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.
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.
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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.
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
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
1/10 What better way to start the new year than with a puzzle about the coding of race and ethnicity by the @uscensusbureau. Specifically, a coding change from 2019 to 2020 changed the percentage of Latinos who identified racially as white from 66% to 24%. This is a huge change.
2/10 Three obvious possibilities: (1) Latino racial self-identification is changing. (2) Latino racial self-identification was misrepresented by the old measure.
(2) Latino racial self-identification is misrepresented by the revised measure.
3/10 All three could be true to some extent. But how much of which? Your essential text is the Census Bureau's blog post about the nature of the change: census.gov/newsroom/blogs…
1/4 I've come to think over the last 20 years that secular humanism has no moral bottom. Absent a core of absolutes of right and wrong, anything can be rationalized. Absent some divine origin for those absolutes, they cannot be absolutes.
2/4 Twenty years ago, I saw the potential for such rationalizations. Since then, I have watched the most secular elements of societies in the West rationalize ever-widening departures from what used to moral principles that secular humanism claimed it could sustain.
3/4 I admire many secular humanist thinkers. But consider how few Steven Pinkers remain and how many who are now advocating forms of totalitarianism. Secular humanism rests on sand.
1/5 How much difference does a single-parent family make in criminality after controlling for genetics? Don't know, but here is a table with the relative roles of genes, shared environment, and everything else on some relevant traits.
2/5 The bad news for parents: The roles of shared environment for traits involving personality and most abilities are quite small. But look at the right-hand page (from Human Diversity, if you're wondering).
3/5 Shared environment's role in explaining basic interpersonal interactions is 36%, which implies an important socializing role (you can't make them kind and compassionate, but you can civilize them somewhat).