OT "Coming Apart" and bubble test.

Guiding principles are, on the whole, created to contrast to life as it is actually lived, and as we will continue to live. As soon as a principle is followed, it becomes unremarkable and is forgotten.

Clifford Heath.

That's a terrible score, you're only halfway "disconnected from the average white American and American culture at large." You can't get disconnected enough from that crowd as far as I'm concerned. They're all big talk, easy solutions, fuzzy details and no follow through.

Sno-o-o-ort ;-) My wife (*) can rebuild a transmission (I was going to write "tranny" and decided against it :-)

(*) Her father ran a rather exotic machine shop. Since she was the oldest child she got to assist in such fun things as pulling an engine, grinding valves, rebuilding brakes, etc ;-) ...Jim Thompson

I don't

I read this entirely differently. I think he said that he adopted a defence, not a offence. That is when someone started to bully hiw, he resorted to chocking. But only as a reaction to being bullied.

Dan

I got a score of 29 also. Which also strikes me as strange.

Dan

The most important question... actually not a question, but an observation: bitrex is a village idiot who spouts nonsense and crude retorts without any bearing on the topic at hand... sort of a Slowman sexual servant... if you get my gist >:-} ...Jim Thompson

the argument

No I would not say that. My reasoning is that college graduates tend to make more money and enjoy more social success than non college graduates. And college graduates tend to have higher IQ's than those who are not college graduates.

What do you think is the most predictive element of social success?

make more money and enjoy more social success than non college graduates. And college graduates tend to have higher IQ's than those who are not colle ge graduates.

That is where "The Bell Curve" fell down, and where it was most lethally cr iticised

"The Bell Curve" managed to paint IQ test scores as the best - if a rather poor - predictor of long term social success, by comparing it with a single "socio-economic status" parameter, which was largely parental income.

"Inequality by Design" took the same data and separated out three socio-eco nomic status inducators - parental income, parental location and school loc ation, and did a multi-parameter correlation.

Granting that rich parents didn't always live in good suburbs or send their kids to good schools, separating the three indicators allowed them to expl ain a lot more long term social success - including IQ test scores, they co uld explain about half the variance in long term success - and left them co nfident in asserting what was already well-known in sociology, that socio-e conomic status had appreciably more to do with long term success in the US than IQ test scores.

They found a few more problems with "The Bell Curve", which was written mor e to support a particular point of view than to explain what was actually g oing on, but that one struck me as particularly impressive.

Dan has got good scores on IQ tests, but doesn't post like a particularly i ntelligent person. He went to some posh university, which is clear evidence that his parents had high socio-economic status, but prefers to think that he did well thereafter because he was intelligent.

Whether you were born into a family that was successful (by whatever measure), or not.

Not watching crap the costal elites think you should watch puts you in a bubble, I guess.

Lefties _are_ bitter.

Right, the U.S. is a "meritocracy" in some universe that I definitely don't have a lot of experience with.

You live or die by who you know.

As an example, any man who has ever been to a "high end" nightclub (I have) understands this - why do you think the staff treats you like shit and there are guys on the 'net leaving bad Yelp reviews for what everyone knows is the hottest club in town? It's because those places are not "designed" for the average man on the street. You're spending $300 there and there are guys dropping 5 Gs, you're window dressing, you're nobody. They don't care if you have a good time or not.

Do you know the promoter, the manager, the DJ? No? Sorry, you ain't "in."

That just means he is at least somewhat sane. Middlebury is snowflake central.

The US is another Venezuela - with Trump playing the part of Chavez.

People like Jim think that Venezuela fell apart because Chavez was leftist, but in fact Venezuela's problem was that it had been rich - from oil expor ts - and that people who exported the oil had hung on to rather too much of the money they had made, and invested too little of it the country they we re living in.

The USA is rich, and has a wide variety of assets, but the people who contr ol them are now just as greedy as the Venezuelan oil magnates, and have inv ested too little of what they have collected in the country they live in - though not as little as their Venezuelan equivalents, and - until about thi rty years ago - a great deal more.

For the past thirty years, essentially all the increase in the US GDP has e nded up in the pockets of the top 1% of the income distribution, and the di ssatisfaction that this is generating is what got Trump elected.

The people who voted for Trump should have voted for Bernie Sanders, who ar ticulated the problem and might have been able to do something about it, bu t the voters got short-changed by the US electoral system (acting the way i t was designed to do).

Mine said "Bachelor of Science".

I knew perfectly well that anything I'd been taught in class hadn't been ta ught in enough detail to let me do anything that was practically useful - I 'd had three years of summer jobs as a chemistry lab assistant in a TiO2 pl ant - but I also knew enough to know where to go to look up the practical d etails that I'd need.

Cars with automatic transmissions started becoming available when I was lea rning to drive, around 1960, but our current car is the first one that we h ave owned with an automatic transmission.

It's quite a while since I took the head off my Peugeot 404 and reground th e seat of the leaking valve.

You are old - even older than I am.

Do you have coffee? I do. Because I'm a closer. Coffee is for closers only:

Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson's gist being that he can't construct coherent abuse.

Bitrex clearly isn't any kind of idiot - village or otherwise - and his comments do tend to be quite sharply relevant (which is more than Jim can manage).

Where the "sexual servant" reference comes from escapes me. Thomas Jefferson had a child by Sally Hemings, but more recent examples are thinner on the ground.

More modern people do seem to hire that kind of service by the hour, but nobody would accuse Jim of being modern.

-- Bill Sloman, Sydney

does make the point that that is exactly where Herrnstein and Murray got it wrong.

They lumped "family wealth" - more usually referred to as "socioeconomic st atus" into one variable which was essentially the parental income.

"Inequality by Design" went to the trouble of teasing out three separate, i f correlated, variables - parental incomes, parental home location, and whe re the kids went to school and used these - with IQ tests scores - to expla in lot more of long term success - about half - than Herrnstein and Murray could claim, making it clear, in the process, what every sociologist had lo ng known, that parental socio-economic status trumped IQ scores in the US s ome forty years ago.

More modern statistics make wealth more heritable than height in the US tod ay. This isn't true of more egalitarian countries, like Germany and Scandin avia.

There are other defects in "The Bell Curve", which was clearly written to m ake rich republicans feel good about themselves - and my first reaction to the book was that the the flattery was being laid on with a trowel - but th at defect in their statistical insight is fatal.

Making education spending per head more nearly equal might be a good place to start. The actual spending per head varies from school district to schoo l district, and I've yet to find a nationwide histogram.

There are state by state statistics and New York spends about $20,000 per y ear per head on secondary schooling, where Idaho and Utah spend about $7,00

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James Arthur makes a great fuss about how much the US spends, but he doesn' t seem to appreciate how much of it is spent giving rich kids in rich schoo ls a gold-plated experience, while poor kids in poor school districts - who need more help - don't get much spent on their education at all.

John Larkin is all for spending money on educating girls in Africa. Ripping up the US education system so that more gets spent on educating girls from poor families in the US would be too political for him.

That interpretation is untenable with /his/ conclusion.

Why did you snip that conclusion?

intelligent person. He went to some posh university, which is clear eviden ce that his parents had high socio-economic status, but prefers to think th at he did well thereafter because he was intelligent.

Bad guesses. Going to Harvard is not clear evidence that the parents had high socio-economic status. When I was there one third of my class were on scholarships. And the annual tuition was $6

1. It is probably much the same now. Harvard has a policy of paying all college expenses if the family income is less than about ,000.

Since both my parents died while I was in college, their socio-economic sta tus did not have much to do with my well being. I also moved to California right after graduating, where the only people I knew were a good friend an d his wife. He was a grad student at Stanford.

My well being pretty much results from my investments in stocks.

As usual Bill makes up his own reality.

Dan