freecounterpoint: Mona Charen's Gruntled

Saturday, December 06, 2008

Mona Charen's Gruntled

Might Pepe be gnashing his teeth?

6 comments:

Pepe le Pew said...: I'll take a pragmatist over an ideologue of any color. This is all good.; 12/06/2008 11:15 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: Sounds like Le Pew has made an ideology out of pragmatism. Makes sense, Vichy did the same.; 12/07/2008 12:24 AM
Mr roT said...: Can go both ways. This time it's not so bad that we get four more years of Bush-Cheney.; 12/07/2008 2:12 AM
Tecumseh said...: He got into terrific trouble as president of Harvard for implying that, on average, men are more mathematically talented than women (which is true but that is irrelevant in the Ivy League). They made him grovel for that one, and, to his shame, he did so. The whole scene at Harvard, I gather from Stephan Thernstrom, who was there, was like something out of China's Cultural Revolution where the mob makes the professor confess error and beg for punishment.

An FCP moment if there was ever one.; 12/07/2008 7:27 AM
Arelcao Akleos said...: Arelcao Akleos said...
"This time it's not so bad that we get four more years of Bush-Cheney".

Two comments: First, these past four years of Bush-Cheney, with the notable exception of not mucking it up in Iraq, have been piss poor. We cannot afford four more years of piss poor.
Second; Obama has had precisely 0 days in office. Unless fate intervenes he will have an 8 year term. He is a clever enough guy, with a far more clever Sorosian group of backers. They are smart in snuffing the instinct to opposition at the start by saying "come on in, ya wannabe DC players, you too are invited to the party". But they have an agenda, and it ain't havin' Camaraderie Central on Potomac.

JJ, you seem to think Obama was a
mere opportunist out of for his ubi mea. I think he has been a consistently strong socialist, economically and in terms of the power of the State over individual life [the Chicago circle which he swam so easily in was thoroughgoing marxist, and socialist have been almost all people personally close to him since childhood], with a keen eye for opportunity and the savvy to first disable opponents before striking. In other words, I think he absolutely has The Vision Thing; and it has diddly squat with Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness being inalienable rights of mankind.

Should I, should we, be here in 8 years, it will be interesting to hear what is said then.; 12/07/2008 12:03 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: Well, that Summers thing is interesting. If he had said what is claimed he said, then he would have been wrong [given the evidence he alluded to]. He in fact did NOT claim that "men are more mathematically talented than women on average". What he claimed is that the consistent evidence from various testing programs shows that although the averages show no appreciable difference between the sexes [some tests go one way, others the other way, and this can change through different eras] the extremes do. In particular, these tests, no matter where in the world, and no matter what decade you look at, show that in the category of "the very best" and "the very worst" men appear much more frequently than women. If you look at those who score in the bottom 1% of IQ tests, and those who score in the top 1% of IQ tests, men rule by a ratio of at least 2:1. And as you go further out on the deviations, the ratio shoots up. If I remember correctly, the IQ test the military gave back some three decades ago, what was known then--as the "gcf" [general comprehension factor], had a ratio of nearly 8:1 men for those who scored in the top 0.1%. It had an even higher ratio for those who scored in the bottom 0.1%.
What Summers actually said was something close to this:
"It may be that we can never expect the elites in mathematically minded fields to show parity of numbers between men and women. For they draw upon the high extreme of mathematical talent, and all studies indicate that-- however different a story it is with averages-- most of those we can draw upon at the extremes, both low and high, are men".
The evidence, as any researcher worth her/his salt will admit in private, is fully behind Summers. What Summers actually said, not what the quote says he said.; 12/07/2008 12:24 PM