing on making outcomes more equal simply misses the point. What will keep us healthy as a nation is making opportunities more equal, for example by working to offer better education for all. The outcomes will still be unequal, because people aren’t equal, but at least the outcomes will be better aligned with how hard people are willing to work and how much initiative they are willing to put forth.
The liberal problem is more subtle. Fundamentally liberals want more social and economic equality in the nation, which is a reasonable aspiration. But they are faced with the uncomfortable fact that people simply aren’t equal. Some are smarter than others. Some are willing to work harder than others. Some are more willing to educate themselves than others. Some are more willing than others to take risks and start new businesses. Some are more willing than others to retrain themselves if their jobs disappear. Some of these differences are inherent (genetic), some are environmental or cultural. But these differences are there, and they are real.
Faced with this, liberals often confuse equality of opportunity with equality of outcome, and end up supporting policies that try to make the outcomes more equal for everyone, rather than the opportunities. As Winston Churchill once said “Capitalism is the unequal distribution of blessings, Socialism is the equal distribution of misery.”
The lesson of the socialist/communist systems that prospered over the past half century and then mostly crumbled is that incentives matter. Systems that remove the incentives by assuring everyone of a job and a wage whether they work hard or not lead inevitably to an inefficient, even moribund, economy. Or as the old Soviet joke goes “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”.
In fact one of the main reasons America has prospered over the past couple of centuries is because, by a process of self-selection, the nation was populated early with a lot of people with more than average initiative. It takes more than average initiative to uproot oneself from one’s culture and family, undertake a dangerous sea journey followed perhaps by a dangerous land journey, and then try to carve out a new life in a hostile wilderness. Or even in later times to immigrate to a city in a new country with a different language, different culture and different customs. Couch potatoes generally don’t do this.
Unfortunately this sort of initiative isn’t reliably passed down to one’s children and grandchildren, so that now, generations later when life is more comfortable, not so many of our people have this sort of initiative and drive. That is perhaps why these days new immigrants are twice as likely to start a new business as native Americans.
Liberal attempts to rectify this by focusing on making outcomes more equal simply misses the point. What will keep us healthy as a nation is making opportunities more equal, for example by working to offer better education for all. The outcomes will still be unequal, because people aren’t equal, but at least the outcomes will be better aligned with how hard people are willing to work and how much initiative they are willing to put forth.
About intelligence
I noted in a recent post that, by definition, the mean IQ is 100, and that about half the population falls below that level. That is because intelligence, as measured by standard IQ tests, is a normal or “bell shaped” distribution, with a standard deviation of about 15.
I got to thinking about this some more as my third grandchild took her SAT tests. Now college entrance exams like the SAT and the ACT are highly verbal, and highly culturally biased. Nevertheless, they are pretty good predictors of college success because American undergraduate college classes tend to be heavily loaded toward verbal tasks (reading texts and writing papers), and are also highly culturally biased. The politically-correct move in the 1970’s to “correct” these biases in the college entrance exams missed the point completely. It was the colleges that were biased, and the tests were pretty good predictors of college success precisely because they were biased the same way.
But the intelligence question is really a good bit more complex than that. The Grant Study, which followed 268 Harvard men throughout their careers starting in 1938, found among other things that above a certain minimum level of IQ (about one standard deviation above the mean, or IQ of about 115), intelligence didn’t seem to matter much in success. Other studies have shown that people of very high intelligence (IQ of 150 or higher) seem almost always to suffer other problems. And in fact Mensa, a society one can join only if one is in the top 2% of the population in intelligence, includes a lot of people whose only significant accomplishment in the world seems to that they were able to join Mensa.
Human intelligence actually appears to be a highly multi-faceted attribute, and people who are poor at some facets can be brilliant at others. I have a gift for seeing through complex problems to the core issue, but I am hopeless at remembering names and faces. I can recall for decades complex details of a design, but can’t for the life of me memorize foreign language vocabulary and verb forms. My wife is incapable of understanding mechanical designs, but can watch a stranger in a restaurant for a couple of minutes and accurately (ie – it matches what someone who knows the stranger well knows about them) read their personality and even much of their life story.
Of course our society values and rewards some of these facets, and ignores and disparages others. When we were a mechanical society, mechanics who had a “sixth sense” (high intelligence) about machines and how they operated were much in demand and highly paid. Now that we have become more of an electronic and computer society, those of us with the peculiar mental facilities to visualize electronic circuits and computer programs have better job opportunities. Soon enough this advantage will probably pass to those whose peculiar strengths are in understanding biochemistry and shaping biological components.
So although intelligence as measured by standardized IQ tests is an important measure of ability, it is just one measure of a limited number of facets of real intelligence. Success in the “real world” is shaped just as much, if not more, by cultural factors, emotional abilities, social skills, perseverance, work habits, and even luck. So the fact that about half the population falls at or below 100 in IQ doesn’t tell the whole story. There are a lot of people who wouldn’t score especially high in a standard IQ test who are nevertheless highly successful in the real world, and very good, even brilliant, at some non-verbal skills not measured by standard IQ tests. And there are some very high IQ people who are, frankly, thoroughly dysfunctional and complete failures in the real world.
I got to thinking about this some more as my third grandchild took her SAT tests. Now college entrance exams like the SAT and the ACT are highly verbal, and highly culturally biased. Nevertheless, they are pretty good predictors of college success because American undergraduate college classes tend to be heavily loaded toward verbal tasks (reading texts and writing papers), and are also highly culturally biased. The politically-correct move in the 1970’s to “correct” these biases in the college entrance exams missed the point completely. It was the colleges that were biased, and the tests were pretty good predictors of college success precisely because they were biased the same way.
But the intelligence question is really a good bit more complex than that. The Grant Study, which followed 268 Harvard men throughout their careers starting in 1938, found among other things that above a certain minimum level of IQ (about one standard deviation above the mean, or IQ of about 115), intelligence didn’t seem to matter much in success. Other studies have shown that people of very high intelligence (IQ of 150 or higher) seem almost always to suffer other problems. And in fact Mensa, a society one can join only if one is in the top 2% of the population in intelligence, includes a lot of people whose only significant accomplishment in the world seems to that they were able to join Mensa.
Human intelligence actually appears to be a highly multi-faceted attribute, and people who are poor at some facets can be brilliant at others. I have a gift for seeing through complex problems to the core issue, but I am hopeless at remembering names and faces. I can recall for decades complex details of a design, but can’t for the life of me memorize foreign language vocabulary and verb forms. My wife is incapable of understanding mechanical designs, but can watch a stranger in a restaurant for a couple of minutes and accurately (ie – it matches what someone who knows the stranger well knows about them) read their personality and even much of their life story.
Of course our society values and rewards some of these facets, and ignores and disparages others. When we were a mechanical society, mechanics who had a “sixth sense” (high intelligence) about machines and how they operated were much in demand and highly paid. Now that we have become more of an electronic and computer society, those of us with the peculiar mental facilities to visualize electronic circuits and computer programs have better job opportunities. Soon enough this advantage will probably pass to those whose peculiar strengths are in understanding biochemistry and shaping biological components.
So although intelligence as measured by standardized IQ tests is an important measure of ability, it is just one measure of a limited number of facets of real intelligence. Success in the “real world” is shaped just as much, if not more, by cultural factors, emotional abilities, social skills, perseverance, work habits, and even luck. So the fact that about half the population falls at or below 100 in IQ doesn’t tell the whole story. There are a lot of people who wouldn’t score especially high in a standard IQ test who are nevertheless highly successful in the real world, and very good, even brilliant, at some non-verbal skills not measured by standard IQ tests. And there are some very high IQ people who are, frankly, thoroughly dysfunctional and complete failures in the real world.
Monday, May 27, 2013
The 4% Universe (of knowledge)
One of the more startling findings in astrophysics in recent
years is the discovery that there isn’t nearly enough matter in the visible universe
to account for the gravitational pull that holds the spinning galaxies
together. Given the amount of matter we
can detect, galaxies spinning at the rate we see should fly apart under centrifugal
force. In fact, current theory estimates
that all the matter we see comprises only about 4% of the universe, the other
96% being made up of what is tentatively named “dark matter” and “dark energy”.
I propose that the same is roughly true of our current state
of knowledge. That despite all the wonderful discoveries in physics and
chemistry and biology over the past few hundred years, we are still just barely
scratching the surface. That we know something
like 4% of what is to be known, and even that may be wildly optimistic.
Case in point: we can accurately describe gravity. Given masses and distances we can predict the resulting gravitational forces with enough accuracy to send
spacecraft safely throughout the cosmos.
Yet in fact we still have not the faintest idea why two masses ought to
attract each other. Oh, physicists have fancy equations, and theoretical
constructs like “gravitons” and “space-time distortions”, but at root we are still clueless about how
gravity really works.
Case in point: like gravity, we can accurately describe
magnetism, create magnets with metals or electric fields , use magnetism for
things like motors, but also like gravity we still have no idea at all why
electric fields or certain metals create these fields, or why these fields
produce attractive/repellent forces, but only on some elements and not on
others.
These two examples mimic human use of fire. We humans and our pre-human ancestors have
apparently made use of fire for up to a million years, but only since the
development of chemistry in the past couple of hundred years have we had the
faintest idea what was really going on in a fire.
In the field of biology things are even worse. We understand
more or less the physical structure of the brain and of neurons, but are a long way from having the faintest
idea how these operate to create “thoughts’ or “self-awareness”. We can see how blood vessels operate, but have
hardly a clue how a developing fetus makes a blood vessel grow from one place
to another and then connect to existing plumbing. We have vague ideas about how “concentration
gradients” of special molecular markers lead to the growth of arms and legs and
the like, but really no idea at all how the body arranges for the bones of the
arm to grow into the humerus (upper arm) and then the radius and ulna (lower
arm), all of these looking remarkably similar in detail from one person to
another.
So I would caution against the “irrational exuberance” ( a Greenspan term) , or hubris, of thinking we
have understood the world and just have a few minor details remaining to work
out. Far from it, if all knowledge is
like a finished oil painting, at best we have only the beginnings of a
preliminary rough charcoal sketch of the finished work. In a 1000 years or so, if we are lucky enough to survive as a species that long, our current views of the world will no doubt seem absurdly childish and primitive.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Recommended: America the Clueless
Frank Bruni has a provocative piece in today's New Your Times Op Ed section: America the Clueless. He points to numerous recent polls that show that large parts of the American public are truly clueless about the politics going on around them. That is consistent with other findings from respected pollsters like the Pew Foundation, that find, for example that most people know relatively little about the religion they are so sure is true (their own), or that a fair fraction of high school seniors can't find the USA on a world map.
I have pointed out before that, by definition, about half the population has an IQ below 100 (that is how IQ is scaled), and that success in an undergraduate program -- at least if the college hasn't dumbed it down too much -- generally takes an IQ of at least somewhere around 115, or for the statisticians out there, about one standard deviation above the mean. So some of these findings really aren't that surprising.
But what does take some pondering is this: in an increasingly complex world, where issues like climate change, energy policy, health care delivery, bank regulation or foreign relations are complex, many-faceted, and require study in arcane fields to even understand all the issues, what is the proper policy role of an electorate that can't even name the current vice president or their own members of Congress, or perhaps even find the USA on a world map?
I have pointed out before that, by definition, about half the population has an IQ below 100 (that is how IQ is scaled), and that success in an undergraduate program -- at least if the college hasn't dumbed it down too much -- generally takes an IQ of at least somewhere around 115, or for the statisticians out there, about one standard deviation above the mean. So some of these findings really aren't that surprising.
But what does take some pondering is this: in an increasingly complex world, where issues like climate change, energy policy, health care delivery, bank regulation or foreign relations are complex, many-faceted, and require study in arcane fields to even understand all the issues, what is the proper policy role of an electorate that can't even name the current vice president or their own members of Congress, or perhaps even find the USA on a world map?
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