Three new Insider pieces since last week: My annual season predictions post, a Grapefruit League scouting roundup (including Phils, Tigers, O’s, Rays, Pirates, and Atlanta prospects), and a draft blog post on three possible first rounders. No chat this past week, as I’m in North Carolina for the NHSI and am headed over to East Carolina today to see the two big bats for Wichita State.
Smart Baseball is now out in paperback, just in time to put one in every Easter basket you hand out this year.
And now, the links…
- Vox’s Ezra Klein dissects the insidious racism behind Sam Harris and Charles Murray’s claims that there are actual, inborn IQ differences between races. (There almost certainly aren’t.) Harris, perhaps more widely known for his atheist writings and advocacy, responded by throwing a tantrum where he revealed private emails between him and Klein that revealed Harris himself to be by turns intransigent and an expert goalpost-mover.
- The Guardian’s long read of the week is by a woman suing over her “dream” internship with the publication Monocle for unpaid wages.
- The Atlantic, an intellectual literary magazine with a progressive tradition that dates back well over 100 years, hired alt-right troll Kevin Williamson, who proposed hanging all women who’d had abortions and referred to a black kid as 3/5 of a person when he wasn’t referring to the kid’s “primate gestures.”
- A Stoneman-Douglas student writes in the NY Times that her efforts to be kind to mass murderer Nicholas Cruz did nothing to prevent him from shooting up the school.
- The Washington Post reports that the maker of Peeps is trying to end its pension, leading to a protracted fight with its union and an ongoing lawsuit.
- Senator James Lankford (R) of Oklahoma spoke to NPR of continuing effort by Russian troll farms to sow dissent online in the U.S., often by weighing in on both sides of hot-button issues.
- Indiana’s Republican government appears to wish to emulate other states to its south, first with the anti-LGBT bill of a few years ago and now with a new bill that stigmatizes any woman who’s had an abortion and later reports any physical or psychological problems related to it.
- The plastic residues from take-out food containers are polluting the world’s waterways, as these single-use items don’t biodegrade, but instead break down into smaller and smaller particles of plastic.
- More from the Washington Post – I subscribe, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in good journalism and current events – on how studies of the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum give researchers more evidence to fuel projections of the damage climate change will do to the earth.
- Two great baseball articles this week, both connected to Nats players and authored by the Washington Post’s Chelsea Janes. The first is a superb profile of Bryce Harper as the young superstar begins his walk year before free agency. The second profiles Eireann Dolan and her husband Sean Doolittle, calling them baseball’s most ‘woke’ couple.
- Former New York Giants player Corey Widmer withdrew his name from Montana Football Hall of Fame consideration because of the sport’s link to concussions and CTE.
- Two-time Top Chef alum Mike Isabella is facing multiple sexual harassment accusations.
- Staring at tiny screens is ruining our eyes — and perhaps also making us pay less attention than ever to the world around us.
- Facebook’s ad-tracking scandal isn’t just limited to that site; Most online publishing relies on the technology, even the outlets who are busy writing about Facebook’s privacy ‘problem.’
- Cancer researchers discovered lung tumors with rudimentary digestive tracts, which probably isn’t as terrifying as it sounds but would make a good starting point for a sci-fi/horror film.
- Florida’s legislature just can’t stop making public education there worse, such as allowing creationism into classrooms and, now, through state lawmakers ignoring conflicts of interest in pushing school choice laws. The swamp you want to drain may be in Tallahassee.
- My friend Kelly Swails, an author of fantasy and YA fiction, wrote about changing her lifelong baseball rooting interest as a result of love, life, and being in the right ballpark at the right time.
Doolittle and Dolan seem like pretty awesome people. As a Star Wars nerd, I appreciate their willingness to embrace their love of it.
As a Giants fan, I remember Widmer as a hard-working, often taken for granted player during an era where the Giants were more often mediocre to bad than good. Reading the story about him earlier this week brought tears to my eyes.
And you’re not going to trick me into paying for the Washington Post, KLaw. They’re nothing more than fake news lobbyists for Amazon who should register as such! 😛
Re: Isabella….is anyone who watched TC Season 6&8 at all surprised about this revelation? I’m actually surprised it took this long for a story like this to come out.
Super Bowl winning quarterback Mark Rypien opened up about his bouts of depression and suicidal thoughts this week and he thinks the concussions he suffered during his NFL career are contributing to it. His cousin is former NHL player Rick Rypien, who also suffered from depression and eventually took his own life a few years ago. Of course, hockey is another sport that causes a lot of concussions.
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2018/mar/30/walking-his-darkest-path-mark-rypiens-long-struggl/#/0
I’m not a biologist and this isn’t a hill I care enough about to die on, but what’s your basis for saying “there almost certainly aren’t” inbred IQ differences between races? Is there even close to a scientific consensus on that? I could be wrong because some nuances within the Vox article were confusing for me, but I believe it even admits there’s no consensus.
I also don’t think it’s helpful to throw the term “racist” around so lightly. Was Sam doing or saying anything racist? He was evaluating data, no?
Geneticist here. I won’t speak for others, but in my opinion there is scant evidence for genetic differences in IQ between races, which does mean there may be some difference. But, there is overwhelming evidence for strong environmental effects. The Flynn effect was mentioned, where average IQs across populations are increasing over time. Another strong example is adoption, where poor children adopted by the wealthy see an increase of IQ between 10-20 points, which is obviously huge. In my opinion, anyone arguing that there *must* be genetic differences that explain the racial IQ gap are espousing pseudoscientific racism.
As a psych major who once took a course from Flynn*, I can tell you that the evidence for strong environmental effects in IQ testing is overwhelming.
If you’re interested in the issue, look up the Flynn Effect which shows that populations consistently rise in IQ over time. Thanks to institutions like the Israeli military, there’s data for whole populations getting tested for decades. If IQ was a measure of some sort innate intelligence (like it’s supposed to be) separate from education, information, or culture that shouldn’t happen – not unless the average person in Flynn’s day was a low-grade moron compared to young people today, which he told us did not anecdotally appear to be the case.
None of this disproves the ideas of innate differences between races, but it means that observed differences are a combination of (hypothesized) innate racial differences plus (known to be real) environmental effects. So anyone in a hurry to conclude there are innate differences without doing the work of trying to control for environment (very difficult to do on a large scale) is not having the serious intellectual discussion they imagine, and when it’s someone whose written about the issue as long as Murray has and they’re not even discussing the environment issue (which the Vox piece points out) it looks *willfully* obtuse. Hence the accusations of racism.
(*Flynn was a visiting professor teaching a summer class at my school. He was a nice guy and self-described “bitter old socialist,” and we had no idea he was famous until afterward. From up close, he didn’t look famous.)
This Guardian longread goes into greater depth on how race science is bogus. Among other problems with this bullshit cover for racism, there isn’t an intelligence gene, or even a specific set of identified genes for intelligence. You’ve inadvertently mimicked this quote from the article: “Defenders of race science claim they are simply describing the facts as they are.” They’re not; these “facts” aren’t.
Also, I’ve trashed a comment from someone else who decided it was appropriate to attack me personally over this topic.
As a psych major who once took a course from Flynn*, I can tell you that the evidence for strong environmental effects in IQ testing is overwhelming.
Thank you for expanding on the Flynn effect–I think it is a critical part of the discussion on the magnitude of the environmental effects. I would go further than calling Murray *willfully* obtuse. His argument is that we should not strive to achieve equal outcomes for African Americans because they are not intellectually equal (due to genetics). That is unequivocally racist.
Among other problems with this bullshit cover for racism, there isn’t an intelligence gene, or even a specific set of identified genes for intelligence.
This is an important point that underscores the largest challenge in human genetics–genetic complexity. Population-level variation for the vast majority of traits ranging from disease susceptibility to human height are governed by differences in hundreds of genes. For some genetic studies, we can come up with dozens or more “candidate” genes, but we generally have little idea of the actual cellular mechanisms by which they exert their effects. These studies are also confounded by “gene-environment interactions,” where genetic differences affect traits only under certain environmental conditions. For example, even if an individual had the hypothetical perfect genetic background for intelligence, they would never fulfill that genetic potential with inadequate nutrition, education, etc.
Pseudoscientific racists try to invoke the argument that there was a selection for intelligence that differed across populations, which led to genetic differences between races. There are a number of problems with this argument. First, the effective population size of humans up until very recently was incredibly small (even as few as 10,000 individuals). In very small populations, genetic differences are frequently due to randomness (genetic drift), because natural selection is less effective in small populations. There is certain evidence of selection during human evolution, but the selective pressure has to be strong (e.g. expression of lactase in adults). Also, the African population was much larger than the founding European population, and as predicted by genetic drift, European populations harbor more “harmful” mutations than African populations. There is no evidence that European populations experienced selective pressure to increase their collective intelligence, and there are incredibly strong arguments that the differences we see across populations are due to environmental effects.
All worship sam! Nuance and subtly when criticism to him, none when he levels criticism against others. He is a racist with an eloquent voice.
There are multiple public debates – the Chomsky one was great- where is he laid open for what he is at heart. A blubbery racist.
“Can’t seem to stop” implies that they want to stop. The Republican Party wants to destroy public education, both because educated people are more likely to question authority and because ending public education is an effective way of redistributing wealth upward, from the poor and middle classes (who can’t afford private education) to the wealthy (who can).
Calling Kevin Williamson “alt-right” indicates you don’t know much about either him or the alt-right. He is most definitely conservative, but he loathes the alt-right.
Scooter, what he says doesn’t matter. If it quacks like an alt-right troll, then that’s what it is. A mere “conservative” doesn’t call for lynching women or dog-whistle racists.
Wow I found my way to the Buckley column “Why The South Must Prevail”. I feel dirty just to have read it.
Yeah, it’s inexcusable. He did eventually change his mind but that’s not a bell you can unring.