I read some of Wendy Doniger’s translation of the The Rig Veda. It’s about ~10% of the hymns in the whole work, but the author claims they’re the more important and evocative ones. There is a reasonable amount of commentary as well.
Two things so far. First, little similarities between Indo-European mythologies I was not aware of, such as the relationship between Indra and his father and Zeus and his father. Second, the Vedic Aryans were truly barbarians. I do not say that in a pejorative sense, but simply descriptive in that these are people who are outside of the gates of civilization. They were most def most total bros.
Reading some of Richard Haier’s The Neuroscience of Intelligence (I got a review copy, though I forgot I’d gotten a Kindle edition earlier). It is a short work, and though I haven’t gotten much through it it reminds me somewhat of Stuart Ritchie’s Intelligence: All that Matters. The main difference is that there is more of a focus on neuroscience.
Psychometrics, like the cognitive anthropology of religion, is a field I take some interest in, but mostly I’ve gotten what I want out of it and do not follow it closely anymore. That being said, I thought I would bring up an issue in relation to intelligence tests.
It is common to assert among many, including many biologists I know, that intelligence testing only measures how well you can take a test. This is false. It is well known that intelligence testing robustly predicts later academic performance to a reasonable degree of correlation. Of course a correlation of 0.50 can be highly significant, and also have lots of exceptions. But that is not a rebuttal, because no psychometrician would assert that their instrument is a perfect predictor, in large part because they also agree that academic performance has other major dimensions, such as conscientiousness, which are not accounted for by these tests.
Probably the major issue that highly educated people do not account for is range restriction. The issue is simple, but often overlooked. One of the professors I TAed for once explained to a class his graduate school did a survey and the correspondence between GRE score and grades to later scientific achievement was low to nonexistent. I asked him what university he went to. He said Stanford, and I immediately pointed out to him that Stanford graduate students are not a typical sample. He grasped what I was getting at because as a biologist he understands range restriction in other contexts, and we did not engage in a debate on this issue any further.
An interesting chart from the book, derived from the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, illustrates that standardized tests are highly predictive, even when you move many sigmas from the mean. Below are results for mathematically gifted 13 year olds and their outcomes as a function of their result on the math SAT at that age:
Remember that a math score of 450 for a 13 year old is not that bad. So the kids in the 700 range are truly exceptional.
To me the regional differences in voting in France are fascinating. I suppose I’ll get the raw data and look at some point myself. More rural de-industrialized areas went for Le Pen, as did the far south, which has long had tensions with its Muslim population (and where the pied-noir population tended to settle; randomly I just found out that the actress Eva Green has a Sephardic Jewish pied-noir mother).
For a while several readers have complained that the archives are incomplete. There are two reasons for this.
One reason is that they were from RSS feeds and so in some cases the source website did not show the whole post. This leads to a cutting off of most of the content. The second reason is that about six months ago I mistakenly removed several years of posts on the aggregator website, so there was a major gap between 2013 and later.
Thankfully Ron Unz’s IT guy had formatted a version of the websites that put them into MySQL files. Because of different versions of WordPress it has taken about a week tinkering here and there, but the full archives are now online (see to the right). Please note that some of the older ones are going to be wonky because of CMS changes (e.g., going from blogger to movable type to blogger to WordPress).
Aside from reader demand one reason I set the archives up is that my archives are pretty valuable for Google. The archives went live overnight and Google has already been hitting them as Analytics tells me that organic search has shot way up.
This is important. I am frankly disturbed how social media drives much of the traffic to this website. Facebook is pretty opaque; you don’t know who the referral is from and what they’re saying. Twitter, I’m not sure Twitter will be around much longer (I think most of the Twitter referral is at least from me).The days of getting links from other blogs are pretty much gone from what I can tell (and to be honest, I don’t link to other blogs much because I don’t 8read other blogs much anymore)
Google is in many ways a monopoly, but it’s another pipeline to get traffic and have some visibility. More is better.
In the near future I think a lot of ‘media’ is going to disaggregate. We’ve seen many prominent bloggers become the media or join the media. That’s fine, but at some point in the next decade or so I wonder if the media landscape will thin out even more than it has today.
Scientific blogging is in many ways on a downswing. Many scientists go straight to Twitter. There are problems with this. In relation to the epistasis paper in Science I mentioned earlier, here is a bloggy behind the scenes from the first author. The authors tweets are much harder to follow and may not be around years from now.
You have probably heard about the controversy around Rebeca Tuvel, This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like. The problem is with the “academics.” The rank-and-file students are much more tolerant. And it’s not all of the academia. Frankly it is those fields populated by style, posing, and signaling, rather than substance. I think this will take care of itself. These people burn witches for fun and profit. Once it’s less fun, and there’s no profit, they’ll move on.
Is there any reason the public funds should support this behavior:
Others went further and supported Tuvel in private while actually attacking her in public. In private messages, these people apologized for what she must be going through, while in public they fanned the flames of hatred and bile on social media. The question is, why did so many scholars, especially feminists, express one sentiment behind closed doors and another out in the open? Why were so many others afraid to say anything in public?
The worst thing for Tuvel is that she now truly knows what craven cretins her colleagues and peers are.
Just curious if readers are finding many 503’s? I think I finally tweaked the varnish restart script appropriately so that this doesn’t happen much, though I’m worried about comments.
Just a quick shout out to those who are using Amazon link to buy stuff. Looks like more people are using this option.
King James asserted that “No Bishop, No King.” I think this was wrong. But what follows from what? That is the question. What if we all agree that truth is not the goal, but social harmony is. What follows from that? I have some ideas. More for later….
Hope the Wonder Woman movie isn’t ruined by DC’s kiss of death.
“It is common to assert among many, including many biologists I know, that intelligence testing only measures how well you can take a test. This is false. It is well known that intelligence testing robustly predicts later academic performance”
Does this not simply reflect the fact that doing well on any IQ test can predict that you will do well on any of hundreds of similar tests?
I think the point is that some people’s brains do not interact with written language very well, or spoken language very well, or that they do not have a high ability or desire to sit still and read and write and answer questions for hours on end.
So if IQ tests are, by necessity, absolutely based on specific language skills, then that conflicts with my definition of intelligence. I know people who sound very stupid when they speak, and have a hard time writing papers or giving reports, yet can solve complicated physics and math problems all day.
Are they not intelligent?
I watched a Jordan Peterson lecture on Youtube recently where he was saying that intelligence + conscientiousness (or industriousness, but he says no one understands where industriousness comes from or what it correlates to) is highly predictive of good life outcomes. (No surprise.) But he particularly emphasized a point that physical exercise (both cardio and weights) is good for maintaining cognitive ability with ageing (fluid intelligence, I guess). It’s logical – the brain weighs only 2% of total body weight, but uses 20% of blood supply. Then recently James Thompson blogged about this at Unz. His findings were confirmatory. What surprised me somewhat was that Tai Chi showed up particularly well for this (although he had smaller samples for Tai Chi than for other things). He also found that frequency is important (i.e. daily), more so than intensity or duration, although they would obviously count more for other things, like cardio-vascular fitness and maintenance of muscle mass.
This got me thinking, because I practice Tai Chi daily, without really being sure why I’m doing it – more curiosity than anything, I guess. I just started to learn it and found that practicing it every day made me feel better, so I just kept it up until I had learned the whole damned thing (which takes some learning – the most common Yang Style has 88 separate movements, some of which are quite elaborate, and Teacher (in my case a middle aged Chinese woman and notably harsh critic, but you need that) hammers home that precision of movement is very important, as is daily repetition. The obvious things are that Tai Chi is utterly useless for maintaining upper body strength; it’s reasonably tough on the legs, but mostly it’s good for maintaining/improving motor skills and balance. But for cognitive ability? You have to do different precise movements with arms and legs all at the same time, like walking while chewing gum but several orders of magnitude more difficult than that; it takes quite a while to get through it just one time (about 20 minutes just to run through the full thing once); and for the duration you need to concentrate/focus on what you are doing, and obviously remember the full sequence of movements, or you just lose track of where you are. It’s definitely in the category of ‘moving meditation’ – mind ‘in the now’ and completely clear of distraction for the duration, or ‘empty mind’ or however people like to phrase it. It’s not magical.
There’s one more thought I had about it – I observe among the Chinese community I live in that most people who practice it regularly do so in groups (which is helpful because it helps prevent forgetting where you are or what comes next) which has a social component, i.e. practice sessions are normally followed by a group collective chin-wag, which I read is also helpful for maintaining cognitive ability, i.e. interaction with other humans, needing to understand, respond, avoidance of feelings of isolation among older people, etc.
Sorry, this is kind of long, but Thompson’s finding really interested me. Tai Chi just by itself is not enough, in my book, because of the things it doesn’t do – mainly to do with maintenance of muscle mass and cardio vascular fitness. I really don’t think it does much at all for those things. But it is now on my ‘must do daily’ list, for sure.
If you do want to get back into reading on psychometrics, etc., there are worse people to read than Thompson. He seems pretty methodical, thorough and knowledgeable.
I’m not recommending Tai Chi for everyone – it took me 6 months of diligent daily practice for an hour to learn all of the movements, and lots of people who do it tell me I will need another 10 years of daily practice to perfect it – sounds tedious, but it’s really not; just once daily is enough to remember it and keep improving, and it’s good for 20 minutes of ‘quiet mind’ time. If Thompson’s finding is borne out, it’s maybe something to think about learning for people who are heading into old age and worried about the onset of senility. As your daily physical exercise workout? No, you need other stuff as well.
No 503 on that monster, but I took the precaution of tying it out, proofing it and then pasting it in. The one time I got 503’d, I took a long time to compose the comment, and think that might have been a factor.
Also looking forward to the Wonder Woman film.
One of my long-standing scientific interests is paleontology. I used to read dozens of paleoblogs back in the day, starting with my discovery of Darren Naish and working my way through different people who he either referenced or who commented on his blog. I still use feedly to follow various things via RSS, but out of that original crew of paleo-bloggers, most have either stopped posting entirely or slowed down considerably – to the point that it’s sometimes months between posts. The old Dinosaur Mailing List is pretty inactive too. The clincher to me showing how far things had decayed was that a major paper came out last year – with a new dinosaur discovery, showing purportedly the most basal sauropodomorph to date – so basal it was still carnivorous and morphologically not very different from a theropod – and not a single blogger even bothered to discuss it. I only found out about it early this year when looking through Wikipedia.
I’m guessing this stuff has moved to Twitter, but when I look through Twitter I just see short messages back and forth. Much of it is amusing, but not much of it is illuminating, except when people link to actual articles from real media. It’s so strange to me how we’ve moved backwards on this from say 15 years ago.
I would recommend caution in using Doniger’s translation. Here is, e.g., criticism of her translations (including of the book you mention) by the way more eminent Michael Witzel of Harvard (who is also very bitter in his criticism of Hindutva, and is not liked by Hindutvavadis including myself):
http://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology_list.indology.info/1995-November/003513.html
http://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology_list.indology.info/1995-November/003511.html
His conclusions: “In short: UNRELIABLE and idiosyncratic.”
and
“Simple question: if *that* much is wrong in just one story (and this is a
small selection only!) — what about the rest of this book and her other
translations?
Facit: It might have been better to have used the old translations and to
have added her Freudian interpretation to them…
In sum: The “translation” simply is UNREALIABLE.”
”
(boldface/emphasis mine)
I have been trying to ‘get into’ Twitter for at least 8 years. It just takes too much work, and not enough reward.
At least on Instagram I can get 10,000 followers, ~1000 likes per pic, and a few dozen comments for daily photos of random stuff I didn’t have to waste much time to think about.
As a user, very high reward for almost zero work. And I then only have to see ads that look like fantastic photos from my imaginary friends in the islands somewhere.
Wendy Doniger: I read her “The Hindus: An Alternative History”. To me it seemed to be a literary analysis of Hindu texts as if they were historical artifacts, without any demonstration that they were historical artifacts or had any connection to any established history. Of course, history as a subject is very thin on the ground in India because the Hindus seemed to have very little interest in it. But, that may be an illusion. Another issue is whether there is such a thing as Hinduism, except to the extent that native elites tried to explain their rituals, beliefs, and customs to imperial interlocutors from Abrahamic traditions (Mughal and British).
Eva Green: I wanted her to be the new Dr. Who. Additionally, I thought the show could be improved by changing the Time Machine so it could not transport the Doctor’s clothing.
Another Jewish pied-noir was Jacques Derrida, yimakh shemo v’zikhro.
Rebecca Tuvel: You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. On one hand, no one should be treated that way. On the other hand, her thesis is perfectly silly, On the gripping hand, her attackers did not attack her for that reason, they attacked her because of her insufficient zeal for their non-sense.
The adage: “The revolution always devours its children”. Applies to feminists as well Jacobins and Soviets. In this case the instability is magnified by the belief common among feminist votaries, that there is no objective reality. Thus, Bruce Jenner becomes “Caitlyn” and proves that women can be just as good athletes as men.
The problem that you and I have Razib, is that you cannot argue with these people. “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts” does not apply to people who reject the very idea of fact. All we can do is sit back and watch them torture each other over ever finer points of doctrine.
regional differences in voting in France: Much of French history is the story of the elite in Paris struggling to unify and homogenize the French cultural area under their control. It has been a multi-pronged and centuries long effort. The theme unifies the reigns of the Bourbons, the revolutionaries, Napoleon, and even de Gaulle.
Le Pen appears to have far too much historical and political baggage to ever break through. But, we should not be surprised if someone with cleaner hands can find a way to mobilize her supporters and gather other people with resentments against the Parisian Elites into a majority.
A Note here about Le Pen. She is a far nastier piece of work than most American conservatives appreciate. Claire Berlinski, an American who wrote a laudatory biography of Margaret Thatcher, tries to explain how nasty in Eight Postcards from Paris on Election Eve. Le Pen is a national socialist. We should be happy that she will not be President of France.
France is not out of the woods, however. Macron would seem to be a French word meaning robot. He cannot/will not do much to change the economic and cultural disintegration of France.
I think the point is that some people’s brains do not interact with written language very well, or spoken language very well, or that they do not have a high ability or desire to sit still and read and write and answer questions for hours on end.
raven’s progressive matrices have among the highest g-loadings of any intelligence test
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices
if you ever comment on this topic in other places or to other people i’d suggest you stuart’s book or haier’s. it will clear up these confusions.
Thanks. I’ll definitely check out those books.
As for raven’s progressive matrices, or similar tests, I guess I don’t see how that changes anything.
People have to both understand the instructions, and have a desire to do well on the tests to get a good score.
There are certainly people who do not care, and people who panic or have overwhelming anxiety, etc.
If that is all part of the definition of general intelligence, then I’m fine with that. And I agree that making predictions about future success is why the tests exist anyway.
I was only trying to explain why some people disagree. I am just saying that the reason that some people disagree is because this is not the only definition of ‘intelligence’ that many people have in their mind (although that may in fact be the dictionary definition).
Perhaps it’s in those books, but how can you test someone who doesn’t want to get a good score on the test?
Strong words on Derrida. Pardon my ignorance, but why do we blot out his name?
Random question for Razib in the open thread. Does the Kindle handle non-fiction books (with graphs, maps, figures) well?
I have a Kobo (very popular in Canada) and non-fiction is a disaster with it. Graphics are too small to be seen. I’ve gone back to dead trees for anything that has diagrams.
Because he glorified Nazis.
Sex and gene expression in humans. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170504104342.htm
A: “Aryan invasion into India is for realz!”
I: “No, actually the facts clearly show that out-of-India is the only possible explanation.”
A:”Wrong! From the steppe they came, and DNA evidence proves it. Checkmate Indian nationalists!”
I: “Dats rayciss neocolonialist pseudoscience!”
A: “Well, well, my R1a brother…”
I: “We wuz Rajas!”
A:“We haz Reich lab!”
I: “Harappa! Indus Valley! – we had civilization long before any invasion. “
A:”But the Kalash people cluster with Europeans…”
A:”But the Sarasvati River!”
(shouting match continues indefinitely)