From this interview with Robert Nozick:
I had been at Harvard as an Assistant Professor in the mid-sixties and then came back in 1969 as a Full Professor. That was immediately after the student uprisings, building takeovers, and so on, at Harvard the previous spring. When I arrived in the fall of 1969, there was a philosophy course listed in the catalog entitled “Capitalism.” And the course description was “a moral examination of capitalism.” Of course, for most students, then, it would be taken for granted that a moral examination would be a moral condemnation of capitalism. But that’s not what I intended. We were going to read critics of capitalism. But we were also planning to read defenses of capitalism, and I was going to construct some of my own in the lectures. Some of the graduate students in the philosophy department knew what ideas I held, and they weren’t very happy about a course being taught in the department defending those ideas. Now it was true that there was another course in the department on Marxism by someone who was then a member of the Maoist Progressive Labor Party and students did not object to that. But still some students objected to my giving a lecture course on capitalism. I remember early in the fall (I guess I was scheduled to give the course in the spring term), a graduate student came to me at a departmental reception we had, and said, “We don’t know if you’re going to be allowed to give this course.” I said “What do you mean, not allowed to give this course?” He said, “Well, we know what ideas you hold. We just don’t know whether you will be allowed to give the course.” And I said, “If you come and disrupt my course, I’m going to beat the shit out of you!” And the student was taken aback and said, “But you are taking all this very personally.” And I said, “What do you mean, personally? You are threatening to disrupt my course! you can do other things; you can stand outside the room and hand out leaflets. You can ask students not to register for my course. But if you come into my classroom while I am lecturing and disrupt the class, then I take that very personally.” In fact, at some point later in the term, this student and some others said they were going to make up leaflets and hand them out outside of my classroom. I said, “That’s fine; that would be really exciting.” Then they didn’t get around to doing it, and so I prodded them, “Where are the leaflets? I was counting on something special happening with the leaflets.” But it turned out that it was a lot of trouble to write up a leaflet, to get them run off on a mimeograph machine, and so they never got around to doing it. Thus I never had the privilege of being “leafleted” at Harvard. It seemed to me that sort of antagonism only lasted for a very short period of time and diminished fast. There was no longer any strong personal animosity after that. Maybe it was the general toning down of things in the country in the early 70’s, and I just benefited from the de-radicalization of the university.
More fun photos from this old post Forever Young :-)
The transcript excerpts below are from my recent conversation with Brian Chau (aka Cactus Chu) on his podcast.
— steve hsu (@hsu_steve) September 28, 2022
Segments begin at 47m and 1h07m.
They have been lightly edited.https://t.co/RJ68FasfJchttps://t.co/TnSuNaxhnQ
Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science
Johan S. G. Chu and James A. Evans
PNAS October 12, 2021 118 (41) e2021636118
Significance The size of scientific fields may impede the rise of new ideas. Examining 1.8 billion citations among 90 million papers across 241 subjects, we find a deluge of papers does not lead to turnover of central ideas in a field, but rather to ossification of canon. Scholars in fields where many papers are published annually face difficulty getting published, read, and cited unless their work references already widely cited articles. New papers containing potentially important contributions cannot garner field-wide attention through gradual processes of diffusion. These findings suggest fundamental progress may be stymied if quantitative growth of scientific endeavors—in number of scientists, institutes, and papers—is not balanced by structures fostering disruptive scholarship and focusing attention on novel ideas.
Abstract In many academic fields, the number of papers published each year has increased significantly over time. Policy measures aim to increase the quantity of scientists, research funding, and scientific output, which is measured by the number of papers produced. These quantitative metrics determine the career trajectories of scholars and evaluations of academic departments, institutions, and nations. Whether and how these increases in the numbers of scientists and papers translate into advances in knowledge is unclear, however. Here, we first lay out a theoretical argument for why too many papers published each year in a field can lead to stagnation rather than advance. The deluge of new papers may deprive reviewers and readers the cognitive slack required to fully recognize and understand novel ideas. Competition among many new ideas may prevent the gradual accumulation of focused attention on a promising new idea. Then, we show data supporting the predictions of this theory. When the number of papers published per year in a scientific field grows large, citations flow disproportionately to already well-cited papers; the list of most-cited papers ossifies; new papers are unlikely to ever become highly cited, and when they do, it is not through a gradual, cumulative process of attention gathering; and newly published papers become unlikely to disrupt existing work. These findings suggest that the progress of large scientific fields may be slowed, trapped in existing canon. Policy measures shifting how scientific work is produced, disseminated, consumed, and rewarded may be called for to push fields into new, more fertile areas of study.
A toy model of the dynamics of scientific research, with probability distributions for accuracy of experimental results, mechanisms for updating of beliefs by individual scientists, crowd behavior, bounded cognition, etc. can easily exhibit parameter regions where progress is limited (one could even find equilibria in which most beliefs held by individual scientists are false!). Obviously the complexity of the systems under study and the quality of human capital in a particular field are important determinants of the rate of progress and its character.
In physics it is said that successful new theories swallow their predecessors whole. That is, even revolutionary new theories (e.g., special relativity or quantum mechanics) reduce to their predecessors in the previously studied circumstances (e.g., low velocity, macroscopic objects). Swallowing whole is a sign of proper function -- it means the previous generation of scientists was competent: what they believed to be true was (at least approximately) true. Their models were accurate in some limit and could continue to be used when appropriate (e.g., Newtonian mechanics).
In some fields (not to name names!) we don't see this phenomenon. Rather, we see new paradigms which wholly contradict earlier strongly held beliefs that were predominant in the field* -- there was no range of circumstances in which the earlier beliefs were correct. We might even see oscillations of mutually contradictory, widely accepted paradigms over decades.
It takes a serious interest in the history of science (and some brainpower) to determine which of the two regimes above describes a particular area of research. I believe we have good examples of both types in the academy.
* This means the earlier (or later!) generation of scientists in that field was incompetent. One or more of the following must have been true: their experimental observations were shoddy, they derived overly strong beliefs from weak data, they allowed overly strong priors to determine their beliefs.
Thursday, April 8 -- Saturday, April 10; on ZOOM
Conference Program:
Keynote Address - Thursday, April 8,
5:00-6:30pm EST
Randall Kennedy, "The Race Question and Freedom of Expression."
Randall Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School, preeminent authority on the First Amendment in its relation to the American struggle for civil rights.
Day One: Intellectual Diversity - Friday, April 9
11:30am - 1:00pm EST
Panel 1: What are the empirical facts about lack of intellectual diversity in academia and what are the causes of existing imbalances?
Paper: Lee Jussim, Distinguished Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, author of The Politics of Social Psychology.
Discussant: Philip Tetlock, Annenberg University Professor, University of Pennsylvania, author of “Why so few conservatives and should we care?” and Cory Clark, Visiting Scholar, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, author of “Partisan Bias and its Discontents.”
2:00pm - 3:30pm EST
Panel 2: In what precise ways and to what degree is this imbalance a problem?
Paper: Joshua Dunn, Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science, University of Colorado, co-author of Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University.
Discussant: Amna Khalid, Associate Professor of History, Carleton College, author of “Not A Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy: Why Left-Leaning Faculty Should Care About Threats to Free Expression on Campus."
4:00pm - 5:45pm EST
Panel 3: What is To Be Done?
Paper: Musa Al-Gharbi, Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in Sociology, Columbia University and Managing Editor, Heterodox Academy, author of “Why Care About Ideological Diversity in Social Research? The Definitive Response.”
Paper: Conor Friedersdorf, Staff writer at The Atlantic and frequent contributor to its special series “The Speech Wars,” author of “Free Speech Will Survive This Moment.”
Day Two: Freedom of Speech - Saturday, April 10
11:30am - 1:00pm EST
Panel 1: An empirical accounting of the recent challenges to free speech on campus from left and right. What is the true character of the problem or problems here and do they constitute a “crisis”?
Paper: Jonathan Marks, Professor and Chair, Department of Politics and International Relations, Ursinus College, author of Let's Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education.
Respondent: April Kelly-Woessner, Dean of the School of Public Service and Professor of Political Science at Elizabethtown College, author of The Still Divided Academy
2:00pm - 3:45pm EST
Panel 2: But is Free speech, as traditionally interpreted, even the right ideal? -- a Debate
Ulrich Baer, University Professor of Comparative Literature, German, and English, NYU, author of What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech and Truth on Campus
Keith Whittington, Professor of Politics, Princeton University, author of Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech.
4:30pm - 6:15pm EST
Panel 3: What is To Be Done?
Paper: Nancy Costello, Associate Clinical Professor of Law, MSU. Founder and Director of the First Amendment Law Clinic -- the only law clinic in the nation devoted to the defense of student press rights. Also, Director of the Free Expression Online Library and Resource Center.
Paper: Jonathan Friedman, Project Director for campus free speech at PEN America – “a program of advocacy, analysis, and outreach in the national debate around free speech and inclusion at colleges and universities.”
Chronicle: When I spoke to the Princeton University legal scholar and political philosopher Robert P. George in August, he offered a vivid zoological metaphor to describe what happens when outrage mobs attack academics. When hunted by lions, herds of zebras “fly off in a million directions, and the targeted member is easily taken down and destroyed and eaten.” A herd of elephants, by contrast, will “circle around the vulnerable elephant.”
... What had begun as a group of 20 Princeton professors organized to defend academic freedom at one college was rapidly scaling up its ambitions and capacity: It would become a nationwide organization. George had already hired an executive director and secured millions in funding.
... Today, that organization, the Academic Freedom Alliance, formally issued a manifesto declaring that “an attack on academic freedom anywhere is an attack on academic freedom everywhere,” and committing its nearly 200 members to providing aid and support in defense of “freedom of thought and expression in their work as researchers and writers or in their lives as citizens,” “freedom to design courses and conduct classes using reasonable pedagogical judgment,” and “freedom from ideological tests, affirmations, and oaths.”
... All members of the alliance have an automatic right for requests for legal aid to be considered, but the organization is also open to considering the cases of faculty nonmembers, university staff, or even students on a case-by-case basis. The alliance’s legal-advisory committee includes well-known lawyers such as Floyd Abrams and the prolific U.S. Supreme Court litigator Lisa S. Blatt.
When I spoke to him in February, as the date of AFA’s public announcement drew closer, George expressed surprise and satisfaction at the success the organization had found in signing up liberals and progressives. “If anything we’ve gone too far — we’re imbalanced over to the left side of the agenda,” he noted wryly. “That’s because our yield was a little higher than we expected it to be when we got in touch with folks.”
The yield was higher, as George would learn, quoting one such progressive member, because progressives in academe often feel themselves to be even more closely monitored for ideological orthodoxy by students and activist colleagues than their conservative peers. “‘You conservative guys, people like you and Adrian Vermeule, you think you’re vulnerable. You’re not nearly as vulnerable as we liberals are,’” George quoted this member as saying. “They are absolutely terrified, and they know they can never keep up with the wokeness. What’s OK today is over the line tomorrow, and nobody gave you the memo.”
George went on to note that some of the progressives he spoke with were indeed too frightened of the very censorious atmosphere that the alliance proposes to challenge to be willing to affiliate with it, at least at the outset.
... Nadine Strossen, a New York Law School law professor and former president of the ACLU, emphasized the problem of self-censorship that she saw the alliance as counteracting. “When somebody is attacked by a university official or, for lack of a better term, a Twitter mob, there are constant reports from all individuals targeted that they receive so many private communications and emails saying ‘I support you and agree with you, but I just can’t say it publicly.’”
She hopes that the combined reputations of the organization’s members will provide a permission structure allowing other faculty members to stand up for their private convictions in public. While a lawsuit can vindicate someone’s constitutional or contractual rights, Strossen noted, only a change in the cultural atmosphere around these issues — a preference for open debate and free exchange over stigmatization and punishment as the default way to negotiate controversy in academe — could resolve the overall problem.
The Princeton University political historian Keith E. Whittington, who is chairman of the alliance’s academic committee, echoed Strossen’s point. The recruitment effort, he said, aimed to gather “people who would be respectable and hopefully influential to college administrators — such that if a group like that came to them and said ‘Look, you’re behaving badly here on these academic-freedom principles,’ this is a group that they might pay attention to.”
“Administrators feel very buffeted by political pressures, often only from one side,” Whittington told me. “They hear from all the people who are demanding action, and the easiest, lowest-cost thing to do in those circumstances is to go with the flow and throw the prof under the bus. So we do hope that we can help balance that equation a little bit, make it a little more costly for administrators.” ...Perhaps amusingly, I am one of the progressive founding members of AFA. At least, I have for most of my life been politically to the left of Robby George and many of the original Princeton 20 that started the project.
6. Many professors and non-academics who supported me were afraid to sign our petition -- they did not want to be subject to mob attack. We received many communications expressing this sentiment.
7. The victory of the twitter mob will likely have a chilling effect on academic freedom on campus.
... I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. I gotta tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, "You can’t come because I'm too sensitive to hear what you have to say." That’s not the way we learn ...
Academics think of themselves as trailblazers, explorers — seekers of the truth.
Any fundamental discovery involves a significant degree of risk. If an idea is guaranteed to work then it moves from the realm of research to engineering. Unfortunately, this also means that most research careers will invariably be failures at least if failures are measured via “objective” metrics like citations.
Today we discuss the recent article from Mark Saroufim called Machine Learning: the great stagnation. We discuss the rise of gentleman scientists, fake rigor, incentives in ML, SOTA-chasing, "graduate student descent", distribution of talent in ML and how to learn effectively.
Manifold man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various
In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.
Steve and Corey have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.
Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.
Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.
Good afternoon and Welcome!
We are so pleased that you are here at Michigan State University. You have joined a leading research university, at a very exciting time.
I usually don’t give lengthy remarks, but since I’m not standing between you and lunch, and because so many exciting things are happening on campus, I could not resist giving something of an overview today.
With increased funding, new infrastructure, and an aggressive hiring initiative, we are positioning MSU research, and the university, for continued success. This success is built on a rich research history spanning many decades and disciplines.
In an MSU lab in 1965, Barnett Rosenberg and his team discovered that cisplatin prevents the DNA in cancer cells from replicating. Cisplatin is now a widely used chemotherapy medication. His “ah-ha” moment led to further research, but not without difficulties. The team initially failed to replicate their first results. But they worked extremely hard to resolve the issue, and subsequently had the drug through trials and approved in record time. It’s this kind of Spartan tenacity and effectiveness that we should all emulate.
Two weeks ago we celebrated the 40 year anniversary of the FDA approval of cisplatin, a therapy that is still considered the gold standard to which most new cancer treatments are compared. This discovery not only continues to help those afflicted with cancer, but the resulting royalties also fuel new research and discovery in the form of internal grants and other investments from the MSU Foundation.
My sincere hope is that one of you someday discovers the next cisplatin, or makes scholarly advances of equal importance.
Our team at the MSU Innovation Center is ready to assist faculty and student entrepreneurs with the next “big idea”. They steward more than 150 discoveries annually into a pipeline of patents, products and startup businesses. In 2017, this productivity resulted in 75 license and option agreements with companies around the world, as well as $2.4M in royalties being distributed to our faculty and departments. Applied research helps to build a diversified economy and brings jobs to Michigan and beyond. It is an increasingly important part of university activity.
I’d like to give you a bit of context for the size and scope of the research enterprise here at MSU.
MSU research continues on an upward growth trajectory. For 2017, total research expenditures were about $700M. This is a number reported each year to NSF for their Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) report. Only 5 years ago our number was closer to $500M, so this represents significant growth.
Based on the HERD comparison data, MSU ranks 1st in the Big Ten and 2nd in the nation in combined Department of Energy and National Science Foundation research expenditures.
We expect to continue our leadership in DOE and NSF funding, in part due to the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, but also due to our work with the Plant Research Laboratory, the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Lab and other interdisciplinary and multi-institutional research projects.
Our strategic plan outlines a number of new initiatives that leverage our current strengths and/or build new capacity to expand our portfolio, increase our competitiveness, and ultimately solve many of tomorrow’s pressing problems.
As I mentioned, MSU is home to the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams. FRIB will be a scientific user facility for the Office of Nuclear Physics in the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy.
FRIB will be operational in 2021 and will deliver the highest intensity beams of rare isotopes available anywhere in the world. Estimates of the total investment in this project are roughly $1 billion dollars--a huge milestone for MSU. Operated by MSU, FRIB will enable scientists to make discoveries about the properties of rare isotopes (which are unusual forms of the elements) in order to better understand the physics of nuclei, nuclear astrophysics, and the fundamental interactions of nature. It will also produce practical applications for society, including in medicine, homeland security, and industry.
Last weekend, FRIB held a public open house attracting some 3000 people. If you didn’t have a chance to visit, you will get a glimpse this Thursday at the new faculty research orientation. I hope to see many of you there.
But new infrastructure doesn’t stop with FRIB, and I’m sure you’ve noticed all the construction on campus.
Two years ago, we opened the new BioEngineering building, which houses the Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering, colloquially referred to as “IQ”. This collaboration of the colleges of Engineering, Human Medicine and Natural Science will apply quantitative methods to biomedicine and life science in an interdisciplinary setting. IQ’s researchers will develop new medical tools and treatments that will advance biomedicine in creative ways. We hope it will fundamentally change the way healthcare is delivered.
We’re already far along in construction of another, larger building next to IQ that will house precision health researchers and several other new initiatives. This building, along with IQ and Radiology will create an entire area of campus dedicated to biomedical research.
Last year, we opened a new health research facility in Grand Rapids to complement our medical school there. Researchers in Grand Rapids, and our East Lansing biomedical neighborhood, will make discoveries in health science, and attract additional funding to expedite our growth trajectory. Our performance in NIH funding lags the stellar results I mentioned concerning NSF and DOE, but the investments listed above are meant to improve this situation. In addition, I should mention that for the first time MSU will have a research hospital on our campus, through a partnership with McLaren. MSU research integration with major health systems in Michigan has never been stronger, and we anticipate announcement of major collaborative efforts in the near future.
On August 31, we will break ground on a new STEM education building. New laboratory teaching and research spaces will support MSU’s increasing student enrollment in STEM fields. We look forward to the opportunities this new facility will create for both our students and faculty.
In June, construction began on a new music pavilion. This state-of-the-art facility will incorporate highly advanced acoustical engineering to create high-quality teaching, practice, rehearsal and research spaces that meet the needs of 21st century musicians. This addition further elevates our reputation in the arts, with a particular focus on student learning.
MSU will continue to invest in infrastructure improvements to support our faculty and students, increase our competitiveness, and to attract top recruits like yourselves to the university.
Another recent development is a new department called Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering or CMSE. This department was planned, authorized, and operational in only three years—quite a feat in academia. I often compare “startup time” (the fast pace at which things are accomplished in Silicon Valley) to “academic time” (i.e., nothing gets done, other than committee meetings, or a no-brainer project takes a decade to complete), but with CMSE this was a case of something on campus getting done in startup time. CMSE is one of very few such departments in the country -- it is focused on data science, machine learning, advanced computation and related applications, but is not a traditional CS department. It supports many of the new efforts on campus that require the analysis of large data sets and development of new tools and algorithms. Researchers in this department utilize datasets drawn from areas such as astrophysics, business analytics, mobile data, materials science, human and plant genomics, and many other areas. The department was conceived as fundamentally interdisciplinary -- bringing together experts in computation with subject matter experts in fields of science which are becoming increasingly reliant on data.
I can’t help mentioning a couple of big data examples related to my own research interests: we’ve created a compute resource with 500k human genomes from the UK Biobank, which is open to interested investigators on campus. All of the data is stored at our High Performance Computing Center or HPCC. Using this data, our collaboration demonstrated for the first time that machine learning applied to large genomic datasets could produce accurate predictors for complex human traits. We can now predict adult human height from genome alone, with accuracy of roughly 1 inch. The predictor uses ~20k genetic variants distributed throughout the genome. Predictors of complex disease risk, for conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, low blood platelet count, and breast cancer, have been developed and replicated in out-of-sample tests. See the NYTimes science section just a few days ago. This is only the beginning for genomics-informed Precision Medicine.
Over the summer, through a CEO friend in Silicon Valley, I obtained access for MSU researchers to mobile geolocation data covering the movements of over 30 million Americans. Yes, geolocation coordinates every 10 minutes or so for 30 million people, via their smartphones. I hope you all were aware of this when you clicked “I Accept” :-) If you can think of interesting research uses for this data, please contact Dirk Colbry in CMSE for more information.
The most important component of a university is not buildings, or even laboratory or compute or data infrastructure. The most important resource is people -- talented research faculty, postdocs, students, and support staff.
Some of you joining us today may have been hired under the Global Impact Initiative (GI2). Launched in 2014, the goal of GI2 is to hire 100 new faculty whose research has breakthrough potential to shape the future. Over the last four years, we’ve recruited new faculty with a focus on key areas of innovation, such as machine learning, precision medicine, computational genomics, autonomous vehicles, advanced materials, gene-editing, and advanced plant science. Nearly 80 positions have been filled, with candidates hired from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, Johns Hopkins University, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, and many other top institutions. But we're not done yet. We look forward, with enthusiasm, to the next year of recruiting.
Working here, you will be surrounded by world-class faculty, including members of the National Academy; Guggenheim, Packard, and Sloan Fellows; a recipient of the Stockholm Water Prize; Pulitzer Prize winners; and many more.
In 2018 alone, faculty at MSU received a record 11 NSF CAREER awards across a number of disciplines including engineering, communication arts and sciences, physics and astronomy, plant science, and others. This speaks volumes about the caliber of our young faculty, and is one reason why I’m looking forward to seeing their progress.
As you begin your time here at MSU, we urge you to think big and act boldly. If you are a new faculty member, still near the beginning of your career, we want to support your growth in every way possible. If you are a senior faculty member, we want to push your research program to that next higher level of impact. And, we hope that you can provide valuable mentorship to younger scholars around you.
If there is a problem -- tell us about it! -- whether it has to do with grant submissions, or startup incubation, or child care, food options on campus, your functional or dysfunctional department. We’re here to fix things, and to provide the best possible environment for your teaching and research.
Only one in a thousand people in our society have the privilege to engage full time in discovery -- in curiosity driven research -- for the benefit of humankind. You are part of that lucky one in a thousand, and we are here to help you succeed.
The bar has been set very high, but with the resources and new opportunities here at MSU, your potential is limitless.
My very best wishes to you all :-)
[20:50] ... I'm talking about 65 or 70 percent of kids born to unmarried women. You can't tell me that that doesn't matter. It matters. There could be many explanations for it, but don't try to ignore that fact. Development, the test scores? This whole edifice that we'd built of Diversity and Inclusion, it's founded on a lie, John. Because the issue is performance and the Asians have demonstrated that. The facts are so palpable that it amazes me that people can't look at them. The Asians have demonstrated -- these are people who are second generation descendants; people were born 10,000 miles from here -- it [the USA] is an open society. African-American under-representation is a reflection of African-American under-development. Now, we can go into the historical reasons for that. If the issue is who is to blame ... plenty enough blame to go around. But the fundamental imperative is to enhance the development and that won't happen unless you acknowledge the absence of it. The test scores reflect an inadequate acquisition of functional and cognitive capacities essential to functioning in the modern world and the gaps are enormous etcetera...Now Loury gets really worked up:
[23:50] ... the Afro Studies hustle ... the avoidance of the necessity of failure against standards in order for the standards to be meaningful and for the kind of disciplines and capacities that constitute excellence to be honed and developed. It's a shell game. It's a lie, ok. That's what I'm saying. Just say that the jails are full of black people means that the criminal justice system is racist and to leave it at that when the bodies pile up in Chicago and elsewhere. To talk about Diversity / Inclusion is the way of legitimating and institutionalizing a deferential and racist withholding of judgment from African-American people to perform at the level of excellence at a place like MIT or Caltech or Brown or Columbia or Yale requires. I mean, I'm really really angry about this because people are being dishonest about this in the interest of a Coon Show, John, a Coon Show -- that's what we're talking about ...More at [25:17] The Bonfire of the Black Public Intellectual Vanities. See earlier post Talking Ta-Nehisi Coates, Seriously?
In the future there will be two kinds of jobs. Workers will eitherI've been pushing Michigan State University to offer a coding bootcamp experience to all undergraduates who want it: e.g., Codecademy.com. The goal isn't to turn non-STEM majors into software developers, but to give all interested students exposure to an increasingly important and central aspect of the modern world.
Tell computers what to do
or
Be told by computers what to do
The Physicist and the Neuroscientist: A Tale of Two ConnectomesMore Bobby, with more hair.
Steve burst into Bobby's lab, a small metal box under one arm. Startled, Bobby nearly knocked over his Zeiss electron microscope.
I've got it! shouted Steve. My former student at DeepBrain sent me one of their first AGI's. It's hot out of their 3D neuromorphic chip printer.
This is the thing that talks and understands quantum mechanics? asked Bobby.
Yes, if I just plug it in. He tapped the box -- This deep net has 10^10 connections! Within spitting distance of our brains, but much more efficient. They trained it in their virtual simulator world. Some of the algos are based on my polytope paper from last year. It not only knows QM, it understands what you mean by "How much is that doggie in the window?" :-)
Has anyone mapped the connections?
Sort of, I mean the strengths and topology are determined by the training and algos... It was all done virtually. Printed into spaghetti in this box.
We've got to scan it right away! My new rig can measure 10^5 connections per second!
What for? It's silicon spaghetti. It works how it works, but we created it! Specific connections... that's like collecting postage stamps.
No, but we need to UNDERSTAND HOW IT WORKS!
...
Why don't you just ask IT? thought Steve, as he left Bobby's lab.
The Bell Curve Revisited: Testing Controversial Hypotheses with Molecular Genetic DataWhile I find the work described above to be commendable (i.e., it foreshadows how molecular genetic methods will eventually address even the most complex and controversial topics in social science), I don't feel that the conclusions reached are beyond question. For example, see this worthwhile comment at the journal web page:
Dalton Conley, Benjamin Domingue
Sociological Science, July 5, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a23
In 1994, the publication of Herrnstein’s and Murray’s The Bell Curve resulted in a social science maelstrom of responses. In the present study, we argue that Herrnstein’s and Murray’s assertions were made prematurely, on their own terms, given the lack of data available to test the role of genotype in the dynamics of achievement and attainment in U.S. society. Today, however, the scientific community has access to at least one dataset that is nationally representative and has genome-wide molecular markers. We deploy those data from the Health and Retirement Study in order to test the core series of propositions offered by Herrnstein and Murray in 1994. First, we ask whether the effect of genotype is increasing in predictive power across birth cohorts in the middle twentieth century. Second, we ask whether assortative mating on relevant genotypes is increasing across the same time period. Finally, we ask whether educational genotypes are increasingly predictive of fertility (number ever born [NEB]) in tandem with the rising (negative) association of educational outcomes and NEB. The answers to these questions are mostly no; while molecular genetic markers can predict educational attainment, we find little evidence for the proposition that we are becoming increasingly genetically stratified.
This is a fascinating study! My comments below pertain to Proposition #1, that “The effect of genetic endowment is increasing over time with the rise of a meritocratic society”.Regarding fertility and dysgenic trends, see this more recent paper from the DeCode collaboration in Iceland, which reaches much stronger conclusions in agreement with H&M.
The data reported here do not seem to unequivocally contravene H&M’s hypothesis. The authors focus on the interaction terms, PGS x Birth Year (i.e. cohort), and show that interaction coefficient is slightly negative (b=-0.006, p=0.47), indicating a weakening of the association between genetic endowment and educational attainment, broadly conceived. The finding is that PGSs (polygenic scores) are (slightly) less predictive of educational attainment in later cohorts.
This isn’t that surprising, given educational inflation – over time, higher percentages of the population achieve any given level of educational attainment. In addition, as shown in Table 3 and mentioned in the Discussion section, this decline in importance of genetic endowment is restricted only to the ‘lower half of the educational distribution’. In contrast, genetic endowment (measured by PGSs) has become even more important across cohorts in predicting the ‘transition from a completed college degree to graduate education’ (534). Isn’t this what we’d expect to happen as the level of educational attainment at the lower half of the distribution becomes increasingly decoupled from cognitive ability?
H&M argued that cognitive ability is becoming more important in determining one’s life chances. The authors of this paper don’t actually test this hypothesis. They instead create polygenic scores *of educational attainment* (!) rather than cognitive ability – based on the GWAS of Rietveld et al. (2013) – and find that genetic predictors of *educational attainment* become (slightly) less predictive of educational attainment, on average, i.e. for high school and college. But again, they also report that the association of this genetic correlate (of educational attainment) and educational attainment has actually become stronger for transitions into graduate and professional schools from college.
If I’m not mistaken, the association between cognitive ability (as measured say by standardized tests, SAT, ACT, GRE, AFQT and NEA reports on reading and math ability) and educational attainment has weakened over time. It is possible that cognitive ability is becoming increasingly salient in determining SES as H&M maintain, and at the same time, educational attainment is becoming less salient, simply because the relationship between cognitive ability and educational attainment is becoming weaker. In other words, educational attainment, at least at the lower levels, is less salient in determining relative status. ...
