Jonas Salk and merit
[NOTE: Because of the Gilot open thread earlier today, I decided to look up Jonas Salk and get up to speed on some of the details of his life. What I found was interesting enough, and relevant enough to today, that I decided on a post about it.]
I thought the story of Jonas Salk might make a nice contrast to today’s war on merit. For example:
Jonas Salk was born in New York City to Daniel and Dora (née Press) Salk. His parents were Jewish; Daniel was born in New Jersey to immigrant parents, and Dora, who was born in Minsk, emigrated to the United States when she was twelve. Salk’s parents did not receive extensive formal education…
When he was 13, Salk entered Townsend Harris High School, a public school for intellectually gifted students.
Surprisingly, this school is still in operation – and even more surprisingly, it still seems to base its enrollment on merit:
Well over 15,400 students compete for approximately 270 seats in the freshman class each year based on their middle school grades, standardized test scores and even attendance records. Admission is available to all New York City residents in 8th grade. A minimum grade point average of 91 is required of all applicants to be considered for admission. Minimum standardized reading and math scores at the 90th percentile are also required (4.3 on both English and Math)…
In sharp contrast with the original school which was open to male students only, the new school has been dominated by female students from its inception, today comprising approximately 70% of the student population.
As of 2019, the school’s minority population is largely Asian, with the New York City Department of Education’s “Asian and other” category making up 44% of the student body total, comprising the largest segment of the school’s population. White students comprise 37% of the population, Hispanic students 12% and black students 7%.
48% of students at Townsend Harris are from an economically disadvantaged background.
The school maintains a 100% graduation rate.
But back to Salk:
Salk enrolled in CCNY, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1934. Oshinsky writes that “for working-class immigrant families, City College represented the apex of public higher education. Getting in was tough, but tuition was free. Competition was intense, but the rules were fairly applied. No one got an advantage based on an accident of birth.”…
After graduating from City College of New York, Salk enrolled in New York University School of Medicine. According to Oshinsky, NYU based its modest reputation on famous alumni, such as Walter Reed, who helped conquer yellow fever. Tuition was “comparatively low, better still, it did not discriminate against Jews… while most of the surrounding medical schools—Cornell, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale—had rigid quotas in place.” Yale, for example, accepted 76 applicants in 1935 out of a pool of 501. Although 200 of the applicants were Jewish, only five got in.? During his years at New York University Medical School, Salk worked as a laboratory technician during the school year and as a camp counselor in the summer.
That probably was enough to pay his tuition.
As for what happened to CCNY later on, there’s this:
Additionally, as the population of New York grew, CUNY was not able to accommodate the demand for higher education. Higher and higher requirements for admission were imposed; in 1965, a student seeking admission to CUNY needed an average of 92 or A-. This helped to ensure that the student population of CUNY remained largely white and middle-class…
Calls for greater access to public higher education from the black and Puerto Rican communities in New York, especially in Brooklyn, led to the founding of “Community College Number 7,” later Medgar Evers College, in 1966–1967. In 1969, a group of black and Puerto Rican students occupied City College and demanded the racial integration of CUNY, which at the time had an overwhelmingly white student body…
Under pressure from community activists and CUNY Chancellor Albert Bowker, the Board of Higher Education (BHE) approved an Open Admissions plan in 1966, but it was not scheduled to be fully implemented until 1975. However, in 1969, students and faculty across CUNY participated in rallies, student strikes, and class boycotts demanding an end to CUNY’s restrictive admissions policies. CUNY administrators and Mayor John Lindsay expressed support for these demands, and the BHE voted to implement the plan immediately in the fall of 1970.
The doors to CUNY were opened wide to all those demanding entrance, assuring all high school graduates entrance to the university without having to fulfill traditional requirements such as exams or grades. This policy was known as open admissions and nearly doubled the number of students enrolling in the CUNY system to 35,000 (compared to 20,000 the year before). With greater numbers came more diversity: Black and Hispanic student enrollment increased threefold. Remedial education, to supplement the training of under-prepared students, became a significant part of CUNY’s offerings.
Additionally, ethnic and Black Studies programs and centers were instituted on many CUNY campuses, contributing to the growth of similar programs nationwide.
However, retention of students in CUNY during this period was low, with two-thirds of students enrolled in the early 1970s leaving within four years without graduating.
Two-thirds did not graduate during that era.
There’s much more at the link, but note this:
In 1999, a task force appointed by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani issued a report that described CUNY as “an institution adrift” and called for an improved, more cohesive university structure and management, as well as more consistent academic standards. Following the report, Matthew Goldstein, a mathematician and City College graduate who had led CUNY’s Baruch College and briefly, Adelphi University, was appointed chancellor. CUNY ended its policy of open admissions to its four-year colleges, raised its admissions standards at its most selective four-year colleges (Baruch, Brooklyn, City, Hunter and Queens), and required new enrollees who needed remediation, to begin their studies at a CUNY open-admissions community college…
CUNY is the fourth-largest university system in the United States by enrollment…
The university has one of the most diverse student bodies in the United States, with students hailing from around the world, but mostly from New York City. The black, white and Hispanic undergraduate populations each comprise more than a quarter of the student body, and Asian undergraduates make up 18 percent. Fifty-eight percent are female, and 28 percent are 25 or older.
This was the dropout rate in 2015:
12% of the cohort completed their degree in four years, 47% in six years, and 51% in eight years.
The official graduation rate of CCNY is 47%. This is the percentage of students who completed their degree within 150% of the published time. That means six years for a standard bachelor’s degree program.
I couldn’t find any data on the dropout rate when Salk was getting his education, but it’s interesting that at his specialized high school, the dropout rate was said to be quite high during his time there. At present, the graduation rate there is 100%.
There’s an interesting book about the development of the Salk polio vaccine, ‘A Splendid Solution,’ by Jeffrey Kluger.
There was one particular science reporter who had actually taken trouble to educate himself on the relevant science, and Salk chose to conduct all media communications through him.
Yale, for example, accepted 76 applicants in 1935 out of a pool of 501. Although 200 of the applicants were Jewish, only five got in.
Milton Winternitz, MD, was still the dean of Yale Medical School in 1935. Although he was himself Jewish, he did not identify as a Jew, and refused to accept more than five Jewish students in a given medical school class on the grounds that Jews were only 5% of the American population. Winternitz also discriminated against Italian Catholics on the grounds that the Yale School of Medicine is a “national” rather than a regional medical school “and must endeavor to maintain a balance representative of the population which is to be served.” A longer quote from Winternitz can be found on page 4 [page 388 in the original journal article from 1990] of a PDF about the Jewish quota at UNC’s medical school:
https://jhssc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Graham-et-al-UNCMedSch-3.pdf
As the American population has become majority-female, so have MD graduates.
Neo says, “I thought the story of Jonas Salk might make a nice contrast to today’s war on merit.”
The Big Guy himself being a prize example of that war: Shortly after the Supreme Court declared affirmative action college admission policies unconstitutional, President Joe Biden said his administration would direct the Department of Education to scrutinize how “practices like legacy admissions … expand privilege instead of opportunity.” The department could start by examining how politically connected families like the Bidens get their children into Ivy League schools.
In 2018, Hunter Biden tapped his father and a number of Biden family connections to help get his daughter into the University of Pennsylvania. Text messages and emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop . . . show how Joe and Hunter Biden worked behind the scenes to get a subpar family member into one of the most selective schools in the country. Maisy Biden’s college admissions process could raise a number of uncomfortable questions for the president. The saga highlights exactly the kind of “legacy admissions” Biden has slammed.
https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/joe-biden-wants-to-crack-down-on-privilege-in-education-he-called-upenns-president-to-get-his-granddaughter-in/
I was a Polio Pioneer. Got the vaccine early, maybe even a test group. I was in Elementary School. 1953? I have a pin that I got for getting the vaccine.
I remember visiting my Cousin while she was confined to a Iron Lung. She survived, had 4 kids.
Linked below, Jordan Peterson describes “Price’s Law”. While Peterson is relating that principle to economics, it equally applies to the profoundly negative effects that a society engaged in a war on merit will eventually suffer. As, it is that 20% who are the drivers of civilizational progress. A war on merit will inescapably obstruct a society’s full utilization of the talents of its most productive 20%. In other words, if there’s 10,000 scientists submitting peer reviewed research papers, a hundred of them have half the publications…
“JORDAN PETERSON | Why 1% Of The Population Have Most Of The Money?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByCXC0R9rWw
BTW, Jordan wonders whether the inherent ‘unfairness’ of Price’s Law can be corrected or even if it should be.
It cannot be nor should it be for without that inherent ‘unfairness’ neither civilizational progress, which rests upon individual genius nor evolution itself, driven by beneficial individual mutations (strictly passed on to their descendants)… could have occurred and life would have never evolved beyond the stage of the amoeba.
““Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people.
Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.” Robert Heinlein
Just last week Seattle Pacific University–a Methodist University over 100 years old–announced it was cutting 40 percent of its faculty. The only conflict it has had in the past few years is its refusal to acknowledge homosexual marriage. The Seattle gay community must have been working overtime on that one!
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-pacific-university-announces-40-cut-to-programs-steep-layoffs/
Related….?
MAZEL TOFF!!!
(Wonder what her technique is like…)
“Rolling Stones rocker Mick Jagger, 79, is ‘engaged for the THIRD time’ to ballet dancer Melanie Hamrick, 36”—
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-12255139/Rolling-Stones-Mick-Jagger-79-engaged-time-Melanie-Hamrick-36.html
File under: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o2gISJYwQU (cue to 1:15)
As the American population has become majority-female, so have MD graduates.
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I believe the population has been majority female since the 1920s.
Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.” Robert Heinlein
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Heinlein’s statement is oft quoted but utter rot. Improvements in productivity are due to modest technological adaptations and process improvements, not the inspiration of some genius. You’ve also not since 1400 seen a society ‘slip back’ into ‘abject poverty’ absent the devastation of intramural warfare. The countries in our time which are abjectly poor were always abjectly poor.
Just last week Seattle Pacific University–a Methodist University over 100 years old–announced it was cutting 40 percent of its faculty.
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The article said it is cutting 40% of its ‘programs’. If it’s like the arts and sciences faculty I know best, it has scads of majors which are interdepartmental or subdepartmental and have no dedicated faculty, just ‘corresponding faculty’.
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That same faculty was at one time organized into two dozen departments. The ten departments which had the smallest census of majors accounted collectively for about 10% of the baccalaureate degrees that faculty issued ca. 1995. An arts and sciences faculty might be serving the life of the mind to have some signature departments and departments in worthy subjects which do not pay the bills, but there are limits to that.
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Most tertiary institutions are overbuilt, have far too many programs, order institutional life to please the tenured faculty, and are dishonestly governed.
one could say after the fall of rome, most of europe was poorer, also much of the classical knowledge base had either dissapeared or had gone into monasteries,
the lessons of galen would take another1200 years to reappear with harvey
Youths at age 21 vary wildly in their willingness and capacity to acquire knowledge and skills. Albert Bowker knew this perfectly well and one might wager most of the political appointees on the Board of Higher Education knew this as well. It would be interesting to have a treatment of the psychology behind them proceeding as if they did not know this.
ee cervantes:
Yeah, the fall of Rome was all about the minority of creators being oppressed. (not)
Utter rot, RAH.
Art Deco:
The article regarding Seattle Pacific University is titled–
“Seattle Pacific University is cutting its budget for academic programs by 40% — mostly through steep faculty layoffs, effective in a year.”
There will be major layoffs. I have lived through one dying university already and know the signs, Seattle Pacific has all of the red flag warnings! These comments about finding ourselves is as you may know–BS. Someone is trying to assuage the staff about to be sent out to look for new jobs! It will probably take another 10 years of fiddle/fa*ting around, but it is a dying university. They started back in 2000 trying to please the feminist leadership of Seattle as opposed to keeping a steady focus on scholarship. One more example of what happens when merit is no longer the guideline.
Russia in 1914 was rapidly modernizing and, and in spite of the Czar, was nearing the level of the rest of Europe. After the Revolution it regressed and has yet to regain equality.
om, I would recommend some reading for you. Any of these would help.
Heinlein’s statement was not ‘utter rot’ but is exaggerated. Technological & economic development does depend on major innovators and far-sighted entrepreneurs such as Watt, Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse, but it also depends on thousands and thousands of people making less galactic but still important improvements in both products and processes.
I entered CCNY one year before they implemented open admissions. After the open admissions policy began the math dept began hiring students to be math tutors and I was one of the many hired.
Almost all of the students I tutored were open admissions students taking remedial, not for credit, math courses. I was literally teaching these students basic algebra.
What did I learn?
That most students cannot make up for 7 years of a shitty education – from junior high thru high school – in one or two semesters of college remedial courses.
The math dept and it’s professors and/or TA’s gave no quarter to the remedial students. If they flunked their exams, they flunked the students. End of story. No automatic “promotion” to the next level.
Ironically, I will speculate that these professors/TA’s were all liberal progressives and were all for open admissions, but as soon as these students were in THEIR class, well, master the material or it’s adios.
Yep, almost all of those remedial students were minority students.
I can recall only one black student – a female- I was helping who was actually taking a college level calculus course. Just one.
Open admissions, like affirmative action, enables it’s proponents to not have to bother dealing with the real problems, which are sending students to really bad public elementary/middle/high schools, automatically moving the students onto the next grade regardless of their level of academic performance and – as Barack HUSSEIN Obama once said when in one of those rare moments when he was telling the truth – the breakdown of the black family.
It is disgraceful that in the present day USA many minority students are compelled to attend schools that everybody knows are horrible.
}}} The official graduation rate of CCNY is 47%. This is the percentage of students who completed their degree within 150% of the published time. That means six years for a standard bachelor’s degree program.
The one relevant question here would be, “What is the percentage of students there going full-time (12h plus per semester)?”
If it is low, then that could explain the “six years to graduate” without it being an actual major issue, and even some of the more than 6y grad cohort…
Not making excuses, just noting one possible cause which would not reflect poorly on the university system. There may be others I’m not thinking of.
}}} As the American population has become majority-female, so have MD graduates.
Not really. It’s far larger than the “majority amount” would explain. It’s got far more to do with the fucked up attitude towards males in our society in general, and the pushing of women to the fore in all things regardless of merit.
Sorry, my own experience with female doctors is that they are often not as good as men. Among other things, they tend to be more likely to accept wrote causes — “most likely” causes rather than looking closer than that and not being aggressive enough at counterfactual information that contraindicates the “wrote” answers. No doubt there are exceptions, but that is my own experience.
In one example, to illustrate, my mother was visiting me in the 1990s, and started having problems with breathing. I asked for a good doctor, was recommended to a female doctor. She heard that my mother was a smoker, and just wrote it off as bronchitis. We did not accept this, went to another doctor (probably about 5d later for the appointment), who was male, who diagnosed it as a flu virus, and prescribed antivirals. She got better within 2 days.
This kind of thing has been my experience with female doctors in general. No, not a statistical universe worth, so not claiming it is absolute fact, but men tend to be more aggressive in this, as with so many other things, and I assert that makes for better doctors, regardless of gender.
its the software, what’s being taught as much as the hardware who is being taught,
I was trying to explain how regressions in knowledge happen, continental wide societal collapse is one,
}}} Art Deco:
Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.” Robert Heinlein
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Heinlein’s statement is oft quoted but utter rot. Improvements in productivity are due to modest technological adaptations and process improvements, not the inspiration of some genius. You’ve also not since 1400 seen a society ‘slip back’ into ‘abject poverty’ absent the devastation of intramural warfare. The countries in our time which are abjectly poor were always abjectly poor.
Art, you’re entirely misreading his point. It’s not individual geniuses, but a general class of highly meritorious people — Jews, or “Asians” would be prime examples in history and more recently — who are being excluded. Not a tiny percentage of the population.
And yes, you can CERTAINLY identify success and failure trends of various nations many times in history based solely on their policies being pro- or anti- Semitic. You chase out the Jews, you chase out a very savvy people, who are very good at many things they do that require sense, wisdom, and intellect.
How you would imagine that CANNOT negatively affect a society is amusing.
One of the notable factors in the USA’s development of the Atomic Bomb is how many of the scientists involved in all theoretical science from 1880 onward were Jewish. And that was just one technology, there were many other developments which were connected to Jews as well. And many of them were refugees from Germany. How would Germany have done had they not lost that brain trust?
Mike K:
I have read all of RAH.
There is scripture that speaks of growing up and leaving childish things.
Utter rot, but you be you.
there are many insane and childish things being taught, sometimes thats all thats being taught, under a stronger czar like alexander 3rd, they might have lasted longer, another meat grinder war on the continent was going to yield no good results,
a lot of it had to do with conrad stark, the reichs science gauletier, he was a decent physicist, but he insisted on aryan scientists, heisenberg, who is feature in volpi’s in search of klingsor, was one of the exceptions,
Art, you’re entirely misreading his point. It’s not individual geniuses, but a general class of highly meritorious people
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No, I’m not missing the point. And it’s still rot.
the overall scientific culture is full of rot
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/06/the-oceangate-disaster-a-submarine-captains-early-unofficial-assessment/
And yes, you can CERTAINLY identify success and failure trends of various nations many times in history based solely on their policies being pro- or anti- Semitic. You chase out the Jews, you chase out a very savvy people, who are very good at many things they do that require sense, wisdom, and intellect.
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I haven’t a clue how we got on the subject of Jews, other than that’s your gloss on Heinlein.
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There are scores of prosperous countries the world over. Only in the following do Jews account for more than 0.4% of the population.
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Israel
Gibraltar
United States
Monaco
Canada
France
Hungary
Uruguay
Australia
U.K.
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Jews may contribute a fair piece to the prosperity of places in which they settle, but the presence of Jews is neither necessary nor sufficient to generate prosperity. See Japan.
gibraltar and monaco, are too small for comparative analysis, I guess its more like amy chuas analysis of distinct ethnicities she included chinese and my paisans into the mix,
the fundamental point is if you dont strive for excellence you aren’t going to achieve it, there is no way around this,
Really easy to say “should be based on merit”, but we don’t all agree on what “merit” is. The people who get to set how “merit” is measured are the people who can discriminate by race or anything else they like. Substitute “qualifications” for “merit” if you like, it’s the same problem.
You don’t get out of it by saying that you’ll use “objective” and “race-neutral” measures. Because whatever those measures are, if races aren’t proportionally represented in those measures, they can be used to discriminate by race.
The academics who oppose “merit” oppose it for exactly this reason: that the measures that middle-class white people associate with “merit” are measures that screen for middle-class white people and so people who aren’t middle class and white are being denied the benefits that college brings. You can’t prove them wrong by saying “but it’s merit”. You have to do the work of showing the value the measures have that’s independent of middle-class whiteness, why anyone should care about that value for the purpose of deciding who is eligible for the benefit of college admissions, and why adhering to that value is better than proportionally shutting out people who aren’t white and middle-class from college admissions.
I don’t say this to defend their opposition to “merit”, I say this because hand-waving at merit as though we all agree on what it is and why we should base admissions on that does not address what the problem is.
Russia in 1914 was rapidly modernizing and, and in spite of the Czar, was nearing the level of the rest of Europe. After the Revolution it regressed and has yet to regain equality.
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People complain about the Maddison Project, but they’re the ones trying to compile historical statistics. They have 32 estimates of the ratio of Russian per capita product to British per capita product over the period running from 1885 to 1916. The lowest ratio calculated is 0.186 (for 1891) and the highest is 0.293 (for 1904). The median value is 0.25. The value for 1913 is 0.274.
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They have 70 readings of the ratio of the Soviet Union’s per capita product to that of the United States. The lowest estimate is 0.087 (for 1921) and the highest is 0.377 (for 1975). The median value is 0.31.
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They have 27 readings of the ratio of Russia’s per capita product to that of the United States. The lowest is 0.199 (for 1998) and the highest is 0.476 (for 2013). The median is 0.327.
You can’t prove them wrong by saying “but it’s merit”.
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The measures are functional and they know that perfectly well. You can’t prove them wrong because their institutional position allows them to ignore anyone outside their social circle. If Republican state legislatures got busy, they’d have to justify themselves to others, and they’d fail.
Interesting comments today.
The Book “The 10,000 year explosion, has an interesting chapter on the Ashkenazi Jews and attributes much of the math skills to an evolutionary stress when European Jews were denied most professions except money lending and finance. It’s a fascinating book and I have given copies to some of my black friends. One of them, an orthopedic surgeon, bought copies for his adult daughters.
I kidded him that Farrakhan was right about white people, calling us “Ice People.” In both Europe and Asia the further north, the lighter the skin. It’s about Vitamin D.
“Merit.”
You can say that again!
“…Life in the fast lane! How reckless Hunter Biden photographed himself driving at 172mph while behind the wheel of his Porsche en route to a days-long Vegas bender with prostitutes and pictured himself smoking CRACK while behind the wheel…”—-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12185871/Hunter-Biden-photographed-smoking-crack-DRIVING-speeding-172mph.html
H/T Instapundit.
What gumption! What nerve! But what panache! What derring-do! What Elan!! What sensational confabulations!
Could it be that Dear Old Dad is grooming his son—AKA “Smartest Guy I Know”(TM)—for the White House?
Hunter certainly has all the necessary qualities—after all, he’s a Biden—all things meritorious that Joe Biden has demonstrated are so necessary for the job. (See above list.)
That’s why it’s important for everyone to understand—to KNOW—that Hunter’s hasn’t done anything illegal. That he’s law abiding and God fearing. That he may not be as pure as snow, but that he’s deep down a good ‘ole boy. (Very deep.) Very soulful, and like his father, a DECENT human being.
Joe wants We the People to know all these good qualities, which, OTOH, those mean Republicans want to keep hidden; that all these nasty Republicans want to impugn.
The media understands this, perfectly and are doing their best to parry the Grand Old Pouncers so as to protect Hunter…so as to remind us all of a HIGHER TRUTH.
It’s how the media earns its own “merit”.
In fact, it’s “merit” all the way down the line.
Er, make that meretricious.
By the way, Salk married a mistress of Picasso who had two of Picasso’s children.
Francoise Gilot who was a well known artist. She survived him and died at age 101.
Medicine? Prevention? Merit?
Some might find this of interest (from Dr. Mercola):
“How to Help Prevent and Treat Alzheimer’s Disease”—
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/07/02/dale-bredesen-alzheimers.aspx
A bit technical in places, but there are some general trends and suggestions that are pretty clear.
“Dora, who was born in Minsk”
Another Belarusian, neo!
Another thing John Lindsay screwed up. He seems to be the prototype for every empty suit in politics today: Gavin, Beto, Pete, Kamala. If you hear about some politician who sounds attractive and interesting, assume he or she is an incompetent airhead until proven otherwise.
It’s true that the lack of professional opportunities meant Jews went into finance and money lending. Jews were literate and numerate at a time when most Europeans weren’t, so there was a fit between their abilities and finance. Jews did work at other trades within the Jewish community, though. If they weren’t peasants, that was probably a plus, rather than a minus.
Russian was fifth in the world in industrial production in 1913, and had the fastest growing economy in Europe. Because the Russian population was so large, per capita figures would be low for some time, and there was no question of catching up to Britain’s standard of living any time soon. Still, Russia would have been a much more powerful force in the world economy if war and revolution hadn’t intervened.
FWIW, Milton Winternitz was John Cheever’s father-in-law. His first wife was Helen Watson, daughter of Alexander Graham Bell’s “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” His second wife was a Whitney, though not one of the very rich ones.
well ‘from a certain point of view’ lindsay and this whole class of silk stalkings have been very successful, up to a point, lindsay ran for president, beto ran for governor and senate, (they have a limited tolerance in texas) I alway thought cheever was more of a wasp type,
I believe in objectlively measuring “merit”. If you don’t like the results, you condemn yourself to a long slide downhill, which we see the country doing. One cannot raise an IQ, even with a Harvard education. And of course no one reports the drop-out rate of the minorities there. It is a financial scam, funded by student loans from our eseemed government. The less able get the loans, Harvard admits them for the money, and keeps that money when they drop out.
Frederick seems to have a problem with that.
But there are strong hard data out there, like IQ determinations, which pose problems for the Fredericks, like Charles Murray’s “Facing Reality” which show the mean IQ for an A-A male is one standard deviation below that of whites. So admit them to Harvard.
I think that basic literacy and mathematic ability is a reasonable benchmark, of course if you prejudge that certain groups are incapable of reading that standard that’s something else again, the smaller sliver of students who are eligible for so called elite institutions, but then again take mrs psaki or mr buttigeg, to assume that they are a higher class of intellect well, facts not in evidence,
certainly our aspiring superpowers have no misgivings about what constitutes a good education and technical skills,
Russian was fifth in the world in industrial production in 1913, and had the fastest growing economy in Europe.
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If Maddison is correct, they may have been growing marginally faster than Britain.
well ‘from a certain point of view’ lindsay and this whole class of silk stalkings have been very successful,
Yes, and successful with many of the ladies. I believe it was Barbara Walters who wrote that he gave her crab lice in one “interview.”
Mike K-
Barbara Wawa surely deserved her crab lice. I have never understood why friends hold her in esteem. Lindsay was the unsanitary bearer. Call him lousy.
As far as Salk, CCNY go, I’m amazed at Neo’s fascination. Reading all that? No thanks.
compared to the current crew, she is margaret bourke white, of course she opened up the Pandoras box and let loose the View, that is a Vienna convention violation
Cicero:
Whatever the mean IQ of each race might be isn’t relevant when you’re talking about people applying to Harvard or other elite colleges, because none of those applicants are at the mean of each group or even of society as a whole. They all are significantly above the mean for each group, and above the mean for society as a whole.
To take one example:
These students are apparently capable, for the most part, of meeting the standards for these professions. The real question is what percentage are capable of meeting the standards of the most “elite” universities, and on what basis should universities make their admissions decisions, and are they lowering their standards for performance. Also, at what point do students become substandard and/or dangerous for professions on which people’s lives depend?
Cicero:
It’s odd that you’re not willing to read some information that would take all of 5 minutes to read, if that, because it’s too long – when it’s relevant to an issue that seems to be very important to you: the decline of the merit system in academia.
Each to his own.
FOAF:
Lots of Belarusians around.
Mike K:
If you follow the first link in this post, you’ll see it is to a video where Gilot describes how she met Salk.
I as mentioned in the comments on the 70’s thread, I dropped out of school not because the work was too hard but because I got divorced. I took an extremely menial job on the space program. It could have been done by a trained chimp. I never received any training of any kind during my time there. I guess because being smarter than the average chimp, I was expected to figure it out on my own. The main requirement was being able to lift a 40-pound box of paper. And yet by the end of the second year I had done such strange things as design a classified spy proof computer room and fix the spacecraft cross compiler. I never knew what the heck I was doing and was too stupid to say Not hired for this, Not trained for this, Not paid for this.
The computer room was a real puzzle because I wasn’t cleared and everything I produced was immediately stamped SECRET and I couldn’t view it anymore. This made revisions somewhat awkward.
Does anyone remember Muhammad Ali rhyming about Jonas Salk in a commercial?
probably they had those redaction stamps like in hidden figures, that disguised obvious data points,
I believe it was Barbara Walters who wrote that he gave her crab lice in one “interview.”
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Florence Henderson made that claim. Unless the incident occurred in 1985-87, they were both married at the time.
Barbara Wawa surely deserved her crab lice. I have never understood why friends hold her in esteem.
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She was a capable interviewer. She made a mess of her domestic life, which people sometimes do, usually with assistance. Not understanding why you’d want her to be infested with crabs.
Not understanding why you’d want her to be infested with crabs.
It was as much about Lindsay as about her. The point is that politicians and TV personalities are a form of incest.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/florence-henderson-john-lindsay-crabs_n_884699
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Florence Henderson, not Barbara Walters. Barbara Walters had an affair with Edward Brooke (at a time when both were married).
Related, from Heather Mac Donald…
“Affirmative action was hurting black students”—
https://archive.fo/p2a7y
H/T Blazingcatfur blog.
WRT merit, it’s true that it has to be defined and then tests can be devised to test for what has been defined as merit.
Are such tests definitive? Not always. But the tests are not always written in stone and they often have to be “fine-tuned”.
You can test for acuity in mathematics.
You can test for imagination.
For reading comprehension?
Writing ability?
For artistic ability?
For linguistic ability?
Can you test for character?
Leadership?
Ability to work in a group?
Hitting?
Fielding?
Speed?
(I’m always reminded of that line purportedly said about catcher Moe Berg—who also happened to be a genius, polyglot and employee of the OSS during WW2:
“He could speak seven languages but couldn’t hit in any of ’em.”…
Well, so much for “da tools o’ ignorance”…)
As the American population has become majority-female, so have MD graduates.
Not really. It’s far larger than the “majority amount” would explain. It’s got far more to do with the fucked up attitude towards males in our society in general, and the pushing of women to the fore in all things regardless of merit.
Some of it was a beneficial opening of career paths for women. The argument that admissions committees made was that women would not practice full time and there was a shortage of doctors. Recent data from companies that recruit and place doctors show that women do NOT practice full time on average and spend an average of 26 weeks per year working. On the other hand, female doctors do fill some important niches. For example, virtually all new OBGYN docs are women. A couple of years ago UCLA had three male OB graduates who could not find a job.
A new woman OB came to my community when I was still in practice (30 years ago). Her husband was in advertising. He began a brilliant ad campaign to get her started. She was pregnant and small stature. That ad included a photo of her and said “Why not choose the pregnant obstetrician?” In four years she had three associates and was the busiest OB in Irvine CA.
On the other hand, I am not impressed with women surgeons. One would think they would have fine motor skills but the ones I saw tended to be rough with tissue. Maybe it’s better now.
Abraxas
Link for Russia’s industrial production in 1913 and economic growth: Modern History Sourcebook: Tables Illustrating the Spread of Industrialization.
Recall that pre-Revolutionary Russia was no slouch in the sciences: the periodic table came from a Russian chemist. Ditto engineering: Stephen Timoshenko and
Igor Sikorsky, respectively a leader in engineering mechanics and the helicopter pioneer.
Which reminds me of DeToqueville’s assertion that revolution occurs in a poorly run country that starts to improve.
@Gringo:the periodic table came from a Russian chemist.
Not quite true: there were many kinds of periodic table proposed at the time. Mendeleev used his version of the table to predict elements that cannot possibly exist, and the table was wrongly based on atomic mass, because he did not understand the physics* underlying the periodic table. At the time there was no obvious way to choose between the competing periodic tables.
Not Mendeleev’s fault, as it needed quantum mechanics for that, and when the mystery of the periodic table was finally sorted out, Mendeleev’s, minus his impossible elements, was the last one standing. I don’t think Mendeleev deserves very much credit for the periodic table any more than Democritus does for atoms, as I think he got lucky in his guesses rather than had any unique insight into the physics underlying chemistry.
*Or indeed the basic physics of objects in space. He was sure that argon must be a molecule of three nitrogen atoms because there was no place in his table for an element with the mass of argon. But the measurements of the specific heat showed that argon had to be spherically symmetric, it could not possibly be three atoms in a triangle. As to why argon had such difficulty forming compounds, and why it needed its own column in the table which would eventually be populated by helium and the other noble gases, that is explained by physics which was not developed at that time.