IQ matters when it matters
As many have noted, The New Republic is now publishing perceptions that Sonia Sotomayor is not that intelligent. Granted, even if affirmative action played a role in her acceptance to Princeton and Yale law school, the fact that she graduated and passed the bar suggests a minimum threshold of ability. But that’s not good enough, it seems that many liberals would like someone who can go toe-to-toe with the conservatives on the court intellectually, and she doesn’t pass the grade on that elevated level. When the stakes are high, and a Supreme Court position is arguably one of the most powerful positions within the American government, the perceived marginal returns on more g become stark for those who would pooh-pooh it in other contexts.
Addendum: As noted in the comments, yes, it doesn’t take a genius to know how political confederates want you to rule. I happen to think that most moral & political reasoning is really moral & political rationalization. So the key is simply to find people who can argue in a crisp manner in favor of positions they already hold a priori. More generally I accept there is some systematic tendencies in terms of what the smart, as opposed to the dumb, believe, regardless of their ideology. See The Myth of the Rational Voter for examples. But let’s not confuse the signal for the noise.
the new republic is not liberal.
the new republic is not liberal.
only if you average in foreign policy. but on domestic stuff it is. now. if moderately so (aside from jaime kirchick is the token non-liberal who doesn’t have a foreign policy related beat).
yes, lawyers are exceptionally well known as pooh-pahers of g. Come on, razib.
But I absolutely question the marginal returns on intelligence for Supreme Court justices. Truth is they agree 9-0 on the easy decisions and then split along partisan lines on the more politically charged stuff. How smart do you have to be to just vote the liberal/conservative line on everything, really? Maybe it’d be different for the swing votes, but Souter’s replacement won’t be a swing vote.
lawyers are exceptionally well known as pooh-pahers of g
when it come to outside of their field they are. inside of their field, yes, tier level and LSAT matter a lot. though that’s generalizable.
How smart do you have to be to just vote the liberal/conservative line on everything, really?
agreed. but appearances matter. it is important for some reason to be able to cleverly reason after the fact so as to rationalize an opinion you hold before the fact. after all, no one wants their own group (in this case liberals) to seem less intelligent than another group if you can’t help it!
btw raft, the last time i was told (the last of many, granted) by someone that they didn’t believe in IQ, it was a lawyer….
Well, Sotomayor may not be smart, but that’s because of her culture and upbringing. Now that Kagan woman, she’s smart because her culture and upbringing made her so.
it is important for some reason to be able to cleverly reason after the fact so as to rationalize an opinion you hold before the fact
That’s integral to Alexander aka “Sasha” Volokh’s argument in Choosing Interpretive Methods: A Positive Theory of Judges and Everyone Else.
What does it matter whether Sotomayor is smart or not? It bothers Jeffrey Rosen because he’s a smart aleck himself, from a culture that values smart aleckness. Once Sotomayor is a justice, her vote’s as good as Oliver Wendell Holmes. Why does she have to convince anyone of anything? Is it because Rosen is scared that she’s gonna be a liberal version of Clarence Thomas, a reliable vote on his side, but not persuasive to wafflers or impressive to future historians of the court?
Whoever Obama nominates is going to be confirmed, so that’s not the issue. I’m a bit puzzled.
Diana,
What does it matter whether Sotomayor is smart or not?
Rosen makes very clear why some Democrats wants a smart justice: “Most are Democrats and all of them want President Obama to appoint a judicial star of the highest intellectual caliber who has the potential to change the direction of the court.”
Wikipedia says:
“After graduating with an A.B. from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1976, Sotomayor obtained her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1979, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. “
Don’t have a deep intuition for how smart SC justices are, but I doubt this person is dumb by any measure
I really have to wonder if there’s anything to this. Anyone can claim that she’s unintelligent, but I see no solid evidence that she is. Rather, as D points out, her background strongly suggests otherwise.
“Most are Democrats and all of them want President Obama to appoint a judicial star of the highest intellectual caliber who has the potential to change the direction of the court.”
Yes I read that and I don’t understand it. Please explain how a smart liberal is going to change the direction of the court in the way that a mediocre liberal will not.
Do they think that a REALLY SMART liberal judge is going to convince John Roberts or Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia to vote liberal? How does this work?
“Oh boy, Sandra, you are so smart that I am going to forsake a lifetime of strict conservatism and vote for gay marriage!”
It’s ridiculous.
Obama will appoint a liberal judge. One of the more refreshing things about the current non-debate is the lack of coyness about this. Every time a Supreme Court Justice resigns, you hear this phony debate about litmus tests and judicial temperament and politics. It’s hogwash – Presidents are politicians and so are judges.
This judge or that judge…won’t make that much of a difference. In fact this appointment is a wash anyway as Souter was one of the most liberal justices ever.
Meng Bomin & D,
I have no idea whether the criticism of Sotomayor in the Rosen piece is accurate or not. It could be a case of sour grapes and selective reporting. But you should not pretend that there is no evidence for questioning her skills when the article linked here in this thread is itself the evidence.
Academic backgrounds are fine, but I’m not sure why you would privilege them over a journalistic account. Is George Bush of the highest intellectual caliber because he went to Harvard and Yale? The elite tend to grade themselves on an entirely different curve than they grade the rest of the population.
Diana,
“Yes I read that and I don’t understand it. Please explain how a smart liberal is going to change the direction of the court in the way that a mediocre liberal will not.’
“Do they think that a REALLY SMART liberal judge is going to convince John Roberts or Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia to vote liberal? How does this work?”
Those three (or Alito)? No. Kennedy? Possibly.
And of course if you can get Kennedy to go along with your decision in a close vote, you’ll be writing the majority opinion.
Rosen makes very clear why some Democrats wants a smart justice: “Most are Democrats and all of them want President Obama to appoint a judicial star of the highest intellectual caliber who has the potential to change the direction of the court.”
It is generally agreed that Scalia is smart but has his well written opinions changed the direction of the court more than just his vote?
K.N.,
“It is generally agreed that Scalia is smart but has his well written opinions changed the direction of the court more than just his vote?”
Scalia is a special case since (although personally likeable) he is prickly and pointed in his opinions. So whatever he gained with colleagues on the court with his smarts, he might have lost through his lack of social graces. From what I have read, Scalia tended to alienate moderates on the bench by his pointed criticisms of their contradictory views.
brains has little relation to chances of being appointed to the SC. If brains were a serious criteria for consideration, Ronald Dworkin, Richard Posner, and Richard Falk would have been appointed long ago. But the first and last are considered too radically liberal and all of them may be too cerebral for the other justices to deal with.
“the article linked here in this thread is itself the evidence”
I call the article the allegation, not the evidence! It is also fairly thin on substance. Evidence would be a legal assessment of the logic of her opinions, articles she’s written etc.
“Academic backgrounds are fine, but I’m not sure why you would privilege them over a journalistic account. Is George Bush of the highest intellectual caliber because he went to Harvard and Yale?”
The relevant data are summa + law review editor. AA can help get her in (as legacy admissions and famous ancestors got Bush in) but a. especially by contrast the hardship seems pretty real b. they don’t get her academic distinctions. Maybe she’s a genius and maybe she’s not, but for now I weigh the objective evidence more than what seems like a hit piece. Of course when she’s questioned my Bayesian confidence goes down, but in this case, not by much, not yet.
D is right about the law review editor as evidence. The students who get in on that, especially at the prestigious schools, are the cream of the crop and another level beyond their fellow cohort.
D,
“I call the article the allegation, not the evidence! It is also fairly thin on substance. Evidence would be a legal assessment of the logic of her opinions, articles she’s written etc.”
The article is thinly sourced with people willing to go on the record. But since articles of this sensitive nature usually are thinly sourced, you basically have to assume that Rosen either has an ax to grind or is incompetent in his job as a reporter.
The relevant data are summa + law review editor.
Not impressive. What did she study? Latin American studies? Spanish? Did she even have to take an economics or statistics class in school? How about a math or science class? We need more details.
AA can help get her in (as legacy admissions and famous ancestors got Bush in) but a. especially by contrast the hardship seems pretty real b. they don’t get her academic distinctions. Maybe she’s a genius and maybe she’s not, but for now I weigh the objective evidence more than what seems like a hit piece. Of course when she’s questioned my Bayesian confidence goes down, but in this case, not by much, not yet.
Bush got reasonable grades at Yale for someone who 1) didn’t care about academics, 2) had a busy extra-curricular life, and 3) went to school during a period when many professors still weren’t embarrassed to give out bad grades.
Certainly a hard-working student with a modest intellectual endowment and few outside distractions could do much better.
D is right about the law review editor as evidence. The students who get in on that, especially at the prestigious schools, are the cream of the crop and another level beyond their fellow cohort.
You think? It doesn’t look particularly onerous to me, and it also appears there are some backdoor ways to get on the law review. And once you are on it, what’s to prevent you from making law review editor?
I also thought of this resume-filler when reading Rosen’s article:
“Her opinions, although competent, are viewed by former prosecutors as not especially clean or tight, and sometimes miss the forest for the trees. It’s customary, for example, for Second Circuit judges to circulate their draft opinions to invite a robust exchange of views. Sotomayor, several former clerks complained, rankled her colleagues by sending long memos that didn’t distinguish between substantive and trivial points, with petty editing suggestions–fixing typos and the like–rather than focusing on the core analytical issues.”
Sounds like just what the Supreme Court needs. A petty editor.
Here’s a longer bio. She didn’t just get “reasonable grades”, she graduated summa and got into Phi Beta Kappa. In fact she won the Pyne prize, which any Princeton alum will tell you is super fucking impressive. AND there’s editor yale law review. I think you’re reaching when you say you need a course transcript which is math intensive to accept claims of smartness, independent of GPA and class standing. By that logic no-one who’s not a scientist or economist or engineer can be smart.
Like her or not, why is it so hard to accept that she might in fact be a smart person? Sure, we’re looking for evidence of more than mere (or just) smarts, but I’d say the odds are pretty good she has a very high IQ.
But since articles of this sensitive nature usually are thinly sourced, you basically have to assume that Rosen either has an ax to grind or is incompetent in his job as a reporter.
Wha?? Why should it be more likely that a woman with these credentials is stupid than that a reporter might have an axe to grind (or limited competence or just want to write a high viewership article)?
D,
“She didn’t just get ‘reasonable grades’, she graduated summa and got into Phi Beta Kappa.”
I didn’t say Sotomayor got reasonable grades; I said Bush got reasonable grades at Yale, despite keeping a busy schedule while in school that had nothing to do with academics.
One can infer from that fact that a semi-bright student could do very well at an Ivy League school if she was mature, disciplined, and in a relatively easy field (i.e., Latin American studies).
“In fact she won the Pyne prize, which any Princeton alum will tell you is super fucking impressive.”
It sounds like a glorified citizenship award for good students.
AND there’s editor yale law review.
You apparently didn’t read my link.
“I think you’re reaching when you say you need a course transcript which is math intensive to accept claims of smartness, independent of GPA and class standing. By that logic no-one who’s not a scientist or economist or engineer can be smart. “
Analytical thinking is important, especially in the law. The main criticism of Sotomayor in the Rosen piece is that she doesn’t seem to be able to arrange her thoughts in a logically coherent fashion and prioritize what is important and what is not.
You do not have to be an economist, engineer, or scientist to demonstrate this kind of thinking, but you have to do something other than academically excel in a field like a Latin American studies program or wow the law review because of your mad editing skills.
“Wha?? Why should it be more likely that a woman with these credentials is stupid than that a reporter might have an axe to grind (or limited competence or just want to write a high viewership article)?”
I never said it was. You are having a difficult time following this discussion. I said in one of my first posts on this subject that I had no idea whether the criticism in the Rosen piece was accurate or not.
I just don’t get as starry-eyed as you do at academic awards that demonstrate no special intellectual capacity.
They have it down to a science by now.
(1) lure you in by putting a thumb on the scales for the vast majority of NAMs via AA
(2) and simultaneously place a swirling miasma of uncertainty around AA, such that no one person is ever definitively marked as benefiting from AA at any point. Unlike a scholarship or named award, it is by no means a bragging point.
This secrecy gives them plausible deniability. Indeed, even saying that NAM X benefited from AA is prima facie racist, despite the fact that at a statistical level it is almost a certainty[1].
That “almost” is key. The left specializes in picking out exceptions like Obama and Sotomayor — who might well have succeeded without AA — and brandishing them as rules[2].
But in the end it doesn’t matter whether they are geniuses or AA beneficiaries or both (they are not exclusive categories — second chances help a lot of smart people). What matters is that they are leftists, and leftists have always been a coalition of both university professors and underclass illiterates. Their policies are predictable, consistent, and negative. That’s what really matters.
The argument between TNR and the White House is about how effectively Sotomayor will be able to drag the country even further to the left, not whether that endpoint is desirable. Note in particular the sharp difference in tone from the Bush administration, when the media rose up as one to demand a “moderate” rather than a “divisive, partisan” figure for the Court. But when the White House Press Corps is the auxiliary (or controller?) of the White House, such events are predictable.
[1] And this secrecy is very precious to them. It required a Supreme Court case to get Michigan to publish the quantitative evidence showing that you got more points for being black than you did for having a perfect SAT.
[2] So does the respectable right, but of course that is because they are in a defensive crouch, stumbling backward with their hands over their head to ward off the unremitting assault of the left. The predictable result is Michael Steele and Alan Keyes — even Bobby Jindal — anything to prove they are not racists.
Look. I’ve already acknowledged that AA might be implicated in her admissions, and said that obviously the TNR piece doesn’t increase my bayesian confidence in her. Also, here’s some reason to take the hit-piece idea seriously.
Meanwhile, you bend over backwards to take an unsourced article seriously, while also insisting that none of the honors this woman’s won matter much. The Princeton/Yale law admits are tarnished coz of AA, though at least in the first instance she’d seem to have as good a claim for a helping hand as any. Fine. The GPA doesn’t matter because any semi-smart person can do well given dedication and hard work – proof being Bush with his “extracurriculars.” Finally you dismiss what Princeton calls its highest undergraduate prize because it includes extracurriculars among selection criteria. Of course, the claim that she was a semi-smart, mere hard worker would conflict with taking on extracurriculars and winning on that basis while getting stellar GPAs, but what of it? No doubt the award process is rigged the same way law review editorship is.
I’ve already acknowledged that AA might be implicated in her admissions
Sure. But independent of the Sotomayor issue, have you done the calculation? Do you know what fraction of NAMs benefit from AA? It’s an instructive thing to do. Certainly opened my eyes.
I would suggest doing the following:
1. Start with the published SAT score distributions for different ethnicities (College Board has them).
2. Pull down the 25th, 50th, 75th SAT distributions for the Ivies + peer institutions (tabulated in the Princeton Review college guides and in other places)
3. Determine the average number of NAMs over freshman/soph/junior/senior year at each school (easily available on their diversity pages)
4. Determine the number of NAMs at high school age (available from the Census)
Now you can determine the number of NAMs who would actually be there if the cutoff corresponded one-to-one with IQ, or was even close. You will find that it’s actually very well modeled by a linear one-to-one cutoff *within each racial group*.
Or you can look at La Griffe’s site, where he has already done a similar calculation.
Before doing it though, what percentage of NAMs at elite institutions do you believe are there on a merit basis? It’s useful to guess first. There’s no dishonor in being wrong. I was wildly off many years ago when I first guessed, before actually working out the numbers.
D,
Your summation of my points is heart-felt, but inaccurate.
“Meanwhile, you bend over backwards to take an unsourced article seriously, while also insisting that none of the honors this woman’s won matter much. The Princeton/Yale law admits are tarnished coz of AA, though at least in the first instance she’d seem to have as good a claim for a helping hand as any. Fine. The GPA doesn’t matter because any semi-smart person can do well given dedication and hard work – proof being Bush with his “extracurriculars.” Finally you dismiss what Princeton calls its highest undergraduate prize because it includes extracurriculars among selection criteria. Of course, the claim that she was a semi-smart, mere hard worker would conflict with taking on extracurriculars and winning on that basis while getting stellar GPAs, but what of it? No doubt the award process is rigged the same way law review editorship is.”
In order…
* I remind you, again, that I do not know if the Rosen piece is accurate or not. This is the third time now that I’ve said this. So it’s wrong to say that I have bent over backwards to take it seriously.
* Yes, I don’t think awards matter that much in assessing top-flight intellect. I’ve won my share of awards and scholarships, and most of them are bullshit. It can often be no more than the result of a teacher taking a liking to you and suggesting you fill out a form while they offer their recommendation. Who knows for sure what happens from there.
* Yes, admittance into Princeton and Yale (and other excellent schools) for favored minorities is so comparatively easy that those schools are literally beating down doors to get minimally qualified students from those categories into their schools.
* The Pyne Prize is obviously for far more than good grades. Two of the three qualities mentioned for the award are “leadership” and “personal character” — neither of which requires even average intellect.
Now Sotomayor may be reasonably, even exceptionally, bright. I don’t know. But I do know that just because someone graduated summa cum laude at Princeton and was an editor at the Yale law review doesn’t make them an intellect of the highest caliber.
Sure. But independent of the Sotomayor issue, have you done the calculation? Do you know what fraction of NAMs benefit from AA?
I can quote you AA numbers, both from California in the 90s and in the form of SAT score differentials. None of which pertains to whether a particular person who graduated in the top of the class needed it four years earlier. (If so, incidentally, I’d regard that as an uncontroversial success of the scheme, especially given all the wholly undeserving people of all backgrounds who get in via various carefully maintained backdoors)
But you should not pretend that there is no evidence for questioning her skills when the article linked here in this thread is itself the evidence.
The article consisted entirely of unattributed quotes. It’s classic agenda-driven rumor-mongering. It’s only evidence that someone doesn’t like Sotomeyer, and that the New Republic is willing to pass on their spin.
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” is not a valid rule.
Pincher, by your standard most justices are stupid, because they studied law instead of math. So nothing you’re saying is relevant to Sotomeyer’s appointment — she’s being compared to other people in law, not to the members of the Institute for Advanced Studies.
I have no idea what your agenda is, but you sound like an idiot. You start out by throwing out all the available information relative to Sotomeyer’s qualifications, which leaves nothing on the table but a political smear job made up entirely of anonymous quotes.
If there’s some kind of drinking game going on about the highest-IQ justices, I suppose I’ll vote for the one with the most math, but law is not at all math-intensive. What does this all have to do with Sotomeyer’s appointment?
John Emerson,
“Pincher, by your standard most justices are stupid, because they studied law instead of math.”
That’s not my standard, so right out of the gate you take a wrong turn.
” I have no idea what your agenda is, but you sound like an idiot. You start out by throwing out all the available information relative to Sotomeyer’s qualifications, which leaves nothing on the table but a political smear job made up entirely of anonymous quotes. “
I didn’t throw them out. Nor did I put the article above the qualifications listed for Sotomayor.
One thing is for sure: Regardless of what this discussion proves about Sotomayor’s IQ, it’s been pretty damning in showing your intellectual limitations.
(And please note the spelling of Sotomayor’s name. If you’re going to defend the woman with such fierce attachment, like a boy defending his mommy, you should at least know how to spell her name.)
The article consisted entirely of unattributed quotes. It’s classic agenda-driven rumor-mongering. It’s only evidence that someone doesn’t like Sotomeyer, and that the New Republic is willing to pass on their spin.
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” is not a valid rule.
It’s also not a bad approach. Someone who notices smoke should at least be looking for fire.
And since you are against unattributed quotes in journalism, I guess that means we need to toss out the Woodward/Bernstein approach to Watergate, as well as many other journalistic coups made over the last few decades.
Unattributed pieces in journalism are so common that they are hardy even noteworthy. Readers should understand that the piece is unattributed, but it doesn’t automatically damn it any more than it damns hundreds of other unattributed pieces published every year. Much of the best journalism has to rely on sources who will not go on the record.
More generally I accept there is some systematic tendencies in terms of what the smart, as opposed to the dumb, believe regardless of their ideology.
This is all too true. One of the greatest problems is that many dumb people are insane enough to believe that they can, and should, lead smart people. Usually they are simply called bullies, but bullies can be highly effective manipulators, in that they can persuade (relatively) smart people to side with them.
Conventionalism is the most powerful weapon of bullies; many have appealed to the supposed authority of the masses to convince otherwise intelligent people that they have some sort of wisdom, coming with it a belief that their ideas should govern the lives of every single human being. This “wisdom” I speak of can come in many forms, deriving from a wide spectrum of ideologies that can span from multiple intelligence theories (see Gardner et al) on the Left to good old fashioned religious fundamentalism on the so-called Right.
In any case, even the most ardent political junkies (I am speaking of myself especially) need a break from political debating; I think that (for example) intelligent and attractive females are wise to distance themselves from politics–why bother with such lies and follies when one can just have a good time? Of course, not surprisingly, political ideologies and sex tend not to mix, thus the Anti-Sex League in Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four.
One thing is for sure, Pincher: your voluminous contributions to this thread have contributed nothing. You claim that you are agnostic about the smear job, but have brought forward no other evidence against Sotomayor (and THANK YOU for correcting my spelling, Mr. High I.Q!!)
Instead you’ve simply dismissed with a wave of the hand all of the information about Sotomayor confirming here competence.
No, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire”, is a bad approach. It makes you a sucker for every blackmailer and slime artist who comes down the line.
You might read up on the debate about unattributed sources.
…ok guys, this looks like it’s turning into a more normal political thread, so i’m closing it. i apologize ahead of time to those who feel they weren’t allowed to get their punches in….