His conclusion for why he hadn’t found many stars: Mexicans just have too short legs.

A useful word is “fossorial.”. This means 1. Having short legs; 2. Adapted for digging; and
3. Adapted for living underground.

As for Mexico’s wanting to enlist Sal Maglie, it is perhaps noteworthy that his nickname was “the barber.” The nickname derived from the fact that brushback-throwing Maglie would pitch you so close inside that, like a barber, he could give you a close shave. The Barber taught Don Drysdale how to do it.

Mexicans are pretty bad at soccer considering their population and how much they love it.

Argentina is surprisingly good at basketball considering it’s nobody’s first choice in that country.

Well, it was also always said of the Mexican boxers that their arms were too short to compete effectively.

[do not publish]

you forgot to define WAR

‘In major league history, Valenzuela remains the best Mexican-born ballplayer, with a career total of 41 wins above replacement (“WAR”)

Even with perfectly meritocratic hiring, the superstars among employees are likely to come from groups shifted to the right on probability distribution.

That’s true, but the lower-performing group’s representation will look like the extreme tail of a distribution. If Amy Wax’s institution, Penn Law School, admitted by LSAT alone, there might be one or two blacks there and as you say they won’t be way up among the superstar students.

But when you see that the group which makes up 13% of the overall population accounts for 13% of actual students *and* clusters among the mediocre performers, then you can be pretty sure there’s affirmative action at play.

One of the weirdest surprises in my life was when Mexico beat South Korea in world cup soccer. It was around 4:30 a. m. in my neighborhood in los estados unidos and approximately 50 million firecrackers suddenly exploded at the maximum possible firecracker explosion rate. I was sound asleep when it began and it took me a couple minutes to figure out what happened.

WAR = wins above replacement. Steve mentions it in the paragraph about Fernando Valenzuela.

In New York Times work environement, there is another anti-racism theory that hasn’t be tested : racism against Goyim.

If the overwhelmingly majority of « whites » there are Jews, it could be one rule for « us », another for the Goyim explanation of money reward.

I am worried that hypothesis wouldn’t pop up in particular here at Unz.com

What’s the difference between Mexico and Dominican Republic? The Dodger scout who found Fernando, Mike Brito, who recently died at 87, spent decades scouring Mexico. His conclusion for why he hadn’t found many stars: Mexicans just have too short legs.

I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing that soccer is now much more popular in Mexico, in part for that reason. You don’t have to be tall like 6’2″ Cristiano Ronaldo to be good at soccer. You can also be 5’7″ like Lionel Messi.

That might only explain why different countries might do better or worse competing against others not why a sport would, internally, be so popular. It really does all have to do with first mover advantage. In those years of the late 19th and very early 20th centuries there were windows for organised league sports to gain footholds. There are very few exceptions where this rule is violated.

Mexico is, though, infamous for not producing very good players despite the huge population, levels of participation, lots of poor kids who are the fodder for professional players and huge passion/money in the game. Some blame the pay and money in Lega MX being much better for Mexican players than they’d be paid in the most competitive European leagues and that the best players never get to properly develop there.

That’s why I laughed at Ted Lasso for having the big foreign star player be Mexican. You can count on your hand how many Mexicans have ever played in the Premier League (Just looked it up, two hands, just 10 ever and the first in 2005) and you can’t name one anyone would remember. The few Mexicans who do play in the better leagues tend to concentrate in Spain. Though again, like immigration and sport, history and connections play far more important roles than people like to imagine. (The recent trend of American players getting better experience in Germany is down to Jürgen Klinsmann setting up those connections when he was hired to coach the USMNT) But Americans are convinced that Mexicans must be good soccer players. In reality a middle class white American (Or half white raised by white parent/grandparents) would have been much more realistic as those guys do tend to be around in small numbers in the Premier League. But in recent years the USMNT and top US players have begun to become very black and foreign. A lot of kids of West African or Caribbean parents. (Maybe following the Williams/Model noticing 15 years ago that there weren’t too many black kids playing soccer in the US and seeing an open market.)

But like with the whole over eager anticipation that any day now Mexicans will prove a veto vote in US presidential elections, US soccer is obsessed with the Hispaniciation of American soccer despite this never actually happening. (ESPN seemingly only hires, often foreign, Hispanic commentators who will pronounce Spanish words with the right inflection despite Hispanics not watching their coverage) Foreign born Hispanics don’t care about US leagues or the USMNT and assimilated Hispanics tend to be poor and not very intellectually interested in anything non-mainstream or middle class to say nothing about the money involved. (Which is a form of gatekeeping so nice white middle class people can have their own social space)

Many conservatives assume that without a racial thumb on the scales in hiring, the average performance of all the races hired would be the same.

Not the average, but the failure rates (college) or the lowest employee performance rating (or the firing rate) should be similar across race (as long as hair-touching is minimized). The absolute numbers will be wildly different.

Steve, is it fair to people who don’t own million dollar businesses, but, afsakiđ, gaffall, erud þiđ međ grænmetisrétti?

OT — Today we really proved that socialism wins!
Now, per historical socialist tradition, let’s identify everybody who wears eyeglasses, has a college degree, owns any foreign products, and/or, has relatives in Israel!

>arms, too short to get ploppy
>just right to remove a beating heart

I have often thought that the current DIE craze has 2 major sources: one, a realization by the more perceptive policy elites that all the social interventions of the last 60 years are a failure and even turning up the dial to 11 still won’t close the gaps and two, the changing demographics of the country means the constituency for putting black cultural concerns first is dissolving. Thus it is necessary to make a hard push to try to cement in place racial quotas now to retain black political loyalty in the future because the need to attract enough Asian and Latino voters in the years ahead coupled with their divergent interests from blacks will be an extremely difficult balancing act that will deliver more disappointments to their black constituency than they are accustomed to.

“Many conservatives assume that without a racial thumb on the scales in hiring, the average performance of all the races hired would be the same.”

other way around. liberals assume all people around the world are roughly the same in their ability level. many conservatives assume the opposite – people of the world have different strengths and weaknesses, so job performance at the right end of the bell curve shakes out naturally from that.

sometimes this view is actually to their detriment. they accept this too often, and start to see situations where their group is artificially being removed from participation, instead as the natural shake out of things.

liberals of course see the natural shake out of things producing the absence of certain groups, and look to tip the scales to change outcomes, because they assume the natural shake out of things would produce a rainbow of participants normally, so something must be stopping that from happening.

There are constantly new stars out of the DR but seldom out of Mexico.

I have no real facts to back this up, but the past threads in the media have alluded to early and often PED use by baseball players in the DR.

That claim is supported by the statistical anomaly of the high numbers of MLB players from the small island country of the DR with a population 10 million.

Note that the same is true for Jamaica and its track stars. An isolated island that somehow has a significant percentage its of small population who are genetically predisposed to be world class track stars.

I don’t know what the dope testing protocols are for young baseball players in the DR and young tracksters in Jamaica. But if they are limited or absent altogether I suppose the standard practice would be to juice the kids early to max their post adolescent potential. That would give them a sustaining edge even after they transition to competition environments with more stringent testing.

Even with perfectly meritocratic hiring, the superstars among employees are likely to come from groups shifted to the right on the probability distribution.

This is Amy Wax’s “never in the top 10 percent, rarely in the top half, usually in the button 10 percent” observation about her Penn BIPOC law students. (Admittedly that’s after “holistic” admissions.)

The rage now is to replace hard math in high schools with statistics and data science classes. Both subjects can be rigorous math, and stats really cannot be done right without some calculus. But in for their woke re-envisioning they are simply vessels to convey “facts” about white supremacy. Hopefully some embedded based math teachers will teach about large right tail consequences of even minor differences in mean and standard deviation. A good way to do this would be to use examples from sports where blacks blow away whites at elite levels even though the differences aren’t that great at high school levels. And then drop a comment that it holds true in other areas, like … oh, the bell, that’s it for today, remember the quiz tomorrow.

Dominicans also love to juice.

OT: I’d like to see Mr. Sailer comment on this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/25/women-tennis-balls-us-open/
Women use faster balls than men at U.S. Open. Some players are over it.

the Pittsburgh Pirates have some of the best scouting in MLB. but not only is this practically pointless, it’s actually less than useless. all they’re doing is spotting and developing new, above average players for other MLB teams to sign as free agents a few years down the line.

Mexico is definitely much better at soccer than DR, and has been, forever? decades and decades at least. and Mexicans are better soccer players. they have 10 times as many people, but nevertheless their best players are better. being stumpy doesn’t affect them much.

The Dodger scout who found Fernando, Mike Brito, who recently died at 87, spent decades scouring Mexico

Long-time baseball fans may not know the name, but they would immediately recognize Brito as he would attend every Dodgers home game, sit in the front row wearing a Panama hat, and use a radar gun to clock the pitches.

The thing about soccer is one does not really benefit as much from early maturity as basketball and football players benefit. Many professional basketball players were taller than their classmates and thus were better at an early age. Football players benefit from maturing early and football is a sport that one does not really need to play until high school.

Soccer and baseball seem to depend upon the coaching model where young, pre-teen players are heavily coached and the best players are those that can best take to the coaching.

…the New York Times’ management being revealed to rate its black and Hispanic journalists more poorly on average than its white journalists

The real scandal here is not the treatment of the minorities, but the lionization of equally bad white “journalists”. Have you read the Times lately? If you read iSteve, you certainly have!

I can’t say for sure that the stumpy Maradona was a mestizo, but he sure looked like one.

Maradona and Messi are Italians.

the hardest hit ball since they started measuring about a decade ago — a single off the right field fence.

Perhaps a more lightly-hit ball might have given him time to reach second? Talk about an inverted U…

In major league history, Valenzuela remains the best Mexican-born ballplayer, with a career total of 41 wins above replacement…

Heck, microscopic Curaçao came close to topping that, with the young Andruw Jones. Too bad the old Andruw Jones sunk to 24 WAR.

Should Andruw Jones’s Hall of Fame Case Be Defined by His Historic Peak or Steep Decline?

If Amy Wax’s institution, Penn Law School, admitted by LSAT alone, there might be one or two blacks there and as you say they won’t be way up among the superstar students.

I’m not sure about 1 or 2. It would be more like 1 or 2% which in a class of 300 would mean somewhere around 3 to 6 per class or as many as 18 for the entire law school. This would be especially true nowadays when “black” includes 1/2 blacks raised by their Jewish or Asian mothers, Caribbean and Nigerian blacks, etc. In the old days there were only a small number of “talented tenth” ADOS blacks but now the pool is not only larger but stocked with more promising material.

The second half is correct. Long before AA, blacks were allowed to enroll in law schools, med schools, graduate programs in math, physics, etc. (the first black graduated from Penn Law School in 1888) But there have been zero black Fields Medal winners, zero black Nobelists in the hard sciences, etc. (one black Nobelist in economics – a Caribbean black).

A black that is 3 SDs out from the black mean has an IQ of 130, which is maybe good enough to get thru a physics grad school program but isn’t going to get you a Nobel. An Ashkenazi Jew that is 3 SDs out is at around 160, where the big prizes are found (this is why hard science Nobels have gone to Jews at 10x the rate of their representation in US population – the same reason that blacks are NOT there). The number of blacks who are 5 SDs out from the black mean ( the number of ANY humans who are 5 SDs above average anything) is a statistical zero – when you go far enough out, there is no daylight left under the right tail, just as there are zero humans who live longer than 130 years, zero humans who are above 9′ in height, etc.

Mexicans are pretty bad at soccer considering their population and how much they love it.

Likewise Puerto Rico and the Philippines with basketball.

Argentina is surprisingly good at basketball considering it’s nobody’s first choice in that country.

Among the middle and upper classes, even soccer isn’t the first choice. That would be rugby. As with several other countries, this gives nationalistic Argentines an opportunity to beat up on the hated English.

They also have a significant Welsh minority in Chubut, though how good these are at sport I couldn’t tell you.

Dominicans were known for their light-hitting shortstops for many years, like Alfredo Griffin. Sports illustrated did a long piece about it as I recall.

Then Dominicans got really into ‘vitamins.’ Improved nutrition surely helped, but they don’t love vegetables. Plantains and roasted pork, chicharron, rice and beans. Green, leafy vegetables, not so much.

But Dominicans love their ‘vitamins.’ You can buy extremely powerful, healthy ‘vitamins’ right over the counter in DR.

What’s the difference between Mexico and Dominican Republic? The Dodger scout who found Fernando, Mike Brito, who recently died at 87, spent decades scouring Mexico. His conclusion for why he hadn’t found many stars: Mexicans just have too short legs.

I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing that soccer is now much more popular in Mexico, in part for that reason. You don’t have to be tall like 6’2″ Cristiano Ronaldo to be good at soccer. You can also be 5’7″ like Lionel Messi.

That might only explain why different countries might do better or worse competing against others not why a sport would, internally, be so popular. It really does all have to do with first mover advantage. In those years of the late 19th and very early 20th centuries there were windows for organised league sports to gain footholds. There are very few exceptions where this rule is violated.

At a certain point, if there aren’t many Mexican and Mexican-derived players in the top league(s) of a sport, the kids growing up won’t identify themselves with it and won’t play the game, creating a vicious cycle where even kids who may have had the physical ability to be good to great baseball players will have spent their formative years playing soccer.

Football and to a lesser extent Basketball seem to defy this to a point insofar as the rare physical attributes to play many positions – i.e., enormous bulk or exceptional height – can be determinative of ability. There may be 5’6″ 145 lb. men with incredible footwork, balance, and skill at the left tackle position but there isn’t one in the NFL. It’s typical in the U.S. to start playing football beginning in high school, and other than at maybe the quarterback position there aren’t tremendous advantages to be gained by having played youth football against simple raw athletic ability and sheer size (while the cumulative nature of traumatic brain injuries is such that there is a general advantage to having not bashed your head around as a child).

Yes. This is how the far right tail of the curve works. It also favors groups that produce a lot of outliers on that side. Some groups are more bunched up in the middle with few outliers, while others are more spread out. (Out to those suburbs. You’ll find some of the smartest professionals way out in the exurbs even, with lots of beautiful space around them. Even lots of Ashkenazis I know. Ahem, sorry.)

A useful word is “fossorial.”. This means 1. Having short legs …

In British English the equivalent expression is short-arsed. It’s not entirely logical but it is widely understood.

I seem to remember some years back John Derbyshire spoke to the black law association at UPenn and pointed out that going off of the most recently available stats from the LSAT, there should only be like 5 black law students who scored high enough to be there on merit yet they had over 50.

So either UPenn either miraculously scooped up an unbelievably high proportion of elite black LSAT takers to the detriment of other top law schools who had to pad their admissions with a load of affirmative action cases, or UPenn itself had done a lot of padding itself. Either way, affirmative action isn’t just a light adjustment to the scale but an unconscionable level of dishonesty.

Anyway, multiply that effect across millions who enroll in undergrad each year and you have the massive racial student loan balance disparities people like Elizabeth Warren rant about. The logical move would be to make it much more difficult for subpar students to get loans much less offered admission, but someone’s got to prop up all those administrators and social justice degree programs.

And the same was said was of Rocky Marciano.

Who can legitimately claim to be African-American for federal jobs. Or any other job.

Can someone with one percent sub Saharan African blood check them selves off as black?

In addition to the Andruw Joneses, Curacao has also produced Kenley Jansen, Ozzie Albies, Andrelton Simmons, Jonathan Schoop and several more. Pretty good for a country with a 155,000 population. Dominican Republic’s population is much more, about 11 million.

And you won’t find a hint of this comparison anywhere in the writing of Mr. Baseball Data, Bill James.

It’s more about keeping Hispanics and Asians on the Democrat side as they assimilate and start making money, I think.

The normal distribution approximation works well around the mean but may not be highly accurate at the extremes. Note also that the black IQ distribution seems to have a smaller standard deviation than 15.

I read in Jensen that the number of individuals scoring above 160 in an IQ test is so low that it is not possible to statistically validate scores above 160. Such individuals are certainly very highly intelligent but don’t take their exact scores too seriously.

Speaking of baseball players from Mexico, back in the early to mid-70’s, the Chicago White Sox had a second basemen named Jorge Orta. Harry Caray was the Sox announcer then, and when Orta failed to catch an easy infield fly ball because he lost it in the sun, Harry blurted out, “Aw, how does he lose the ball in the sun, he’s from Mexico!”

Ted Williams was half Mexican??

>faster than star NFL wide receivers

Not to take anything away from him, but that claim is comparing against ball carriers wearing full pads & helmet.

Where is the mulatto distribution of NFL quarterback ability relative to the black distribution and the white distribution? The mulatto distribution is certainly very far to the right of the black distribution and might be pretty far to the right of the white distribution. The mestizo distribution is so far to the left that it is not even visible.

The Student Loan Program should be totally abolished. It’s effects have been disastrous. It has enormously raised the cost of a college education and saddled taxpayers with huge liabilities

Something like 40-50% of college graduates are in jobs not requiring a college degree. Large numbers of students waste years of their life pursuing college degrees which they never get. We need more students in college like we need a hole in the head.

>In the old days there were only a small number of “talented tenth” ADOS blacks but now the pool is not only larger but stocked with more promising material.

I agree with the thrust of the argument, but it should be noted there are some countervailing forces. For instance, the ADOS talented tenth of yore was probably more capable then than that of today. In the old days, smart black women had kids with smart black men. Today, those women women would go childless and the men miscegenate.

And for that matter, early and mid twentieth century also had its own flavor of higher iq immigrant blacks– from the Caribbean.

Many conservatives assume that without a racial thumb on the scales in hiring, the average performance of all the races hired would be the same.

In rejecting this assumption, I think Steve is mixing up quantity and quality. Where an employer has specialized performance criteria, these will act as a filter. Those who pass through the filter are going to be pre-selected to have a highly compressed range of performance.

To use one of Steve’s favorite examples, blacks are faster than whites on average. But if they ever do start a white guy at cornerback in the NFL there is no reason to think he’ll be slower than the average black cornerback.

So I think the conservative “assumption” is generally correct in the end. If the NYT rigorously hired and weeded out reporters based on merit they would have far fewer, but far better qualified, black reporters. And they would, in fact, be largely indistinguishable from white reporters in measures like performance reviews.

It would be more like 1 or 2%

Not with HYPS law schools lowering standards to grab as many blacks as they can rationalize. They all end up poaching a lower tier’s students.

A black that is 3 SDs out from the black mean has an IQ of 130, which is maybe good enough to get thru a physics grad school program but isn’t going to get you a Nobel.

My father taught high school physics in a big city high school and could never get hardly any of the black kids interested in taking his class. They would tell him they planned to be pro athletes and my dad would patiently explain there was only a one in thousand chance of that and they should have a backup plan. It never worked. I think they intuitively knew they couldn’t handle learning physics.

He eventually got tired of this and just moved out to a suburban high school. It was always easy for him to find a teaching job because most people smart enough to teach physics are smart enough to make more money doing something else so there is always a teacher shortage in this area.

Women use faster balls than men at U.S. Open. Some players are over it.

Is this the new, “Professional Female Crossfitters who look like they could have shot put for the East German women’s track and field team could beat up all Men of Unz?”

Asking for a friend….

The bell curve has a right tail, but no right edge, strictly speaking. In theory it just dwindles away forever.

To go back to the opener. The right side of the curve, the black “talented tenth” starts at an IQ of 104, the Mean for White men is about 103.
4 SD’s up for Whites is about 164, for blacks, low 140’s.

Those who pass through the filter are going to be pre-selected to have a highly compressed range of performance.

Correct – a range but those that fall into the TOP of the range will still tend to be from the group with the right tail advantage. For example, if you look at females playing chess, there are 37 out of 1,600 international chess grandmasters who are women (this is a very rigorous filter – out of the 8 billion people on the planet, only 1,600 are international grandmasters). So you say, these women are good enough to have passed the filter and therefore will be randomly distributed among grandmasters and “largely indistinguishable” from male grandmasters. Totally wrong.

In reality, there is only 1 female in the top 100 chess players (vs. 2.5% that would be expected under your random hypothesis) and the highest ranked female is #89. This is a perfect example of how the right tail advantage works. The same thing is going to be true for whites in certain running events, blacks in science, etc., etc. even in the complete absence of AA.

At the present rate, in ten years MLB will be either majority or nearly majority Hispanic–of whom players from the D.R. will predominate. And all the while, attendance will continue to drop. The level of interest in the MLB is declining for several reasons, one of which is almost certainly the “Hispanic Factor”. Things being the way they are, this will always remain unstated, but it cannot be ignored. Interestingly there is a similar phenomenon taking place in the NHL, with more and more European players taking center stage (Canadians represent only a plurality). The difference with baseball however, is that the NHL fan base is almost exclusively white, Euro-descendant. Thus, even though the players are European (Scandanavians are heavily represented in the NHL) it’s easier for such a fan to relate to them due to the shared European heritage, rather than to Third-World mulatto Hispanics–even though the latter originate in North America.

It would not surprise if, eventually, the MLB– like the NHL–will become a sport with a core constituency, lagging far behind the NFL and NBA. As always, time will tell.

And if Brito had ever wanted a night off he could have given Larry King the radar gun

The 1619 Project was Times’ management attempt to prevent people from noticing it’s readership, management and staff are collectively about as diverse as an Upper East Side synagogue on the High Holy Days. The New York Times: diversity is our greate…yeah, not really. And don’t mention Jayson Blair and how that brilliant young diverse writer thing turned out.

At super elite places like Harvard, there are still enough whites and Asians that they need a big AA thumb on the scale to have a class with “enough” NAMs in it. But as you go lower, the collapse in white births means that either you fill your school with NAMs or you close the doors. UC Merced is 54% Latino and climbing. Institutions are not in the business of putting themself out of business. If you have to cut standards to fill your classrooms, you cut standards – whatever it takes so you can keep that cushy job.

Who was it who said that we go seamlessly from a situation where AA cannot be abolished because there are too few minorities to a situation where it cannot be abolished because there are too many?

“Maradona and Messi are Italians.”

From wiki it seems he’s 50% Italian, 25% Basque, 25% Guarani Indian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Maradona#Early_years

OT – woman starts university course at 50, wonders why she’s 65 with a load of student debt.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/25/student-debt-strike-biden-older-people

I’m 65 and have \$300,000 in student debt. I and other older debtors are going on strike

“By Lystra Small-Clouden”

Is that the Small-Clouden no bigger than a man’s hand?

I seem to remember some years back John Derbyshire spoke to the black law association at UPenn

https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/HumanSciences/upennlaw.html

On the Mexico-DR baseball continuum, if there is such a thing, where does Venezuela fit in? Where is its bell-curve center relative to Mexico’s and DR’s? I see from Wikipedia that that country still sends lots of players to MLB and is also pretty mestizo. I can’t even remember what the folks there looked like – it’s been decades since my one visit.

I ask mainly because I’ve been reading aloud, as a Spanish-language exercise, the autobiography of Juan Vené. This Venezuelan had done MLB play-by-play for decades. Maybe he still is. Not that I knew any of this until a few weeks ago. The only reason I heard of him was that I was looking for a long and absorbing and non-boring book in Spanish, hit on the idea of searching for beisbol on amazon, and bingo. It was an excellent purchase. But except that he himself is in Venezuela’s baseball hall of fame, I have yet to learn anything about that nation’s contribution to the sport. He had been a political reporter, his beat the Presidential palace in Caracas during the 1950s; then, somehow, he got sent to the U.S. to cover the 1960 World Series, and I don’t think he ever looked back, or had to.

I’m only halfway through the book, though, and Vené’s narrative does jump around; maybe the blanks will be filled in.

Among the middle and upper classes, even soccer isn’t the first choice. That would be rugby.

It may be counterintuitive to Americans but rugby is the sport of choice for the bourgeoisie in Europe and Europe adjacent countries because it is safer and less violent than soccer. This is of course a function of who plays the game not the inherent nature of the sport. Elite soccer is dominated by kids from rough neighborhoods and/or rough ethnic groups, and players are perfectly willing to maim opponents for an edge. Rugby is known for its sportsmanship and fair play.

Well, Mexico is a mestizo country while the Dominican Republic is a mulatto country.

How does this explain baseball powerhouse Venezuela (as distinct from Valenzuela)?

Let’s face it, the reasons why baseball is #1 in certain countries are pretty opaque. A lot of it may have to do with their relations to their neighbors. Venezuelans, channeling Tony Montana, don’t like Colombians very much. Soccer is #1 in Colombia by far, while I’m not sure Venezuela even has a soccer team.

Mexicans don’t like Americans much, despite their eagerness to live amongst them. For Mexicans, sports seem to be an avenue to act like a total flag-waving douche, and soccer provides more of those opportunities. Although they will also apply that rule to other sports, like when Mexicans poured hatred on the pochas who represented Mexico softball at the Tokyo Olympics.

The Houston Astros have a solid Mexican starting pitcher, José Urquidy. He was the winning pitcher in Game 4 of the 2019 World Series. Fun guy to watch, works very fast.

But as you go lower, the collapse in white births means that either you fill your school with NAMs or you close the doors.

What can Whites do to increase the White birthrate? What steps would you advise the White community to take? What sort of messaging can you come up with?

The Middling could be a horror movie about being stuck in the middle between high IQ morons and low IQ insensate dumb boobs.

I am routinely considered a dolt by dopes that don’t know no better. I have about a 110 IQ; I threw in the 10 points to make sure I stay over a hundred because nobody wants an IQ of 99 or a career batting average of .299. Kenny Lofton and Bake McBride and Dante Bichette all had great careers but they finished up with a batting average below .300.

Us middle or slightly above average IQ people are stuck between boneheads who are so stupid they can’t even fathom how dumb they are and super smart high IQ bastards who are so smart that they can’t comprehend how dumb much of the population is. We middle IQ people are in no man’s land Hell.

Essentialism is good for judging political brains. Ask people what really matters or what is the important things to watch and understand. Cut to the chase and be quick about it is the thing. I say Debt — central banking — and Demography — mass legal and mass illegal immigration and ancestral origins — are the two big issues of the day.

Ruling class has central bank buy corporate bonds and backstop the financial bubble assets of the ruling class and nobody discusses that the central bank is conjuring up the currency out of thin air and the EU bastards just power-grabbed by conjuring up loot electronically from the ECB and that means the ruling classes in each European nation is feeling nervous in Port Jervis and they are going for broke which might create a call for each individual citizen in Europe to get a CONJURED LOOT PORTION.

Better to dole out central bank electronically conjured up loot individually than to reward states or towns or counties or government workers or the like. Electronically conjure up the cash and hand it out to each eligible citizen and be done with it.

The Pewitt Conjured Loot Portion(PCLP) will pay each American who has all blood ancestry born in colonial America or the USA before 1924 a cool ten thousand dollars a month. The US Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank shall work together to conjure up the cash out of thin air, just like the ruling class is doing now.

There is no such thing as so-called “capitalism,” there is only globalized central banker shysterism. You can’t have any damn thing called “capitalism” when you have a debt-based fiat currency system. The greedy and immoral and evil ones will always use the electronics of an electronic debt-based fiat currency system to their advantage and they don’t give a frigging damn about what is in the best interests of the nation as a whole.

A lot of sonofabitches are saying they want this thing that is so-called “capitalism” and I say give it to ’em with both barrels. Stop the monetary extremism from the Fed and you greedy stupid boneheads will get your damn “capitalism.”

Agree – too many institutions depend on hordes of under-qualified but leveraged-up students to pay their bills and they aren’t going to reform themselves. If the GOP ever has power again and has the balls, they ought to require schools to be partially liable for the loans of any student they admit, perhaps by pledging their endowment. Another reform would be some kind of risk evaluation of loan applicants.

Obviously this would have a ‘disparate impact’ and requiring shrinking or shuttering entire departments, but I am sure the wealthy that truly care about DIE would step with private scholarships, right?

How does the old line go? Football is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans, while rugby is a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen?

Steve understands that baseball is a metaphor for life, but I never expected the Pirates to come under the microscope here.

Cruz may only be hitting .200 but in exactly 200 MLB at bats he already has 11 hrs and 33 rbis — you do the math. At the very least he can be Dave Kingman with a shortstop’s glove and a sunnier disposition. But he could also be a Dave Winfield who can play short.

Meanwhile the pledge drive drama is building as the Pirates try to lose less than 100 games and earn Steve a Buccothon performance bonus, on top of their once again abysmal win total. But we can come up with other incentive clauses if need be

Often in the underground bunker behind Home Plate.

Maglie pitched for all three New York teams. He was the opposing pitcher when Larsen threw his perfect game in the World Series. Maglie himself threw a fabulous five hitter which made Larsen’s feat all the more intriguing. Larsen had no breathing room at any point in the game. Berra called a magnificent game. Larsen said that he never thought of shaking off Berra on any pitch. Mantle was the key to the game. He hit a homerun and made a great running back to the plate catch on a ball Hodges hit deep into Death Valley in the real Yankee Stadium. If Mantle didn’t make the catch Hodges would have been on second. The pressure would have been even more intense and the pitching strategy altered to meet the threat.

Been watching baseball since end of WWII. In my opinion the world series mvp should be named after Mantle, most homeruns or Berra, most rbis and most rings 10. Others more deserving than Mays for the WS award name are Gibson, Brock, and Allie Reynolds. Reynolds started 9 games. Completed 5. Won 7 and saved 4 more- accounting for 11 wins. He was native american. The exploits of Brock and Gibson are also legendary and more well known than those of Reynolds who is wrongfully not in the hall of fame. During the regular season pitching simultaneously as a starter and reliever he won 182 games and saved 49, accounting for 23 wins. One of a kind.

On June 29, 1990, Fernando Valenzuela threw a 6-0 no-hitter against the Cardinals at Dodger Stadium.

The very next day, Maradona’s Argentina team won a 3-2 shootout against Yugoslavia to advance to the World Cup semifinals.

I simply don’t believe in IQ orthodoxy.

What seems to be acceptable is that various personality tests, including IQ, show that someone is gifted for some area (or many areas) -and that’s it. Nothing more.

For instance- I simply don’t believe that Beethoven or Michelangelo had some astonishingly high IQ (and that would be obvious if we could resurrect them & force them to take the test).

Also, mathematicians are, mostly, extremely gifted for their calling, but, frequently, almost dumb in other areas (even those close to their field). Even mature minds like Einstein, when one reads his thoughts on philosophers who had influenced him (Hume, Kant, Spinoza,…)- it is evident he didn’t understand much. It is also probable that very gifted scientists, Nobel-prize rank, don’t have too high IQ. They’re just gifted, sometimes supremely, for that particular field they devoted their lives to.

I mentioned philosophers… recently I’ve been re-reading some stuff from/about Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Hegel … and it is amazing how parochial, narrow & clueless they were.

But, that’s another topic…

an IQ of 130, which is maybe good enough to get thru a physics grad school program

I don’t think that is high enough for a physics graduate program. It may not be high enough for a physics undergraduate program either. Physics is, cognitively, the most demanding discipline at universities.

So I think the conservative “assumption” is generally correct in the end. If the NYT rigorously hired and weeded out reporters based on merit they would have far fewer, but far better qualified, black reporters. And they would, in fact, be largely indistinguishable from white reporters in measures like performance reviews.

That you as a “conservative” make this error (and what you said is in fact in error) shows how far we have to go in the national dialogue (which would consider getting rid of AA to itself be a “radical” step – just wait to hear how the whole Democrat Party will scream if the S. Ct. gets rid of AA – it will be right up there with abortion as a Dem talking point).

Imagine some future where the NY Times does only meritocratic hiring according to your “filter” method (even this is difficult to imagine – they will, to the extent at any such requirement is legally mandated, go kicking and screaming and use any possible means to evade the law). And yet, for the reasons I have already given, the black employees of the NY Times will STILL be at the bottom of the ratings pile. This will only cause redoubled efforts to find the invisible racist monster who is causing this to happen when in fact it is entirely what you would expect from the operation of the normal distribution. Since even you say such reviews should be “largely indistinguishable” then in fact if they are distinguishable (which they are sure to be), racism can be the only explanation.

BTW, I wonder how companies (such as Amazon) who practice or practiced “the fire the bottom 10% of performers every year” system avoided firing a disproportionate # (perhaps all) of their black employees? Did they rig the performance reviews so that blacks would be rated higher than they merited or what?

Derb’s “The Talk: Nonblack Version”:

https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/NationalQuestion/talk.html

[…]
(11) The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”

If you needed an IQ >130 to do a physics graduate program (any program, not just at elite schools like MIT) then there would be close to zero blacks doing graduate physics in America. Keep in mind that some grad. physics programs are just basically preparing folks to teach HS physics, not to do cutting edge work about the nature of the universe.

In any given graduating class, there are something like 1,500 blacks in America with IQ>130 (1/4 of 1% of blacks in that age cohort) and those 1,500 blacks have to suffice for all of the professional schools and graduate programs in America.

According to this chart, the average IQ of physicists is 127, meaning that half are below that #, probably some are significantly below:

Social scientists: 121.8
Agricultural scientists: 121.6
Mathematicians, biochemists, and chemists: 130
Biologists: 126.1
Medical practitioners: 127
Physicists: 127.7

https://www.insider.com/guides/health/average-iq

Note than none are above 130 IQ average.

I think people in general overestimate the frequency of high IQs and underestimate how many people in various professions have fairly low IQs. For example, the frequency of IQ>150 is around 1 in 10,000 which means (unless you hang around MIT and similar places) you might not have ever met such a person.

“Mexico is a mestizo country while the Dominican Republic is a mulatto country”

That is a useful observation, host; Obvious once pointed it out, but I hadn’t thought of it before.

[When my dividend check comes in I will pay more than just a compliment.]

Although I don’t care for IQ tests, your data are obsolete:

https://thetab.com/us/2017/04/10/which-major-has-highest-iq-64811

Experts have worked out which majors have the highest IQ

By the way- this is a far more interesting article:

https://thetab.com/uk/nottingham/2015/05/13/why-are-there-so-many-stupid-people-at-university-24795

Why are there so many stupid people at university?

Fun guy to watch, works very fast.

He may have pissed off some cartel; the less time out in the open the better

Talking of the right edge of the Bell Curve

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-62670717

South Korea has again recorded the world’s lowest fertility rate with the number sinking to a new low.

The rate in the country first dropped lower than one child per woman in 2018.

But on Wednesday, figures released by the government showed the figure had dropped to 0.81 – down three points from the previous year, and a sixth consecutive decline.

North Korea will end up controlling the South – their rate, still pretty low, is twice that at 1.6

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=KR-KP

The BBC, in the hands of childless feminists, see this as a tale of female empowerment.

Women in South Korea are highly educated, yet far from equal in the workplace. The country has the highest gender pay gap of any rich country. Most of the housework and childcare in South Korea still falls to women and it is common for women to stop work after having children or for their careers to stagnate.

Essentially, many women here are still forced to choose between having a career and having a family. Increasingly they are deciding they don’t want to sacrifice their careers.

I’m sure in their old age they’ll look back at that urgent audit they got under the deadline, or the promotions they won, as they sit alone on their birthdays in front of the TV.

Does anyone look ever look back on their life and wish they’d spent more time at work?

If one wants to get nerdy, things like height or IQ should use a log-normal distribution since in a log-normal distribution all the numbers are positive, and it favors the high side over the low side.

So true. And the benefits of PEDs actually last close to a decade….the extra muscles and bone growth due to steroids and humans growth hormones can last years after the last injection….most minor league players should be juicing to build up their muscles and bones , the benefits are too great with little downside risks but great potential rewards..

That’s correct – the common tests (Weschler, Binet) are only normed out to 160. Weschler don’t even try to assign scores >160 (the WAIS which is the adult version ceilings at 155).

Stanford-Binet offers a method to compute higher scores but these need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Theoretically, the people who require an extended score calculation are exceptionally rare. The assumptions of the normal curve, combined with the population of the United States, suggest that there would be only approximately 933 individuals in the entire nation (across all ages) with an
IQ above 160.

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.566.3439&rep=rep1&type=pdf

So while such a person is not 1 in a million, they are 1 in 300,000.

Anyone claiming scores above 160 has most likely taken some funky and not scientifically validated “test” or is (even more likely) just pulling a number out of his ass.

I have no information that indicates that black SD is smaller than white, but if so, 3SDs out for blacks would be even less than 130.

Princeton ( the P in HYPS) doesn’t have a law school.

It’s a shock to people when they do university physics and discover it’s 60%+ maths – a lot of people sign up who would never have gone to do university maths.

All’s not lost though as long as you have an engineering bent – you can work on the kit that the theoreticians need to prove (or disprove) their stuff.

Fifty years back physics was still the most interesting/glamorous science – I think genetics has that position now.

Still, when a war breaks out engineering heads right back to the top. This guy, from Zala Aero, has a real “guns before butter” approach – he wants to turn under-used shopping malls into drone factories.

From the Lord of War telegram channel, can’t work out how to link.

Recently, Alexander has presented a new initiative – the world’s first project to convert shopping centers into mass drone production facilities. Despite the fact that Russia has established the production of world class strike and reconnaissance drones, they are sorely lacked in the areas of SMO – production simply cannot keep up with the demand. Each new drone represents the saved lifes of our fighters.

“As a person who was born in and works in the city of gunsmiths, it was bitter for me to witness the powerful factories built in Soviet times, turn into shopping centers one after another” says Alexander Zakharov. — But there is a way to quickly and exponentially increase the production of unmanned vehicles. We have developed a concept for the re-equipment of shopping centers, which before the start of the SMO traded mainly goods of Western brands, into factories for the conveyor production of three types of drones.”

The first assembly line project in Russia will focus on the production of three main types of unmanned aerial vehicles and will meet the needs of any consumer. In addition to maintaining jobs and the level of tax deductions, the conversion of shopping centers into factories of military equipment and weapons will allow not only the conveyor production of well-established products, but also ensure the development of new production, which will increase the prestige of the country.

“I have long kept the idea that a time will come and the industry will return to those places where we lost factories for various office and shopping centers in the 90s. Now we need to look at the departure of foreign companies as an opportunity to create new jobs and provide the market with products necessary for our consumption,” says Alexander.

So what explains the tens of millions of European descended White men who spend 8 or 9 months of the year watching the black sports of football and basketball?

only a one in thousand

That’s way too high of a chance. For the 3 major professional sports (baseball, football, b-ball, forget hockey which blacks rarely play), there are a total of around 3,000 players out of 300,000,000 Americans or 1 in 100,000. You could narrow it in various ways (males, males between 18 and 40, etc.) but it would still never get down to 1 in 1,000.

As great as he was in the regular season, Mays was pretty much of a bust as a WS performer (leaving aside the catch he made off of Vic Wertz in the ’54 Series). No home runs, .251 batting average, 6 ribbies in four WS appearances.
Mantle, Berra, Brock, Gibson—all excellent choices. No clue why the WS award was named after Mays.

I have often thought that the current DIE craze has 2 major sources: one, a realization by the more perceptive policy elites that all the social interventions of the last 60 years are a failure and even turning up the dial to 11 still won’t close the gaps and two, the changing demographics of the country means the constituency for putting black cultural concerns first is dissolving.

Arclight, I think DIE is pretty much a logical necessity of this upside down ideology–minoritarianism. Once you’re on “the evil white gentiles are oppressing you, responsible for your problems” train, you don’t just go a few stops and hop off.

I think this current insanity was mostly driven by Trump the Nazi. The Jews in the overclass thought this thing was over–Great Replacement baked–and then Trump pops up and–to them!–he was the personification of their worst nightmare: some bumpkin Hitler rousing the somnolent flyovers to march down the streets and herd them into camps. This had two effects–they had to get everyone, especially their critical black vote bank–roused up. And the more foresighted guys lost whatever “guardrailing” capability of “keeping it sane” they’d had.

But I think you are right, that blacks are well aware that there are all these other minorities–the well off Jews most annoyingly, but likewise Asians, then all these Mexicans, Muslims, immigrants generally, then all the homos and LBGQWERTY crowd and now crazy dudes in dresses–who have been honing in, basically piggybacking on black oppression. And they know immigration is making this worse. So the George Floyd OD was a chance for blacks to elbow the rest of the “coalition of the fringes” aside and yell out what they really feel: “Blacks are who matters!” “We’re the real oppressed people.” “If it’s not black it’s not right.”

Start believing in God or some higher power, Destiny, whatever …

So you say, these women are good enough to have passed the filter and therefore will be randomly distributed among grandmasters and “largely indistinguishable” from male grandmasters. Totally wrong.

I never said a performance “filter” was a low, binary threshold. Do you really think that the NFL (my example of a filter) just randomly assigns positions to people they deem “minimally qualified” as football players?

Aside from your strawman fallacy, you also don’t seem to understand what constitutes “merit” from an employer’s perspective. It certainly isn’t the employee’s relative ranking in IQ but rather the absolute value added to the organization. Your chess example proves how wrong you are. If a company staked chess players and took a percentage of their tournament winnings, their definition of merit would be based on expected winnings. Expected winnings would be based on your ranking numbers, as correlated to the odds of winning tournaments, and the amount of prize money. That would be their definition of “merit” and they would have no women or blacks on the payroll. (If they ever did hire woman it would only be because she demonstrated the ability to win as well as those who were paid the same.)

On the other hand, if the New York Times hired the top 37 female grandmasters and the top 37 male grandmasters and assigned them to write articles about how black women don’t like to have their hair touched, I can assure you that the difference in performance at that job would be “largely indistinguishable.” (And in reality, the extreme right tail of the curve isn’t going to be flocking to this job which creates a practical IQ cap on the workforce in any event.)

Making money isn’t the Field Medal. 99.99% of jobs aren’t concerned about distinguishing between the to 1,600 per 8 billion and the top 37 per 8 billion. Any performance distinction between the 99.9the and 99.99999th percentile of IQ is likely to be mere noise compared to differences in other relevant characteristics like work ethic, energy, personality type, etc.

Obviously, if employers set an irrationally low threshold for performance and refused to consider gradients of merit you could be right. But the whole premise of my comment is what would happen if employer’s did evaluated solely on merit. Just changing the premise to say: “Yeah, but assume they don’t . . . ,” isn’t even responsive.

Fifty years back physics was still the most interesting/glamorous science – I think genetics has that position now.

I wouldn’t agree. Physics still radiates the aura of Einstein, quantum paradoxes & the Bomb.Just look at popular science bestsellers.

Genetics is, in popular opinion, something very un-glamorous. Cooking & dreary lab work.

OT but hearkening back to an earlier post, does Shia LeBeouf have the same facial structure as St. Padre Pio?

> I was looking for a real world example of [how normal distributions affect promotions].

It’s not real-world, but I think a hypothetical height-based job is intuitive for people to understand.

Imagine that was a job that only hired people who are 6′ tall, but that being even taller gets you promoted more easily. In that world, there would be many more men than women at the entry level, and the fraction of men only goes up as you go up the ladder.

As the Boston Irish-American said to the reporter in response to the question as to why he voted for the imprisoned James Curley as mayor: “He may be a crook, but he’s OUR crook!” Football and basketball may be dominated by blacks but they’re for the most part “Made In America”. And—they speak English! Well, sort of anyway.

Eliminating affirmative action discrimination against White men is the first step. I believe the advanced age of the Men of UNZ including you means they are unaware of the major reason young White men can’t get family wage jobs any more. It’s affirmative action discrimination that’s been around since March 6 1961 the infamous executive order 10925.

One of the big research companies Pew?? just published a study that it now costs 300 K to raise one child to 18 at a lower middle class level. And that doesn’t count the fact that most parents support their kids long after 18. Or college expenses that result
in massive debt and ordinary low paid working class jobs.

What can Whites do to increase the White birthrate? What steps would you advise the White community to take? What sort of messaging can you come up with?

Increasing birthrates is very straightforward.

You get more of what you pay for….you get less of what you punish.

Almost every measure that would increase white birth-rates would violate a mountain of laws in almost every country in the world.

But–a place like Hungary (that might actually consider such programs) could offer free houses to young white families with children as long as both parents and the children lived in the home–just as one example. There could be cash awards as well based on the number of white children. There could be no federal taxes during the child-rearing years for such families, etc etc etc.

Actions speak louder than words–actions are the “messaging”.

@76 YetAnotherAnon: They don’t marry because they cannot find a male Korean who looks sufficiently androgynous and pseudo-Caucasian, because male Koreans don’t have the same degree of plastic surgery that female Koreans do. And heaven forfend they pop out a kid who looks the way they did pre-surgery. Some try to claim that rounder eyes and bridged noses and brunette/blonde hair are some sort of historical Korean beauty standard to which they aspire, rather than that they ape pseudo-White appearance in the way blaq women utilize skin whitener and hair straighteners.

So they’re looking for their K-pop idol, or a tall, blue-eyed White man.

Unlikely that Ted William’s absent Mexican father was the stubby legged mestizo demographic you are looking at.

Maradona and Messi are Italians.

Messi looks very Italian. He looks like the figures you see in Renaissance paintings. Also, because of his health issue growing up, he has somewhat irregular bone structure and he looks like what I imagine a Medieval Italian who suffered malnutrition or some disease that stunted growth might have looked like.

I’m not sure what Maradona’s precise genetics were but he looked more or less mestizo. Presumably he was at the least a quarter Indio.

Incidentally, Maradona played professionally in Italy where he was popular, but he did face racist taunting and the like while he played there, which Messi wouldn’t have faced.

Who can legitimately claim to be African-American for federal jobs. Or any other job.

How did Elon Musk get into
Stanford?

How does this explain baseball powerhouse Venezuela (as distinct from Valenzuela)?

Venezuela is also a mulatto country.

Note than none are above 130 IQ average.

Lawyers aren’t mentioned. Where do they rank? What LSAT score equates to a 130 IQ?

This is circular reasoning – you say merit is defined strictly by job performance therefore those having merit would have similar job performance. “Merit” cannot be known or assessed in advance in this way. The whole reason for evaluations is that people can underperform/overperform the guesses of merit made at hiring time.

On more interesting things ..

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/25/health/doppelganger-dna-study-wellness/index.html

You have a doppelganger and probably share DNA with them, new study suggests

Dugin- Solzhenitsyn

Imran Khan- Mark Wahlberg

Putin-?

Trump-?

Here, in Croatia, we have a Hitler fan (actually, a courageous soldier during war, plus embezzler; anyway a food for tabloids:

The whole reason for evaluations is that people can underperform/overperform the guesses of merit made at hiring time.

Agreed. You have to try to promote, compensate, and fire by merit as well.

Although I also recognize that, in reality, performance reviews at most companies are a bit of a joke. The politics are such that managers normally give bland “satisfactory” reviews as long as they know they are stuck with the person anyway. Then, when they belatedly decide they need to get rid of them, they over-correct by papering the file to justify their decision. Anytime there is any subjectivity or politics involved it’s a mess. If someone could devise a method to truly, objectively measure job performance and value-added by employees, they’d make a couple billion dollars.

(The black AA employees at the NYT must be truly awful to consistently earn such sub-par scores at a hyper-political, woke institution. But I guess if your mission is subverting America, you still try to be somewhat effective in accomplishing your goal.)

Maybe not here, but there’s lots of stuff on Unz about it. To somewhat ridiculous levels.

OT Epstein close business partner, guy behind the biggest ponzi scheme until Madoff, believed to have been found dead in apartment, but they’re not sure because he’s either in an advanced state of decomposition, or really really messed up (or sitting on a beach near Haifa drinking umbella drinks with his buddy, having mutilated a similarly sized homeless person).
https://bnonews.com/index.php/2022/08/steven-hoffenberg-worked-with-epstein-found-dead/

Some fields like sales can be objectively evaluated. If you bring in lots of money, you are a good salesman.

Thank you for your insightful comments about that era in baseball. You seem to be knowledgeable about Larsen’s perfect game, so I will ask a question. As soon as the final out happens, (check-swing strikeout), Larsen shows no reaction, no emotion. He simply begins to jog slowly toward the home-plate / first-base baseline to get off the field. Berra and the other players immediately swamp him with celebration and emotion. I would have expected some immediate show of emotion from Larsen…maybe open arms awaiting Berra, something like that; this was one of the great moments in baseball history. I am not into overly dramatic celebrations. A lot of players have gone overboard. But this seemed to go in the opposite direction.

Some fields like sales can be objectively evaluated. If you bring in lots of money, you are a good salesman.

That’s probably the best example of an objective standard. But even in sales, a person’s true value and talent can get obscured by all the formulas and metrics they use — what accounts or territories they get assigned, how commissions are calculated. Some employers have a nasty habit of raising the next year’s minimum sales quota accordingly, whenever someone actually knocks it out of the park with a good year.

Probably the only people who get what they are “worth,” are the ones who can take clients with them when they leave.

Fifty years back physics was still the most interesting/glamorous science – I think genetics has that position now.

But genetics no longer exists! And physics may well go that way too, if it doesn’t start behaving itself better.

I have friends at the Times who tell me it’s not that woke anymore, and that many employees can’t wait to see that mediocrity Dean Baquet go. They all complain about the Opinion section, and most are disgusted by what Baquet did to the cultural reporting (ie, blackety black nonsense). They are all hoping the new editor will bring new standards to the paper and, like Netflix, fire the incompetent black affirmative action hires

Cool, so my height could finally win me the advantages that 80% of the country figures I already have by virtue of being a white man.

Pittsburgh’s organizational coaching is what is detrimental. In the last two decades, players either do not develop properly or the very talented underperform with few exceptions like the without a doubt talented McCutchen, and hopefully; the recently arrived Cruz [for starters, see the rotations worth of general underachievers as Pirates in Cole, Morton, Glasnow and Taillon].

When it comes to scouting, yes, they are able to pick out top talent pretty consistently which puts them ahead of several teams who tend to dwell near the bottom but with much spottier records from drafting/signings. Yet, successful teams do not just pick out generational talents but draft a host of complementary league average talents at a consistent clip, something the Pirates don’t seem to do all that well. When they do have a host of these types of players about to emerge from the minors, they are traded away in package deals for one big name or another.

It’s like the whole organization is still geared towards a Ralph Kiner strategy of compiling stars&scrubs rosters but with the added penalty of modern free agency, so they need to grow new stars every four or five years.

The Right Edge of the Bell Curve

The left edge of the baby curve:

Korea Shatters Its Own Record for World’s Lowest Fertility Rate

미국의 비율은 한국의 두 배입니다.

In addition to the Andruw Joneses, Curacao has also produced Kenley Jansen, Ozzie Albies, Andrelton Simmons, Jonathan Schoop and several more. Pretty good for a country with a 155,000 population. Dominican Republic’s population is much more, about 11 million.

Sidney Ponson was knighted, as were one or two others. But not Jones.

Ponson is from Aruba, not Curaçao, but they’re under the same queen. Queen regnant at their knighting, queen consort today. The latter is also South American.

According to this chart, the average IQ of physicists is 127

You should read your own citation:

We were able to find one small 1967 study that used the WAIS to compare the average IQ scores of male scientists at the University of Cambridge

The graph I linked above is based on ETS data in the US and is much more recent and lists undergraduate physics and astronomy student average IQ at 133. Graduate students in physics will have a higher average still since graduate physics programs are more selective.

Hard to overstate the level of Jewish nepotism in this horror show of a country. Ridiculous? What are you smoking?

You are obviously quite ignorant about Association Football. In the last 50 odd years, the Mexican National Team has produced several fine teams. The problem was that they never produced enough scoring chances or goals relative to their general play. They had good defences and midfielders, but the attackers just weren’t sharp enough, rather like the French National Team until the late 1990s.

I don’t know the reason for this. If someone with more knowledge of Mexican Football is out there, please explain.

So what explains the tens of millions of European descended White men who spend 8 or 9 months of the year watching the black sports of football and basketball?

One of the good solid criticisms of white men.

Give that crap up white guys. Sex up the wife an extra time or two on the weekend. Spend more time with your kids–go play ball with them. And if you really need “guy time”, go golfing … or invite the guys over for poker night and discuss the latest posts on iSteve.

Ted Williams was half Mexican??

Yes. His mother was Mexican.

And if Wikipedia’s TW article is to be believed, his baseball ability might have come predominantly from his mother’s side:

At the age of eight, he was taught how to throw a baseball by his uncle, Saul Venzor. Saul was one of his mother’s four brothers, as well as a former semi-professional baseball player who had pitched against Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Joe Gordon in an exhibition game.

It may be counterintuitive to Americans but rugby is the sport of choice for the bourgeoisie in Europe and Europe adjacent countries because it is safer and less violent than soccer.

Rubbish. Outside the British Isles and France, Rugby is almost entirely ignored in Europe. Even in the British Isles, Rugby is very much fourth fiddle to Football in Scotland. Modern Football was invented in Scotland and Rugby Football is a foreign import. In Britain , it’s really only South Wales and parts of South west England where Rugby is seriously popular.

In France, Rugby is only popular in South West and Central France. There are a few outliers in Northern Italy. Also Romania, but that seems to be in serious decline. Both were due to pre-WWII French influence.

As for Rugby being safer and less violent than soccer, as you call it, this is nonsense. Association Football is much easier to referee as it has much more open, and any foul play is much easier to see.
There is much less open play in Rugby and much more room for serious malpractice. As a young flank forward, last century, I got very p***ed off being kicked in the scrum and ruck, and the malefactors were left unpunished. In modern pro Rugby, that’s why they use the camera much more than Football. They’ve got to.

“But it usually takes around 60 to make the Hall of Fame, although lately they seem to be letting in players around Fernando’s level, such as Harold Baines (39) and Tony Oliva (43), so he might make it someday if the lowering of standards goes on.”

By letting in so-so players such as Oliva into the HOF, it is becoming more apparent that Cooperstown is not a HOF, but the Hall of Very Good, with each and every borderline player allowed in.

An MLB player’s stats do not suddenly improve decades post-retirement. They remain what they are when he stopped playing in his final game. It would also appear that certain stats have the adverse affect of dumbing down the concept of a HOF in the first place, namely, to honor and immortalize the top 0.0001% of players in a given era.

For example, if currently there are say, about 800+ players in MLB, then about 2-5 of them should be first ballot HOFers post-retirement without hesitation. Plus there are another 10-30 borderline to very good players. But the thing is, the borderline to very good are not of first ballot induction quality, but because of various factors that go into HOF induction (including politics) then some of the 10-30 players will eventually be inducted into Cooperstown, even though they have no business being in there to begin with.

The point, big picture remains apt:

Well, it was also always said of the Mexican boxers that their arms were too short to compete effectively.

Uh, there are plenty of great Mexican fighters:

Top 12 All-Time Greatest Mexican Boxers

https://www.thefightcity.com/top-12-all-time-greatest-mexican-boxers-salvador-sanchez-julio-cesar-chavez-carlos-zarate-erik-morales-mexico/

The pale ginger Canelo Alvarez will make that list 13 entries long when he finishes his career.

Sex up the wife an extra time or two on the weekend.

Knock up the wife an extra time or two.

That’s why in my prematurely woke elementary school we all sang “Onward Goyim Soldiers” marching to and from assembly.

Ted Williams was half Mexican??

Why is that surprising? He was from San Diego.

Leo Durocher was all French-Canadian, and didn’t speak English until grade school. The northern counterpart to Williams.

University of Pennsylvania medical school just announced its moving to a special admissions program for underrepresented minorities.*

No longer will these underrepresented geniuses have to take the racist MCAT. These special students will be admitted under extra special criteria for affirmative action aristocrats.

* underrepresented minorities meaning those at the very top of the American caste system. Equivalent to European kings queens and royalty Indian Brahmins in the old Indian caste system.

thecollegefix.com

It’s Nomar Garciaparra, not Garcia.

Ted Williams’ head is frozen.

133 for physics so still right around 130 which is what I said in the 1st place.

No if you are given all the entry call and others have to do cold calling or if you are handovered the portfolio of best clients/sector, your figures comparisons are nowhere a good estimate of your sales abilities.

You can compare two Programers or two Lawyers who are locked in a room and given the same set of problems they have the same previous experience – better if it’s none – on dealing with. But it’s a very rare and it’s an artificial environment. Otherwise, all performance evaluations have huge subjectivity and shortcomings in it.

Another example : the best neurosurgeon will kill more people than the worst one in the same big hospital because one would be given the hardest cases and the other one the easiest ones. No sane hospital director would give the case by mere rotation for the sake of getting an optimal evaluation. And even there the team may be a huge differentiating factor.

It’s a shock to people when they do university physics and discover it’s 60%+ maths

I can’t imagine anyone being shocked. Physics has been heavy on the math since Newton’s time. Newton invented calculus so he could do physics.

As for the shopping mall drone factories, it won’t work. Russia can’t get the Canon cameras that they need to build their drones nowadays.

https://dronexl.co/2022/04/12/russian-orlan-10-drone-canon-camera/

The are probably able to make their own soda bottle fuel tanks though.

The maker was charging the Russian government \$100k each for these duct tape drones so there was lots of room for kickbacks and London flat buying.

On June 26, 1990, George Bush abandoned his “Read my lips: No new taxes!” campaign promise.

On June 27, 1990, NASA officials announced a major flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.

On June 28, 1990, Nelson Mandela came to Miami and was snubbed by local officials because he had shaken hands with Fidel Castro. This led to a three-year black boycott of the city.

On June 29, 1990 … the sun rose in the east and set in the west. Children cried. Poets dreamed.

Somewhere in the darkest reaches of the universe, an epic battle was about to begin. For some it would be their first mission. For others it would be their last.

On June 30, 1990 … a rich little man with white hair died. But what’s that got to do with the price of rice?

But, yeah, trivia is fun.

Point taken, but their grad schools are still sucking up higher IQ blacks that would normally go to second tier schools, even in another field, because of their prestige, money, and available connections. From the high percentage of law grads not working in the law, not everyone is or stays committed to becoming a lawyer when they consider law school, so it’s likely some give it a pass and end up in other fields of study. Or does law school uniquely turn off its students?

“For example, the frequency of IQ>150 is around 1 in 10,000…”

No it isn’t. 151 is greater than 150, and 151 occurs at a rate of one in 2968.

https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/IQtable.aspx

I don’t know what the situation is now but back in the 1950s and 60s, in New Zealand, there was no chance that one would get a BE with an IQ < 130. Even at high 130s could be a struggle.

But in recent years the USMNT and top US players have begun to become very black and foreign. A lot of kids of West African or Caribbean parents.

The soccer fields of Fargo are filled w/black players. They ain’t Somali and they ain’t from Chicago.

Knock up the wife an extra time or two.

Leave the poor wife alone. She’s suffered enough.

The black AA employees at the NYT must be truly awful to consistently earn such sub-par scores at a hyper-political, woke institution.

At even “normal” institutions and corporations, they enjoy a massive thumb on the scales in their favor. Every step of the way from recruitment and training all the way through retirement.

At a place like the NYT, where they are absolutely venerated and no stone is ever left unturned to their advantage, that they still cluster at the lower range is somewhat shocking. To most people.

And the NYT is an organization (like Amy Wax’s Penn Law) which has enough prestige to pull in nearly any applicants it wants.

What will happen, ultimately, is that the ‘disparate impact’ and ‘proportional representation’ interests will gain enough sway to turn it around. They’ll be in position to massage every performance review and they’ll be even more biased than the MSM tells them whites were.

Fairness is possibly the most ‘white supremacist’ notion of all, and—like all the others—it’s being trampled underfoot as we speak. My guess is that it won’t be coming back.

“Some fields like sales can be objectively evaluated. If you bring in lots of money, you are a good salesman.”

Not quite that simple. Lots of stories about companies getting in trouble by letting their sales people agree to ridiculous terms to make the sale.

Knock up the wife an extra time or two.

That’s a lot to ask of one weekend.

I think that you are probably onto something here…….Isaac Asimov PhD Columbia , I THINK, claims in his autobiography that he struggled with Calculus. Makes no sense to me.

Steve: what is the standard deviation for IQ scores among the top 10% of the population if they take , say, 5 IQ tests?
How does one explain Feynman, Bill Shockley low IQ scores? What if they had taken 4 more tests? What would their maximum score be?

Just talked to a parent whose kid is applying to engineering programs. Apparently the best predictor of your success in engineering is your grade in AP Calculus.

Of course, this assumes that you actually understood the material in HS, not that you were given an A based on equity or something.

“Maradona played professionally in Italy where he was popular, but he did face racist taunting and the like while he played there,”

They loved him in Naples, absolutely loved him. When he arrived, Napoli had never won the league, and a song asking him to “take the shame from our city” topped the local charts.

“At Napoli, Maradona reached the peak of his professional career: he soon inherited the captain’s armband from Napoli veteran defender Giuseppe Bruscolotti and quickly became an adored star among the club’s fans; in his time there he elevated the team to the most successful era in its history. Maradona played for Napoli at a period when north–south tensions in Italy were at a peak due to a variety of issues, notably the economic differences between the two. Led by Maradona, Napoli won their first ever Serie A Italian Championship in 1986–87. Goldblatt wrote, “The celebrations were tumultuous. A rolling series of impromptu street parties and festivities broke out contagiously across the city in a round-the-clock carnival which ran for over a week. The world was turned upside down. The Neapolitans held mock funerals for Juventus and Milan, burning their coffins, their death notices announcing ‘May 1987, the other Italy has been defeated. A new empire is born.’” Murals of Maradona were painted on the city’s ancient buildings, and newborn children were named in his honour.”

He visited the city again in 2005, and was mobbed everywhere he went. His brand of genius with a side of sleaze was perfect for that “interesting” and fascinating city. It’s very different from say Milan or Turin.

“Diego! Your happiness is our happiness!”

Yes, but for nitpickers …

His brand of genius with a side of sleaze was perfect for that “interesting” and fascinating city.

True.

Not rubbish at all. Even in Austria the affluent classes have started seeking out rugby for their kids. Remember that violence also happens in practice and locker rooms – not just on the pitch. Association football is increasingly a sport of „people with immigration background“ as the German euphemism goes. Nice middle class white boys don’t find that atmosphere so congenial.

the social interventions of the last 60 years are a failure

Yes. The liberal vision is like cosmology pre-Copernicus, with today’s ridiculous excesses of negrolatry and censorship analogous to the invention of new epicycles.

the constituency for putting black cultural concerns first is dissolving

Here I’m less convinced. A few clear-eyed leftists may understand this, but the narrative is still mired in the old black-white binary America — a country still overwhelmingly populated by productive whites who can easily carry the welfare state, who are affected by affirmative action in but the most imperceptibly marginal way, and whose children are plentiful enough to integrate the public schools to a pleasing 90/10 mix.

I call bullshit. Those pictures are posed just so and the people are dressed the same. Maybe some of them are close relatives but unaware of it, or they are but they’re looking for cheap publicity.

True, they didn’t give any DNA data.

It annoys me when people refer to film as video – they are distinct technologies just like a carriage is not an automobile even though they do the same thing. Almost certainly, what they found in Crosby’s basement was a reel of film.

Until quite recently there was no such thing as “high quality video”. Video recording was an inherently low definition technology. If you see any sharp looking image from the past, it was not recorded on video but on film. If you see an old TV series that looks reasonably good, it was recorded on film. If it looks blurry, it was probably a kinescope. Prior to the invention of the video tape recorder the only way to record TV was to point a film camera at a monitor that was playing the broadcast.

The video tape recorder didn’t become commercially available until 1956. It was a significant technological breakthru – it was not feasible to move a tape fast enough to record all the data needed to form an image, which is a lot more data than you need for sound. But Ampex figured out that you could put the tape HEAD on a rotating platform and spin the head really fast (in addition to moving the tape). The first tapes were 2 inches wide and the machine was the size of two washing machines. Because the tape was expensive, many of the early broadcasts recorded on tape were written over and not preserved. But breakthru that it was, the resolution was still very low – it look just fine on the low resolution TVs of the day but played back on a modern TV they look blurry.

Obviously you can enhance the similarities by wearing similar hairstyles, beards, etc. But haven’t you seen people who look a lot like someone else? Look alikes are a real thing and they are not always close relatives. I don’t think it’s BS at all.

Is The Hall under pressure to admit new members every year? As concerns this year’s crop…I mean, nothing against Jim Kaat who I liked as a pitcher and as an announcer but, not sure he was quite HoF material. Close but not quite “there.” Ditto for Baines and Oliva. Hodges is also close but he makes the cut in as much as he was the best first baseman of his era.

And all the while Jeff Kent sits and waits. That’s what happens when you cross swords with the wrong people I guess.

The idea of measuring IQ stems from the observation that people who are good at one sort of intellectual task are generally good at all of them (just like kids who are good at baseball also tend to be pretty good at football) but this is not 100% true – there are people like Feynman who can be quite uneven.

In Feynman’s case, the IQ test tests things like general knowledge and vocabulary on which he scored poorly. Feynman was only interested in that which he was interested in and amazingly, even purposely, ignorant of things in which he was not interested – history, facts and figures that could be looked up in a book, etc. He was the king of hyperfocus. His math scores were off the charts – among the highest ever seen at MIT. IQ is reported as a single number but the way you get to IQ is by taking a number of subtests, some of which are more verbal and some of which are more mathematical or visual.

IQ tests are highly repeatable (although you can’t take the same test over and over during a short interval – eventually you will memorize the questions). Most people test within a few points on a properly done test such as the Wechsler or Stanford-Binet.

Ted Williams’ father was a violent white drunk often absent from his family. His mother was a true believer Salvation Army street worker often absent from her family.

There were reasons for his demons.

“His mother was a Salvation Army street worker — a zealot, really — and she was dedicated. She was out until all hours of the night, saving souls on the street. That’s what she believed in; that was her passion in life, more so than taking care of her two sons, Ted and his younger brother, Danny. Those kids were one of the first latchkey kids, really. They were up until about 10 o’clock at night waiting on the front step of their house, waiting for their mother to come home.

The father was sort of a drunk and a ne’er-do-well and not around. His mother not being present caused Ted a lot of resentment and anger. I think that was the source of the anger. He had, luckily for him, a playground right down the street which had lights, unusual in those days. So he was able to spend much of the time on the ball field. He nursed this anger and resentment. These were festering early memories for him.”–Ben Bradlee Jr.

Nah, this guy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankie_Crosetti

Venezuela is also a mulatto country.

True, but much higher percentage White.

Well, it’s possible to do a classics degree nowadays without knowing any Latin or Greek. You can also acquire degrees in German, Russian, French, etc. history without learning the languages. This would have shocked old-time academics, but there it is.

In light of this, it’s no so strange for wannabe physicists to arrive in college expecting there to be no math.

On June 30, 1990 … a rich little man with white hair died. But what’s that got to do with the price of rice?

Paul McCartney’s concert at Knebworth, infamous for Linda’s rendition of ‘Hey Jude’

NYTimes is the enemy of White Americans. And a very powerful and effective enemy. Have their advertisers like Mark Cross Bergdof’s the antique and art auction houses noticed the NYTimes wants everyone of the customers who buy those expensive products dead?

Animals who almost killed the Central Park Jogger, the Times defended them during their trial and later led the campaign to exonerate them. Tessa Majors, s barely mentioned that 3 8th grade animals killed her. But published endless articles sympathetic to the worthless animals who killed her. And wept and wailed that the worthless animals. reinforced the evil White stereotype that 12 percent blacks are responsible for 50 percent of the crime? And have destroyed every city they live in?

There does seem to be a modest corporate trend afoot to, you know, actually give customers what they want and try to make money for stockholders. But the NYT has radicalized its own readership to the point where maybe all they want is crazed, woke bias confirmation.

If there is a downturn in NYT grist for the iSteve mill, then maybe it will be a sign the new guy is having an impact.

There is a job that only hires people of at least six foot tall: it’s called middle management. You have to have a good head of hair too. Personal disclosure: I’m five foot eight and bald. Luckily I have various nerdy skills that mean I don’t have to compete for those jobs, and in fact I’d make a terrible manager. But it kind of shows. The Dilbert cartoon used to notice this quite a lot. The pointy haired boss is lower management, by the way.

“You don’t have to be tall like 6’2″ Cristiano Ronaldo to be good at soccer. You can also be 5’7″ like Lionel Messi.”

Cristiano Ronaldo is an excellent striker, one of the best, has worked extremely hard at developing his skills, but he is not even close to Messi’s caliber. Messi is a creative genius. Talk about being to the right of the bell curve! Watch his passing (which is usually pinpoint accurate), his dribbling, his chips, his dekes, his nutmegs, his balance and agility, and his speed. Yes, he is very fast, clocking in at speeds equivalent to the best American football players. But where he really shines is in his playmaking; this is where he really shines.

The fielders in baseball act as one big goalie, everybody trying to stop the opposing team from advancing. Soccer is way more creative, and if you’re intelligent, like Messi, you can create the plays. He is a master at this. If you want to watch intelligence in action, look no further than Messi.

Austria- so that’s where you live. Anatoly Karlin would be amused, if he doesn’t know already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugby_union_in_Austria
Austria has 1,345 registered players ! LOL

As you live in Mitteleuropa, maybe I’ve been a little hard on you. However, I do have to dispel certain misconceptions you obviously have about Rugby Union.

Rugby Union in France, England and Wales suffers the same problems as Football in these countries – gross overrepresentation of Coloured and other non-European players at the professional and national team levels. Recent French National teams have fielded teams with half or more Coloureds, North Africans and Polynesians. This year’s team against England was a slight improvement – it was only a third Coloured, but with white South African and Irish imports. So only half of the team were indigenous French. The French replacements were half non-European and featured one Mohamed Haouas. Apparently, Mohamed is on the side of France! Another, Dylan Cretin ( sic ), is an indigenous Frenchman, however.
For the record, the current captain of the English Rugby Union team is Coloured. I could continue, but it would be tedious to do so.

The Whitest of the 6 Nations teams are Italy and Scotland. They are the poorest Rugby Unions, so they usually can’t afford to import guys from abroad with the intention of playing for the national team ( In Rugby Union, you only need 3 years’ residency to switch national teams ) Having said that, they’ve imported the odd New Zealander over the years and in Italy’s case the odd Scotsman ! Rock on Tommy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommaso_Allan

The rest of the top 10 – Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa- are in the Southern Hemisphere. The only one fielding an all-white team is Argentina. I don’t even remember them playing an (obvious) mestizo. They really are the Whitest team in world Rugby.

I hope that’s clarified things.

My point is that in 1990, whether Mexican kids wanted to be Valenzuela or Maradona was a toss-up.

What is the point of Affirmative Action for blacks who aren’t ADOS? Probably the worst whiner about racism I’ve encountered on the job was a very clever fellow who immigrated from the Congo. He left real work at our company (where he got pushed up higher every time he cried “discrimination!”).

Last I knew of him he was riding high as a refugee advocate, praised as a pillar of the community. Not an ADOS, but certainly a POS.

That was the TV game 7 broadcast recorded on film using kinescope. Hence the limited resolution. A lot of the early TV survives only via kinetoscope.

IIRC, Lucy and Desi were early adopters of filming their TV show rather than performing live.

The early video quality left much to be desired, and video tape decayed much faster than film. A lot of video from the 70’s looks horrible, like an out of focus lens with snow.

“I simply don’t believe in IQ orthodoxy.”

Perhaps you should adopt a child and find out?

https://www.unz.com/jthompson/adopt-a-child-drop-an-illusion/

Yeah, I know.

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”

“To forget it!”

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

“But the Solar System!” I protested.

“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

I was on the point of asking him what that work might be, but something in his manner showed me that the question would be an unwelcome one. I pondered over our short conversation, however, and endeavoured to draw my deductions from it. He said that he would acquire no knowledge which did not bear upon his object. Therefore all the knowledge which he possessed was such as would be useful to him. I enumerated in my own mind all the various points upon which he had shown me that he was exceptionally well-informed. I even took a pencil and jotted them down. I could not help smiling at the document when I had completed it. It ran in this way —

SHERLOCK HOLMES — his limits.

1. Knowledge of Literature. — Nil.
2. Philosophy. — Nil.
3. Astronomy. — Nil.
4. Politics. — Feeble.
5. Botany. — Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.
6. Geology. — Practical, but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them.
7. Chemistry. — Profound.
8. Anatomy. — Accurate, but unsystematic.
9. Sensational Literature. — Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.
10. Plays the violin well.
11. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.
12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law.

When I had got so far in my list I threw it into the fire in despair. “If I can only find what the fellow is driving at by reconciling all these accomplishments, and discovering a calling which needs them all,” I said to myself, “I may as well give up the attempt at once.”

Obviously, you scored low on your IQ test. Those of us with extremely high scores know it’s all about the IQ test and we’re your natural superiors.

[Feynman] was the king of hyperfocus.

Later, Donald O. Clifton at Gallup was the king of selling “hyperfocus”. It capped his career and made ones for acolytes such as Marcus Buckingham.

https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/252137/home.aspx

For instance- I simply don’t believe that Beethoven or Michelangelo had some astonishingly high IQ…

Mozart may not even have had an especially high musical IQ Higher than most people’s, perhaps, but nothing special in his family or similar ones. He was the Tiger Woods of the 18th century, a product manufactured by an intense father.

Nobody claims there is some great innate advantage present in Woods. He’s a cross between two races undistinguished at golf. He played along with his nutty dad, then later put in a lot of hard work you never got to see.* This is exactly what Mozart did two centuries earlier. Wolfi made it the old-fashioned way. He earned it.

*I mentioned Clifton’s “strengths theory” in the previous comment. Woods went completely against this at times. He was bad at sand traps, and spent many unwatched hours working to overcome this weakness, which Clifton and Buckingham would have advised him merely to “manage” and move on. Reminiscent of Robert Greene’s books where each chapter delineates some aspect of power or whatever, then ends with a striking counterexample.

This might have made sense in the case of a Woods, working in an ultracompetitive and mature field– cf. Frans Johansson— so any incremental improvement would go a long way. Duffers needn’t bother.

Interestingly, Johansson is Swedish, black American, and Cherokee, and his wife looks Asian. However, he’s no Earl Woods.

Let’s stick to the point. If taken seriously, this points to some sort of multiple intelligences, although it would be more appropriate to call them talents.

As I said before: It all boils down to unreliability of psychometry as such. And I’m not talking about geniuses, bursts of creativity & similar stuff.

Simply, what those tests should measure is talent, gift, capability for some area. If limited to such, rather narrow field, psychometric tests could work very well.They could show that some people are gifted for numbers, or for engineering tasks, good with words, or good in space orientation etc.

But it is absurd to derive (I know the argument from factor analysis, but it is bollocks) that some magical number, /g/, as the final product which will show a person’s success in life in general. What is “success”? How can we measure the capability of an individual to attain”success” in a given field?

There are many problems with IQ ideology which remain insurmountable.

We all use the word “intelligence” & even if we look at psychology dictionaries & agree with it, nonetheless the concept remains vague. Probably there are a few types of intelligence: verbal, arithmetic, geometrical & maybe a few others. Why would we lump these types of intelligence together is beyond my comprehension.

As for musical ability, various types of talents in other fields…better not call this “intelligence” (social intelligence, emotional “intelligence”,..). This is a misuse of the word. Ability, talent, whatever…

Intelligence, as defined by textbooks, is by no means as important & decisive in modern societies as IQ religionists would like us to believe. Moreover, I would rather call it TQ (talent quotient) or CQ (capability quotient), than IQ. There are a few CQ, we all know this:

* CQ for something like mathematics
* CQ for abstract thinking in words (not eloquence)
* CQ for ….

In short, the old “multiple intelligences” theory was onto something, although not in the old, dogmatic way. How many capabilities are to be measured- I’d leave it to psychometricians as long as they follow common sense. I’d say 5-10. And those, say, 8 types of giftedness cannot be, reasonably, manipulated to give a single figure..

To “extract” one figure from all those variegated talents is absurd (I don’t buy the factor analysis argument). If one could, say, try to assess AQ (artistic quotient) from areas of literary writing, music, painting, dance, … for a guy who is a genius painter, but abysmally bad in dancing, music,…- we would get a mediocre AQ, a figure which doesn’t tell us anything. The guy is a genius in one area & moron in others.

And – judging from “success”- Ibrahim X. Kendi must have extremely high IQ.

Exactly. Only pathetic manipulatable white liberals give a s### about black whining. When the Mexicans, Chinese , Koreans et al take over, the game is over.

I am positively delighted that feminists are evolutionary dead ends and will die childless.

On June 28, 1990, Nelson Mandela came to Miami and was snubbed by local officials because he had shaken hands with Fidel Castro. This led to a three-year black boycott of the city.

Lucky Miami!

Entertaining because logical but of course there are three problems: you can’t know which facts you’ll need to know in the future, the most powerful thing in learning is analogy so almost no knowledge is truly waste-lumber, and plenty of successful old people recall both things they need to know and things which do not lead to a paycheck. To connect it back to Feynman, in his retirement, he sought to become more well-rounded, and was a good draughtsman.

“…the major reason ..”

No, the major reason is that blue collar jobs don’t pay as well as they used to.

Right around the time that the boycott ended, there was a spate of black-on-white armed robberies targeting European tourists.

At the time there was no central repository for rental cars at the Miami airport – every company had its own lot. Many of the lots were on small side streets, so it was very easy for someone unfamiliar with the area to make a wrong turn and end up in a danger zone.

Furthermore, most agencies had custom license plates identifying the vehicles as rental cars, making the criminals’ job that much easier.

Typically the perps would follow the rental car until it reached a deserted area and then ram it from behind to get the tourists to pull over.

After a couple of British and German tourists were murdered, the rental-car agencies began handing out pamphlets advising travelers not to pull over for minor fender-bender accidents but to proceed to the nearest gas station.

One German tourist tried to follow this advice; the perps got angry and shot him through his car window. IIRC he was murdered in front of his wife and kids. (There were several of these homicides; I can’t remember all of the particulars.)

Eventually Germany issued a travel advisory.

Freedom of Inquiry on the Line | Glenn Loury & Amy Wax | The Glenn Show

Aug 26, 2022

0:00 Amy’s recent conflict with the Penn Law School administration
7:38 Amy responds to her dean’s charges of racism, sexism, and xenophobia
16:38 Should we take students’ feelings into account when discussing race and admissions?
27:34 Glenn: If Amy is fired, it will be an outrage beyond belief
34:53 Why Amy invited Jared Taylor to speak with her students
44:28 Amy’s defense of race realism’s legitimacy
50:25 Glenn and Amy’s first encounter
53:36 Amy: Sometimes reality is upsetting and offensive
58:58 How to help Amy

Glenn Loury and Amy Wax (Penn Law School). Recorded August 12, 2022.

https://bloggingheads.tv/videos/64705

Yep – despite the occasional op-ed in the NYT from some Asian lady talking about how blacks and Asians should be political allies, I don’t know a single Asian person who thinks they have anything in common with blacks at all. Hispanics and Asians do not have white guilt and do not want to sacrifice the educational, economic, or personal safety of themselves or kids so blacks feel better.

Right now the Dems can stitch together enough gullible whites, nearly all blacks, and a healthy amount of Hispanics and Asians to be nationally competitive. But the growing numbers and economic impact of the latter two that are part of the Dem coalition means at some point the party is going to have to deal with them and their divergent interests from their black base.

And frankly, it will be better for the entire country if black political and cultural demands are treated in proportion to their contributions to society, which one might call “equity.”

“For instance- I simply don’t believe that Beethoven or Michelangelo had some astonishingly high IQ”

LOL–that’s precisely the attitude of smart gatekeepers at places like Harvard and Stanford: they know that IQ tests can’s screen for creative genius–THEY HAVE TO!

Intelligence, as defined by textbooks, is by no means as important & decisive in modern societies as IQ religionists would like us to believe.

I don’t know a single Asian person who thinks they have anything in common with blacks at all…

…let alone a married one!

I’m a Mensa member. Mensa is a not a club or society of geniuses. A simple look at the bell curve will tell you that.

The membership is predominantly male, but here’s the type. Think of the kid in your school class who always got the highest test scores. But not the one who was the goody-goody who always got straight A’s. The one who missed assignments and pitched pennies with the C students during lunch hour.

The membership is pretty old, and the organization itself make it hard for younger people to join by not accepting SAT and GRE scores after 1994 or G.I. battery (military) general aptitude scores after 1980. Someone who took the SAT in 1994 is at least 43 years old now, probably more like 45 or 46. Add four years for the GRE. Someone who took the G.I. battery in 1980 is at least 59 years old today.

I took the original GRE general tests several times from 1974 through 1992. I took it again in 2019. I guarantee you, the only thing that was different about it was the scoring scale. Am I calling Mensa an ossified organization? I think so.

The women in Mensa tend to be old white ladies. Largely, they are more dutiful than the men, as you would expect. In the major metropolitan areas, there might be more women who are somewhat younger and who could be called hot numbers. I have been told, in the Los Angeles area, sometimes women join explicitly to find a husband and when they find a man of sufficient means who takes them, they drop out. If this happens, and I am sure it does, because someone in my local area who once lived there told me so, it tells us something about the concept of high IQ organizations.

The basic idea is that high IQ organizations cannot afford to be too snooty about membership. Only in an area with a huge population base like Greater Los Angeles can an organization draw in enough membership that there are some women in it who have viability in the marriage market in the eyes of financially successful men. Or draw in those men in enough numbers that the organization becomes a viable place for women with high value in the marriage market to plausibly seek a husband. Excuse me for sounding like Jordan Peterson or Stephan Molyneaux, but that’s the world we have.

My thought is, it would not be possible to have a high IQ organization with a gate above 145 and even then there would be enough members to have viable chapters only in the largest cities. Mensa’s market penetration probably is less than one percent of all who already qualify or could qualify. A change in policy allowing the acceptance of later iterations of the college and university tests particularly might at best double the membership. One thing I do know, millennials and Gen Z members are not going to go through the rigamarole of taking a privately administered IQ test to qualify for a membership organization.

Don’t fall for the tricknology. Especially, don’t fall for the tricknology of your own invention. Mensa is not a society for geniuses. It’s a club for people with high test scores. Seriously if you got a V+Q composite of 1250 on the old SAT or 1200 0n the old GRE, you’re in. Those are not extraordinary numbers.

They don’t. Whites and blacks have a lot in common. Tall stature. Propensity for boorish behavior and disorderly conduct. Superficial charm and geniality. Tendencies toward promiscuity. Seeking a big windfall in place of valuing steadiness. Even Earnest Sevier Cox said so. He said that the line between civilization and chaos was pretty thin and that whites had enough people on the top side of it only by a tiny margin.

Only social pressure and lack of options have kept the largest number of whites on the good side of the social equation over the entire era of the industrial revolution. Now social pressure has decreased and options have increased. What is the likely outcome? One possibility is that it sinks the whole ship. Could happen.

“… One possibility is that it sinks the whole ship. Could happen.”

So far though technology has been increasing the margin for error.

Everybody think so Everybody thinks the orange ball has to always just get bigger and bigger and higher and higher. The only difference with the contemporary left is that they want to replace the orange ball with the green one, which also will last forever.

No guarantees. Just because smeone can conceive of failure doesn’t mean they can prevent it.

Sales clerk isn’t a blue collar job. Nor are most cubicle coolie jobs blue collar. And the lower levels of the non profit jobs are low paid but not blue collar.

And – judging from “success”- Ibrahim X. Kendi must have extremely high IQ.

Nah, I’d say he’s 110 tops, but has figured out the smooth talking race hustle grifting that appeals to guilty white libtards.

And Florida changed the plates issued to rental cars so they would not identify the car as a rental.

I joined Mensa many years ago when I was 17. IIRC, I took a special IQ test that discriminated well at the right hand of the Bell curve. You have to be in the top 2% to get in. Then I took another test to see if I was in the top 1%. I went to a few meetings and was unimpressed by the people there.

Blacks and whites share many socially & “biologically” deplorable characteristics. But, as regards “high” stuff, from morality, individuality, creativity, industriousness, … they have almost nothing in common.

Using Confucian categorization, low-type whites have much in common with virtually all blacks; high type blacks are so rare they are almost non-existent.

Their arms were too short to box with God or man.

Intriguing that Social Work is substantially lower than Education.

“if you got a V+Q composite of 1250 on the old SAT or 1200 0n the old GRE, you’re in. Those are not extraordinary numbers.”

They are, by definition, within the top 2% whether you consider that extraordinary or not. I’m trying to grasp the point of using an characterization like “extraordinary” when you have the actual numeric range?

That was my point precisely. What people believe about Mensa or any other high-IQ organization is not the same thing as what it is. I joined four years ago largely because I had a roommate who refused to believe I qualified. To me, it’s something to do. The local groups bring together people of a certain profile. We eat ordinary food and converse, but it gets me out of the house one or two nights a month. I expect nothing else of the organization.

The roommate, who was female, kept on insisting that I was a Dunning-Kruger case. In my opinion, the Dunning-Kruger Effect is pop psychology right up there with the Kinsey Report and Kenneth Clark’s crackpot doll studies.

Baseball has to a considerable degree outsourced player development. Boys in the Dominican Republic attend for-profit residential middle and secondary schools where they live under rough conditions that would not be even close to legal in the United States. At these schools, they spend a great amount of time playing and being coached in baseball and also study secondary school subjects.

These schools stay above water financially by selling player contracts to American professional baseball teams, either those affiliated with major league teams or teams in independent leagues.

At these schools, the boy sleep on plywood bunks and eat whatever the school decides to feed them. Even so, I doubt the school operators make any huge amount of money. It’s what people do to survive in the Third World.

If Major League Baseball decided to concentrate its player development efforts on American blacks, there would be more American black player. If the effort was concentrated on American white kids, there would be more white players. Baseball is doing what other American businesses are doing, going abroad for talent in order to avoid the tangled world of American law and American racial politics.

People outside of the United States and the West have means of qualifying for careers and getting hired that are not available to American. True in tech. True in baseball.

I attended a few meetings. The people there were predictably nerdy and socially uninteresting types if you weren’t into things like Esperanto and software.

They don’t marry because they cannot find a male Korean who looks sufficiently androgynous and pseudo-Caucasian

South Korea has a marriage rate of 5 per 1,000, the same as Germany and higher than most Anglophone countries (Australia, New Zealand, UK) and substantially higher than most Western European countries (France, Italy, Spain, etc.): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_marriage_rate

South Koreans have a low fertility rate, not a low marriage rate.

Intriguing that Social Work is substantially lower than Education.

Social work is even more female-shifted (and, yes, lower IQ) than education.

133 for physics so still right around 130 which is what I said in the 1st place.

Still trying to “win,” eh?

133 is the average for a physics major in college. This is what you wrote originally:

an IQ of 130, which is maybe good enough to get thru a physics grad school program

First of all, you ought to realize that at the right end of the distribution bell curve for IQ, small numbers make a large difference in selectivity. For example, when you go from an IQ of 100 to 103, you go from 1 in 2 people to 1 in 2.38 people. But when you go from 130 to 133, you go from 1 in 44 people to 1 in 72 people. That’s a pretty big jump in selectivity. So as you go higher in IQ, you have to be more careful and precise with your statements.

Second, that 133 is for undergraduates. Your original claim was that an IQ of 130 would be “maybe good enough” for “a physics grad school program.” Physics graduate programs are far more selective than undergraduate programs. Actually completing the degree (usually Ph.D.) is more selective still. People who fit your description likely have a substantially higher average IQ than 130. Indeed, research scientists in general are said to be around IQ of 140 on average and physics is, by far, the most cognitively selective of all disciplines. Even at IQ 140, we are talking about top 0.4% of the population.

Shouldn’t a guy who can make a 98 mph infield throw be considered for pitcher? Especially if he’s hitting only .199.

You have no idea how mediocre the average physics professor is, do you?
Even at the “top schools”.

People just are not all that bright at describing the real world.

Doing “amazing” while taking tests —- lots of people can do that.
And the elite colleges have set up a racket where the professors can all claim great things about their abilities.
Funny thing is, when it comes to actually explaining the world, outside of the tests they give each other, outside the rewards and awards they give each other, the “top schools” and their “top professors” just aren’t all that impressive. Of course they all call each other amazing, but that just is not true.

And no, physics is not “by far” the most cognitively selective of all disciplines. They are just bragging when they say that, and they are not right.

He would give up three or four home runs every inning because he has no idea how to mix up his pitches.

He will be a good ball player day if, and only if, a coach of genius teaches him how to compete with other ball players.

Well, what does being in the top two percent mean? First of all, being one out fifty doesn’t mean anything because as many as 80 percent are out of the game. Among those you would designate as smart as many as 10 percent qualify for Mensa, with many more passably close. I don’t see anything that exclusive about the group. Or that extraordinary about the people who are in it. The Bell curve being what it is, most of the membership has to fall in the 130-135 IQ range.