Undead Astronauts

This week in the NYTimes, we have a couple of stories that both pertain to giving your kids the best shot at a good life. The first story is a report that most of the money spent on education may be wasted.  The reason is that differences in cognitive abilities appear at an early age.

Children of mothers who had graduated from college scored much higher at age 3 than those whose mothers had dropped out of high school, proof of the advantage for young children of living in rich, stimulating environments.

More surprising is that the difference in cognitive performance was just as big at age 18 as it had been at age 3.

“The gap is there before kids walk into kindergarten,” Mr. Heckman told me. “School neither increases nor reduces it.”

If education is supposed to help redress inequities at birth and improve the lot of disadvantaged children as they grow up, it is not doing its job.

It is not an isolated finding. Another study by Mr. Heckman and Flavio Cunha of the University of Pennsylvania found that the gap in math abilities between rich and poor children was not much different at age 12 than it was at age 6.

For this reason, some researchers have suggested better nutrition for mothers-to-be with low income. Not an easy task to solve. Few will bring up the idea that it might be they don’t have the genes to pass down that will result in high achievement.

The second story approaches the same issue from a different perspective. What do the rich and the elite do to ensure their kids have the best chance to stay an elite? Susan Patton had the temerity to suggest that Princeton girls should look for husbands while they’re at Princeton. The reaction to her article was widespread condemnation. But Ross Douthat sums up the breach of protocol pretty well here:

The intermarriage of elite collegians is only one of these mechanisms — but it’s an enormously important one. The outraged reaction to her comments notwithstanding, Patton wasn’t telling Princetonians anything they didn’t already understand. Of course Ivy League schools double as dating services. Of course members of elites — yes, gender egalitarians, the males as well as the females — have strong incentives to marry one another, or at the very least find a spouse from within the wider meritocratic circle. What better way to double down on our pre-existing advantages? What better way to minimize, in our descendants, the chances of the dread phenomenon known as “regression to the mean”?

That this “assortative mating,” in which the best-educated Americans increasingly marry one another, also ends up perpetuating existing inequalities seems blindingly obvious, which is no doubt why it’s considered embarrassing and reactionary to talk about it too overtly. We all know what we’re supposed to do — our mothers don’t have to come out and say it!

The article itself is op-ed gold and expresses something I didn’t understand well at the time, or possibly even now. College isn’t about learning so much as connecting. A college degree gives you a signalling device for employers. Your college classmates set you into your social class. None of this is set in stone of course – I’m talking about averages.

David Brooks has an op-ed that describes an elite group of overachievers as “The Empirical Kids.” The origin of this label came from a paper written by one of the kids themselves that uses the descriptor “The Cynical Kids” instead. The writer notes that members of her group are deeply cynical of idealism and want to see empirical results before committing to a course of action. The problem with that is that getting the data to answer these questions can be time consuming and reduces them to a “stick with the evil you know” mentality.

Brooks actually applauds this view as he’s an empiricist, so he changed the moniker. I wonder about the truth of this however. Beyond a few websites, has this view actually taken hold in elite circles and is that a good thing? I can’t claim to be in the in-crowd of any elite group, but I don’t get the feeling that elites have run out of idealism. They certainly have a view to constant self improvement, but if they didn’t view that as leading to a larger goal, why would they try? And how many of these elites actually pay attention to statistics? I’d like to see some data on that. Haha.

The interesting thing is that Brooks believes that the elites are data savvy. Elites will know better how to interpret statistics and will be better able to craft policy from it when the data becomes available. The only other place that I can think of where the elites pay so much attention to statistics is Singapore, which is one of the best governed nations on earth. One can hope.

Here’s some speculation you won’t see much in mainstream media. I don’t have enough time to expand at the moment, but the title says it all. A conservative writer ponders whether current day economic success by the Chinese is due to a socially Darwinist society.

In a study published in Psychological Science, researchers have found that whites behave differently from Asian Americans when it comes to motivational primers. When primed with messages emphasizing independence, whites worked longer at a difficult task that required some persistence. When primed with messages emphasizing interdependence however, they worked for a much shorter duration. When no priming was given, the time they spent was still closer to independent priming than interdependent.

When Asian Americans were tested, they performed about the same in all situations.

What apparently goes un-noted is the fact that Asians didn’t persist as long as whites in any setting except the one where whites were primed for interdependence. That result is somewhat counter to what I might have expected, which is that Asian Americans would persist longer than whites in most situations. I suppose I’m biased to think that Asians have higher grit when I have no evidence to support that position (I’ve looked… albeit briefly).

The only issue here is that I don’t have access to the paper, so I don’t know what the primers were. It’d be interesting to see what they actually consisted of and what other types of primers might have an effect. I’m actually somewhat skeptical of the result’s applicability in the real world as there are plenty of whites that feel like working with a good team is highly motivating in and of itself. Perhaps there’s a psychological difference between working toward a true public good versus a semi-public good like a small well-knit team. Political identity might also have an effect as liberals might be expected to do better under interdependent priming than conservatives.

The new Edge.org question and responses have been posted for 2013. The question is “What should we be worried about?”  The first response from Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist, is that we should be worried about Chinese eugenics. The tone of the response is overwrought and somewhat breathlessly alarmist, but in the final analysis the guy has a point, if a minor one.

China has been running the world’s largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China’s ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization. Yet the most likely result is that America and Europe linger around a few hundred more years as also-rans on the world-historical stage, nursing our anti-hereditarian political correctness to the bitter end.

What’s true of today’s political correctness might not be true of tomorrow. Think of all the social change that happened in the 50 years between 1960 and 2010. 50 years from today, maybe we’ll all be hereditarians.

For generations, Chinese intellectuals have emphasized close ties between the state (guojia), the nation (minzu), the population (renkou), the Han race (zhongzu), and, more recently, the Chinese gene-pool (jiyinku). Traditional Chinese medicine focused on preventing birth defects, promoting maternal health and “fetal education” (taijiao) during pregnancy, and nourishing the father’s semen (yangjing) and mother’s blood (pingxue) to produce bright, healthy babies (see Frank Dikötter’s bookImperfect Conceptions). Many scientists and reformers of Republican China (1912-1949) were ardent Darwinians and Galtonians. They worried about racial extinction (miezhong) and “the science of deformed fetuses” (jitaixue), and saw eugenics as a way to restore China’s rightful place as the world’s leading civilization after a century of humiliation by European colonialism. The Communist revolution kept these eugenic ideals from having much policy impact for a few decades though. Mao Zedong was too obsessed with promoting military and manufacturing power, and too terrified of peasant revolt, to interfere with traditional Chinese reproductive practices.

Of course the reformers of Republican China were Darwinians and Galtonians. So were the reformers in every other major nation on earth during that period. And what? And why include the romanizations of Chinese words here? Does every other country not have their own terms for these issues? The author’s purpose in highlighting foreign words here is dubious. He then goes over the gaokao test which he equates, not completely incorrectly, with the past imperial exams. Even so, China is hardly the only nation to use them. On a practical level, there’s no easier way to gauge which students to admit into higher education than a test. The US has plenty of them in the form of SATs, ACTs, MCATs, LSATs, etc. None of this demonstrates a stark difference between China and any other nation. Finally, he mentions the Beijing Genomics Institute.

The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles… These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of “preimplantation embryo selection” might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.

Here is where I believe he has a point. The BGI is indeed hunting for these alleles, and why search for these genes if not to put them to use in the future? The worry here is still overwrought, because it would conceivably take much more than a “couple generations” to have any large effect. In vitro is still extremely expensive ($15-20k per attempt) and a success rate of less than 40% even for young women and that rate drops precipitously by the mid 30s. There’s no way that enough young Chinese women could afford something like that to matter for many generations, even if they wanted it. But if you’re looking at a long enough timeframe, then yes, it will matter. Still, the state of political correctness by that time could be vastly different around the world. There’s little justification in saying the entire Western civilization needs to worry about this today.

An admission officer’s uncomfortable explanation for why they don’t get in as often as their test scores would predict suggests it’s not.

Are Ivy League institutions discriminating against Asian Americans by limiting how many are admitted? That’s the subject of a debate published this week in the New York Times. Let’s start with the folks who believe that there’s effectively a race-based quota limiting Asian Americans.

A recent study has shown that the “cold shoulder” is real. Those who feel social rejection have measurable skin temperature drops. It seems the autonomic nervous system reacts to social rejection with vasoconstriction. Luckily, this bodily response can be reversed by simply holding a warm beverage.

Next time you feel lonely, grab a cup of coffee or tea. Hot shower might be even better.