Wordcels vs. shape rotators: differences in musical composition styles, favoring melody vs. harmony, and modern vs. primitive humans

The wordcel vs. shape rotator discourse makes me feel like we're right back in the late 2000s heyday of psychometrics blogging. So what better contribution to make than a dive into the archive?

Here is the first post, as well as a follow-up post, showing that a group's average cognitive abilities profile (i.e. wordcels vs. shape rotators) predicts their musical compositional style. Namely, the more wordcel they are, the more they emphasize melody, and the more shape rotator they are, the more they emphasize harmony. Click on those ancient links, which still work unlike most links of their age, to see which groups were surveyed (teaser: one of them is Ashkenazi Jews).

Homo sapiens are distinguished by our linguistic faculties, so all of us are wordcels to some degree, and all musical traditions have some degree of melodic emphasis. Being a shape rotator is more of a holdover from our pre-linguistic hominid history, more animalistic or savage or primitive. Not every group has a lot of it, and not a lot of musical traditions emphasize harmony or the "vertical" aspect of music.

To throw out some new ideas since those posts from 15 years ago:

Looking around the animal world, it's unusual for them to employ melodies to the exclusion of harmonies -- songbirds being the only major exception. Typically their musical-ish vocalizations are more like layers stacked in a chorus, without much of a serial change in pitch, no elaborate riffs or phrases. Crickets chirping, wolves baying, even human-domesticated species like sheep baa-ing and cows moo-ing, and so on and so forth.

It makes me wonder whether spatial ability and harmonic music were gifted to certain human populations by the Neanderthal and Denisovan species (cousins of Neanderthals) with whom they interbred after leaving Africa. Those species were big-skulled, big-brained shape rotators with comparatively meager verbal abilities.

Sub-Saharan Africans have none of those non-human admixtures (they have a different archaic admixture, from within sub-Saharan Africa), and they're the least harmony-focused in making music. Perhaps something in their distinct musical traditions (polyrhythms?) owes something to the archaic species with whom they interbred as well, though we don't know so much about that one as we do about Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Although humans are distinguished by our verbal abilities, when taken too far to the extreme, we become disembodied minds, no longer corporeal bodies. It leads to Rube Goldberg machines that end up doing in their clever-silly creators. We need some degree of rootedness in our pre-linguistic animal past, in order for our lives to feel meaningful and fulfilling.

That's why New Age music is so heavy on the harmonic aspect of composition -- it's not just the inanimate ambient sounds that lack melody (rain falling, waves lapping, wind gusting, fire crackling, etc.), it's the "music" of other non-human creatures that are mostly layers of a chorus. Re-connect with the primitive animal within, by sliding that Gregorian chant disc into your CD player, as a chorus of raindrops comes to sing a lazy-day carol at your window...

Evangelical betrayal of Trump came from right half of the bell curve, left half was solid pro-Trump

The recent upset provides a good occasion to point out that the airheads in Iowa and out West generally are above-average in IQ and education. Gelman et al showed that the red state vs. blue state culture wars are primarily fought among the better-off, who don't have to worry so much about basic economics and politics, and can indulge in their airy-fairy values contests.

Studies of the Tea Party members also find them to be more educated and wealthier than the average American, even if they're not 1% Ivy grads.

True to form, the entrance poll results in Iowa show that Trump did the best among those with no college education, and had lower support for each additional level of education. Rubio was the other way around, and was the winner of those with college or more. Cruz was in between, peaking with those who had some college, losing to Trump among no-college voters, and edging out Trump on college-and-beyond voters (though below Rubio).

Trump won handily among the non-evangelical voters, while Cruz won just as handily with the evangelicals.

Do not fall for the "what's the matter with Kansas?" narrative, which Gelman et al have already demolished. Not that there isn't something wrong with out-West states, but that it is driven by the right half of the bell curve whose battle over values comes in red-state and blue-state flavors, each of them eclipsing the fight for basic economic and political matters like a healthy economy, low debt, good incomes, solid borders, keeping the culture American rather than foreign / cosmopolitan, not wasting our military on video game shit in the Middle East, etc.

The lower-status folks vote primarily on those economic issues, and therefore do not show so much polarization around the country. They went solidly for Trump in Iowa, and they will do so everywhere else. Ending the culture war means restoring the franchise to the blue-collars.

It is not the left half of the bell curve that is to blame, as the IQ fetishists would have you believe. They want a "cognitive elite" uber alles? -- well then what else do you expect than voting for a non-American, Ivy slimeball with deep ties to Goldman Sachs?

This realignment election season is revealing a deep rift in the "alternative right" between populists and elitists -- both may want some form of nativism, but is it for the benefit of all classes, or for helping the strivers reach the elite and stay cushy once they get there, freeing them from having to take out million-dollar mortgages to avoid the brown hordes? Something that the blue-collar majority cannot afford to do, aside from having their jobs stolen by foreign scabs.

College as part of lifestyle competition, not for later career / wealth / consumption

To rein in the problem of the higher education bubble and student loan debt, we first need to understand why so many adolescents are going to college in the first place.

The widespread but incorrect view is that it is for careerist reasons such as learning useful knowledge, acquiring useful skills, getting to know the ins and outs of some sector of the economy, or networking with potential employers. Or, if the observer is more cynical, a college diploma is for signaling to potential employers that you are smart and conscientious enough to be worth employing, regardless of what you may or may not have studied.

This is why the Baby Boomers first poured out of their small home towns and into college, but that was way back in the '70s. Unfortunately, given their control over the media, the Boomer view persists to this day.

In their day, the only point of going to college was to get a diploma, and since the generation before them wasn't very credentialed, a bachelor's degree gave them a substantial leg up when they were searching for their first real jobs. They had to convince employers that a piece of paper from a college was important, but they won that propaganda war, perhaps owing also to a shift in the mindset of the employer class.

In any case, they didn't care too much about "campus life" beyond the basics of there being a willing student body to get drunk and make out, and an utterly no-frills house or apartment to host the party. They could have gotten high back in their home towns -- and probably did already during high school -- so the point of going off to college was primarily to be able to secure a decent middle-class job and decent pay as a young adult.

As more and more high school grads decided to go to college, a larger and larger fraction of 20-somethings had a bachelor's, diluting its relative value in the job market.

However, we shouldn't let that fact distract us from the changing purpose of college as the higher education bubble as inflated to such extremes. For if students were truly concerned with the career-and-income value of a degree, once they wised up to the diluted value with so many of them in circulation, they would take measures to try to get the most possible out of it.

Whereas before students might have majored in arts and humanities, they would now only major in engineering, accounting, and other employable majors. They would also bust their ass more in their coursework, to make sure their skill-set was maxed out come job-hunting time after graduation. And they would ruthlessly scrutinize the colleges they were thinking of applying to -- with a keen eye to which ones added the most value to the incomes of their graduates.

Instead we observe the exact opposite. "Value added to income" is not just hovering somewhere out in their peripheral vision, they pay no attention to it at all when narrowing down a list a colleges to apply to. They pride themselves on doing as little and as poor-quality work as possible in their classes: "All right, BS-ed another essay an hour before it was due, and still got a B! Unstoppable!" Unstoppable grade inflation, moron -- that's why you got good grades. They make a point of shying away from employable majors, with a steady proliferation of junk majors fed by a ballooning demand for pointless studies -- communications, business, gender studies, African-American studies, etc. Majors that are established and respectable, yet still unemployable, continue to be popular -- philosophy, psychology, history, etc.

If it seems like students aren't going to college to prepare for a better career and higher income and consumption, it's because they're not. Instead, they are preparing for the competition in the arena of lifestyle striving rather than wealth / career striving.

In this earlier post, I discussed these two separate avenues of competitiveness in the context of generational differences. Silents and Boomers -- the Me Generation -- are career strivers, with Boomers pouring into colleges to get a leg up on the Silents, who were career strivers but did not go to college in large numbers. Competitive people will never leave the battle arena, so the careerist avenue has been closed off to new competitors. Gen X and Millennials chose to compete in an arena that was less saturated with contestants, and found it in lifestyle-based competition.

A big part of lifestyle competition is knowledge, but not necessarily of the scholarly or intellectual kind. It's whatever you need to know about, have an opinion on, and be prepared to discuss and passive-aggressively debate with the others in the contest. "Do vaccines cause autism?" is of minor importance on a scholarly or scientific level. But it just happened to be one of those areas of knowledge where lifestyle strivers became expected to have very informed and strong opinions on, whether they are pro or con.

The other part of lifestyle competition is an emphasis on leisure -- not so much with having loads of free time, but what you do with it. Do your leisure activities make you a superior person, or reveal you to be a sub-human loser? There is only so much leisure time in the day, so these contests will revolve around the most basic and frequent non-work activities -- food and drink, lounging around the home environment, sports or athletics, etc.

Combine the contest over knowledge with the contest over leisure activities, and you get decadence. Lifestyle strivers become obsessed with increasingly arcane points about seemingly mundane leisure activities, and having to flit from one fad to the next in order to not appear to be taking a break but still vigorously invested in the competition. Who is cooking the most original and titillating variation on the mac-and-cheese dinner? Who has the latest style jogging shorts? Who has the most on-point living room decor? Whose playlist contains bands that no one else has ever heard of? Ad nauseam.

If all that is the long road ahead of adolescents, then they had better get a solid training in young adulthood. In fact their parents already model the adult lifestyle striver behavior while the children are still school-aged -- bringing home bacon-and-avocado mac-and-cheese for dinner from Whole Foods, so their kids will know what to order when they're on their own. The parents drag the kids along to IKEA so that they'll learn what kinds of trendy furniture to pick out once they're living away at a college dorm room, or their first apartment.

But the parents can only accomplish so much by modeling the behavior. The kids actually have to leave home and begin lifestyle striving in earnest on their own. Hence the current form that the college experience takes.

I've already detailed how the lifestyle-striving orientation guides their choices of college, major, and other aspects that relate most directly to employment and income prospects. Let's take a look at some other revealing ways that college life is more about preparing kids for lifestyle striving rather than career striving.

- Students would rather not work. If the purpose were to take their first baby steps toward a grown-up career, they would all want to work. If they do work today, it's only to provide a little spending money for their lifestyle pursuits, not to learn the ins and outs, nor to establish trust with an employer and get a good recommendation for future employers.

- Colleges spend big bucks not on anything that will help their students earn more money or be more employable. The overwhelming trend during the higher ed bubble has been on providing more leisure and lifestyle services, both mundane amenities (cafe in the library) and spectacles (pro-level sports stadium). Libraries are hang-out spots where no books are read, instead of places for browsing the stacks and reading books that would help you earn more after graduation.

- Dining halls must cater to the nascent foodie snobs, offering charcuterie rather than meat loaf, located in separate "stations" rather than in a single assembly-line, with lighting and decoration appropriate for a sit-down restaurant rather than a public school cafeteria.

- Exercise equipment that a person would ordinarily need a gym membership to have access to.

- Always having something to do for boosting your arts-and-culture quotient. Even mid-tier colleges spend big bucks to acquire more fine art to display in professionally designed galleries. The film club screens the classics every weekend. And there are regular performances from music and dance groups, from both students and professionals.

- What the particular college tells other rival strivers about your lifestyle. Two colleges are equally good at academics and all that other unimportant stuff, but you chose that one that signals you're an urban boho-chic type of striver, rather than the sports buff type of striver. A college's brand and brand value revolve around these qualitative lifestyle matters. 

And so on and so forth.

None of these sweeping, ubiquitous changes to college life make any sense under the view that college is for getting a credential, leading to a good job, leading to good income, leading to higher consumption levels. They make perfect sense under the view that young people today expect to have no shot at the career competition and are opting instead for lifestyle competition, and that the college years are training them for that kind of striving.

It's missing the point somewhat to portray college life as merely a four-year playground experience, as though their decadence will be useless in the real world afterward. A lot of effort still goes into mastering the ins and outs of lifestyle striving -- what topics to be knowledgeable about, what pastimes to pursue, which foods are cool, which interior design schemes are cool, etc.

This isn't just fitting into youth culture or the broader culture -- there's a sense that they're going to be tested on this stuff for the rest of their lives, and they have to be able to keep up with the lifestyle contests no matter how the wheel of fashion spins. So it really is a kind of training or apprenticeship that segues seamlessly into adult status competition (rather than being a pointless vacation), only it's for lifestyle striving rather than career striving.

To wrap things up, how does this correct view let us see what's going on with the loud demands among Millennials to have their student loan debt canceled or to receive a tuition-free college life from the government?

Well, it won't do us any good to lecture them about how they can pay off their debt once they use their degree to get a decent job. They know their degree is worthless -- they went to college for lifestyle striving, not to earn more money.

What they're really asking for is state-subsidized training and apprenticeship in the domain that they'll be competing for status in as adults -- lifestyle contests. In their minds, it's akin to state-subsidized high school classes in math, science, and technology for those who are planning to strive in the career domain. Fairness would seem to argue for subsidized training for the lifestyle strivers too.

Of course, one of those domains is productive for society, and the other only enriches the individual's reputation. But the productive niche is already beyond saturated with incumbents and foreigners to whom the work could be outsourced. We can't expect most young adults to focus on career-building when there are hardly any decent careers waiting to be filled. It's only natural that they will mostly turn to lifestyle striving as their form of "bettering themselves," while accepting a crummy job and crummy living circumstances.

Thus, the decadent and fruitless competition in the lifestyle domain among Gen X-ers and especially Millennials is ultimately the fault of all the competitiveness in the career domain, where Silents and Boomers still run the show and get most of the wealth and status. As if hyper-competitiveness in the career world weren't bad enough in itself (white collar crime taking off like a rocket, selling out the country to make an extra buck, and the like), their tenacious incumbency has created a ripple effect whereby the later generations are not bothering to enter that saturated niche and are focusing their energy and effort on decadence contests instead of something productive.

Reining in the competitiveness in the career world would not only clean things up in the productive part of the economy, it would also free up more decent jobs for younger adults, blunting the appeal of lifestyle striving. Lower demand for lifestyle striving would deflate the higher ed bubble and restore sanity to tuition costs, as well as restore the college's mission to being productive somehow (economically, intellectually, or whatever, but somehow).

It's beyond the scope of this post to talk about how to start reining in the anarchic war of all against all in the career world. The important lesson for now, though, is that many of the things that are going wrong in the world are interconnected, often with one causing another, so that reforming one area will set off a chain reaction and reform some other area as well.

Forget it Jake, it's Malaysia-town

The near complete inability of the nations in eastern Asia to reveal what information they may have and cooperate during an urgent, life-and-death matter should temper the enthusiasm that many Westerners feel for glorious Asia — what with their high IQ levels (by global standards) and their low homicide rates.

Rather, this groping-through-the-labyrinth of an investigation should serve to revive an older description — "the inscrutable Oriental." It's all about keeping your guard up, wearing an unreadable stone face, and covering your ass / saving face above all else.

And it is not only in lending a hand that the Asian is stingy. Merely requesting help from others is seen as a sign of weakness, incompetence, "Why you so lazy?!" etc., and must only be resorted to long after it has become obvious that you're not as all-powerful and all-knowing as you'd thought. The level of hubris among Asians is astounding: no matter what the calamity, the in-over-their-heads team is bound to respond with, "Back off, man — I got this."

Why any Westerner would want to import large numbers of denizens from a black hole of trust, is beyond me. But probably boils down to them being a nerd who lives in the abstract and the hypothetical, where BRAINS + DOCILITY = MAX STATS, and having little connection with the real world, where these ghost people are among the worst neighbors and citizens you could ask for.

Gay Peter Pan-ism and being slaves to fashion

How does being a slave to fashion fit into the framework of male homosexuals being stunted in childhood? ("Ewwww, girls are so yucky.") Most second graders don't read fashion magazines or regularly go out to clothing stores to see what's in this week. However, they are mindful of how everyone else looks -- whether they'll fit in or not -- and how the cool, older kids look -- whether they'll have to change the way they look in order to fit in, going forward.

A child has to be fairly open to changing the kind of tribal membership badges that he displays, given that he's just starting off in the slow, gradual process of enculturation. He doesn't know exactly what range of colors, patterns, proportions, etc., are normal in his cultural group. Nor does he know what range of hairstyles is acceptable, what musical genres, what slang words, and so on.

That process seems to harden during adolescence and young adulthood, when people are the most sociable and anxious to fit in with their peers. Once that's done, they're a member of a cultural group, having absorbed both the enduring aspects of their cultural lineage, as well as the particular traits of their generation.

Like it or not, they'll always have soft spot for at least some of the pop culture trends from their childhood and adolescent years. This allows for nostalgia in adulthood, perhaps reaching the level of a revival movement, however limited in scope within the broader society. For example, the early '90s revival of the past several years, primarily at Urban Outfitters but probably also in places catering to like-minded (and like-aged) customers.

If the "gay germ" arrests psychological maturation in the elementary school years, then their minds might never congeal around a particular set of generational traits. They're permanently stuck in the stage of looking around to see what everybody else is doing this year, and how they have to alter their existing set of cultural markers in order to fit in with this new state of affairs. If you never grow up, you never belong for good, so you struggle to belong for this year, at least.

Hence, why gays all tend to look the same no matter what generation they ought to belong to. They're all desperate to fit in with right now. And hence why they tend not to be bold trend-starters but annoying copycats playing catch-up.

It's striking how little nostalgia queers feel, and how minimal their participation is in the whole "vintage" phenomenon. I've mentioned before that the most faggot-free event you can rely on is '80s night -- "omigosh seriously? the '80s were like so however-many years ago!" It's like connecting with the past, however briefly, causes them physical pain. They don't use slang from when they were growing up, ironically or not, nor make pop culture references to things more than five years old (except to disparage them for being so old). They failed to fit in with their peers all those years ago, and now they've moved on to trying and failing to fit in with what's cool right now.

Some of them have a slight interest in mid-century retro, but that's only because Fifties pop culture looks and sounds so gay and kiddie. It's doesn't feel that exotic to their existing sensibilities, the way that the Seventies or Eighties would feel to a college girl these days.

And then there's the minor tendency for them to try to live in an era way before they were even born, another signal that they never fit in growing up. Some geeky-goony types do this too -- but then they were total misfits too. Normal people who take an interest in the past nevertheless show signs of having been enculturated by the time they were 20. With gays and geeks, it's more a form of escapism into a world where no-longer-living peers cannot reject them, and so where their cultural membership is approved in the absence of existing members speaking up against their inclusion.

It's also striking how gays don't appear to play the fashion game in order to boost their sense of superiority in the greater status competition. That's a uniquely adult way of approaching fashion, in the broad sense of signalling how au courant your tastes are. Gays aren't so much striving to climb one rung higher on the ladder, as they are struggling to keep their head above water when it comes to fitting in with a cultural group.

Sure, there are a handful of haughty homos who ape snobs, but in general they look more like stressed-out children rushing around the department store with their surrogate big sisters, the fag hags, uncertain of whether this or that shirt will make them fit in with or stand out against their peers. You always seem them with that neurotic "Be honest, what do you thinnnnk?!?!?!" look on their face, which you don't see among grown-up status strivers who are inspecting the selection.

What predictions does this view make? Perhaps homosexuals would be able to learn foreign languages more easily, controlling for IQ. What language you speak is one of the strongest markers of what cultural group you belong to. On IQ tests, they might also show higher crystallized intelligence scores than fluid intelligence. Crystallized intelligence is the things you pick up from experience, such as vocabulary words, whereas fluid intelligence is on-the-fly reasoning or working memory. Gay brains don't seem to crystallize as much or as fast, although I'm not sure if that's specific to the cognitive part of enculturation, or if it extends to pure intelligence as well. Worth looking into, and it wouldn't even be that politically incorrect to find one set of results or another.

Declining meritocracy in an age of greater status striving

There's a discussion at Steve Sailer's about the rise and fall of meritocratic tests in hiring, riffing on this article in The Atlantic. It was low around the turn of the 20th C., peaked in the mid-century, and fell out of favor sometime during the '70s. Most of the article is about how Big Data may help revive and re-vamp test-based hiring, but for now it's more of a nerd obsession than a widespread business practice.

By the way, what was the prevailing way of hiring around the peak of intra-elite competition and inequality, in the early 1900s? For workers, it was ruthlessness in a melee:

Near the turn of the 20th century, one manufacturer in Philadelphia made hiring decisions by having its foremen stand in front of the factory and toss apples into the surrounding scrum of job-seekers. Those quick enough to catch the apples and strong enough to keep them were put to work.

I'm sure they would have made great Black Friday shoppers. And for managers?

In those same times, a different (and less bloody) Darwinian process governed the selection of executives. Whole industries were being consolidated by rising giants like U.S. Steel, DuPont, and GM. Weak competitors were simply steamrolled, but the stronger ones were bought up, and their founders typically were offered high-level jobs within the behemoth. The approach worked pretty well. As Peter Cappelli, a professor at the Wharton School, has written, “Nothing in the science of prediction and selection beats observing actual performance in an equivalent role.”

Buy-outs by behemoths, where the former leaders are absorbed into lesser roles within the newer bigger trust -- sound familiar? If people's thirst for ever greater status and wealth is insatiable, this Borg-like assimilation is inevitable.

But resistance was not futile. During the 1920s, the elites agreed to rein in their pyramid-climbing, for the stability of the society, after the explosive climate of World War I and its aftermath. Not long after, inequality began steadily falling. What new norms were adopted by the middle of the century?

By the 1950s, it was not unusual for companies to spend days with young applicants for professional jobs, conducting a battery of tests, all with an eye toward corner-office potential. “P&G picks its executive crop right out of college,” BusinessWeek noted in 1950, in the unmistakable patter of an age besotted with technocratic possibility. IQ tests, math tests, vocabulary tests, professional-aptitude tests, vocational-interest questionnaires, Rorschach tests, a host of other personality assessments, and even medical exams (who, after all, would want to hire a man who might die before the company’s investment in him was fully realized?)—all were used regularly by large companies in their quest to make the right hire.

During the Great Compression of roughly 1920 to 1980, ruthlessly jockeying for status was taboo. That belonged to the Gilded Age with its robber barons, courtesans, and other professional strivers. Now you were supposed to be more content with what you had, and not step on someone else's skull just to so you could own a second car.

Perhaps the rise of meritocratic testing was a way the elites found of dampening the internecine status-striving that newly blew the country up in the wake of World War I. "Quit your complaining -- the test says you belong in this range, and that's where you go. Don't bother trying to act like a courtier."

Objective tests have a natural ceiling, where no extra amount of resume-padding, networking, and butt-kissing will alter your destiny. It contains elite status jockeying.

Here's a reminder of what the Great Compression business culture was like at the executive level, from Fortune magazine in 1955. You get a good feel for mid-century cocooning and isolation, but you also can't help but notice how self-effacing and reining-it-in the elites were compared to the robber barons or our neo-robber barons today.

During the late 1960s for elites, and a little later for everyone else, the restraints of the Great Compression came undone, probably as folks had forgotten or were unaware to begin with of the soaring inequality and social-political instability of the period running from the Civil War through the Gilded Age and culminating after WWI.

Peter Turchin, whose basic "structural-demographic" framework I'm borrowing here, has a series of posts on the topic of how and when elite competition and over-production of elites began. Straightforward measures like enrollments (per capita) at law schools, business schools, and medical schools, not to mention the higher ed bubble in general, all point to the 1970s as a transition era. By about 1980, the break with the mid-century restraint was complete.

What then became of hiring based on objective tests?

Remarkably, this regime, so widespread in corporate America at mid-century, had almost disappeared by 1990. “I think an HR person from the late 1970s would be stunned to see how casually companies hire now,” Peter Cappelli told me—the days of testing replaced by a handful of ad hoc interviews, with the questions dreamed up on the fly. Many factors explain the change, he said, and then he ticked off a number of them: Increased job-switching has made it less important and less economical for companies to test so thoroughly. A heightened focus on short-term financial results has led to deep cuts in corporate functions that bear fruit only in the long term.

Over the past several decades, companies don't want to invest in testing out potential hires, when they're so footloose about where they work (see the rest of the article for numerical data, or consult your own experience). All that costly scientific testing wouldn't pay off until it discovered and hooked a good fit for the long term. Instead, new hires always have their eyes peeled for the next job, always on the move to find an angle on reaching one rung higher on the status ladder. Not content with a decent job at a good company.

With the return of unbounded status striving, hiring is more and more driven by "playing the game" factors, as though you were a latter-day courtier:

Perhaps the most widespread bias in hiring today cannot even be detected with the eye. In a recent survey of some 500 hiring managers, undertaken by the Corporate Executive Board, a research firm, 74 percent reported that their most recent hire had a personality “similar to mine.” Lauren Rivera, a sociologist at Northwestern, spent parts of the three years from 2006 to 2008 interviewing professionals from elite investment banks, consultancies, and law firms about how they recruited, interviewed, and evaluated candidates, and concluded that among the most important factors driving their hiring recommendations were—wait for it—shared leisure interests. “The best way I could describe it,” one attorney told her, “is like if you were going on a date. You kind of know when there’s a match.” Asked to choose the most-promising candidates from a sheaf of fake résumés Rivera had prepared, a manager at one particularly buttoned-down investment bank told her, “I’d have to pick Blake and Sarah. With his lacrosse and her squash, they’d really get along [with the people] on the trading floor.” Lacking “reliable predictors of future performance,” Rivera writes, “assessors purposefully used their own experiences as models of merit.” Former college athletes “typically prized participation in varsity sports above all other types of involvement.” People who’d majored in engineering gave engineers a leg up, believing they were better prepared.

There's another reason, well discussed by conservatives, for the decline of objective testing: namely the fact that whites tend to do better than blacks:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which exposed companies to legal liability for discriminatory hiring practices, has made HR departments wary of any broadly applied and clearly scored test that might later be shown to be systematically biased. Instead, companies came to favor the more informal qualitative hiring practices that are still largely in place today.

I'm starting to think the whole "disparate impact" thing is a rationalization to do away with merit-based hiring, in an era of greater status striving. The charge of "b-b-but, it's racist against blacks!" is just a shameless smokescreen that the strivers know will sell well with the target audience.

For example, my impression is that other countries without many Non-Asian Minorities share our disdain for objective testing, etc. It makes it even harder to do objective testing in America, but I'm convinced that it's a second-order thing. The main source is the discontent of elite strivers who want to be able to dazzle the HR rep with their fifty pounds of filler and connections.

And the military continues to use IQ testing. The usual argument is that their jobs are too important to let diversity worship fuck them all up. But you could say that about all kinds of industries, and in fact the military isn't exactly beating back the Indians, Nazis, or Commies these days. I think it makes better sense to see it as part of the military's wish to keep status-striving from getting too out of control -- that could get violent and destabilizing to the political order. Income inequality within the military must be far less than in the private sector, since the top-ranking generals still don't make as much as hedge fund managers.

Aside from the noxious atmosphere produced by the striving mode of thinking and behaving, it neuters the ability of people to do just do their damn jobs well and get paid decently for it. The current regime does not reward competency but rather resume-padding and networking.

Like, isn't it striking how much stuff they invented between 1920 and 1980, on a per-decade basis? The '80s weren't so bad, but then that was just the beginning of the trend toward where we are today, politically and economically. And the last 20-odd years? Jack. All we're better at these days is how to socialize costs and privatize benefits, and how to best dress it up in fashionable ideology -- see the housing bubble, bank bailouts, etc. Neo-con corporate cocksucking mates with liberal diversity worship -- imagine the beautiful offspring they'll create!

At any rate, there's another sign to watch for, to anticipate the unwinding of this spiral of intra-elite competition -- a renewed sincere interest in objective meritocratic testing.

Has grade inflation struck IQ tests, too? A look at kids of New York elite parents

Via Steve Sailer, here is an NYT article on the increasingly high-stakes contest among New York parents to get their kids into elite kindergartens. The focus is on the IQ test used to sort out the top 1% from the rest. Several sources express concern that something funny is going on because the fraction of all New York kids clearing the national top 1% mark has shot up in recent years. Just 6 years ago, only 18% cleared that mark, while last year 29% did.

The IQ / HBD crowd should show some more interest in corruption, test prep, and other forms of grade inflation among the elite -- not just in the obvious places like the Atlanta public school system (wink wink).

Intra-elite competition has been ramping up for decades now, so we can't assume that the most powerful and wealthy group of parents in the country aren't making good use of that power and wealth to get artificially better outcomes for their kids, and hence lower outcomes for everyone else, where those resources are limited.

Looking through the ERB report on changes over time, it's clear that something funny is going on. There's an increase in the mean combined score of 0.375 Standard Deviations -- in just 5 years (fall '07 to fall '12). If we phrased it in terms of height, it's as though these kids had gotten 1.1 inches taller on average in just 5 years. Little of that is due to changes in verbal scores, which are pretty flat. The performance scores, however, have increased by 0.6 SD, almost linearly over time. In height terms, that's 1.8 inches taller on average than 5 years ago.

Moreover, there are no changes in the national sample of children, whether for the verbal, performance, or combined scores, and whether you look at mean scores or 90th or 98th percentiles. Something is going on specifically in the New York bunch of test-takers.

Now, what would champions of the "cognitive elite" say about a group of Atlanta public school kids whose mean IQ scores had apparently risen in 5 short years by nearly 0.4 SD, and whose performance scores had risen by 0.6?

Demographics? Nope -- the ERB looks at age and sex, and there's no change. They don't mention race, but by fall 2007, New York super-parents were already fully white / Jewish / NE Asian. Environmental improvement? Nope -- those kids of Manhattan super-parents weren't starving, disease-stricken, etc., "back" in 2007, only to have recovered by now.

That leaves artificial causes. Since the verbal scores are flat, you might think that it's mostly test prep -- little human beings are already designed for verbal communication and reasoning, but not for weird new things like "what picture comes next in this sequence?" or "3 of the cells of this matrix are filled in. What goes in the missing cell?" There are larger marginal returns if you prep for the performance sub-test, and don't waste too much time on the verbal one.

That's some pretty damn good test prep, if that's all there is to the rise in scores. Remember -- 0.6 SD in just 5 years, on an IQ performance test, not some quiz of factoids. I don't doubt test prep is the new normal for Manhattanite children, and that smarter kids will get more out of it than duller ones. But, not enough to produce such a huge fast increase.

Rather, the likely causes are some mix of tacit grade inflation and outright corruption. IQ-focused nerds can join the 21st century and recognize how rampant such practices are -- including among the very top of the elite, like grade inflation and "No Child Left Without Latin Honors" at Harvard.

I have no experience with Manhattan super-parents or the local test-production and test-prep industries, so I have no intuition about what mix is the most likely. Grade inflation sounds more likely -- understood as necessary by the test-makers, or the super-parents will take their business elsewhere. That will hit the company financially and reputationally.

It's like during the last economic bubble, the ratings agencies inflated the worthiness of various financial packages because if one of them were more honest, the customer would shop it around to another ratings agency that would give it higher marks. The customer holding this batch of mortgages (or whatever) was not interested in an honest appraisal -- they wanted to pass it on to some sucker for as much money as possible, and a higher rating means more money.

Similarly, parents don't want an honest score for their kids -- they want the highest score possible, in order to pass them along to the school that will give them the greatest resource-earning potential into the future. They can't all get the maximum score, or the jig will be up. But that still leaves plenty of room for gradual, subtle rating inflation. The cumulative effect is more pronounced (like the '07 to '12 comparison), but by then your kid has already taken the test and gotten his inflated score, so what do you care if the bubble bursts in the future and wrecks the community? Gotta look out for Number One (and mini-One).

Corruption is not out of the question either, but probably less of a factor. You see that more when the test-takers are below average, and the proctors will just erase the wrong answers the students gave and write in the correct ones. Maybe with orders from above, lest the test make the public school system look bad. But not so much at the elite level -- parents in general aren't greasing the administrators' palms to get their kid into Harvard. Same with the housing bubble -- holders of the mortgages didn't plunk down however-many dollars on the conference table. They used the less detectable tactic of shopping their product around to find the highest rater, with competitive ratings agencies only too eager to accommodate the demand for inflated ratings.

I'm not sure how much revenue the ERB brings in from New York parents, in order for their shopping-around to drive possible decisions to inflate scores. I'm guessing it's more of a reputational concern -- if New York elite parents drop your test like a hot potato, you look like losers. That would hold even for an established IQ test like the SAT -- but would really slam a more unknown test that's just starting out (only existing since the mid-2000s), trying to distinguish itself from all the other tests that elite parents could choose from. Theirs is an endorsement that money can't buy. You have to make it worth their while in other ways.

Both of these causes still don't explain why the rise in scores is most dramatic for the performance and not the verbal scores. Perhaps the grade-inflaters know how to make it seem less noticeable. It is what they do for a living, after all. Like, if the goal is to inflate overall GPA, then (at least at first) inflate the grades for music class but not for math class, which would raise more red flags. And perhaps part of what those $200-per-hour tutoring sessions get you is some first-hand knowledge of the questions through someone who's socially connected and hard-up for money in uber-expensive New York City, though restricted to just the performance sub-test. Again, don't want to give away too much and have it look obvious. And to maintain a decent bargaining position, you want to still be holding onto something they want, not just give it all up on the first date.

All of these hypotheses and their predictions should be followed up on, to see where the culprit truly lies. Though good luck figuring it out. It's not simply a case of "getting your hands on the data" -- that's just test score data. The "data" that you're really after is the behavior and relationships among the various players -- and they're not likely to reveal that much to outsiders.

There's also likely an understanding that the test is designed to get the Children Who Matter into the Schools That Matter. If they don't, why, the global economy could unravel or blow up in 20-30 years. How could America run itself without the right children getting into the right schools? So, you cut them some slack in advance appreciation for the all the society-holding-together work their children will be contributing throughout their lives. Like driving home-ownership rates up to 100%, handing out mortgages to illiterate Mexican strawberry-pickers, opening the floodgates of immigration, and so on.

In summary -- time for the IQ crowd to stop pretending we have a meritocracy these days, to stop being such naive pawns in the elite's game of self-advancement. Intra-elite competition couldn't get any fiercer (although stay tuned for some scenes from next week's episode), and evidence of "rating inflation" of one kind or another has been obvious for decades now. As elite households fight more ruthlessly against one another in naked self-promotion, they'll result to whatever it takes. We don't live in a restrained, sportsmanslike meritocracy but in a no-holds-barred war of all against all.