Michael Moore ✔@MMFlint
Honor Rosa Parks: Purge police of racists. Release all nonviolent drug offenders. Make college free. Be a patriot – hire African Americans!

Makes a change from the non union Canadian Canadians that he normally works with.

I think they use standardized tests you take in elementary school. I don’t even remember the name of ours, other than that among the five tests we had to take each year was this weird thing called the OLSAT which was sort of a spatial IQ test. I think the Duke TIP is weighted towards Math scores. If your standardized Math scores are below a certain cut-off, you don’t show up on their radar. Teacher recommendations may having something to do with it too.

I was never identified by Duke, even though a bunch of my classmates with lower ACT/SAT scores were tested and recruited by the program. On standardized tests my Math scores were consistently in the 70th percentile range, while my reading/English scores were around the 99th percentile. On the actual ACT years later I used my memorization/verbal skills to punch above my weight on the Math section. Nothing ever helped much in Science though.

My younger sibling and I attended different schools and had different teachers, so that might explain it. My parents were totally clueless about CTY, and I don’t recall anyone from my high school attending CTY or similar programs. It was an old-fashioned all-male school where nerdy kids went for theater, band/orchestra or debate as activities. We didn’t have a quiz bowl team, but we did take part in state math and science competitions. I first met people who had attended CTY in college.

The UK has a great admissions system. First, you apply directly to your intended major so fine arts majors are competing for slots with engineers. Second, you submit test scores related to your intended major. An English major may submit exam scores in English, drama, and French. While a chemistry major may submit exam scores in chemistry, physics, and math.

They UK universities even accept foreign exam results. For Americans, Cambridge wants a 2100 SAT and 5 AP results with a score of 5 that are related to the intended major.

They even have programs for the less privileged like the Gateway to Medicine that adds a remedial year to medical school and accepts grades lower than normal for those who show promise despite their upbringing. Race is not a factor and it doesn’t continue for multiple generations.

The Gateway to Medicine criteria for Durham University:

Candidates must meet at least two of the following: First generation applicant including those who have a parent, or parents who graduated from their first degree within the last five years or are currently studying for their first degree; attend a school whose GCSE performance is below the national average; be eligible for Free School Meals; be resident in an area that falls within the lowest 40% of the Index of Multiple Deprivation.

Additional consideration will be given to applicants who have spent time in care, or are from a Traveler family, or have a registered disability.
https://www.dur.ac.uk/courses/info/?id=8211&title=Gateway+to+Medicine&code=A190&type=MBBS&year=2016#admissions

SJWs don’t join the cuck-right or mainstream right, they join the left. A lot of PUAs are apolitical–really, guys of every political leaning want to pick up chicks. Probably there are a lot of Christians who don’t realize how bad the game has gotten, conservative guys who don’t get the whole picture or don’t agree with the whole alt-right agenda (Half Sigma comes to mind), and so on.

Also, a lot of Trump voters are just low-information blue-collar types who smell something is wrong but don’t quite know what. Personally I think Trump is playing everyone for a fool, but he’s the best the alt-right has right now.

Yes a bad choice of words. Thanks for the correction. I blasted that out without really thinking.

Research by Caroline Hoxby of Stanford has discovered that the biggest concentration of overlooked smart kids that colleges should recruit harder are, unsurprisingly, exactly whom the conventional wisdom doesn’t expect them to be: male, white, flyover states, maybe from broken homes.

So Caroline Hoxby is picking up on something that Bill Belichick coach of the New England Patriots has known for years 😉

No, I actually think being a blue-collar or generally underprivileged white guy tends to produce an alt-righter.

The alt-right (at least the part that matters) consists of men smart enough to game the system but wise enough to know that doing so amounts to eating one’s own seed corn.

The cuck-right are males without those smarts, the PUAs dudes without the wisdom, and the SJWs guys who lack both.

not quite CNN but hey it’s all good….

you not on the CNN blacklist Steve? sounds like you need to be outed!!!!

Was that the actual Harvard “Wasp” Mafia! I thought Whiskey had made that up!

being a blue-collar or generally underprivileged white guy tends to produce an alt-righter

My own immediate family is blue to gray collar in previous generations that transitioned to gray to white collar in mine.

By the way, my observation over several years is that CTY students are about 5% non-Asian minority, and the rest are evenly split between white and Asian kids (Chinese, Korean, Indian, Japanese, a sprinkling of other Asians). The white kids are maybe 1/3 Jewish, possibly more, but these were campuses in NY and PA, the mix might be different at other campuses (CTY has summer programs at about 10 colleges). It’s about the same number of boys and girls. Every one of the 5 years I have had a child in CTY, there has been a ballet camp on the same campus during the same weeks, no administrative connection just coincident traditions, and the ballerinas are 80-90% white.

From a National Review article by David French.

The ideological cleansing also happens to white candidates. In one of the most memorable incidents, the committee almost rejected an extraordinarily qualified applicant because of his obvious Christian faith (he’d attended a Christian college, a conservative seminary, and worked for religious conservative causes). In writing, committee members questioned whether they wanted his “Bible-thumping” or “God-squadding” on campus. I objected, noting that my own background was even more conservative. To their credit, the committee members apologized and offered him admission.

My two daughters went to CTY, my two sons could have if they had cared to. ANY CHILD can take the SAT and qualify for CTY if they score well enough and don’t have some unusual disqualifying factor, but the only ones CTY can actually RECRUIT are the ones that schoolteachers tell them about when they ask schools which kids might be talented.

Thirty years or so ago, ambitious small-town girls would move to the nearest regional capital, leaving the faraway big cities to their brothers. Has this changed?

Most of my experience is as a suburban UMC public high school kid (and later teacher), although I lived in other settings in between.

The big universities (State Us and up) have been draining most of the girls these past 30 years, ambitious and otherwise, with the 8-10s generally heading to the coasts/Chicago. Even if they return, as many eventually do, their primes went to men from elsewhere, and didn’t go to building healthy families in any case.

A younger sibling of mine was invited to take the SAT in 7th grade to attempt qualification for Duke’s TIP but didn’t quite make Duke’s cutoff. Duke’s TIP never invited me, yet I had consistently higher standardized test scores and grades than this sibling. How do Duke or CTY choose who gets to take the qualifying SAT?

There was a study that showed that there was a negative correlation between admittance to elite schools and these being your activities on your application. No doubt a subconscious negative bias by the admission people.

No doubt?

I doubt it strongly. I believe the bias is a conscious bias in many instances.

No doubt a subconscious negative bias by the admission people.

You give them the benefit of the doubt here. That’s not like you.

…you’ve still got the Babe Drain taking most of the women who would’ve been their wives off to the Big U./Big City chasing that elusive career/fiat-currency-fed alpha males.

Thirty years or so ago, ambitious small-town girls would move to the nearest regional capital, leaving the faraway big cities to their brothers. Has this changed?

Or are you only counting the 9s and 10s?

But when I was at UCLA I did know the daughter of the former ambassador from Imperial Ethiopia: a lovely girl.

The majority of young ladies I meet of Ethiopian, Eritrean, Somali and Oromo descent know how to turn on the charm. Apparently feminism never made it to the Horn.

For another high-born African, Andy Razaf, who wrote the words to “Honeysuckle Rose” and “Ain’t Misbehavin’”, was nephew to the Queen of Madagascar. The French killed his dad before he was born, and his American mom returned home with him.

Most Whites do not have IQ’s over 120. No large racial/ethnic group has an average IQ that high.

My dad was the son of a telegraph and telephone man, was taught “radio” (which encompassed all electronics back then) in the Coast Guard at the end of WWII, and took a job in production for Admiral after the war.

Are you sure you’re not me? That’s my dad’s bio, except he enlisted in the CG in 1939 (smart move!) and worked for AT&T and later RCA after the war. And his dad was a teacher in a reform school.

His sister married a CG man, too. She and my dad’s first wife were born on the same day. Weird.

Both of my kids were identified by Duke TIP. The recognition put them on a mailing list for summer school courses and programs that we couldn’t afford.

I did get to brag a little bit…

They didn’t want to give up their assets. All the justifications and defenses of slavery flowed from that.

All the 7 Indian winners, come from elite castes, no Patels or Singhs or Caribbean Indians who together makeup most of the Indian immigrants

Also, I suspect a lot of IQ 140 kids in flyover country would rather be orthopedic surgeons in their local capital, etc., rather than going to Harvard and joining the DC/NY/Boston feeding frenzy. Think about it–would you rather be one of a million high-priced lawyers in a tiny apartment (and remember, these kids grow up in areas where they have a lot of space) so you can eat weird food and watch weird movies, or have a nice fancy office in Indianapolis, Boise, or Bismarck where everyone around you knows what a bigshot you are, you live by the governor, and you can drive out and go hunting, fishing, or sailing anytime? Better to be a big fish in a small pond…

That sounds appealing enough, and in fact more and more talented young males are going that way, but you’ve still got the Babe Drain taking most of the women who would’ve been their wives off to the Big U./Big City chasing that elusive career/fiat-currency-fed alpha males. The sort of family formation healthy communities (and societies) depend upon suffers, as does overall happiness for both males and females.

This is the primary failure of Black Americans, as a class they can’t advance in their career or even keep a job. I have been a proponent of AA for many years, justifying my position by noting that eventually enough successful Black men would help in the career advancement of their sons and neighbors as other ethnic and religious groups have done since forever. It’s the way of the world. I did not factor in the relative lack of drive and intelligence possessed by the typical Black American. They are fucked. Much better for a smart Black kid to put an American flag button on his lapel and get his ass discovered by a benevolent White guy.

No the problem would be exactly like it was before affirmative action and what it was like when grade schools had the dumb kids classes and the smart kids classes – there was an obvious distinction between the classes. I will leave it to the student to figure it out.

Here is an article by Gavin McInnes of Takimag. He says his father was singled out after taking the formerly required, 11+ exam they used to give all British pupils. Gavin’s father scored very high, his uncles did not. I’ll let you read it for yourselves. This method would seem the best way to find qualified pupils from every race and economic background, much as the Soviets used to find athletes for their Olympic program. The problem would be that some parents would refuse to admit that their chicks were not so bright and try to game the system. But that is happening anyway.

http://takimag.com/article/a_nation_of_working_class_dropouts_gavin_mcinnes/print#axzz3suN0gaJq

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven_plus_exam

If you’re a higher-ranking white guy, you might start to believe in the privilege story because, well, you are privileged.

It is also part of how you stay on top or at least out of trouble. The number of managers I have met who who barf up the “diversity makes us stronger” crap is mind-numbing. Do they really believe it even though they are surrounded by a lack of diversity or is it just what you are expected to say to stay employed.

Even somebody like Norm Matloff barfs this out.

I strongly support diversity and don’t pretend everything is quite rosy in racial terms on the campuses,

https://normsaysno.wordpress.com/2015/11/23/the-main-characters-in-h-1b-story-speak-at-cis-event/

Isn’t Google in the process of rethinking their recruitment strategies? I think they reaqlize that it is more important to find people who can actually do something in the real world than somebody who got high grades on tests. If you were going to hire an automotive engineer who would you hire a guy from Harvard with a degree or this guy?

http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2008/04/post_moto_kid_death_story_here.html

Yes, but you still are not completely locked out if you don’t get into an Ivy, you just have a tougher go of it. I used to work with an engineer who went to law school. He was initially put on the UCLA waiting list and enrolled at Whittier College of Law. After his first year he was admitted and had to repeat his first year and graduated from UCLA. While at UCLA he worked on the writings of a few law professors and got good enough references to work at Richard Riordan’s law firm downtown as an intern before graduation.

Skadden blah, blah, blah was opening a Los Angeles office and hired him as a first year associate so it isn’t impossible to get one of those jobs without an Ivy sheepskin.

The funny part about it was that one of the partners at Riordan didn’t like him. When Skadden called for a reference, he was friendly with the HR staff and they finagled it so that person wasn’t part of the process. At least that was what my friend said.

I haven’t talked to him since then. He was hired by Bear Sterns in New York to work in the bankruptcy department after one of those early high tech darlings that made PC cards and expanded into PCs went bust. He worked on their IPO when he was at Riordan.

Post-PhD I couldn’t get a job in UK academia until I took “church officer” off my CV.
It was a temporary summer job, too – & my family are atheist!

I’ve got this. I went to CTY, its northern cousin (note they pretty much cover the South and Midwest).

Basically, you take the SAT (or some other test) in 7th grade or so, and if you do well enough, you get to go for summer courses. It’s the only chance a lot of smart kids have to meet other smart kids. They do all the things you’d expect, passing notes using the elements of the periodic table as abbreviations and making dirty jokes with integrals (integral of e^x from midnight to midnight = f(u sub n)…there, are you happy now?).

Now I was in the Northeast, so the few people I kept in touch with now clutter my Facebook feed with annoying left-wing SJWery. But what actually happened to them? IT, of varying levels of prestige (a few went to MIT–I noticed most of the girls got in but very few of the boys, which solidified my hatred of feminism–it *started* with draft registration, growing up back in the 80s when Vietnam was not yet forgotten). But I didn’t hang out with too many humanities kids. (Come on, they didn’t play Dungeons & Dragons!)

And, um, enough from me for now.

I know that was snark but Snowden isn’t the only one with principles:

http://movies.netflixable.com/214647

So being a college graduate doesn’t stop you from having principles.

Fair enough–I admit I am not up on Catholic theology– but they still told the peasants not to revolt against the bloodsucking aristocracy. (My animus is not specifically at the Catholic Church, BTW; the Eastern Orthodox wasn’t much better, and as you yourself stated, the Protestants did much the same thing. And yes, they kept the West from disappearing completely after the fall of Rome–few institutions are all good or all bad.)

As for the Southerners…we both know what Detroit looks like now, but is that *why* John Calhoun and all the rest of them made up those stories, or because the planters wanted their cotton grown cheaply and didn’t want to pay farm hands?

Some truth to that too, though I think he thinks if you had more blue-collar-origin whites in the elite they’d swing things in a more America-friendly direction. I honestly don’t know. They might identify with their new class more than their old one, especially if they felt out of place.

I had a friend who went there. Probably 50/50 from what he told me. You could google the size of the Hillel (I think it was a few thousand) and go from there.

I agree with you.

The modification I’d make is that there’s no real start or stop to ‘cashing out’, it’s a change of degree rather than of kind–if you have a group that can’t produce and has to be accommodated, they will always take resources. And large organizations perpetuate themselves always. But when the population decreases enough in quality, that’s when you start to see problems.

Socialism? We’ve got less socialism than every country in Europe. We don’t even have universal health care. Most industries are privately owned. You’re right about the lack of nationalism.

This is a global-capitalist country with a large, restive ethnic minority that has to be bought off and elites that are more interested in money (on the right) and curing the world’s ills (on the left) than the country.

To some degree ‘wealth, productivity, and efficiency’ can have drawbacks for the average Joe. America has more wealth thanks to offshoring (the total bank accounts of all American citizens increase when you add in the huge profits the management makes). It doesn’t help the ex-coal miner doing meth in the ruins of West Virginia.

Look at Germany’s mass refugee import–Merkel’s probably at least in part trying to provide cheap labor for the big industries (as well as assuage her guilty conscience over what her grandpa might have done). I wouldn’t be too surprised if they do get a temporary boost in profits with wages going down. What’s going to happen to your average Hans on the street when he gets knifed is another story.

No, I actually think being a blue-collar or generally underprivileged white guy tends to produce an alt-righter. If you’re a higher-ranking white guy, you might start to believe in the privilege story because, well, you are privileged. Blue-collar and broken home increasingly go together, as Murray has documented. You also have to have a ‘taste for distasteful truths’, I agree–otherwise there’s football and Xbox and so on.

I actually came from a professional family, just wasn’t as successful as I should have been due to a lack of schmooze. I actually was a conservative (by NYC standards, which I guess made me center-left) in my youth, moved to the left after hearing about the Gilded Age, stayed there until about my late twenties when I read Howard Zinn’s book on how American history is taught to cover up the evil doings of the right, and thought, ‘What is the *left* lying about?’

‘Red pill’ also implies you believe being a nice guy will get you girls, but I don’t think I ever thought that (I thought it had more to do with dressing and working out, which I was too lazy for)–I just put off chasing after women for my career because I wanted money more than poontang. I figured sex was temporary and fleeting but money could be saved and invested for my later years. (Obviously with more natural charisma I would have likely gotten some anyway.) It’s only after I realized my lack of schmoozing was hurting me careerwise I started dating.

“Suspect gifted white high-school males are comparing college brochure against what they read on reddit, quora, or perhaps, speaking with older peers, who are now beginning to intern at tech companies. Interesting that so many high-performing white males which elite schools “fail to reach”, will not hesitate in applying for an internship at Tesla or Google during college.”

I suspect that the qualities that our meritocracy values in college applicants might not be the ones best-suited for identifying talent, especially in terms of character, yet these qualities seem to be very rarely questioned, at least publicly.

“Pretty sure that’s about making Duke money.”

Perhaps. I’ve gone to the TIP website several times and have read about the program on Wikipedia a couple of times, but I still have no sense, in practical terms, for what the program is really all about or how it works.

OT:

Anthropologist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Fox on what the West is in a nutshell, and why vast numbers of people want to relocate from wherever they live in the world to North America and Western Europe:

“In the West we had to move from tribalism, through city-states and small nations, through empire, feudalism, mercantile capitalism, and the industrial revolution to reach our present state of fragile open universalistic democracy (shrugging off communism and fascism along the way). Athens and Rome had a period of republicanism and democracy — at least voting and elections for free males — but this did not last and succumbed to autocracy and dictatorship with the growth of empire. The English were helped in the shedding of dominant kinship groups by the relative individualism of the Angles and Saxons, with their emphasis on the independent nuclear family. (See Alan Macfarlane’s ‘The Origins of English Individualism.’) Christian monogamy and the banning of cousin marriages by the Catholic Church helped to break down extended kinship groups and encouraged even more individualism.

“This breaking up of tight kin groups by expanding ‘prohibited degrees’ (as far as third cousins) is perhaps not sufficiently appreciated. Think what it would have done to the Arab cousin-marriage system. In England the institution of primogeniture — inheritance by the eldest son — also helped prevent the dissipation of family fortunes produced by partible inheritance: division of the patrimony among all sons, common on the continent (and in China, but not Japan). It reduced the power of aristocratic clans by forcing the younger sons into the professions: the army, the law, and the church.

“This move away from kinship and into the world of voluntary and non-kin organizations was in turn infused with the Protestant work and reinvestment ethic, and the Miracle happened. It did not happen all at once, but over several centuries of cumulative effort that fed on the new humanism and the growth of science and industry. As labor became ever more specialized and more mobile, family groups became ever less self-sufficient, and individuals became more and more dependent on strangers and on the institutions that made dependence on strangers possible: in particular, the rule of law and the enforcement of contracts.

“And we had to do it by our own efforts, pull ourselves up by the social bootstraps, to make it stick. We have seen in Germany, in Italy, and in Spain how fragile this really is. Russia never did make it. France is always problematic. Latin America and the Balkans continue to be a mess. But in making this move we had to change the entire particularistic, communalistic, ritualistic, kin-dominated society that is natural to us, and we have to keep at it all the time….” [from: Robin Fox, “The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind,” pgs. 69-70.]

OT:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26607976?dopt=Abstract

The Evolutionary Basis of Honor Cultures

Around the globe, people fight for their honor, even if it means sacrificing their lives. This is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective, and little is known about the conditions under which honor cultures evolve. We implemented an agent-based model of honor, and our simulations showed that the reliability of institutions and toughness of the environment are crucial conditions for the evolution of honor cultures. Honor cultures survive when the effectiveness of the authorities is low, even in very tough environments. Moreover, the results show that honor cultures and aggressive cultures are mutually dependent in what resembles a predator-prey relationship described in the renowned Lotka-Volterra model. Both cultures are eliminated when institutions are reliable. These results have implications for understanding conflict throughout the world, where Western-based strategies are exported, often unsuccessfully, to contexts of weak institutional authority wherein honor-based strategies have been critical for survival.

It is likely mutual disinterest from both elite colleges and white male applicants. Some white students who fail to apply are worse off at the individual level — particularly, if they end up in the lower tail-end of the career outcomes scale without the insurance policy of an elite degree. But the elite colleges are much worse off in the long-run and at the aggregate level. It’s interesting that so many commenters who otherwise adhere to demographic IQ research and the Law of Large Numbers, fail to appreciate this.

Elite universities ignore several-thousand 140+ IQ white boys from Middle America. Instead, they oversample from women (rarely found in top 1% of performers 10-years post-grad in any field), minority groups with either lower cognitive abilities or lower cultural tolerance for risk, and admissions-groomed, risk-adverse white children from the Coasts.

Also add that elite universities push post-graduate education as entry-point for prestige-driven, low-professional-risk careers. This likely discourages highly-intelligent risk-seeking individuals from applying (namely, gifted boys who dislike the structure of school and are not afraid of disappointing relatives). If reframing IQ scale into overall ability to place in top 0.01% of career outcomes, elite schools can attract the 115-140 crowd (likely overrepresented by women) but fail miserably at attracting and keeping the 140+ crowd (likely overrepresented by women who were former men).

Suspect gifted white high-school males are comparing college brochure against what they read on reddit, quora, or perhaps, speaking with older peers, who are now beginning to intern at tech companies. Interesting that so many high-performing white males which elite schools “fail to reach”, will not hesitate in applying for an internship at Tesla or Google during college.

At the individual level, it’s a lost opportunity for these young men. At the aggregate level, these primarily East Coast colleges have basically lost the future mega-donors to colleges who capture these boys’ imaginations (Stanford), colleges that offer a accessible 4-year training ground for the Bay Area or Seattle (like UT-Austin, Wisconsin-Madison) or have lost them all together, except for when they show up 20 years down the road to poach the University’s robotics department.

you had the medieval Catholic Church saying the kings and princes were divinely ordained

Divine Right of Kings was a heretical Protestant invention. The Great Chain of Being (the Catholic thing) was not really that similar. Like any heresy, Divine Right of Kings picks up on some subordinate themes in Catholic teaching and exaggerates them to the point of unrecognizability. The Protestant value proposition, to kings, was 1) we steal the Church’s money and split it, 2) you set us up as the established church, and 3) we propagandize in your favor among the masses, explaining that your authority is in no way dependent on, say, the approval of the Catholic Church or on you being a proper Christian monarch. This latter is the DRoK.

Southerners writing about the need to take care of the slaves

The Southerners were wrong about this? Black people are capable of taking care of themselves?

Pretty sure that’s about making Duke money.

Also, I suspect a lot of IQ 140 kids in flyover country would rather be orthopedic surgeons in their local capital, etc., rather than going to Harvard and joining the DC/NY/Boston feeding frenzy.

This particular theme of Steve’s is a bit disturbing. Do we really want the Borg to be more efficient at assimilating our best people? Is that really what we want? Steve sometimes gets these enthusiasms in which he forgets that the people in charge are bad people with bad goals. Then he starts giving them good advice. It’s how engineering minds work. You just want to solve problems. Even if the problem is how to deliver really effective Anthrax into the hands of megalomaniacal sociopaths.

Please continue commenting in future.

Actually, smart white kids in the inner-cities are totally marginalized. All the attention is given to the Blacks and Latinos. The Blacks and Latinos who make trouble hog a lot of attention and the few who do apply themselves seem a lot smarter than they actually are by comparison to the rest, so the teachers are all over them. Also, if you have an I.Q. above 120, as most whites do, inner-city schools are stultifyingly boring, not to mention having to watch all the high jinks your fellow classmates engage in.

The Chinese and some of the Vietnamese, mostly children of restaurant workers and nail salon owners, plug away like the troopers they are. Most white kids whose parents send them to ghetto schools have parents who have already failed in some way usually at relationships and ended up searching out cheap rent. Teachers pay no attention to those kids because they don’t see them as needy enough to stir their liberal instincts. Also, they don’t want to look racist by championing white kids.

Wow! That is profound. Beautiful even, and is it ever true.

This is why participating in activities like 4H, FFA, ROTC etc is actually a liability.

There was a study that showed that there was a negative correlation between admittance to elite schools and these being your activities on your application. No doubt a subconscious negative bias by the admission people.

The problem with primary schooling is that it is much easier to fake it. Study hard and work harder than anybody else and you are very likely to do extremely well even if you aren’t all that bright. Your larger vocabulary and better language skills will also mean higher test scores on the verbal portions of tests like the SAT as you won’t have to mull the possible answer’s over before marking that blob as the less well equipped students do. Add in some SAT preparatory classes to teach you how better to exclude the obvious bad examples on the spacial reasoning questions and you can punch above your weight. This is where parenting can help.

Now you are in a college above your level. The only students who stand out are those who at the undergraduate level don’t even seem to need the professors unlike you. You study endlessly and are at every open door session the professor and TA have but still only get Bs and the occasional As. You are a run of the mill student here and if your family isn’t rich or connected, the old money families from the Ivy League won’t care about you. The parents can’t help you here.

Do you have a link for the information about the Rwandan U.N. ambassador’s granddaughter benefiting from affirmative action?

I mentioned Snowden because he’s the only NSA employee who’s educational background I’ve heard of. I’m sure many of them are highly qualified mathematicians. But Snowden shows that if you have a high enough IQ you might end up in the NSA regardless of education. I expect lots of other smart folks who came in via Snowden’s route did not betray the US. (My opinion)

Amex’s heyday was when credit cards were hard to get and an Amex card was some kind of status symbol. They charged the retailers a higher percentage of the sale and the card carriers had to pay everything off each month. Many places dropped them when regular credit cards became common. I am surprised they are still in business.

does he know what his career is likely to be like with Nebraska on his sheepskin, as opposed to MIT?

Unless you want to be a quant on Wall Street there is no difference. If you want to be a physicist going to Nebraska may not give you the same range of research opportunities as MIT but for a BS that doesn’t matter a bit.

A guy in our airgun club got his PhD from Tennessee and is teaching at Cal Tech working on their gravity wave detection project. Unfortunately, his is not a tenure track position. He was offered a tenure track position at a lessor university but decided to stay at Cal Tech for the work he was doing.

From an institutional standpoint it would be an excellent long term strategy to recruit white flyover talent as well. There is no demographic more institutionally loyal than middle/lower class whites to an institution that “made”them.

The rulers of Britain went to a lot of trouble to replace the working class with non-whites, wymyn, homos etc. They’re not going to let them back in.

In the good old days you could just send Tommy off to India or South Africa.

Even if you’re not Danny Noonan?

First of all it doesn’t matter one bit what college you went to at all. However, even if you went to a community college as a start, there is nothing stopping you from learning just as much as a freshman at Harvard or MIT. Yes, the instructor at your freshman calculus class might not even have a PhD and he certainly did not do anything of significance in the world of mathematics but he would probably enjoy dealing with a bright student who just inhaled the subject and reminded him why he first studied math. He would probably bend over backward to help a student like that.

You might even impress the instructors so much that they would help you get into an Ivy League school. You would at least be very likely to get into the flagship campus of the state university and have a chance to do real college level work.

I know people who have been accepted into the physics program at UC Berkeley from a JC, and one accepted into Cal Tech for an MS who got their BS from CSU Northridge.

I think, but a society should probably have a way to spend rather than squander the kind of “potential” I had/was.

There was such a place (the factory) and there still is (the military).

In the factory a smart guy would soon realize he was smarter than his boss and maybe even smarter than the engineers and go back to school at night for an AA and see if he could get on the swing shift or graveyard and finish his BS. Many companies have fellowship programs to allow smart people to get their degrees with company help.

Lots of people get advanced degrees in the military.

this is probably why the Janissary effect is muted: you have to accept the children of your enemies into your institutions in order to brainwash them.

In Britain I think it’s no longer controversial to say that white working class boys are the worst performing group and need help. The hatred of whites & of males in the US is stronger, but if you frame it like that it might help.

The real reason that the elites don’t want to bother looking for smart rural kids (other the the obvious anti-white hostility) is that those kids might be able to compete intellectually with the elites. The black affirmative action kids aren’t a real threat, and the elites don’t take them seriously.

For the most part, they get shuffled off to useless make-work jobs.

Rural high-IQ go-getters, by contrast, represent a real threat. This is why participating in activities like 4H, FFA, ROTC etc is actually a liability.

The movie “Real Genius” is silent on how Mitch first came to the attention of Dr Hathaway, but your idea is a worthy one.

(If you haven’t seen “Real Genius”, Mister Sailer, run don’t walk to check it out. )

I wonder how the Jew / Gentile percentages of the White subcategory break down.

From today’s headlines: Amex vs Costco

How Bad Will It Get for American Express?

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-how-amex-lost-costco/

Traditionally the Feds will give you 10% of your funding and 90% of your bureaucracy.
It partially explains the explosion in administrative versus teaching expenditure.

Paging John McCain!

steve, you’re assuming anybody wants to help these kids. nobody in power does. the whole point is to destroy smart capable kids from the outer districts to prevent them from winning the hunger games and threatening the capital.

but, in case somebody out there is interested:

A simple way to help these kids out would be to provide some detailed explanation of how student loans work, and realistic projections for what it will mean to pay them back.

Smart kids from dumb families fall hard for the “go to the best college you can” line, and don’t have anyone around who can do math, and understand and explain student loans to them.

If you expect to make 50-60k a year after graduation, well, let’s see here now, if you live cheaply and save a lot of your income for a couple years, well i reckon you can probably pay that 120k student debt off in like 3 or 4 years. No shit, this is how people think. Oh, 10% interest? well that’s another 12,000 right? ok so, say 5 years…

“In the late ’70s, I was one of those kids from the sticks in a rural state, smart parents but neither had opportunities to attend college, going to a small rural school, 99% on the ACT, National Merit finalist. Went to the local solid second-tier State U for engineering; in retrospect, I probably could have gotten into a much more prestigious school with my test scores, but I simply didn’t know that there were other options. My school didn’t have a guidance counselor; nobody from that school had ever gone to college out-of-state (few left town; graduates from my high school usually went to the local teacher’s college if they went to college at all); neither of my parents could really help – they wanted me to succeed but didn’t know the options either.”

I think this point bears repeating. Look let’s say you are a young whippersnapper from a podunk 150 miles outside of Lincoln. If you want to go full blown HBD let’s say this kid has a 140 IQ or something, one anyway which would let him do well at Harvard if he were admitted.

Does anyone think this 18 year old kid knows how the world works (according to us at least), and knows what the ramifications of an elite school degree are? Let’s say he wants to be a physicist (though he wouldn’t have much real knowledge of what that means, his attitudes would have been formed by TV shows), does he know what his career is likely to be like with Nebraska on his sheepskin, as opposed to MIT?

Think he knows anything about the application process? That he needs to play an instrument or something? Let’s say he comes from a religious background. Does he know that he should be vaguely spiritual but vehemently opposed to Christianity at his Harvard interview? That he should spout all the platitudes about trans-gender this or that?

Well he might know some of this if he spends altogether too much time on the internet, as opposed to working at the local hardware store or whatever wholesome activity that used to be common. My take is that doesn’t really carry any weight anymore; you have to grind and be involved in approved extra-curricular activities. Having some kind of job gets in the way of being involved in some kind of activism the interviewer will like, and playing your instrument so you are well rounded or something.

You know someone here ought to make a couple youtube videos, “How the world actually works” or something like that. Couple 10 minute videos ought to be enough if you stay on message.

Education is signalling. (Trigger warning: Bryan Caplan.).
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/11/the_magic_of_ed.html
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/04/educational_sig_1.html

There were, and still are, scholarships for kids who are the first in their families to go to college, and the state colleges really like getting that type of applicant.

Yes, there’s a fair amount of bureaucracy dedicated to helping first-generation college students (albeit generally mentioned a bit sotto voce after discussing all the other affirmative action programs), and it was considered a firm advantage when I was applying to colleges a few years ago.

There are also a lot of scientists working for the federal government who get to do real science but dont spend their lives chasing grants.

@Sailer
If you want more researchers to work on the ideas you occasionally throw out there, you should tag those posts with “research idea” if not include some reference in the title. That way the smarter sort might also look through older ideas and keep mining your work for new projects.
Memory hole proofing!

“CASHING OUT …”!

I have my own way of describing what is going on in North America and the European Union that encompasses affirmative action and massive immigration — diversity for its own sake. It’s called “cashing out”.

At some point, a once vibrant society has had enough of excellence and accomplishment and decides to divy up its assets among diverse claimants. The game is to organize and define youself as a “victim class” seeking reparations or compensation from society at large. This starts slowly but then the pace quickens. It eventually starts to resemble “Black Friday” as people scramble to grab what they can, while they can, any way they can.

But then the “carrying costs” of paying for affirmative action for under achieving “victim classes” and supporting large-scale immigration from alien cultures starts to have its impact. These social programs are welfare by another name. Soon, the society that is “cashing out” starts to suffer from organizational and social friction as layers of “carrying costs” for diversity start to severely burden the effectiveness of education, business, and government. Across the board, things simply don’t work as well as they once did. The universities, corporations, government, military, etc., become “self-licking ice cream cones”. They progressively serve no other purpose than perpetuating themselves for the sake of their claimant populations.

Eventually, the society that is “cashing out” finds that it has “cashed out”. The assets are gone. The capital is depleted. The “victim classes” — the claimants — then turn on each other to fight over what is left.

Questions: Is the process through which a society starts “cashing out” reversible … or, does it reach a critical point at which eventual social, political, technical, and functional “bankruptcy” are inevitable?

Isn’t that an argument against hiring high school dropouts, though? We might all be happy as Americans Snowden blew the whistle, but it’s horrible for the NSA. Maybe college shows you can keep your head down and mouth platitudes for 4 years and aren’t too rebellious.

Ditto here, though I doubt my IQ is above 125-130, and my home was profoundly broken. Countenance blog is a daily stop for me, natch.

I wonder how many in the Steveosphere /Alt-Right have been red pilled since childhood, living through circumstances that tend to create the worst sort of SJW cretin? But instead of engaging in outrageous identity illnesses we developed a “taste for distasteful truths” (Bierce).

Yes, The military in general, if they apply the tests will pick them out. And also the NSA somehow. I believe Snowden is a high school dropout.

Bud Bundy!

“Malcolm in the Middle, Lisa Simpson, the evil genius baby on Family Guy, it’s been done a few times.”

Not to mention Stewy’s (“the evil genius baby”) talking dog Brian. He is so easy to overlook; your utter failure to mention him clearly shows how exceptional talent can so easily fall in the cracks. According to Wikipedia, “He primarily works in the series as a struggling writer, attempting essays, novels, screenplays and newspaper articles.” He sounds like a canine version of Steve Sailer, although I think Sailer probably lacks Brian’s ability to chase cars. Further, “Brian is fond of dry martinis and is seen to have some issues in various episodes when he is told or forced to stop drinking. He smokes occasionally, although in the episode “Mr. Griffin Goes to Washington”, after seeing Peter promoting a corrupt cigarette company, he quit smoking, a habit he resumed at the end of that episode. He also occasionally smokes marijuana. After a brief stint as a drug sniffing dog, he developed a severe cocaine addiction, but after spending time in rehab he managed to quit.” Apparently, Sailer failed to mention him because he feared Ron Unz or Taki might show an interest in Brian’s undeniable talents and give him a blog on their respective “mags.”

A dog so talented obviously deserves his own entry in Wikipedia. For those interested in reading more about this overlooked talent, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Griffin

“Affirmative Action for Students Smarter Than Their Parents?”

Isn’t that what used to be called “Meritocracy”?

Where are you getting that the overlooked students are mostly male? I didn’t read the article but ctrl+f’d it and she doesn’t say anything about gender. Smart white girls in rural areas are being overlooked just as much as the smart white boys. Smart white kids from rural areas are probably the U.S.’s most poorly utilized resource.

The progenitors of Wal-Mart-the dime stores such as F.W.Woolworth, S.S. Kresge, W.T. Grant, and Ben Franklin and their big box offshoots, K-Mart and Woolco-recruited their management from scrappy but bright East Coast and Midwest row-house kids in their salad days. They hired them in as stock boys before or right after they got out of high school and trained them inhouse in accounting, marketing, store maintenance and everything else needed. They were physically fit, could and would work very long hours and ran their stores as fiefdoms-anything went so long as the store made money and the company was never exposed to shame or embarrassment. Disputes with male subordinates were occasionally settled with fisticuffs (off property and off the clock) and at any given time at least one of the “office girls” was probably sexually involved with said manager.

In the late seventies, a college degree became a requirement for entry level store management. By the late nineties, Woolworth/Woolco and WT Grant were gone entirely, Kresge and Jupiter stores were gone, and the few remaining Ben Franklins became women’s crafts stores. Shortly thereafter the Dollar General and similar chains shot to nationwide prominence, doing exactly the same thing Woolworth and Kresge did in the thirties and forties. It would be interesting to find out how they recruit managers.

What the other two guys said. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Why we necessarily think it’s a tragedy if a 140-160 IQ person winds up being a car mechanic, or as in my father’s case a TV repairman (and later a electronics and hardware retailer) is something which bears thinking about. My dad was the son of a telegraph and telephone man, was taught “radio” (which encompassed all electronics back then) in the Coast Guard at the end of WWII, and took a job in production for Admiral after the war. He started a TV shop, married his first wife, had two kids, and made half a million dollars by 1961 while serving in the Naval Reserve as an avionics tech. It cost him his marriage, but he remarried and had two more kids (I’m the younger of those.) He had a great life owning a TV/radio/music business and we had a great life growing up. He retired out in the early eighties as a reserve warrant officer, participated in ham radio and the Civil Air Patrol, and was a traveling tech trainer for several TV manufacturers. He never did earn as much as an associate degree.

The progress made in those industries depends on there being at least a smattering of “too smart to be a…” people in the field. My father designed several pieces of test equipment for servicing TV sets and CRT computer monitors that the degreed engineers at the factory were amazed at. (Dad did have a morbid side, though. He also designed an electro-euthanasia machine for dog pounds which was never adopted by any, but his idea was the genesis for the electrical stunning/killing machine mink and chinchilla farms use to this day.)

Making progress in industry depends, of course, on there being an industry in the first place. It wasn’t 100 IQ people who cooked up the ideas of mass offshoring, outsourcing, lean manufacturing, kanban, just-in-time and all the other job destroying idiocies: it was extremely high IQ people with Ph.D’s and the like. We’d certainly have been better off if many had been car mechanics or TV repairmen.

I focus on the parents of math talent and offhand I can’t think of anyone who didn’t have a parent with a STEM degree or at least a graduate degree in another field.

Both of Melanie Wood’s parents were middle school teachers. Her mother taught French and Spanish but Melanie wasn’t interested in languages. Her father died when she was 6 weeks old and he was a math teacher. Melanie’s mother taught her math in memory of her father. When she was 4 years old Melanie could solve 3x + y = 12 when x=2 in her head. Melanie attended a private high school, Tudor Park.

The other two girls to go to the International Mathematical Olympiad were Alison Miller and Sherry Gong. Alison was homeschooled. I don’t know anything about her father, but her mother has a bachelor’s in math from Bryn Mawr and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. Alison went to Harvard and has a Ph.D. from Princeton.

Sherry went to Exeter Academy in NH. Both of her parents have Ph.D.s (I think math related) and teach at a university in Puerto Rico. Sherry went to Harvard and is a Ph.D. candidate at MIT.

I only noticed one obvious female name in the MathCounts link. Walter Kroubalkian’s father is a software developer. I don’t know what Moses Schindler’s parents do but his mother converted to Judaism and neither parent had a strong math background so they put the kids in Kumon in pre-school. His older brother and sister, Max and Stella, took BC Calculus in the 8th grade.

It’s always great to see Steve in a mainstream outlet. No mouth-frothing, no anger, etc. It really throws them for a loop.

The US Navy is still doing it, although women on the boats and other such insanity is certainly narrowing the opportunity. The Nuclear Power Program takes bright high school kids and makes them functionally engineers, and many earn engineering degrees while serving or thereafter. Seabees makes not only construction workers but construction managers, many who become construction firm executives, and of course after SEAL/UDT/EOD the few who make it often have stellar careers. (My cardiothoracic surgeon was a former SEAL.)

Of course, there are also a lot of sailors that are dumber than rocks (although the Army always has been the service of last resort for the marginal IQ or those with previous legal or behavioral issues), and a fair number of Naval officers from ‘the right families’ that are screwups or of minimal talent which the Air Force or the Marines would never have commissioned.

male, white, flyover states, maybe from broken homes.”

Aren’t they what the military is for?

Maybe, but they’re also what solid second-tier state universities used to be for, back in the day when companies weren’t afraid to recruit from said solid second-tier state universities.

In the late ’70s, I was one of those kids from the sticks in a rural state, smart parents but neither had opportunities to attend college, going to a small rural school, 99% on the ACT, National Merit finalist. Went to the local solid second-tier State U for engineering; in retrospect, I probably could have gotten into a much more prestigious school with my test scores, but I simply didn’t know that there were other options. My school didn’t have a guidance counselor; nobody from that school had ever gone to college out-of-state (few left town; graduates from my high school usually went to the local teacher’s college if they went to college at all); neither of my parents could really help – they wanted me to succeed but didn’t know the options either. In the end, it was fine; I did well, got recruited by a number of quality high tech employers, and have had a very successful career doing exactly what I want.

But today…I probably couldn’t replicate my success because the quality high tech employers tend not to recruit at the solid second-tier state universities anymore; they want the MIT and Stanford and Caltech and Berkeley and, yes, Rice grads; good ol’ State U gets left out. All my young co-workers come from well-off families where typically both parents have graduate degrees. Credentials are everything nowadays, at least to get your foot in the door; once you have a few years, then performance is all that matters, but you can’t perform if you can’t get hired…