Month: January 2012

Healthcare reform:

A reader writes:

Your repetition of the claim that Obama "punted" on tax reform is probably right. But as a football fan, I have to say: I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

No one likes punting. It isn't aggressive and it isn't showy. But you do it when you know you have the long-term advantage, when you're backed up into territory you don't want to be in and need to flip the field. It gives you a chance to change the dynamic of the competition while you regroup and tweak your strategy. If you do things right in the interim, eventually you've manipulated the field position in a way that sets you up to score. What sounds more Obama than that?

He's constrained by 2012: by the noise of the Republican nomination, by congressional focus on their reelection, and yes, by his ambition for his own. The speech last night was a statement of what he can and will do given the current reality. But I don't think you can give up on him reaching the endzone eventually.

As you're so fond of saying, "Meep meep."

Skip the intro to get to some otherworldly ski jumps starting at the :45 mark:

 Bainbridge is tempted to endorse Gingrich:

Romney versus Obama will be a snoozefest, mainly because Romney elicits no passion from anybody. Newt versus Barak [sic], however, could be vastly entertaining. Two really smart guys, both of whom are good speakers, and both of whom will be at least affecting being really pissed off at the other and the other's base. If the Newt who tore into John King the other day shows up at the debates, they will be truly great TV. Since I don't think anybody in Washington or running to be in Washington can fix the problems we face, why not vote for the circus?

A reader writes:

The whole idea that there is one useful intellectual skill set and that the SAT Verbal measures it is alluring false. I would rather have a kindergarten teacher who is kind and patient and loving and knows how to motivate children to learn the building blocks of language and mathematics than one who is "brilliant" in the narrow way defined here.

Another writes:

The SAT does not judge intelligence.  It judges scholarly accomplishment, hence the name change from the Scholastic Aptitude Test to the Scholastic Assessment Test several years ago. It tests what you have learned, not what you are capable of learning. And that graph is ridiculous.  For one thing, it is impossible to compare scores from 1994 to an average from today (see here for information on recentering); the average score in 1994 on the verbal exam was 452, not 543. 

But let the main point stand: Gym teachers did less well on the SAT. Perhaps that is because they often had other skills (say, athletic talent) that would help get them into college, so they focused less on maximizing their SAT score than the average student and focused more on winning state championships. Judging gym teachers on their high school SAT scores seems silly. If you want to judge them, have them take an IQ test today and compare that to other teachers – then you can call them 'dumber'.

Razib Khan, who wrote the controversial post, responds to his critics below. But first another reader:

The SAT test is eminently coachable. I say that because for the last ten years I've made a comfortable income off coaching students. As long as you cram a student's head full with vocab words, and force them to read, read, read, then they will become much better at the test. This is best understood by looking at teachers themselves: when I took my PSAT at the age of 15, I got around a 500 on Verbal. I studied my ass off, and got a 620 a year later. I took even more time to cram for the third test and got a 700. Apparently I became more intelligent by memorizing obsolete vocabulary words like "ingenue".

Once I got into the industry, though, the scales really fell from my eyes. Full-time test prep instructors spend a good portion of every day with the content of the test. After a few months of doing it, I was able to get a *perfect score* on the SAT. Not just the verbal either – the math section too. Every single goddamn test, practice or real. And this is normal for test prep instructors – sometimes we play a game where we try to finish practice tests with a perfect score using the least amount of time, e.g. finish in half the time allocated. It becomes pretty easy with repetition. ETS attempted to address this problem in 2005, which is why your data stops there, by restructuring the test – but it really didn't work.

Whatever the "intelligence" of me and my students, the SAT is clearly a poor measure of it. The more we prep for it, the better we do. Wealthy enough to hire private tutors? Enjoy tailored lesson plans from virtuosos? Anyone who thinks the SAT is a measure of intelligence and compares college grads to their test performance five or six years earlier as high school juniors has no credibility on education issues.

Another:

As an education professor and former elementary teacher, I have to take issue with Razib's concept of intelligence.  Although, for some reason he uses the SAT to point out the relative "intelligence" of teachers, the SAT is not and never has been a measure of intelligence.  In fact, many of us in this century see so called measures of intelligence as antiquated and quantitatively biased.  Howard Gardner's work on multiple intellegences, for example, has expanded our view that there is more than one way to be "smart" (bodily-kinesthetic, inter-personal, musical, spatial, etc.).

As a former teacher and a current teacher educator, I have studied exemplary teachers all over the world.  I liken the best ones to Jedi masters.  They have this otherworldly intuition that could NEVER be assessed on any form of standardized test.  To be great, you have to know each of your student's skills, weaknesses, interests, passions, and vulnerabilities.  You have to be profoundly empathetic and savvy with how you use that information to motivate each of them.  And, in classes with 20-35 students, you have to be an exceptional multi-tasker, because you must constantly monitor and adjust what you are saying and modeling to fit each of your student's needs and interests.  This requires stamina, flexibility, courage, empathy, and, yes, an intellect that can process all of that information and deliver the goods, on your feet, seven hours straight, five days a week.  I don't know any item on the SAT that can come close to measuring that.

Full disclosure: I made a 440, on my SAT verbal.  A 440!  Look at the chart – I'm not even on the chart!  So, let's cut the bullshit and stop pretending like these tests even come close to measuring human capacity, let alone "intelligence."  It's ridiculous.

Here's Khan:

The post below on teachers elicited some strange responses. Its ultimate aim was to show that teachers are not as dull as the average education major may imply to you. Instead many people were highly offended at the idea that physical education teachers may not be the sharpest tools in the shed due to their weak standardized test scores. On average. It turns out that the idea of average, and the reality of variation, is so novel that unless you elaborate in exquisite detail all the common sense qualifications, people feel the need to emphasize exceptions to the rule.

Will Wilkinson considers the morality of wealth:

[M]ost complaints about the American 1% are not grounded on the view that the global political economy is a comprehensive web of exploitation. It's based on the supposition that the domestic 1% is guilty of something or other the domestic 10 or 30 or 50% isn't, and therefore deserves to be a target of scorn in a way the 10 or 30 or 50% does not. But, however you slice it, it's going to be true that a lot of people in the top 1% got there in pretty much the same way a lot of people in the top 30 or 50% got there.

If there's nothing wrong with a way of making money at the 50th percentile, there's nothing wrong with it at the 99th. And if there's something wrong with it at the 99th, there's something wrong with at the 50th. The unwillingness to identify specific mechanisms of unjust income acquisition, and the insistence on treating income-earners above a arbitrary cut-off point as a unified class deserving special contempt, strike me as symptoms of intellectually laziness and a less than thoroughgoing interest in justice.

Elliott Abrams blasts Gingrich's self-image as one of Reagan's closest allies:

Jonah Goldberg can't imagine why Romney isn't bringing this up more. Doug Mataconis remembers when Republicans weren't afraid to criticize Reagan:

Gingrich’s attacks on Reagan were actually quite common among members of the hard-line right in the late 80s, especially once the President began pursuing a new relationship with the Soviet Union upon the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev. I recall reading some of that criticism the pages of National Review itself at the time, and hearing it on the airwaves from the likes of Rush Limbaugh. Reagan was a patsy, they said. He was letting himself be deceived by a man with a nice smile who was still, at heart, the same kind of Communist that his predecessors were. Some conservatives were even suggesting in the late 80s that Reagan’s openings to the Soviet Union and willingness to negotiate were signs of oncoming senility. 

J. Bryan Lowder grapples with Cynthia Nixon's insistence [NYT] that homosexuality was her choice:

I’m not really interested in guessing at what Nixon’s “true” sexual identity is—that’s her business, and labels are always only approximations at best. What does interest me, however, is the alternate political model that her comments suggest. She asks why choosing one’s sexual orientation is any less legitimate than being theoretically "born this way," and in so doing, Nixon questions why we depend on biology as a measure of worth as opposed to creating a society where the sexual relationships between consenting adults need no justification at all.

It’s a compelling thought, a world where grown-ups don’t have to explain away their sexual activities by way of what amounts to an unavoidably apologetic "I can’t help it." Still, many critics will argue that appealing to biology is the only way to protect against the attacks of the religious right—if God made me this way, surely you can’t hate me. But I have to agree with Nixon that depending on biology cedes a great deal of control to bigoted people; after all, much of Christianity is based on the idea of resisting sinful bodily desires. If homosexuality is truly genetic, why not just ignore it, like good old heterosexual lust?

John Aravosis thinks Nixon must be bisexual. My own view is that female sexuality is inherently more fluid than male sexuality, and that lesbians and bisexual women, because they are less fixated on crude physical signals for arousal, have more of a choice than men, gay or straight, in their choice of loved ones. I think this is about the difference between lesbian identity and gay male identity. For all the attempt to corral us into one vowel-free liberal conglomerate, I know few communities less alike than lesbians and gay men.

Windhoek, Namibia, 7.30 pm

There's only one GOP debate planned for February. Joel Gehrke thinks the schedule benefits Romney: 

The debates provide Gingrich with something he can't buy: television time to air his views and the face-to-face encounters with his opponents that give him a chance to drive the news cycle, generate momentum, and give potential donors a reason to think they should contribute to his campaign. If Romney manages to win Florida … Gingrich might lose all of those advantages. Romney has the money to buy television ads, and he would have the front-runner status that relieves him of the need to attack any other candidates. Gingrich, by contrast, might lose fundraising momentum. Romney still has an uphill fight in Florida, but Gingrich needs the win there even more than Romney does.

Noah Millman also looks past Florida. So does Weigel.