View 576 June 22 - 28, 2009 (original) (raw)
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
You will find
http://www.nytimes.com/
2009/06/21/nyregion/21about.html?
_r=3&ref=nyregion
interesting in many ways.
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The Iranian Election and the Revolution Test,
Jerry
Based on what we're seeing and hearing from Iran - and more importantly, what we're not seeing and hearing from Iran - I believe this analysis is more likely correct than what we're getting from the MSM:
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/
20090622_iranian_election_and_revolution_test
Ed
This is pretty well my analysis. I thought of the analogy to China when it first began. Now a number of Obama critics are berating the president for not doing more in support of the uprising. I'm not sure what he could have done. The United States is not popular in Iran even among those who have smart phones. Injecting the US into Iranian politics would probably be counter productive. Encouraging an uprising we are not willing to support with blood and treasure is not often a good policy: look where that got us after the First Gulf War when we encouraged uprising in Iraq but then did nothing to support them.
The United States is not omnipotent, nor are we all wise. Iran is not Iraq, and the government there has a far different relationship to its people than Saddam Hussein and the Baathists had to the people of Iraq. Is democracy the answer to all foreign relations questions? At one time that was assumed. Democracies don't make war on each other. Liberal democracy is the end of history. So we were once taught during the heady years after the collapse of the USSR. I questioned that premise then, and it seems even less obvious now.
I believe there may be a democracy in the Middle East (other than Israel). It appears to be Gaza. It would certainly make war on Israel given the means.
The world is a dangerous place.
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And if that isn't enough to think about this morning:
Moore's Law is coming to an end - because of finance:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/
2009/06/21/isuppli_semi_process_forecast/
It reminds me of the trends noted long ago about the high cost of fighters driving down the numbers bought. Makes sense.
Ed
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I put this in View rather than Mail because it raises a fundamental question:
Indicator of Success:
IQ is not the most reliable indicator of success; far from it. I believe that privilege is the single most reliable indicator of success. The higher the level of priviledge to which one is born, the greater the odds for one's success in life.
Given two prospects of equal IQ, one common born and the other born to privilege, which will be the more likely to succeed? Even if we extend that field to ten or even a hundred prospects of equal IQ, one of whom is born to privilege, the expanded field might change the odds, but not likely the outcome.
Bruce
My correspondent says "indicator" rather than "predictor". When we discuss the utility of IQ, we generally mean as a predictor. There is a difference.
There are a number of knotty problems raised in this common sense observation. Most of us would agree with the general proposition that privileged people do better in life than those not privileged; so what do we mean when it is said that IQ is the best single indicator of success? In what context is this true?
The classis example is grade prediction. The University of Washington grade prediction program, funded by the Navy Electronics Lab back when funding such studies was not so politically incorrect, took measures of all the students coming into the University and gave them batteries of tests as well as gathered a great deal of information about such matters as high school grades, what school they went to, high school class standing (which turned out to be more useful than high school grade, incidentally) and other such measures. Then four years later we took the grade point average as well as the major. We also had GPA in classes in the major. All this went into a huge matrix and ended up with a multi-factor program that predicted the grades of incoming students in a number of majors. This was supplied to the student and various counselors.
The program worked pretty well. It wasn't exact, of course, but if it predicted that you'd flunk out of pre-med, the odds that you'd get grades good enough to get into medical school were way low.
Note that we had a very narrow definition of "success": what GPA did you get after four years at the UW? Note also that while there was some theory involved in selecting the predictor variables, none of that went into generating the prediction equations. The formula fell out of the matrix algebra manipulations of the data.
Similar studies elsewhere have got the same results. Most of these have been academic and "success" was generally defined by grades, but there have been other studies in other fields. The general proposition is that if you take a group of people -- bank tellers, machinists, preachers, officer candidates, gardeners -- and form a committee of experts to rank order those people on their "success" in what they are doing, then what measure might be used to predict how successful a single individual would be? And the answer to that is almost IQ or some other measure of "g". This doesn't mean that g will be a very good measure, but for most non-sports activities g will be the best single predictor. Note, though, how we have defined success here.
As to general success in life, I don't know how to define that. We could I suppose use a committee of experts (although who is an expert on life success?) to rank order a bunch of people, then look at IQ vs. "privilege" to see which does a better job of such prediction. We'd need a defined measure of "privilege", which I presume would be some measure of parental socio-economic status. I'm not sure what the result of that experiment would be (it may have been done; there have been a lot of such studies).
We certainly have done studies of parental SES and IQ as predictors of GPA in many schools and in many trades. Parental SES isn't as good a predictor of success as a plumber or welder (I'm pretty sure I recall those two studies, done a long time ago of course). IQ was better in those.
The point here is that "privilege" certainly helps. Among other things, privileged children are likely to have better educations because their parents have many more choices. If, however, you are trying to make predictions about a group of privileged kids -- say the incoming class to an exclusive prep school -- you'll find by and large that IQ does a better job than parental SES. I wouldn't care to speculate about predicting success at being, say, a stock broker, where parental SES would have a lot of influence over whom you know and whom you meet. Clearly we all know stories of successful privileged but stupid aristocrats. IQ or "g" is a powerful predictor, but one does need to qualify generalizations with the usual "other things being equal."
