The Myth of American Meritocracy

Ron Unz has performed an exhaustive analysis of elite university admissions in The Myth of American Meritocracy (December issue of the American Conservative). He finds strong evidence for de facto quotas on Asian-Americans at Ivy League universities. See below for a brief summary. I suggest reading his entire article, which is filled with additional insights, including one rather shocking surprise. Don't miss the statistical supplement.Asian-American...

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Persistence, motivation and reliability

GED holders are roughly comparable to high school graduates in terms of cognitive ability, but weaker in terms of personality factors such as conscientiousness. Labor market outcomes for GED holders are closer to those of high school dropouts than to graduates.Heckman talk (mp3) at Yale Law School (also available on iTunes). For related results on personality and earnings for cognitively gifted individuals, see Earnings effects of personality, education...

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Schwinger on quantum foundations

The excerpt below is from the excellent biography Climbing the Mountain by Mehra and Milton. Milton was one of Schwinger's last Harvard grad students, eventually a professor at the University of Oklahoma. Schwinger's view is the one shared by all reasonable physicists: quantum mechanics must apply to the measuring device as well as that which is measured. Once this assumption is made (as Hawking and others have noted): many worlds follows trivially.(p.369)...

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DC photos

National Museum of the American Indian.Hirshhorn Museum. Next four images are of the Ai Wei Wei exhibiti...

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Fed town

Council on Competitiveness meeting in Washington. Fed town is weird. It's jarring to see people using ancient Blackberries ...State Department dinn...

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Michigan startups

Niowave, a Lansing company with roots in MSU's number 1 ranked nuclear physics program. The founder is shown smoking a cigar in the wedding photo here.Startup event in Dan Gilbert's beautiful Madison building in downtown Detro...

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F > L > P > S

Andrei Sakharov with daughter, 1948.Excerpts below from The World of Andrei Sakharov (link goes to full text) by Gennady Gorelik. See Out on the tail for a discussion of Landau's logarithmic ranking of physicists.(p.159) Discussing Tamm’s desire that Landau be his official dissertation opponent in his Memoirs, he remarked that the latter “fortunately, refused; I would have felt very awkward because I realized the dissertation’s inadequacies.”...

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The benevolence of financiers

Olivier Desbarres is (now former) head of Asia FX strategy at Barclays. Condolences to my friends in finance who have to work with people like this. Struggle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster!(In anticipation of comments: yes, people from all walks of life have meltdowns, but anyone familiar with global finance can detect authentic banker arrogance in this guy...)Careful observation reveals it's disproportionately sociopaths at (and near) the top.What a tremendous misallocation of human capital. See The illusion of...

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All In

This is creepy to watch given the recent news about Paula Broadwell's affair with (now former) CIA director Petraeus -- her husband is also in the video. Breaking news -- the FBI got involved when Broadwell threatened another woman close to Petraeus via email.It's disproportionately sociopaths at (and near) the top -- see also Lance Armstrong and Penn State scandal (especially the most recent grand jury presentment). If you watched this Daily Show segment when it first aired you probably thought Broadwell was a normal, even...

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Training days

Great training footage here of Carlos Condit and Georges St. Pierre. It's incredible how far MMA has come in the last 15 years. I'd say training methods of the top camps are as good as or better than in any other sport. The talent pool that MMA draws from still has a way to go, however. I think we'll see a lot more Jon Jones/GSP level pure athletes if the sport continues to progress.I especially like the brief part near the end where John Danaher (Renzo blackbelt) is coaching GSP in BJJ, and what Firas (GSP head trainer) says to the team about...

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Broad Art Museum

Opening of the Broad Art Museum at MSU.Senator Levin, Governor Snyder and Eli Broad.Senator Levin and Eli Bro...

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Global fashion equilibration

The timescale is now down to weeks, not seasons. See also Pronto moda and Globalization and high fashion (from 2005!).NYTimes: ... The Zara headquarters is a huge airplane-hangar-size open space, with regional sales managers sitting at a line of desks running down the middle, designers on either side of them. The managers field calls from China or Chile to learn what’s selling, then they meet with the designers and decide whether there’s...

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"They take students like you there."

The touching essay I quote from below is by Eddie Frenkel, a noted Berkeley mathematician. I recommend the whole thing. Eddie and I used play in the regular Junior Fellows basketball game at Harvard's Malkin Athletic Center (MAC), where Spike Lee and Obama also played. I don't recall ever playing with Obama, but I do remember Spike, who was teaching a film class on campus. Spike is no baller, despite being such a big Knicks fan. For some reason I came up with the nickname "Kazakhstani Kid" for Eddie, which he never appreciated. During all the years...

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Hail to the quants, pundit fail

Pundit idiocracy: "Close race", "Too close to call", "Neck and neck". (I heard this all day long.)Quants and data geeks: "Obama will win. Unlikely to be close."From an earlier post High V, Low M:high verbal ability ... is useful for appearing to be smart, or for winning arguments and impressing other people, but it's really high math ability that is useful for discovering things about the world -- that is, discovering truth or reasoning rigorously.......

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Obama wins!

At least, according to the quants who performed the mind boggling, incomprehensible, mysterious, nearly impossible task of averaging state poll numbers to estimate likely electoral vote totals.Pundit and non-quant reactions evidence of Idiocracy. See earlier post Bounded Cognition.Chronicle: ... While it may not seem likely, poll aggregation is a threat to the supremacy of the punditocracy. In the past week, you could sense that some high-profile...

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MSU photos 6

A tour of some animal facilities.My office.MSU Technologies -- exterior and some startup spa...

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