Category Archives: Intelligence

The Data Are In: Even American PhDs Are … Dumber

America, Education, Intelligence, Literature, Science, Technology

I’ve been saying it for years, based on my encounters with a relatively smart cohort, through this column. My husband, a South African PhD (received at the age of 24), has been saying it for a long time based on encounters in his field. Barely A Blog correspondent Myron Pauli, a physics PhD from MIT (of which he thinks poorly), has been saying it over these pixelated pages:

American millennials, in general—but even with masters degrees and doctorates—are unimpressive, to put it charitably. They do, however, score high in self-esteem, which is part of the problem. From a 2007, Ottawa Citizen article I wrote:

Paradoxically, while our high school students score near the bottom in international competitions, when asked to rate themselves, they consistently give themselves top marks. But then so do their parents and teachers. Thanks to constant, unwarranted worship, and no moral or rigorous intellectual instruction, American schools are full of lame and lazy megalomaniacs.

The Washington Post cites a recent report by “the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, better known as the OECDU.S,” according to which “millennials with master’s degrees and doctorates did better than their peers in only three countries, Ireland, Poland and Spain. Those in Finland, Sweden and Japan seemed to be on a different planet.”

Top-scoring U.S. millennials – the 90th percentile on the PIAAC test – were at the bottom internationally, ranking higher only than their peers in Spain. The bottom percentile (10th percentile) also lagged behind their peers. And the gap between America’s best and worst was greater than the gap in 14 other countries. This, the study authors said, signaled America’s high degree of inequality.

The “daunting” PIAAC Test showed that “U.S. millennials performed horribly.”

That might even be an understatement, given the extent of the American shortcomings. No matter how you sliced the data – by class, by race, by education – young Americans were laggards compared to their international peers. In every subject, U.S. millennials ranked at the bottom or very close to it, according to a new study by testing company ETS.

“We were taken aback,” said ETS researcher Anita Sands. “We tend to think millennials are really savvy in this area. But that’s not what we are seeing.”

By the way, note how forthrightly readers of the liberal WaPo discuss the well-documented racial differences in scholarly achievement. Alas, could the “dumbassery” documented in the WaPo article be manifesting in the reading and comprehension skills of its readers? For the article explicitly states that results were consistent across “class” and “race.” Yet many readers missed this crucial tidbit.

The information comes courtesy of Vox Day, who also quips as follows about the findings:

This isn’t surprising to me. Generation X had to understand its toys in order to play with them. There is nothing creative about a tablet or a smartphone. You can’t do anything on it. It’s basically a dumb terminal on the mainframe of the Internet. These digital natives are actually digital cargo cultists, comfortably familiar using things they don’t actually know the first thing about. As far as they’re concerned, it might as well be magic.

Since When Do Words Speak Louder Than Actions?

Free Speech, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Political Correctness, Race

The Bell Curve authors, Charles Murray—an American Enterprise Institute Scholar and the 2009 recipient of the Irving Kristol Award—and the late Richard Herrnstein, a Harvard professor, used multiple regression analysis and other perfectly conventional and uncontroversial statistical methods to arrive at some irrefutable correlations, linking the G Factor (general intelligence) to other social and demographic indices.

Frank Borzellieri, a dedicated educator in “a predominantly black and Hispanic Catholic elementary school located in the Bronx, New York,” spoke and wrote of the same facts, for which he lost his job and was expunged from our increasingly Sovietized society, accused of a thought crime: a belief in “white supremacy.”

Via Jack Kerwick:

Borzellieri is the author of six books, some of which treat racial and cultural issues. His great sin seems to consist in the fact that he dared to note that there are interracial IQ differences that correlate to some extent with other social indicia. …

… Borzellieri chose—he chose—to ply his craft as an educator tending to the needs of New York City’s black and Hispanic students. He was also elected thrice to the New York City school board where he resisted efforts to replace literature on such Western heroes as Columbus and Washington with a curriculum requiring children to read books on homosexuality, masturbation, abortion, and birth control.

“Today,” writes Jack, “Borzellieri lives a lonelier—and dramatically harder—existence. The man who wants for nothing more than to resume his duties as an educator is jobless. Branded with the “R” label, he’s been shut out in the cold.

Mike Abel, the caretaker of an orthodox church, has started a ‘Go Fund Me’ page for Borzellieri. Please consider helping this casualty of Political Correctness.

As Mike Abel says, Borzellieri could be any of us.”

[SNIP]

Let me add this: The substance of Borzellieri speech is irrelevant. As this column has explained, policing what people say for political propriety is … “a dance adopted by the political establishment to cow contrarians into submission. By going on the defensive—allowing themselves to be drawn into these exchanges—libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone, and deserve to be purged from ‘polite’ company.”

Help Frank Here.

No Regrets For Playing With Lives

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Military, Terrorism

You can play with lives when you are the POTUS. You give life; you take it. President Barack Obama, like his predecessor, likes to use the levers of powers to score political points. Hoping to score, he launched a failed operation to rescue two hostages from al Qaeda in Yemen: American Luke Somers and South African Pierre Korkie. As a consequence, both hostages were killed mid-raid.

Here’s the rub, via The Hill:

… “A second hostage, South African Pierre Korkie, was also killed by his captors during the raid, to the dismay of his family, who believed they had brokered a ransom payment for his release.
Earnest said the U.S. had no knowledge of the negotiations being taken for Korkie’s release. South Africa’s government, like the U.S., does not negotiate for the release of hostages, but the Korkie family had pursued such a deal privately — although some reports indicated U.S. officials might have been aware of the proceedings.”

Eminently quotable is one of the bimbos on MSNBC’s “The Cycle,” who, when reporting on the dismal failure of Rome’s army to liberate these men, went on to scoff at the “amateur hostage negotiators” who, but for Obama, had in fact accomplished their their mission to ransom their loved one.

UPDATED: Grubby Gruber To Enter ‘Smithsonian Museum of Dumbassery’ (CNN Reports?)

Economy, Ethics, Government, Healthcare, Intelligence, Internet

Jonathan Gruber’s “off-the-cuff” trail of stupidity belongs, as Big Bang’s delicious Leslie Winkle would say, in “the Smithsonian Museum of Dumbassery.” Here the Gruber collection is, as uncovered and tracked, not by major media, but by citizen journalist Rich Weinstein:

* Nancy Pelosi is a Liar Too. Tell me something I don’t already know.

* “Gruber suggesting that states that did not create health insurance exchanges risked giving up the ACA’s subsidies.”

* “Clip from Gruber’s year-old appearance at a University of Pennsylvania health care conference.”

* “Gruber … ‘I have no comment.’”

* Gruby “at a January 2012 symposium.”

* “Scholar”? Gruby on “Ronan Farrow Daily”: ““I was speaking off the cuff and I spoke inappropriately, and I regret making those comments.” Aha.

* Gruber second “stupid” tape, uncovered by Megyn Kelly’s team:

In this next clip from also last year, Mr. Gruber explains how Democrats played with the language of the Obamacare law so that it achieved their goals, by again, fooling the stupid public.”
She then played a short 5-second clip of Gruber, saying the following, that a part of the Obamacare passed because “the American people are too stupid to understand the difference.”
Gruber was talking about the so-called “Cadillac tax” in Obamacare, which increased the tax on high-end insurance packages. The fact that Obamacare would raise taxes was seen as politically toxic. But then-Senator John Kerry came up with the idea of taxing the companies providing the Cadillac plans, rather than taxing Americans directly.

(Via Daily Caller.)

Stupid III clip: “It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter”

… In an effort to add a cost-control measure to Obamacare, former Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who Gruber called a “hero,” successfully pushed through a 40 percent excise tax on insurance companies for plans that cost more than $10,200 for individuals and $27,000 for families.

“A WONDERFUL shopping experience, economists will tell you.” (Read: I am telling you, fools!)

Gruber is a technocrat, not a scholar; a corrupt central planner extraordinaire, high on his own vapor. He has no right to talk economics. Leave it to the Austrians, freak.

UPDATE (11/14): CNN’s Jake Tapper may have let slip a word or two about Grubby, earlier this week. Today, November 14th, 2014, finally fuller coverage on CNN. What a disgrace.