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This opinion piece is, no surprise, authored by someone who has a "solution" to peddle.

Debates about testing often focus on how different socioeconomic or racial groups compare within the system, questioning why wealthier students get better SAT scores than poorer or if the ACT favors Whites and Asians over Blacks and Hispanics.

This focus on disparities makes us blind to a much more vital question: Do these tests even measure what’s important?

Ok, which ACT and SAT?

The ones we have now or the ones I took?

You see, there are in fact universal languages.  There are two and one is derived from and dependent on the other.

The first is mathematics and the second is physics (of which chemistry is a subset.)

Next, there are two forms of reasoning: The factual use and capacity to master the first two universal languages which requires you to have about a 115IQ or thereabouts, which is the threshold requirement for modern society.  That is, without sufficient people in that basket you don't have modern society.  If you think that is wrong I direct you to Rwanda and dozens of other examples (including Haiti) and you can look to South Africa which had it, drove out most of their higher-IQ population and now is losing it because they cannot maintain what those people built -- there simply aren't enough 115IQ people remaining to maintain and expand what they require for modern life.

But there is a second element which is where the further-to-the-right area of human mental capacity arrives, and that is abstract and spatial reasoning.  These are relatives but not the same, and some people are very good at one and not so good at the other -- but to be good at either you have to be in that rarified atmosphere up above the 115+ IQ realm.  It is simply not possible to be good at either if you don't have that much mental firepower.

It is that second realm where all great discoveries relating to our physical world derive.

All of them.

115 isn't that rare -- about 15% of the human population is in this basket.  That 15% of humanity is responsible for everything we enjoy today when it comes to technological advancement and its maintenance, and always has been all the way back through history.  It will never be otherwise.  Virtually all actual collegiate-level work requires this capacity; it is the lower threshold for abstract and spatial reasoning and if you can't get there you cannot do actual college-level work because actual derivation from prior knowledge requires this capacity and that is the definition of "college level achievement."

This is an old SAT of about 1100, a new (current) SAT of about 1280 (yeah, it's that different) or an ACT of about 26.

If you're not there then you're not and if a college is handing out degrees to people without that capacity then they're certifying that which is not true in terms of real expectations that society requires to maintain and advance itself.  I don't care who argues for what in "equity" or whatever; society absolutely has to have that 15% of people to maintain and operate our modern world and it also needs people with at least the next 10 points, up to 125-135, to advance.  It is those people who are in fact qualified for degrees that allegedly require you to break new ground in-field (that is, a Masters or PhD.)  We have wildly violated that premise over the last 30+ years in that now regurgitation of prior work and even word salads survive a thesis defense -- and as a result a Masters or PhD no longer proves anything.

This doesn't mean you can't train someone without either capacity to perform a task and/or trade.  You can, of course, but they are not capable of the inductive and deductive reasoning to advance the state of knowledge.  You can train someone as an electrician, for example, to follow the National Electric Code while wiring your house or perform as a lineman stringing and maintaining electrical transmission lines even though their IQ is bog-standard 100 and you can probably do so with someone down to about an IQ of 90.  But said person will never understand why the NEC specifies a given thing at the detail required to understand why it was and is written the way it is; they can apply said knowledge but cannot generate it as they simply do not have the intellectual chops to do so.

The entire point of testing is to provide that filter in a way that is reasonably-repeatable and to put forward standards for American society that are prerequisites for same.  The often-hated "analogies" section of the SAT (I personally found it quite easy) was one of these until they removed it in 2005; without a good mastery of English you cannot score on that part of the test and some people argue that's "racist" in some way.  That criticism is nonsense; it is not "racist" for a society to require fluency in a given language and if you can't get there for whatever reason as an individual you simply don't have the intellectual chops.  The point of that section is to test your capacity for inference and to do so you must have both a good understanding of English and the ability to draw said inferences.  What replaced that section doesn't do that at all, nuance is not inference with the latter being a materially-higher intellectual function.  Note that if you choose not to gain both in your educational journey despite the capacity then any screaming about "racism" is flat-out BS since nobody has the right to demand that you coddle a personal decision to refuse one's own advancement.

At the core of the question is what are tests of this sort supposed to demonstrate?

The only reasonable answer is "personal intellectual achievement in the context of intellectual capacity."  Both are highly individual; one you're born with and the other you put effort into.  This isn't about "inequality" because no two people are equal and therefore an attempt to "work around" that is not only futile its foolish.

In the context of higher education there has to be some means of gating for those unlikely to possess either the personal drive or fundamental intellectual chops required to complete college-level work.  To admit students who lack either, say much less both, is to exploit them as they will either not complete the work (and thus wind up wasting the money spent on it, plus the time they put in which can never be recovered) or worse the college, in an attempt to "satisfy the student" will pass and confer upon them a degree when it is unwarranted which now causes a person to go into the workforce unable to do the work for which they claim to be qualified.

Molding a test to compensate for what boils down to unwillingness to personally exploit one's intellectual gifts, or worse cover up for the lack of fundamental intellectual chops in the first place, is both unwise and risks destroying any value such a alleged credential would otherwise have, all the while enabling colleges to continue to collect money from those who simply cannot, and never will be able to, do the work.

We must do better.

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2024-03-22 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Editorial , 432 references
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I didn't believe it.

I do now.

Yeah, people did a lot of dumb things.

I believed you were fucked.  There was no way out, you were just fucked.

I was wrong, and last night, I saw proof.

The peak is, in at least one case, never past.

Steve, you proved it and by God, I'm unbelievable happy I saw it in person.

It was almost as good as sex.

Almost.

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2024-03-19 07:42 by Karl Denninger
in Editorial , 464 references
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This really pisses me off.

 

How about if we just speak some truth for a few minutes, eh?

  • This person is a man who happens to be gay.  That is, he is attracted to men.
  • Heterosexual men are attracted to women.

Said person was somehow convinced that if he "transitioned" he would become a woman.  That's not possible.  He looks like a woman but is not a woman.  Believing that he is a woman is akin to me believing I'm a Black Man.  No matter what I believe the facts are that I'm a White Man and nothing that can be done from the instant of my conception forward can or will change that.

Said person is now utterly fucked because neither a heterosexual or gay man will want him, as he is not their preferred sexual partner either in person, appearance or both.

What's worse is that there's nothing he can do about it since he cut his dick and testicles off, which is of course irreversible.  He has no ordinary adult sexual function, including both physical and the emotional/mental engagement characteristic of either sex and cannot regain it as the neural connections necessary for his former male response have been destroyed and they're different than those of a female so no practice of medical art can fashion them.

The people who coddled this man's delusion failed to inform him on a fair basis that while plastic surgery can always alter one's appearance one's genetics cannot be altered and much of sexual attraction is genetic and thus pheromone based, we do not have anything approaching a reasonable understanding of this or exactly how and why it works, we know it is tampered with through hormonal drugs (e.g. women's chemical birth control) and we have no means to reproduce or reliably regulate it among any human.  Indeed much of that process appears to exist for the specific reason that it improves genetic compatibility among mates which of course is a pointless exercise for him as his "female parts" are non-functional for reproduction.

Who would undergo any of this if they were told that all of this is fact and nothing you can do will ever change it no matter how far we advance in the future when it comes to medicine?

I have no idea but from the above it is very clear that this guy was lied to repeatedly both by people in society and multiple professionals who had not just a professional but LEGAL duty to tell him the truth.  Some people might, even with full and fair disclosure, act in this manner anyway and as adults you're free to do whatever you want to your own person provided you get honest and full information.  Specifically any entity "addressing" people who claim they might be or are "trans" must be required to prove all of four below points, and the mental competence of the person advised to understand them, before any of the below occurs or they must be held accountable for all negative outcomes, including criminal felony assault or, if the person ultimately kills themselves, manslaughter Not fines shifted to some insurer or corporation, criminal felony penalties.  Since in our legal system adulthood is required to legally contract this means no person under the age of 18 may, under any circumstances, be provided any of this unless the persons doing so -- all of them -- accept said personal liability.

  • Taking hormones to "suppress" your sexual characteristics may permanently preclude ever bearing or siring children.  You must assume and agree that this is acceptable just as a man who has a vasectomy is told that the procedure is permanent and, while you can attempt to reverse it, that reversal may not succeed and in fact he must sign a document so-stating.

  • "Bottom" surgery will, in every case, permanently preclude both having or siring children and permanently preclude you from ever having a normal adult human sexual response.  There are zero exceptions to this fact and you must consent to this; you are removing functional sexual parts of your body and replacing them with cosmetic approximations that are not and never will be functional as is a natural penis or vagina.

  • "Top" surgery, likewise, obviously does not produce functional breasts nor ones that have a female sexual response if stimulated.  That's not possible; ask any woman who has had reconstruction after a mastectomy; many lose all arousal from breast stimulation.  Since a man never had female breasts by definition he cannot acquire what he never had and while many men do find their breast area to be arousing, it is not the same as a female response and never will beno matter how much is spent on a pair of fake tits.  A woman who has hers removed may lose all sensation but whether that occurs or not she will definitely not have the same response as a man to stimulation of that part of the body.

  • Persons who are heterosexual of either sex, by definition, want heterosexual partners.  If you undergo this process you will never be attractive to any material percentage of those individuals for any sort of permanent adult relationship because you are not in the group of humans they find sexually attractive.  You are still genetically of the same sex as you were born and there's nothing you can do about that; only your appearance can be changed and as a result virtually all heterosexual persons will find your chosen appearance to be deliberately deceitful -- an act of deliberate misrepresentation -- and be turned off by it.

Understand another aspect of this: If you do this the only person who will want you sexually is likely to be another person who has also mutilated themselves.  You will not be attractive to a heterosexual person and probably not to someone who is gay either because your appearance does not match your sex!  Worse, if you do hook up with someone else who also "transitioned" neither of you will be able to obtain ordinary adult sexual satisfaction since both of you have voluntarily destroyed that capacity.  I have no idea what this portends for you in the longer term but I'll lay a sizeable wager it isn't anything good!  Some people have no real desire to pair-bond at all and if that's you then all is good -- but that's a small minority of the population, at least when you're younger.  Calling people who don't find you attractive a "bigot" after you deliberately ruined your physical and sexual congruence won't fix this -- what it will do is get you excluded socially and economically rather than just romantically.

Finally there is another, larger problem from a societal perspective: Men and women have to mate in order for humans to continue.  For each person there must be slightly more than one child born during said person's lifetime, of/from them, on a statistical average.  If there are not, over enough time, humans cease to exist.  Therefore the deliberate leading of children toward this sort of decision is a crime against humanity and must be punished as such without fail in every case.

No, one person will not make the human species cease to exist but neither will slaughtering a huge number of Rwandans or Jews.  Nonetheless we recognized those acts as crimes against humanity and as such we must recognize this as the same -- because it is.

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2024-03-12 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Editorial , 301 references
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and if we do not stop it, with finality, by stomping on it at all levels, our society will fail.

That's a strong statement but again I have receipts and they come directly from the firms who have said "Fuck that shit!" to America.

The Biden administration recently promised it will finally loosen the purse strings on $39 billion of CHIPS Act grants to encourage semiconductor fabrication in the U.S. But less than a week later, Intel announced that it’s putting the brakes on its Columbus factory. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has pushed back production at its second Arizona foundry. The remaining major chipmaker, Samsung, just delayed its first Texas fab.

Now this article in The Hill is marked "opinion."  Its not opinion when every instance of a firm involved in a given space does the same thing, and that is exactly what has happened.

The CHIPS Act in fact requires putting "diversity" before competence.  No, you say?  Well then how about this?

Critically, this must include significant investments to create opportunities for Americans from historically underserved communities, including people of color, people from rural communities, veterans, and women.

Must is a strong word and when you hear from a government it is a mandate.

Equity is not equality of opportunity is is, in raw terms, a statement that equal result must come.  This can only happen when there is a mandate to be inefficient on purpose because all persons are not equal in their talents and capabilities and to provide equity you must therefore be less efficient than you would be if you employed the best and brightest with that being the only criteria.

Further, that sheet explicitly calls for women, who are on balance physically not as strong as men, to be increased in their proportion in construction, a physical task which in turn means there will be less output over the same time.  

It gets worse:

acility workforce plan. The plan must have the following five elements: (1) a workforce needs assessment, including an assessment of job types, skills, and workers required over time; (2) strategies for worker recruitment and retention, including plans to address well-known workplace barriers; (3) the applicant’s approach to meeting the Good Jobs Principles published by the Departments of Commerce and Labor; (4) commitments to provide workforce training and wraparound services, including programming for training and job placement for economically disadvantaged individuals; and (5) the core milestones the program aspires to achieve, as well as metrics and processes to measure, track, and report publicly on these goals and commitments.

If you want to access this money you must intentionally cripple your firm by expending more money than necessary and that spending doesn't even end at your firm's property border; you are expected and mandated by law to do so in the community at large among anyone the government deems "economically disadvantaged."  This is an open-ended requirement that has no boundary and the industry has said "we don't have to do it elsewhere and we refuse to do it here because its bullshit and will damage the quality and cost-effectiveness of our products."

Not only that it goes even further and demands spending by the firms on the regional and local K-12 educational system!  Now you're telling these firms that its not just adults being recruited who must be recruited, trained and hired on other than competence oh no -- it now extends to having the responsibility of educating the children in a given area even though they may or may not choose to go into that line of work.  No matter that; its their responsibility to pay the bill.  That's ridiculous and they all said "fuck you!" -- as I would.

Removing barriers to equity, including through wraparound services. To ensure that companies are accessing a diversity of talent, applicants are expected to lay out a robust plan for outreach and recruiting. In addition, applicants must describe any wraparound services—such as adult care, transportation assistance, or housing assistance—they will use to increase access to and completion of training.

It is the firm's responsibility to provide for "adult care" (e.g. those who aren't working!), transportation and housing.  No, its not an individual responsibility of a person to purchase their own transportation and housing by going to work, earning a wage and then spending it on those things they desire, including a place to live and transportation.  Naw, the firm is expected to provide that to the community including to those who aren't working simply by virtue of being there.  And again, they said "FUCK YOU!"

It gets more-ridiculous from there, including explicit demands that those who are "under-represented" in chips manufacturing be explicitly favored (without regard for the fact that perhaps the reason is that they don't have the intellectual chops to do the job) and to forcibly pay for child care and, in fact, that's not a "request" -- it is a mandate for any firm applying for more than $150 million and must be cheap enough that low-income people can pay for it, meaning basically free, even though essentially nobody of "low income" will be working in such a facility as these are skilled labor positions and pay a quite-decent wage.

Well, Biden can stick stuff like this into his requirements but he cannot make firms take the dangling bait and get hooked.

They've refused to cripple themselves and hire unqualified or less-qualified people who will raise their costs and destroy their competitiveness compared with firms that do not in other parts of the world.

Now what?

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2024-03-11 10:33 by Karl Denninger
in Editorial , 315 references
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The video of a school-age girl getting her head bashed against the sidewalk by a black person is disturbing.

Unfortunately, it is not a new problem; who remembers Zimmerman?

I remember it vividly because at the time I was an elected member of the Libertarian EC in Florida and we had a candidate running under our flag who publicly advocated for Zimmerman to be jailed without the benefit of trial or discovery first.

I got to deal with that as part of the EC and it is a messy process when that sort of thing happens.  A big part of the mess is that the law does not permit a political party to prohibit or eject a candidate.  That is, I can run as a "Republican" and the party cannot stop me from doing so.  If I meet the petition requirements then I'm on the ballot (in the primary, if there is one for that race) and if I win there I'm on the general election ballot whether the party likes it or not.

Now there are things the party can do.  It can disavow me, it can endorse someone else running for the same seat and of course it can choose to spend money (or not) on my or anyone else's candidacy.  But it cannot prohibit a candidate.

In any event I did a lot of reporting and investigation on that case since it was a matter of significant importance to me.  As it turned out Martin, after getting into a fight with Zimmerman and decking him, thereby "winning" the fight, mounted Zimmerman and repeatedly bashed his head against a concrete sidewalk.  It was that action, not the fight itself, that prompted Zimmerman to draw his weapon and shoot Martin and he was ultimately acquitted of criminal liability -- justly so -- for that reason.

The media tried to hide this, including by deliberately placing a local station logo over the bleeding wound in Zimmerman's head that was evident on the police camera footage when he was detained and taken into custody.  In other words the media deliberately concealed the fact that even very early on there was evidence that Martin tried to kill Zimmerman after the fight had been initiated, and thus Zimmerman's use of force was reasonable self-defense.

Oh and let's not forget that they also tried to claim "racism" as the root cause of the altercation -- specifically, that Zimmerman was White while Martin was Black.  The media in fact went so far as to doctor their pictures of Zimmerman by intentionally lightening his skin.  That ultimately blew up in their face as Zimmerman is, in fact, Hispanic and it wasn't long before undoctored photos and video footage emerged.

Many people, usually when younger, have gotten into a fight or two.  It would be nice if humans could always resolve their conflicts with words and debate but that is an unreasonable expectation.  There will occasionally be physical combat.  You see it in the animal kingdom all the time -- two male Elk having a "debate" about who gets to mate with the female, two male Lions, chimps and other primates and similar.  Its a part of life, and humans are animals.

But you will note that with a few exceptions -- such as in primates -- these instances of combat are typically not mortal.  That is, once the determination of a "winner" is obvious the combat ends even though the winner could continue and kill their opponent.

This "I beat you, now you're dead" mentality is not exclusive to non-whites but it certainly is more-common in non-whites.  When was the last time you saw a white person take someone to the ground and, having clearly won the fight, continue to attack them, specifically with actions like punching or kicking them in the head or bashing their head against a hard surface?

This is a problem because as soon as a person who has this point of view demonstrates that they are willing to become involved in physical aggression the only reasonable action for everyone else to take is to kill them immediately because any such aggressive event involving that person is immediately and in every case mortal combat.  Therefore once the willingness to engage in aggression is demonstrated you've demonstrated you will kill in such an event and it is only reasonable for all others in society to preemptively destroy you before you can do that.

That's not good.

To prevent this result we need to change the law so as to break this pattern in people's heads or lock up, on a permanent basis, those who will refuse to change their reaction to such an event.

Specifically, we need this written into the criminal code:

If you engage in an instance of continuing aggression, no matter who initiated the combat, once your opponent in a fight has clearly "lost", which is presumptively concluded for the purpose of this law if your opponent is on the ground and has ceased hostility, the next blow you strike, or if you mount said person is deemed attempted premeditated murder and you shall do 10 years in prison for it, serving every day.

If you continue to attack under these circumstances and the person you strike dies it is capital murder and you are locked up for life with no possibility of parole or shall suffer the death penalty

If two or more people are involved in such an act every single one of them bears joint and several liability if they remain engaged in the combat beyond the point where the other party is on the ground.

Your age or mental capacity is immaterial to being charged and convicted under this law; if you're a minor or mentally challenged but do this you're charged and tried as an adult -- no exceptions.

Enough of this shit.

Its not new, as the Zimmerman/Martin case proved and it must be stopped now with "right of first refusal" going to the State Legislatures with the above change in the law -- but if they fail to act, then given their specific and intentional endorsement of lawlessness where the chips fall they're deserved.

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