This is what comes of affirmative action in college admissions. Admitting students to college who are not prepared for college is nothing but a waste of everyone's time, money, and effort because they won't finish. Period.

Of course, you could hide that fact by granting minority students preferential grading as well, at the cost of throwing away the school's reputation and rendering its degrees worthless, and this seems to be the road some Ivy League schools are on. But that only means the coming generations of scientists and engineers will be incompetent.

The place to fix this problem is in the K-12 schools. Institute school vouchers nationwide, and at least some of these minority kids will be able to learn as well as the "privileged" kids do. (Of course, those whose parents don't give a hoot will still be hosed. There's no fixing that.)

The LA Times had a heartbreaking story about this a few years ago.

I'll always wonder what became of that kid.

Curse you Crid! Now I'm crying!

His facial expressions in the photos have stayed with me for seven years.

My freshman year sucked, too... But sheezus.

"Institute school vouchers nationwide, and at least some of these minority kids will be able to learn as well as the "privileged" kids do."

Why should this change the status quo? A culture has been grown on purpose, cultivated merely for their votes, which has no use whatsoever for learning. They have been shown that money and the possessions it buys come from government, not personal effort - and the attitude is spreading.
"Free" college, you say? Not gonna work. These people want to get something, not DO something.

"If black children can be educated, the question arises: Why aren’t they? The usual answer is that racism and conservatism are responsible, and much ink is spilled in exorcising these evils. But racists and conservatives have almost nothing to do with educational policy in Washington. Until recently, we’ve had a Democratic president and Congress; we have a liberal National Education Association, a black city government, a black school board, and a black electorate. They, not conservatives or racists, bear responsibility for conditions in the schools."

"Education is the keystone of any modern civilization. Blacks alone care nothing for it. Exceptions, yes, but again, overall? No. The countless schools entirely controlled by blacks are the worst in America. They do not improve."

This is the product of pretending that everyone from an entire continent is the same, and telling them that they cannot achieve anything on their own. Encouraging indolence via public policy, such as the EBT card, which cannot go broke.

What's that old saw about leading a horse to water? Why the hell should it walk anywhere if it can whinny and get water brought to it?

Aptitude is a very important component of high skill occupations. And even some less high skill ones.

Mao sent the city people out to work on the farms. (I have a friend who was one of them) and assigned many of the peasants to high skill occupations such as doctoring and engineering projects.

He insisted they would *learn* how to do it. Needless to say it didn’t work out very well for either medicine, dam building or farming.

But maybe a few people are catching on to the philosophical basis for this social engineering. They can’t achieve these goals in a republic friends.

It has nothing to do with eliminating racism. The goal is being in the group pulling the strings, and having the power to eliminate your opposition.

Crid—google the guy’s name and find out. He sells insurance.

For those who hit the paywall, as I did:

https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/depressing-article-about-black-kid-from-south-central-at-cal#rest_1008558

There are three pages of comments as well.

One said (regarding Kashawn's black roommate and best friend Spencer, who also grew up in a tough neighborhood):

"hint: Spencer isnt smarter than Kashawn because his mom bought him books and took him to museums, he is smarter because his mum has a much higher IQ than Kashawn's mum, as evidenced by her going to UCLA.

"The fact Spencer looks half-white from his photos in the article is another factor, but we dont want to get too controversial here, do we."

(end)

Maybe Kashawn's mother isn't as smart. However, even illiterate parents can care enough to push their children into more literate surroundings, regularly, with the help of more literate family friends. You don't know until you've tried. Like Ben Carson's mother, who was practically illiterate.

Interesting:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/christ-opposes-use-of-sat-act/#comment-3572117

Scroll almost halfway down to Nov. 23, 2019, 5:42 am.

It tells you when he MAY have dropped out, at the bottom.

Btw, I looked up Kashawn's use of the word "retire" (from his Facebook page), since I was suspicious of the way he was using it as a transitive verb. As it happens, he used it correctly, but it's the most obscure use of the word, so I wouldn't blame anyone else for being suspicious too.

"Public" schooling doesn't only fail and harm "kids of color".

My youngest daughter was eagerly learning to read and write, but then she entered kindergarten and immediately developed an allergy to anything which seemed related to learning. I would have pulled her out if not for her mother (who was also the one insisting she be enrolled in "public" school in the first place.

My son was reading before he turned 3 and was reading my Lawrence Krauss and Michio Kaku books (and my old encyclopedia set and everything else on my bookshelves) by the time he entered school. He also stagnated somewhat after entering school-- and would get in trouble for reading actual educational books instead of listening to the "teachers".

My appreciation for education explains my opposition to schooling-- especially government schooling or anything based on the Prussian indoctrination model.

These people want to get something, not DO something. ~ Radwaste at July 11, 2020 5:46 AM

I'm afraid that the free college for all movement is about just this, getting something, not doing something. The advocates want the rewards of having completed college, not to do the work of completing college.

My son was reading before he turned 3 and was reading my Lawrence Krauss and Michio Kaku books. ~ Kent McManigal at July 11, 2020 8:47 AM

My mother used to take us to the library every week. We looked forward to getting new books each week. Both my siblings and I started reading early and consistently read at above-grade-level throughout school.

My parents had purchased a set of encyclopedias when we were young. Both my siblings and I read through them A-to-Z.

Ben Carson, former head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins and current Secretary of HUD, grew up in a Detroit housing project and was a beneficiary of his mother's efforts to get him to read.

From a 1987 interview, by Jon Winokur, of Chicago columnist Mike Royko (he died in 1997):

Q: Are you concerned about the decline in the quality of education in his country?

A: No. We went through a period in this country where everybody thought their kid had to have a college education. The result was we got stuck with a whole generation of overeducated dummies. Guys who should be slicing corned beef are mucking around some corporation making dumb decisions. You've gotta have a certain number of people to pump gas and work in the checkout line. If they don't want to learn to read, if they don't want to go beyond the second year of high school, okay, there'll be a job out there for 'em.

Q: Isn't that an un-American attitude?

A: Yeah, but the reality is we can't all be white-collar workers, we can't all be executives, and I don't blame the system...the hustlers will make it, even today.

(I'm kind of surprised Royko didn't anticipate the loss of entry-level jobs via automation. People were warning about that even before he was born! Nowadays, even if you don't go to college but you don't want to risk life and limb either, you'd better darn well find the right trade school - and qualify to get in, in the first place. That typically means doing well by most high school standards - and graduating.)

> —google the guy’s name

Seems intrusive, like looking up the divorce of a high school date who didn't even like you very much.

(Yoosher it's him?)

Lenona, automation doesn't really do much to eliminate entry level jobs. It does change the nature of the work. But it has relatively little effect on the number of entry level jobs or even the level of education required for them. Instead it is government regulation that has a significant impact. The most recent example was the obamacare mandates a few years back. They absolutely killed entry level jobs by making those jobs unprofitable. When many of those mandates were later repealed you saw the number of entry level jobs return, though not the exact same jobs.

Lenona, automation doesn't really do much to eliminate entry level jobs. ~ Ben at July 11, 2020 10:07 AM

Au contraire, mon ami.

Automation does a great deal to eliminate unskilled entry-level jobs. Automated ordering kiosks eliminate human order takers in restaurants.

Lots of jobs that moderns of today never saw were eliminated decades ago by encroaching technology, things we don't think of today as jobs or as automation.

• Readily-available electricity has eliminated coal deliveries and colliers. The lower levels of Chicago streets were used by coal companies to deliver coal to power the boilers of Chicago's iconic skyscrapers.
• Push-button elevators eliminated the elevator operator.
• Electric phone exchanges eliminated the job of operators.
• Railroads eliminated many long-haul teamster jobs.
• Prefab PVC piping eliminated the need for an apprentice plumber to cut and thread pipe.
• Large scale printing eliminated the need for typesetters. Reporters turned in a computer file which was turned into a film and used to print a book, a newspaper, etc. Today, digital papers, books, etc. are eliminating the jobs that took over from the typesetters.
• Container cargo eliminated the job of the longshoreman. No longer did loading ships require large crews of strong backs, but a skilled operator of a computerized crane. Now, unloading and loading a ship, a process which used to take an average 6 days, can be done in 6 hours. Merchant mariners used to use port time to go ashore, get drunk, get a tattoo, and get a girl. Today, they rarely have time to leave the ship.
• Clerk jobs have been eliminated by software, stenography jobs as well. Once companies had large departments whose only purpose consisted of supervising clerks who tabulated columns of numbers. Today, one financial analyst can do that with Excel in less than a tenth the time.

We need to be cognizant of what the elimination of entry-level jobs does to people not blessed with the mental ability to complete a rigorous college or trade education. And it's not just that they get useless grievance studies degrees and thus lack the ability to enrich themselves in anything but the political or academic arena. It's the idleness and mounting anger of those locked out of an expanding economy. We're experiencing a good deal of that right now in the BLM riots.

Russia experienced that in its March revolution and, when the new republican government failed to placate or suppress the anger in the streets, the October revolution.

The 1901 Boxer Rebellion in China was about modernization. The Chinese, for centuries, had used human labor to overcome obstacles. Where the West used horses and wagons, and eventually railroads to carry cargo, the Chinese used coolies. Coolies took pride in their ability to carry heavy loads many miles. When the West started investing in China, building railroads to carry raw materials, mined from Chinese territory, to ports for shipping to the West, and to carry supplies necessary to keep the mines in operation, coolies lost their livelihoods. Combine that with a series of droughts and bad harvests and the Chinese peasants were starving. The Society of the Harmonious Fist (Boxers) promised them that if they got rid of the foreign devils, they'd get their livelihoods back and prosper.

The defeat of the Boxers and the Qing forces by foreign armies hastened the eventual fall of the already-creaky Qing dynasty. Floods, droughts, civil unrest, and economic crises had already convinced the populace that the dynasty had lost the Mandate of Heaven. China became a republic in 1912; and a communist dictatorship in 1948 when a country with no history or tradition of democracy could not sustain itself as a republic.

Amy's tweet about thank-you notes explains the disparity in law, too. Law school grades are overwhelmingly based on written tests that are graded blind. Ditto the bar exam.

You can't teach young adults how to write well at that stage. You can't even teach them how to read well enough to go through hundreds of pages of appellate decisions every week. You have to start in elementary school and then ramp it up through high school and then maybe -- maybe -- some of them will overcome the handicap of not growing up in households where reading is a priority for the adults and the kids naturally follow suit.

And, Conan, I don't remember where I read or saw this, but some journalist said that quite a few specialized surgeons and nurses could be losing out to automation as well. (It was sometime in the last five years.)

> We need to be cognizant of what
> the elimination of entry-level
> jobs does to people not blessed
> with the mental ability to complete
> a rigorous college or trade
> education. And it's not just that
> they get useless grievance studies
> degrees and thus lack the ability
> to enrich themselves in anything
> but the political or academic arena

Coney O'Grammeria, you are so beautiful… To Me. ♫

With your literate grace and attunement, you dance in one of my favorite gardens… …

America, nay, the whole of humanity has not figured out what to do with people who just aren't very bright.

By default, we are cruel to them.

> I don't remember where I read
> or saw this

There are dozens of such cites. Especially with wristwear-style devices, I-watches or whatever, the acuity of automated monitoring to protect individual health humbles the acuity and intuition of the best fleshy family doctors for a huge number of illnesses.

That may or may not be worth worrying about, especially as we get old.

I'm 61: My years of illicit drug trafficking, collusion with organized crime, international money laundering and fucking other men's wives are (largely) behind me. Google knows *everything*… How hard I pressed for a good rate on my new mortgage (to the penny), where my investments are (to the penny), and what kind of sex I like (to the nipple)… EVERYTHING about me, all of it.

Okay.

Because Google cloud services are rilly convenient. No, reee-leee convenient....

If I were black and qualified to become a physicist, I would instead choose medicine, law, or business--and that is what blacks do. Blacks are much better represented in medicine than in physics. They get a bigger bang for the buck taking that route. No one gets rich as a physicist unless they found a startup.
The kneejerk reaction that any disparity is due to racism is tearing the country apart. The true cause of disparity is terrible inner city schools (in democrat cities), single parent households, lack of interest in books in those households, an attitude among young black men especially that school is for losers, and inner city crime that ruins their chances.

When science develops an injection or a pill for *aptitude* then we can restart the arguments about parental role modeling.

The gubmit can be forced to buy every home a grand piano but without a few other magic ingredients like seven hours a day of practice, and a great ear, you aren’t going to Juilliard.

Frankly if you do all that, and your fingers are a bit short, that will doom your chances as well.

Some days I would kill for John McEuen’s hands.....

surgeons and nurses could be losing out to automation

Robotic surgery. Emphasis mine. Because of these features, recovery time is reduced.

Robotic surgery, or robot-assisted surgery, allows doctors to perform many types of complex procedures with more precision, flexibility and control than is possible with conventional techniques. Robotic surgery is usually associated with minimally invasive surgery — procedures performed through tiny incisions. It is also sometimes used in certain traditional open surgical procedures.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/robotic-surgery/about/pac-20394974

America, nay, the whole of humanity has not figured out what to do with people who just aren't very bright. ~ Crid at July 11, 2020 12:03 PM

By using the term "not very bright" here, we're referring to those smart enough to hold down a middle-management level job and be self-sufficient, but not quite enough to become accountants, engineers, doctors, master electricians, etc. Not everyone being left behind by modernization is at the bottom of the IQ curve. Some are just a few points, enough points, below average.

As Lenona points out, some folks being edged out by modernization will be at the top. However, their physical work is so specialized that it has already at the edge of human capabilities. Nevertheless, we'll still need those specialized folks for the knowledge of what we want the robots to do and to oversee the actual process.

The main point here is not that low-IQ people are being automated out of jobs, but that entry-level jobs are disappearing. These are the jobs that teach even smart people to show up on time, complete a task, follow orders, deal with office politics, etc. These jobs are increasingly being taken over by those folks automated out of their last job.

Reminder: the Left is not interested in solving problems - but in perpetuating them.

Racial tension is a rich seam of political leverage that they are not done mining.

Moving from equality of opportunity to demands tp artficially create equality of outcome was *designed* to create a whole new set of racial suspicions and tensions.

I think this passage is sleight-of-hand:

But the root cause lies in inequities that arise far earlier in the education process.

There are very few black physicists with PhD's… If you're a black physicist with a PhD, the world is your oyster. Google (and each of Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook) would probably love to hire EVERY black physicist with a PhD in the country: Those companies are desperate to demonstrate hospitality to minorities, blacks most of all. They LOVE to have the smartest of the smart working for them, and would find plenty of research duty for the geniuses.

But such people have a lot of choices about how and where to sell their gifts. A LOT of choices.

"Automation does a great deal to eliminate unskilled entry-level jobs. Automated ordering kiosks eliminate human order takers in restaurants." ~Conan

1. I covered that the jobs classified as entry level are always changing.

2. You are wrong on the kiosks.

The automated kiosk has existed for a very long time. The little things at Chilies and elsewhere existed without eliminating any server jobs. What killed off human order takers was Obamacare mandates that raised the cost of those jobs over the value they provided. It also eliminated many jobs processing groceries and elsewhere. The best proof of this is the growth in low wage (often called entry level) jobs after many Obama era regulations were repealed.

@Crid: Every likely employer that you cited for physicists doesn't do research in _physics_. They don't hire physicists for what they were trained to do (and probably loved - I can't imagine someone who wasn't thus motivated going through what it takes for even someone talented mathematically to learn the higher levels of physics), but for applied mathematics.

A long time ago, I majored in physics for the love of the subject, and then I dropped that and switched to engineering when I understood what the job market for actual physics researchers was: after several years as a barely-paid graduate student (more years than a middle-middle-class family can afford to subsidize), you can fight for a scanty set of university and government jobs - which will usually not be fun. Many of them are behind a veil of secrecy (which is antithetical to scientific work) because they relate to weapons research. Most of the rest involve working out a hypothesis on paper, and then getting in line and waiting years for a chance to test it on a billion-dollar accelerator. And looking in from the outside now, it looks like this has only become worse; the equipment is larger, more expensive, and has even longer waiting lists.

So the lack of black physicists may just mean that blacks tend to be more practical and less likely to fall in love with learning for its own sake, rather than following a path more directly related to a high-paying job. Maybe that's because few blacks come from families wealthy enough that a sane kid can take a slow route to a PHD, let alone ignore the slim chances of making a living in anything related to that doctorate.

But coming from a culture that places little value on learning, growing up in neighborhoods where the only people making a living with their minds are con men or a gangster's accountant, and going to schools where half the kids aren't even trying - and the teachers eventually give up, too - sure doesn't help!

A long time ago, I majored in physics for the love of the subject, and then I dropped that and switched to engineering when I understood what the job market for actual physics researchers was.... ~ markm at July 12, 2020 7:24 PM

I went to business school with a physics major. When the professor asked her why she was getting an MBA instead of a job in physics, she told him that without a doctorate, she'd only ever be doing scut work in physics; and with a doctorate, she'd have to wait until someone died to have a shot at a small number of decent teaching or research positions, since they are few in number and not surrendered lightly by the people who hold them.

It's not just POC that have that cultural problem. When I think about such issues, I remember an ex-someone I once knew: a Pole born in Hamtramck when it was over 90% Polish immigrants, an ex-priest, and a university professor who was the recognized expert in some area of the humanities too esoteric for me to comprehend at all. So he was getting paid moderately well just to pursue his love of learning. But getting there took decades and a quite crooked path.

Because he grew up in a working-class Polish-immigrant neighborhood, the only scholars he knew were priests. He wanted to be a scholar and took that as a vocation to the priesthood. He was brilliant. He won all-expenses scholarships to a seminary and to graduate schools, the last of which was at the Vatican itself. He became an expert in Canon Law, and eventually was assigned to an office processing requests for annulments, and trying to help applicants through a nonsensical legal maze - he said it's almost always possible to find a technicality to justify an annulment, but only by ignoring whatever was really wrong with the marriage...

After too long in that office, he finally admitted that his real vocation was to learning, not to be a priest. So in his late thirties, he left the priesthood and began pursuing his real interests - while also having to find a job. He finally made it, but I wonder how much further he could have gone if he had not spent a couple of decades learning how the Church justifies the unjustifiable.

> Every likely employer that you
> cited for physicists doesn't do
> research in _physics_.

1. A number of them could put an employee in a field of study very close to raw physics and get their money's worth. Of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook, only the latter isn't famous for moonshot-ish research.

2. If the person is a once-in-a-century physicist, they'll still be able to write their own ticket at a world-class institution, at *any* institution that does the rarefied work.

But again— options, options, options. People that intelligent enjoy big money no less than the rest of us.

This twitter exchange describes what I was getting at.