you are not, actually, in control of your own life

Obama giving the commencement address at Morehouse College:

Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination....If you stay hungry, if you keep hustling, if you keep on your grind and get other folks to do the same — nobody can stop you.

Setting aside a liberal Democrat making this point, and all the attendant problems with that— the notion that you are in charge of the outcome of your life, and that all it takes is working hard and trying, is not true. Realizing it isn't true is a big part of adjusting the adult world. As time goes on and on, more and more empirical measures demonstrate it isn't true. And saying that to students like these, at this age of their lives, in this economy, at this terrible point in history for recent college grads... it's cruelty. Cruelty.

reminder: Academically Adrift's methodological flaws

So new research suggests that perhaps college students aren't going through college without learning anything, contrary to the public perception of Academically Adrift. I say contrary to the public perception, rather than contrary to the text, as in fact the book found that not only did the group of college students tested show statistically significant gains between their first and fourth semester (not between their first and last year, a common misrepresentation of the study) as a whole, every individual subgroup within the sample did. I suppose I can't blame the media too much for the misperception that the book showed only failure, given that the authors of the book took every opportunity to play up the idea of a failed higher education system.

Of course, it's easy to show pessimistic findings when every aspect of your methodology is bent towards that result. Richard Haswell, in a review essay from Research in the Teaching of English (PDF):

I should be clear that my final sounding of this book is not that the authors misinterpret their own findings. I believe that their findings cannot be interpreted at all. As regards the significance of their research and its methodology to the college composition profession, my conclusion is terse. If you want to cite these authors in support of the failings of undergraduate writing, don’t. If you want to cite these authors in support of the successes of undergraduate writing, don’t. Academically Adrift’s data—as generated and analyzed—cannot be relied on. 

Harsh judgment on a book published by the University of Chicago Press. But consider two research scenarios. Research Team A wants to test the null hypothesis that students do not gain in writing skills during college. What do the researchers do? Whether using a cross-sectional or longitudinal design, they make sure the earlier group of writers is equivalent to the later group. They randomly select participants rather than let them self-select. They create writing prompts that fit the kind of writing that participants are currently learning in courses. They apply measures of the writing that are transparent and interpretable. They space pretest and post-test as far apart as they can to allow participants maximum chance to show gain. They control for retest effects. They limit measures and discussion to no more than what their statistical  testing and empirical findings allow. Meanwhile Team B is testing the same hypothesis. What do they do? They create a self-selected set of participants and show little concern when more than half of the pretest group drops out of the experiment before the post-test. They choose to test that part of the four academic years when students are least likely to record gain, from the first year through the second year, ending at the well-known “sophomore slump.” They choose prompts that ask participants to write in genres they have not studied or used in their courses. They keep secret the ways that they measured and rated the student writing. They disregard possible retest effects. They run hundreds of tests of statistical significance looking for anything that will support the hypothesis of nongain and push their implications far beyond the data they thus generate. 

I am not speculating about the intentions or motives of the authors of Academically Adrift (AA). I am just noting that AA follows the methodology of Team B and not Team A.

 But, of course, that college is worthless is a conclusion that pleases many with flagrantly anti-academic biases in our media, so I doubt this new study will get much press.

the right to live in history

Andrew Sullivan: "That’s the core problem with debunking the Richwine thesis. The policy inferences are repellent to me. But the data are real."

I want to argue by analogy, here.

I've seen this blog post get passed around a few times. It's about the origins of homosexuality. The post argues that there are good reasons to doubt the straightforward genetic theory, that gay men and women possess a specific gene or genes that cause them to feel sexual and romantic attraction to members of their same sex. I possess nothing resembling the expertise to make that determination. In my own limited way, though, I'm sympathetic to questioning the purely genetic hypothesis, as it's always seemed overly simplistic, and the extremely common discordance in sexual orientation between identical twins is a major suggestion against a purely genetic cause. It's important to say: homosexuality can be physiological and unchosen and still not be genetic. Personally, I think that the perception of political necessity has caused a lot of people to assert a purely genetic cause in a way that outstrips the evidence. I understand that though "they can't help it, so let's let them have rights" may have had short-term political power, it is not a satisfying way to defend gay rights or the equal dignity and worth of gay love.

Yet when I read an argument that homosexuality is caused by a pathogen, it gives me pause. I read it with defensive skepticism. Why? Because, of course, the notion of "homosexuality as disease" is old, and has been used for a long, long time in the oppression of gay people. I read the post, and it has superficial plausibility to me. But there's no proof, yet. And when I read the comments, or find blogs that have linked to the post, my worst fears are confirmed: the commenters are repeatedly and explicitly comparing homosexuality to pedophilia, they are talking about gay sex as "wanton sex," they are using the language of deviance and disorder. The author of the blog post himself says: "Of course it’s a mental disease: a Darwinian disease, which is the only reasonable definition of disease. Curable? Who knows? Preventable? Likely." Whatever the truth of the origins of homosexuality, I want nothing to do with the people who are arguing that the origins are pathogenic.

It turns out that people who are inclined to see homosexuality as caused by a pathogen are also people who are inclined to see homosexuality as disordered, deviant, and wrong. Could any functioning human intelligence be surprised by this? And yet if I apply the kind of thinking Andrew endorses when it comes to race and IQ, I would have to ignore this connection and suspend skepticism, as though doing so is somehow in service to science.

Because this dynamic is exactly the same when it comes to race and IQ. People insist: hey, you've got to let the science be the science, you've got to look at the facts, you've got to let them make the case. And I try. I read their essays. I follow their links. I do make a good faith effort. But I do not make that effort with similar credulity or sympathy that I do when I read someone write about tweaking the Earned Income Tax credit or make an argument about alcohol licensing. Why? Because one of these arguments has been used for the perpetuation of a system of chattel slavery and racist domination. That's why. And, sure enough: whenever people pop up to tell me, "Here, check this link, read the facts," and I click and read around, and then I follow more links, inevitably, I end up at Stormfront or similar houses of explicit racism. Inevitably, the people who are arguing about inherent black and Hispanic tendency to be unintelligent are also arguing about "black aggression" or "hypersexuality" or "inherent tendency to criminality." This will apparently come as a shock to Andrew: racists love race science.

Is the correlation between belief in race science and racism 1? No. But it's a lot closer to 1 than it is to 0. Is that dispositive of the question? Of course not. If there's a racial bias towards low IQ, and if IQ is really an adequate gauge for real-world, lived intelligence, then the truth will out, just as it will if homosexuality is pathogenic. But to pretend as if people who are pushing the idea of inherent racial inferiority in IQ don't tend to be the kind of people who believe all sorts of racist things is stupid. It's moronic. It's exactly the kind of willful failure to see connections that Andrew is accusing other people of.

Take Steve Sailer. If many of the commenters who pop up here when I talk race and IQ are to be believed, Sailer is a great guy who has been wrongfully vilified by liberals. Well, setting aside the inherent moral questions of race and IQ, Sailer has also argued that Andrew's passionate style is not a part of his intellectual and moral makeup, but is a consequence of the medication Andrew is to control his HIV. Sailer has also argued that Brian Beutler was shot because he was a guilt stricken liberal who was too embarrassed to avoid the dangerous black neighborhood. (That happened in the comments at one of Matt Yglesias's blogs, and I can't find a link, so you'll have to take my word for it.) Sailer has also argued, without evidence, that Matt Yglesias's beating was a racist hate crime, black against white. This is the guy I'm suppose to see as an unfairly marginalized figure.

I am not arguing that these connections and associations prove anything. I am not arguing that we shouldn't consider these questions or these consequences. I am, however, arguing that recognizing these associations and allowing them to color how I read and interact with these arguments is not some unfortunate refusal to be appropriately scientific. It is a natural and principled way to act in a world that remains full of racism and in a country in which the cost of racial discrimination has been incalculable. What I am asking for, again, is the right to live in history. I am asking for the right to let the legacy of racism and attempts to use science as an argument for racial domination inform how I read arguments in the present. Is that really a bad thing? Is that somehow a failure of intelligence? I find it, instead, the only smart way to proceed.

When Andrew says "I don't like the policy prescriptions, but I believe in the data," he is once again acting like there is no question between the two. But it is precisely the people who want to find the ugly policy prescriptions that are most enamored of those data. We don't need to guess if Jason Richwine's opinion on the data led to policy prescriptions we find offensive! He did let his stance on the data lead to ugly policy prescriptions. Richwine wasn't criticized just because he believes that Hispanics have lower IQs. He was criticized because he believed that those lower IQs render Hispanics so undesirable that we should harshly restrict Mexican immigration into this country. That is the black letter argument in his work.

I appreciate that Andrew has, as he always does, engaged with criticism and opposing opinion on this issue. But I am frustrated by Andrew's continuing ahistorical credulity on this issue, his tendency to read the people making these arguments with the most possible charity. And he matches that with a distinct lack of charity for those resisting them, the constant invocation of liberal piety and political correctness. I would like very much for Andrew to consider whether his long history with this issue, and the attendant criticism he's received, has rendered him too ready to see those pushing the race-IQ connection as principled empiricists untouched by emotion or animus. To posit that they are sober-minded, rational minds merely pursuing the scientific truth disinterestedly while their opponents are motivated by groupthink and emotion is a pretty great way to make yourself gullible on an issue where gullibility has profoundly negative consequences.

Race is the central political question of the American experience, and racism a stain on our national character that has never wiped off, and if I and others are suspicious of arguments that elide with those of racists because of this history, then so be it. That doesn't mean I won't listen or look at the evidence. It just means that my suspicions will remain. I can live with the consequences of being too vigilant about racism far easier than I can live with the alternative.

This will have to be my last word on this, for awhile.

Breaking: CIA corrupt, incompetent

I've been saying for some time that the Benghazi story is, in fact, a big deal, just not for the reason Republicans keep saying it is. The two major issues are 1) that we entered into a civil war without the slightest pretense of a national security rationale and removed a regime, helping to install a new Islamist regime that has brought with it harsh new oppression for disfavored groups like homosexuals and sub-Saharan Africans. And 2) that the CIA was involved in up to its elbows, and that the CIA has demonstrated once again that it is both willing to do flagrantly immoral and illegal things to advance US interests and yet very bad at advancing US interests. The knee-jerk partisan dismissals of Benghazi by prominent liberal Democrats represent a major missed opportunity to take part in a national dialogue about our continuing program of enforcing our will militarily in the Muslim world, and about the CIA. The Republican idiocy of trying to make this all about Obama is, well, Republican idiocy.

It seems the evidence is mounting that, in fact, the CIA was deeply complicit in the fuck ups, and that as is so often the case, where we find violence against the United States we find bad behavior by our espionage service. I expect that increasing clarity over the CIA's role will neither get Republicans to back off the State department, nor get liberal Democrats to take the story seriously. But it's a shame nonetheless. I cannot for the life of me understand why more people don't reflect on the fact that our intelligence services have not only undertaken flagrantly immoral acts, constantly and deliberately, but have actively undermined the security of Americans by creating anti-American rage. I just will never understand it.

history and social science

One of the commenters on that Ta-Nehisi Coates piece from the other day lectured Coates about how he should "learn some statistics." It was, as you can imagine, not a helpful comment, and whether the commenter would have said the same to a white writer or not, it echoed traditional condescension towards black writers and black intellectuals in a way that was really unfortunate. This is a sticking point in arguments about race all the time. People complain that they are judged on the symmetry between their ideas and historical racism rather than their intent. But we live in history, not in a land of pure ideas, and the insistence on sensitivity and care in our racial dialogue is a necessary product of a legacy of oppression.

I've been thinking about statistical analysis of social phenomenon and history lately. Coates, as much as any other blogger, bases his work on history. History and the social sciences, particularly those pursued quantitatively like experimental psychology, have always been tense neighbors. Why? Because the purpose of history is to establish context. History's enduring message is that no condition can be understand without understanding the conditions that created it. History is an effort to contextualize. Statistical examinations of human life are just the opposite: they rely on the decontextualization of sampling and stratification, where we divide humanity into various groups, based on demographics and features, on the theory that this is the key to getting to the causal relationships that we want to find.

The people who conduct such research (and I read and interact with many) are often themselves quite candid about the limitations of stratification and the existence of uncontrolled variables. The important question, always, is the details, and reasonable people can reasonably disagree. When we point out that poverty has a large impact on a variety of life outcomes, particularly metrics of education or intelligence, you often hear the reply that poverty has been accounted for in the research. What that means in practice, typically, is stratifying the sample for income level, and then "comparing like with like." The question is whether these stratifying mechanisms are actually accounting for the influence of confounding variables adequately. You might point out, for example, that poverty is a holistic phenomenon that extends far beyond the simple question of income strata. When people talk about the role of parentage, people will say, "we've controlled for parent's educational level." But surely, parenting contains a vastly larger amount of variation than can be explained with that control.

Adjudicating those disputes has to be conducted by people with a deeper grasp of and greater expertise in the philosophy of social science than me. I do want to say: that there are people who dispute the degree to which key variables can be adequately controlled for in social scientific research, and people who point out that there are some potentially key variables that researchers have almost no ability to investigate, such as childhood lead exposure in adult subjects. These people are perfectly mainstream scholars. People asserting the case for racial inferiority through these mechanisms often express them with considerable certitude over the experimental mechanism, even when the most anodyne parts of the data analysis are subject to legitimate debate.

But even beyond the specific and limited questions involved with stratification of variables in the social sciences, there is a broader question of locating observed results in the context of history. Even if we are perfectly confident that individual variables have been isolated, when it comes to end results, it's our responsibility to place their observed values in a broader social context that helps to explain discrepancies. That is more true than ever when it comes to race. In a very real sense, the effort to combat racism has been the effort to insist on history: the history of slavery, the history of Spanish conquest of indigenous American people, the history of the decades in which Southern black people lived under slavery in all but name, the history of systems of racial discrimination, the history of immigration, the history of our war with Mexico.... Isolating variables can be a key part of socially just research. It is from the attempt to isolate variables that we can say with great confidence that poverty has an impact on education, for example. But we must return always to the reality of a history that has witnessed systematic and relentless oppression of nonwhite people. What aggravates me so much about many who raise the race and IQ question (often while refusing to speak plainly about their feelings on it at all) is the shortsightedness of their considerations, the denial of history. It happens so frequently that, yes, I think it is fair to ask about their motives.

Will Wilkinson put it well:

I don't think the subject or conclusion of Mr Richwine's dissertation is out of the bounds of reasonable discourse. Yet I think a suspicion of racism is perfectly reasonable. Grad students can choose from an infinite array of subjects. Why choose this one? Who are especially keen to discover a rational basis for public policy that discriminates along racial lines? Racists, of course. Anyone who chooses this subject, and comes down on the side vindicating racist assumptions, volunteers to bring suspicion upon himself, to expose his work to an extraordinary level of scrutiny.

Precisely so. It is not racist to ask these questions. James Flynn, one of the most important researchers of the question of human intelligence in history, has used this sort of research precisely to agitate for social justice and left-wing politics. But it is perfectly natural, in a country with such a long legacy of racism, to expect those arguing that race leads to inferior outcomes in as existential a quality as intelligence to be held to very stringent consideration. That is particularly true when, as in the case of Jason Richwine, that argument is levied in the service of further discrimination, a reactionary call against immigration and deepening racial diversity in the United States.

I think that the idea that is being combated here is not merely the question of whether non-white people are prone to low intelligence, but an idea that is rarely voiced but frequently floats around in the ether the way taboo ideas do. The idea is the notion that, whatever historical oppression for nonwhite people we can accurately identify, they've "had long enough," that all these decades after the Civil Rights Acts— after people decided that we had "solved" racism— nonwhite people should have figured it out. But this attitude depends on an ahistorical account: black and Hispanic Americans have never reached outcome parity with white Americans. We can't claim that they have failed to maintain the conditions of American middle class lifestyles when they have never enjoyed them. I could list a dozen metrics for quality of life and economic security on which black and Hispanic Americans have never enjoyed equality. To act as though it is their fault for not meeting those standards when they are working from a legacy of entrenched and deliberate exclusion is precisely to deny history.

What we ask for, when we dispute the conclusions pursued by the race science crowd with such zeal, is that they be forced to live in history, that they not try to argue as though human life is a series of disconnected variables but rather that it is an interconnected fabric of phenomena that cannot be separated without rending the garment. If we force those discussing race and IQ to live in the history of racial oppression, we are merely asking them to occupy the same position as those they are describing. People of color have never had any choice but to live in history.

summer time in the springtime

Suavi vs Spiderman

Tenure track professors admitting they didn't read arguments they refer to critically and responding to criticism of same by literally saying "LOL" aside, my summer break is off to a really swimming start. It's been lovely around here. And I've been reading for pleasure! Like, 100% because I have to, not because I need to. Lovely, really lovely.

Erik Loomis is a dishonest person.

So in the past I've pointed out that standard operating procedure at Lawyers Guns and Money has been to tiptoe up to saying nasty things that the bloggers know they can't get away with, aware that the rabid Obots in their comments will be sure to say it for them. I have, as in the past, become the target of that tactic recently.

Today, Erik Loomis wanted to call me a proponent of race science, because Andrew Sullivan quoted me in a post talking about race and IQ. Unfortunately for Loomis, he has an evidence deficit on that position. See, since I've been writing about politics publicly, I've been arguing against The Bell Curve and the purported scientific case for racial inferiority. If Loomis was confused about this, he might have read when I said yesterday "I believe that the case for scientific racial inferiority is wrong." But he wasn't confused. There can be no doubt, given the many times I've written against these ideas at considerable length, that I am opposed to the idea that black people are inherently less intelligent than white people.

Rather, Loomis doesn't like me, because I believe that Muslims should not be murdered via drone strikes, and that my antipathy to murder of Muslims via drone strikes was enough to compel me not to vote for Obama (after voting for him in 2008), and further that I often praise Glenn Greenwald. And so Loomis goes for pure guilt by association. And of course, his commenters take the bait, and engage in one of the Two Minute Hates that seems to be the only way they have of interacting with the world at all.

Loomis is someone who, when his academic freedom was disgracefully challenged by his institution, the University of Rhode Island, made a point of standing up for himself, as well he should have. At the time, I signed the petition insisting on Loomis's academic and intellectual freedom. I was proud and happy to do so, in no small part because I am an alum of URI and someone who was deeply embarrassed by its conduct. Today, despite his loud stand for his own academic freedom, he threatens my own.

Please understand: as a graduate student, I am very vulnerable to the opinions of tenure-track professors like Loomis. When I hit the job market, a professor attempting to associate my name with an argument for the legitimacy of racism could easily render me incapable of getting a job, even though I've repeatedly and explicitly objected to that argument. Loomis knows that. He knows what he's doing. Make no mistake: that post is a threat. In the incredibly competitive world of the academic job market, it's very easy for vague innuendo to ruin a career. Loomis is aware of that.

Now, were Loomis an honest person and Lawyers Guns and Money an honest forum, he would post again, this time pointing out my actual views on the subject through which he is making me guilty of association. But he won't, because he is not an honest person, because his commitment to academic and intellectual freedom extends precisely as far as it concerns his own employment, and because of the cause of his personal resentment, which is that people of prominence actually link to and interact with a grad student like me.

He's says it himself: "I obviously didn’t read the linked post because why would anyone read something DeBoer writes?" Pretty much all you need to know. Remember that, next time he makes a martyr of himself for academic freedom.

Update: "I obviously didn’t read the linked post because why would anyone read something DeBoer writes?"

Update II: "I obviously didn’t read the linked post because why would anyone read something"

Update III: "I obviously didn’t read the linked post"

Update IV: "I obviously didn’t read"

just a note

I have an emailer who I've been keeping up a more-or-less weekly email conversation with since, I think, the second month I ever wrote this blog, with occasional breaks when we really piss each other off. (He's a conservative, by the way.) This morning he sent me a request to make the anti- "scientific racial inferiority" argument myself, rather than lecture others about how to do it. And, you know, he's right.

I have made the argument many times in the past. If you use the search function you can find these versions. I do need to keep doing it. I just want to cop to the fact that I find doing it a profound challenge. Not because I don't think that the argument is correct, and not because I think I'm incapable of making it. But because race is the central political preoccupation of the American experience, and the argument is hugely important. So it takes a little time for me to muster the research and write with care. But: yes, he's right. It remains my responsibility. In the meantime, you can check this link for my thoughts on the subject from the last couple years.

Here's a sample on racial achievement gaps in standardized tests:

I wouldn't be surprised if a whole slew of factors, including poverty, exposure to lead, poor diets, parent educational background, the idiom tests are written in, neonatal health care, learning disorders, dyslexia and dyscalculia, lack of exposure to educational toys and games, low childhood reading loads, the persistence of syntactic immaturity due to parental modeling (my own academic obsession), and other environmental factors played a role. That doesn't even begin to untangle the web of what "black" means in terms of specific linear heritage, particularly since we are talking about a truly unique genetic history that has been conditioned by the rape and forced breeding programs that are common to chattel slavery. If I'm right and the origins of the racial achievement gap are revealed to be a stew of competing factors, it will make our job of closing the gap harder, but it will also hopefully blunt the words of those who ascribe vast social problems to the supposed inherent inferiority of our most oppressed group.

Update: Oh, and. I'm not a big Stephen Metcalf fan when it comes to his cultural writing. But I think that this response to William Saletan's work on race and IQ is a model for how to do it. It's unflinching, based on evidence, a close and fair reading, and devastating. 

ah, freedom

Corey Robin writes a detailed, measured, and well-researched piece about Hayek's connection to Nietzsche, which cites, among other things, Hayek's indisputable support for the horrific and murderous despot Augusto Pinochet. In response, libertarian blogger Jason Brennan calls for a purge. What great support for intellectual freedom!

I read a lot of libertarian writing. I did my homework years ago, reading my Hayek and Friedman and Rand and Nozick. I read essentially everything Reason publishes, I keep an eye on what Cato puts out, I follow Bleeding Heart Libertarians, I read Marginal Revolution. But more than that I try to read comments and interact with libertarians on Facebook, because those places are where you find the actual heart of a party, a movement, or an ideology. I do this both because I think it's essential to engage with opinions you disagree with almost every day, and because I maintain a (perhaps foolish) belief that there's hope to be found among the type of libertarians who oppose the limitless projection of American power. Now, I fight with conservatives, liberals, libertarians, my fellow leftists, and assorted fringe groups constantly. No group is more taken to groupthink and the expression of their ideological boilerplate than libertarians. None. In fact, it's not close.

Mainstream conservatism has taken a great deal of heat for its epistemic closure, and rightly so. For reasons that escape me, libertarianism has avoided similar criticism. Yet I can identify very real currents of reformism and heterodoxy within conservatism, and I find no similar strains within libertarianism. Bleeding Heart Libertarians is supposedly such a vehicle, yet here you have one of its members meeting an intellectual challenge by calling for the author to be banished. (Libertarians have insisted that leftists consider the intellectual proximity between our intellectual fathers and brutal regimes for decades. They are apparently unwilling to be asked to do the same.) Check the comments at BHL. They are always filled with snarky dismissal and invective for anything outside of a terribly narrow band of presumed libertarian ideas. I look at the inter-libertarian squabbles between my Facebook friends, and it's remarkable how quickly apostasy is punished and how quickly libertarians move to get into lockstep with Hayek or von Mises or Rand. If someone suggests that, say, the federal free lunch program isn't a matter of creeping authoritarianism, they are swiftly dispatched. It's like clockwork.

Part of this is merely the pleasures and lack of responsibility that face an ideology that controls nothing. For all the ballyhooed irrelevance of the left, socialist governments have existed and continue to exist. Socialism is a powerful force in Europe and an ever-growing one in South America. Yet there exists no country that would prove adequate to libertarian requirements. The closet analogs are the failed states like Somalia that, my libertarian friends always insist, have nothing to teach us about what libertarianism would be like in practice. So we are left with the pleasing lack of accountability and real-world conditions that are the privilege of purely theoretical politics. What percentage of libertarians prefer to remain in such a condition is an open question.

I don't expect a single libertarian to care for the criticisms of someone like me. I do think that anyone within an ideological camp should always ask where internal criticism and reformist tendencies reside within that camp, no matter how politically or procedurally healthy. To me, an ideology that is founded on the idea of personal liberty should be a wild collection of disparate ideas and conflicting philosophies, one that is full of dramatically different ideas and convictions. What I see in libertarianism is the opposite; I see an orthodoxy. But then, you wouldn't think an ideology that is founded on personal liberty would have had such long and deep support for a man like Pinochet. For the time being, I expect libertarianism to continue to fight for only certain kinds of freedom: the freedom to sleep under bridges, the freedom to die of preventable disease, the freedom to face total economic despair, the freedom of banks to defraud their customers, the freedom of bosses to terrorize their workers....