Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

You can paste full URL like: https://x.com/threadreaderapp/status/1644127596119195649
or just the ID like: 1644127596119195649

How to get URL link on X (Twitter) App

  1. On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
  2. Click again on or Share Via icon
  3. Click on Copy Link to Tweet
  4. Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
  5. More info at Twitter Help
Charles Murray Profile picture
@charlesmurray
Feb 20, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
For those of you who are not familiar with the Vietnam Era, this was tried by LBJ in 1966 with Project 100,000, which lowered the minimum required score for the Armed Forces Qualification Test. It was a disaster. The newly qualified soldiers were slow learners, routinely
incompetent and undisciplined, and in combat were dangerous to themselves and their comrades. Their fatality rate was three times that of soldiers who met the previous qualification standard.
You can get the details in a book titled "McNamara's Folly." amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks…
That the Navy is doing it again after that experience, in an era when cognitive demands of military service are higher than they were 50 years ago, is gross negligence towards those who are already serving and damaging to national security.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Charles Murray

Charles Murray Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @charlesmurray

Charles Murray Profile picture
Jul 8
Fun's fun, and I have indulged in a certain amount of, um, persiflage over the last few days, but to be serious for a moment:
1. I live in a town of 150 about six miles in each of three directions from towns of 4200, 2100, and 8300. I know and talk to plumbers, painters, electricians, arborists, landscapers, heating & a/c guys, and other employers of blue-collar workers. These are not Boomers. They're in their 30s and 40s.
2. They pay good wages. They are desperate for workers. Can't find them. They voice a common problem about the ones they do find: They don't know how to work. It's not that they lack skills. They literally do not understand what a day's work is all about, or what reliably showing up on time is like.
3. Employers' problems are even worse in convenience stores and fast-food places. Finding employees who show up every day is tough. They are ecstatic to find an employee who is promotable--and to quickly move such employees into full-time work (or more) and promote them.
Read 7 tweets
Charles Murray Profile picture
Jul 6
(1) A young married couple, both unskilled, take convenience store jobs at $15/hr in a moderately prosperous state. The big convenience and fast-food chains offer pretty good benefits. They both work 48-hour weeks, giving them a combined annual income of $74,880, enough to pay for a nice place to live everywhere except a few megalopolises, and even enough to put some money aside to help pay for a baby.
(2) After a year of this, the wife has a baby and works just 20 hrs a week, still at $15/hr. The husband has been promoted to store manager or higher (convenience and fast-food store chains are desperate for workers they can promote) and makes $25/hr.
(3) Their new combined income is $67,600--less than before, but still enough for a good life except in a few megalopolises. This is a completely realistic scenario, and not even demanding (the husband could easily continue to work 48 hrs a week). And it's been done with jobs at convenience stores.
Read 4 tweets
Charles Murray Profile picture
Apr 24
A lot of the commentary this morning assumes that ending disparate-impact doctrine requires overturning Griggs. If you read the executive order, it's obvious that a lot can be done without that.
Some preliminary thoughts:whitehouse.gov/presidential-a…
Employers can start ignoring disparate-impact regulations. They aren't going to be enforced by the feds. Here's a scenario:
A police force in a major city announces that henceforth all promotions will be based on a combination of scores on a standardized police exam (and there are many good ones out there), with a minimum cutoff score (say, scores in the 90+ percentiles on the normed scale).
Choices for promotion within the qualifying candidates will be based on performance measures without regard to race or sex.
The administration of the test over the first year produces hardly any qualifying black candidates.
What happens next?
Read 5 tweets
Charles Murray Profile picture
Sep 7, 2023
1/6 Most of you have heard of the book Hidden Figures and the subsequent film. The role attributed to the lead character, Katherine Johnson, has been questioned by the veterans of manned spaceflight operations in the 1960s. Now those questions have been explored systematically
2/6 by two aerospace engineers who were part of mission planning of trajectories and rendezvous from Mercury through Apollo. Their commentaries plus supplementary material are posted at .hiddenfigurescritique.com
3/6 The purpose of the document is to be primary source material for future historians and journalists writing about early manned spaceflight. As such, it is not publishable in the usual outlets. It’s 61,000 words, far too long for any magazine. But length isn’t the main problem.
Read 6 tweets
Charles Murray Profile picture
Mar 29, 2023
1/4 I'll elaborate a little. Let's say I'm writing an article or a chapter using data from the 1000 Genomes Project. I want to make statements about Sub-Saharan Africans and also statements about the Yoruba, Luhya, and Esan subsamples of Sub-Saharan Africans.
2/4 Which is easier? To write sentences in which all are referred to as populations or sentences in which some groups are races and others are, um, what? Sub-races? Ethnicities? For me, it's a no-brainer. "Populations" is flexible, easily shifting from the continental level to
3/4 more granular component populations. I _prefer_ "population." I think it's better terminology. If I'm writing an article about US unemployment by population, I'll use "race" because I don't have any more granular populations that I want to talk about. But if I'm presenting
Read 4 tweets
Charles Murray Profile picture
Feb 21, 2023
1/7 Good review, and I certainly can't complain that the reviewer didn't read carefully. I am of two minds about Bo's complaint that I tried too hard to not rile up my readers (a point that others have made as well).
2/7 My decisions about tone for Human Diversity were made early in the writing process, around 2017, when I was still optimistic that I could get some people on the left to read me in the wake of my post-TBC partial rehabilitation
3/7 via Coming Apart. I was obtuse, especially considering that the Middlebury Affair occurred in March 2017. But I'm still not convinced that I should have been more aggressive. My audience for Human Diversity was really other social scientists. I'm convinced the social
Read 7 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

Send Email!

:(