Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
It’s often assumed that medical students take the Hippocratic Oath when they graduate or during the “white coat ceremony“—when they get their Official Doctor Coats at orientation. In fact, there’s a report from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) that most medical students never take that famous oath, and many classes write their own. Although there are still some “standard” oaths, the AAMC notes this:
. . . it was only around 20 years ago that schools began to allow students to craft their own promises.
Nancy Angoff, MD, remembers the decision to discard Yale’s long-standing oath back in 2000. “Some students and I didn’t care for the language,” says Angoff, associate dean for student affairs. “It seemed very impersonal, cold, and too pat.” At first, they considered reverting to the Hippocratic Oath.
“We debated it,” recalls Angoff. “The students didn’t want to promise things they couldn’t deliver on” that the ancient oath included, so they opted to write their own pledge.
Now Yale is among the 17% of surveyed schools that have an annual process for writing, revising, or selecting an oath. At Yale, the oath is written during a pregraduation course, explains Angoff. Each year, she says, “the students end up with a really personal and beautiful oath.”
You can see why they’ve ditched the original Hippocratic Oath if you read it here. There are parts that are really outmoded, such as this bit, which rules out assisted suicide and abortion:
I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.
Now I’m not sure why the students write oaths rather than the faculty, for the faculty surely have a better idea of what good physicianship is all about. And of course the students, who are quite young, can go hog wild, as they apparently did at Pitt. And you know already what they did—and what’s probably happening all over the U.S. They pledged themselves as doctors to engage in social-justice activism.
From PittWire, a publication of the University of Pittsburgh, we have a report of one new oath (click on screenshot to read):
There was a committee to write an oath (always a bad idea), and they produced an oath that was sent to me by reader Ginger K., who commented, “Some of this is quite reasonable, such as the commitment to research and mentoring, collegiality, and personal health. But the woke vocabulary dilutes the good stuff.” Indeed. The titer of real physicianship is quite low here.
Read the oath for yourself. Right off the bat I was distressed by the ubiquitous ritual invocation of George Floyd, who has nothing to do with medical school or prospective doctors (The Floyd Invocation also initiates “antiracism” statements on some of the University of Chicago’s departmental websites that violate our University principles):
One gets the impression from this statement that medicine is more a social justice mission—fixing racial inequities, fostering allyship and so on—than a mission to bring health and save lives. There’s more about social justice here, including the au courant “self care”, than there is about caring for patients per se, or practicing ethical behavior towards all patients. (And where is the confidentiality clause that was in the Hippocratic oath?)
I’m not going to make too much of this, as students probably enjoy producing their own oaths. But in the end this seems to be an act of virtue signaling, for most of the physicians will be engaged in the quotidian duties of simply helping the afflicted rather than fixing racial inequality.
I do admire those who sacrifice a comfortable existence to help the oppressed and poor, but this is an individual choice, not something to be decreed with a pledge recited by everyone. For surely not all students agree with this oath—just like not all professors at the University of Chicago agree with their departments’ “anti-racism” statements.
Take this as a sign of the times, and of the racialization of everything. For some students it may be a genuine pledge, but for many of the others it’s performative wokeness, something to be forgotten as soon as they pass their boards.
I’ve written before about predatory scientific journals: those fly-by-night venues that will publish nearly any submitted paper, however dreadful. Their motive is to get the thousands of dollars in “publication fees” that authors are forced to pay. In return, the authors get to cite their paper on their c.v.s, even though most papers in these journals are worthless. (Those who evaluate c.v.s, however, often don’t know which journals are bogus.)
In April of last year I wrote about a hilarious and deliberately insane paper written by Daniel Baldassare, “What’s the deal with birds?”, published in the predatory Scientific Journal of Research and Reviews (it’s not there any longer). Its thesis, such as it was, was that birds tending to look like fish (i.e., penguins) occurred in areas most susceptible to climate change, while birds with weird beaks (i.e;, parrots), didn’t live in those areas. But it was a farrago of madness and humor, done on purpose to show that these journals will publish anything. Here are the “data” from Baldassare’s paper:
I guess after Baldassare exposed both the paper and the journal in his Twitter thread, they decided to remove the paper. Baldassare, by the way, managed to bargain the “author’s fee” down from $1700 to zero. Audubon Magazine even wrote a piece about the hoax.
Now we have another of these hoax papers, also dealing with “fishy” birds. This one, published by Martin Stervander and Danny Haelewaters, appears in in Oceanography & Fisheries. It’s still up (click on the screenshot), but won’t be for long (I have a pdf for you if it’s taken down).
The premise and thesis is also bull-goose loony, again on purpose. This time their complex hypothesis took into account no fewer than four biological factors. Here’s how the authors describe the genesis of the hypothesis:
At the time we developed the original idea about fishiness of birds potentially being correlated to absence of poisonous mushrooms, one of the authors (D.H.) was eating pizza with four cheeses, chicken, anchovies, and mushrooms. It was really a good one, and this prompted us to—just like the pizza—integrate all four parameters in this study: fishiness, birdiness, lack of fungal toxicity, and effects of prolonged heating. We note that integrative taxonomy approaches [8], and by extension approaches to integrate everything in research, are being increasingly employed, thus supporting the rationale for the work presented in this paper.
It is important to keep in mind that research has not always been this integrative, or cross-disciplinary. For example, Charles Darwin worked alone [9] and still published a relatively well-cited contribution to the field of theology and some other disciplines. We feel it is natural for humans to dangle up and down between extremes. This is true for scientists, just like it is for politicians (consider the formation of the European Union in the 1990s and early 2000s versus the current wish of some countries to leave again [10]).
All in all, in this study we present the results of our work with fishy birds (fide Baldassarre [1]). We hypothesize that, (1) despite climate change, it is still cold in Antarctica and thus the presumed lack of poisonous fungi leads to fishy-looking birds. Further, with a clear correlation of pizza and lower latitudes [11], we hypothesize that (2) birdy-looking birds (as well as fishy-looking fish) will be more prevalent than fishy-looking birds on pizzas.
Any good reviewer would have spotted this in an instant as a Poe, but of course these journals don’t care about quality, or even seriousness. I doubt the reviewers even read the papers.
Their results, like Baldassari’s are presented in a single bizarre figure, with lots of bogus statements in the text about statistical methods and significance. But what they conclude is that birds that look like fish (i.e., penguins) tend to occur in areas without poisonous fungi (Antarctica), while birds that don’t look like fish (chickens, swifts, etc; they also threw in a flying fish that looks like a swift, an anchovy, and a “Nemo fish”) live at lower latitudes where there’s an abundance of pizza. A remarkable vindication of their thesis! The results in graphic form:
. . . and in the text:
Our PCA revealed that most of the variation in the dataset was partitioned along the first (59.3%) and second (34.8%) principal components (PCs), with loadings corresponding to poisonous funginess and pizza toppingness, respectively (Table 1). There is a clear bimodality in both PC scores, distinguishing on the one hand penguins (PC1, low funginess) and on the other hand anchovy and chicken (PC2, high toppingness). Plotting the scores for all taxa, a quadratic model explains the two-dimensional distribution of avian species (p <<< 0.05) with low residual variation except for the outlier H. rustica (Figure 1).
They note that while fishy-looking birds occur in areas lacking poisonous fungi and pizza, that relationship doesn’t hold for birdy-looking fish (flying fish). They also note that the swallow is an outlier.
In the discussion they take up the parlous subject of climate change, and postulate that, with global warming, poisonous fungi may invade Antarctica and “may thus exert a strong selection pressure on penguins to evolve a less fishy morphology,” so that the evolved penguins may, with their new appearance, expand into “pizza topping habitats.”
There are two more immediate clues that this was a hoax: the acknowledgements (which damn predatory journals!) and the author contributions, which cite Darwin:
First author Martin Stervander also wrote an exposé on his own website about the paper, including a positive “review” of the paper for another journal where it was submitted, Journal of Ecosystems and Ecography, published by OMICS International. It’s clear that the reviewing process of all these journals is deficient—to say the least. But if it was rigorous, they’d have no way to make money!
So we have another exposé of predatory journals, which we all know exist because every scientist gets daily requests for submissions to these journals, even when the journals aren’t remotely connected with the scientist’s research. (I’ve had pleas for my papers from journals in obstetrics and gynecology.) But there’s no better way to expose this nonsense than to publish a loony paper in it. Sadly, this doesn’t bring down the journals (they just remove the papers), and they continue to serve as citations for desperate scientists.
Is there anything unethical about these hoaxes? Hell, no: there’s no way anybody could be deceived by papers like these, and it’s the best way to show the journals up for what they are.
They also resemble the “hoax papers” sent by Boghossian, Pluckrose, and Lindsay to social-science journals in the famous “grievance studies affair” that now has its own Wikipedia page. As I wrote last April:
One final remark. In the “grievance studies affair“, Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, and especially Peter Boghossian got into big trouble for “hoaxing” humanities journals with equally ludicrous papers. Baldassarre won’t get into trouble (and shouldn’t), for his paper is in a clearly predatory journal. But what’s the difference between a predatory scientific journal that will publish nonsense and humanities journals like Fat Studies or Gender, Place & Culture that publish nonsense but also purport to be venues for serious research? In effect, they both do the same thing: help researchers fatten their c.v.s with worthless research. Why should Boghossian et al. be excoriated for exposing the same kind of crappy journal standards that Baldassarre did?
Anything that exposes this kind of academic garbage, including clear hoax papers, is to be applauded, so long as the hoaxes are revealed (as they were with the Grievance Studies Trio) or are so palpably ridiculous (as with Baldassarre’s paper) that they couldn’t be anything other than a hoax.
Please send in your wildlife photos; they are coming in very slowly and, as usual, I’m nervous.
Today we have some European and American landscape photos by James Blilie. His captions are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.
Fountain detail, Chatsworth House. UK, 2015. If you get the chance, don’t miss Chatsworth House! Many scenes from the 2005 film Pride and Prejudice were filmed at Chatsworth House.
Mountain reflections. This was taken out the window of our car as we drove along next to a wide river. No place to pull over. Norway, 2012.
View of the Cinque Terre. Italy, 1999. Scanned Kodachrome 64.
Domaine du Vieux Télégraphe, Chateauneuf du Pape, France, 1997. Scanned Kodachrome 64. Some vineyards in the Rhone Valley are just heaps of (large) pebbles. Makes good wine!
Vineyard, Gigondas, France. 1997. One of my favorite places. Scanned Kodachrome 64.
Climbers on the Kahiltna Glacier, Denali (aka Mt. McKinley), Alaska. 1987. Scanned Kodachrome 64.
Good day on Friday, January 15, 2021: National Bagel Day. There are few places in North America where you can get a good (i.e., authentic) bagel: two are in Montreal and one is in New York City. I will let you do your own investigation, but do not be gulled into thinking that those inflated pillows of dough sold as “bagels” everywhere in America are real bagels. They are simply toruses made from Wonder Bread. Some even have what purports to be blueberries in them. Here’s a real bagel with a schmear from Montreal, boiled with honey, cooked over a real wood fire, and properly dense and chewy.
Today there’s a Google Doodle celebrating the life of James Naismith (1861-1939), the inventor of basketball (click on screenshot). As C|Net reports, it was on this day in 1862 that Naismith “[unveiled] the rules of the sport, which he’d invented just weeks earlier, in a Springfield College school newspaper.”
Wine of the Day: If you want a good, dry bubbly but don’t want to pay Champagne prices, the American Roederer Estate Brut, which you can get for not much more than $20, is your ticket. It’s made from wine of different vintages, as they mix oak-aged wines from their collection to the blend of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir that are the body of this sparkler. It’s toasty, with prominent fruit notes: apple and pear (probably due to the malic acid). And it’s a terrific bargain if you want a sparkler. Very dry, too, which is good as I don’t like sweet bubbly.
News of the Day:
The news is scary: according to the FBI, via ABC News, there are now credible threats to attack every state capital on Inauguration Day. Will this really happen? Are there that many armed loons in America? Maybe I’m naive, but I’m hoping nobody gets killed on January 20.
And Mitch “666” McConnell now declares that an impeachment trial can’t begin until Inauguration day, January 20. Will we see Senators first watch Biden and Harris get sworn in, then quickly repair to their chamber to debate the article of impeachment? If not on that day, the trial will surely begin that week, for there are no plans to delay it.
Lisa Murkowski, a Republican Senator from Alaska, has intimated that she may vote to impeach Trump. That means we’d still need 16 Republican Senators joining her to secure a conviction. . That simply won’t happen, barring a miracle, and we need to accept it.
At the Washington Post, a Yale Law professor explains why it’s unlikely that Trump would be able to pardon himself. It’s not dead certain, but there are several legal and societal reasons why Trump couldn’t do it. Of course he could always resign and get Pence to do it, but based on their now soured relations, I think that unlikely.
Reuters reports, based on information from insiders, how Trump is spending his final days in the White House. It’s not a pretty picture, and reminds me of Nixon’s last days. The report adds that Trump wanted to march with the protestors down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, but was dissuaded by the Secret Service, who couldn’t guarantee his safety. An excerpt:
Trump’s last days in the White House have been marked by rage and turmoil, multiple sources said. He watched some of the impeachment debate on TV and grew angry at the Republican defections, a source familiar with the situation said.
Trump has suffered a sudden rupture with his vice president, the departure of disgusted senior advisers, his abandonment by a small but growing number of Republican lawmakers, the loss of his cherished Twitter megaphone, and a rush by corporations and others to distance themselves from him and his businesses.
Reuters spoke to more than a dozen Trump administration officials with a window into the closing act of his presidency. They described a shrinking circle of loyal aides who are struggling to contain an increasingly fretful, angry and isolated president – one seemingly still clinging to unfounded claims of election fraud – and to keep the White House functioning until Biden assumes power.
“Everybody feels like they’re doing the best job they can to hold it all together until Biden takes over,” one Trump adviser told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 388,785, a big increase of about 4,000 deaths from yesterday’s figure, or about 2.8 deaths per minute. In a few days we’ll pass 400,000 deaths: double what the most pessimistic pundits thought we’d have. The world death toll is 2,004,466, a big increase of about 15,500 deaths over yesterday’s total. As predicted, we passed two million deaths yesterday.
Stuff that happened on January 15 includes:
1559 – Elizabeth I is crowned Queen of England in Westminster Abbey, London.
Here’s the cartoon (Wikipedia gives this explanation: “Andrew Jackson’s enemies twisted his name to “jackass” as a term of ridicule regarding a stupid and stubborn animal. However, the Democrats liked the common-man implications and picked it up too, therefore the image persisted and evolved.”)
1889 – The Coca-Cola Company, then known as the Pemberton Medicine Company, is incorporated in Atlanta.
1919 – Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two of the most prominent socialists in Germany, are tortured and murdered by the Freikorps at the end of the Spartacist uprising.
1919 – Great Molasses Flood: A wave of molasses released from an exploding storage tank sweeps through Boston, Massachusetts, killing 21 and injuring 150.
Yes, it’s that time of year when I must report that nearly two dozen people were drowned in molasses. A sad end, but also a sweet one. Here’s a photograph of the damage; caption from the Boston Globe.
That reminds me of a joke about the guy who died from drinking furniture polish: he had a horrible end, but a beautiful finish.
Boston, MA – 1/16/1919: Looking across North End Park on Jan. 16, 1919, the day after a giant tank at the Purity Distilling Co. on Commercial Street collapsed, sending a wave of an estimated 2.3 million gallons of molasses through the streets of Boston. The great molasses tank was located in the center of this picture. Sections of the metal may be seen at the extreme left and right in the picture. Twenty-one people perished, including two 10-year-olds, Pasquale Iantosca and Maria Distasio, who were collecting firewood near the molasses tank while home from school for lunch. (Boston Globe Archive/) — BGPA Reference: 150115_MJ_001
Here’s a crappy photo, but it’s the only one I could find:
1947 – The Black Dahlia murder: the dismembered corpse of Elizabeth Short was found in Los Angeles.
This murder is still unsolved, and it was a bad one. If you want the gory details, Google “Black Dahlia crime scene”.
1962 – The Derveni papyrus, Europe’s oldest surviving manuscript dating to 340 BC, is found in northern Greece.
The fragments of the papyrus comprise a commentary on a poem by Orpheus. Here’s a photo of some of them.
1967 – The first Super Bowl is played in Los Angeles. The Green Bay Packers defeat the Kansas City Chiefs 35–10.
1976 – Gerald Ford’s would-be assassin, Sara Jane Moore, is sentenced to life in prison.
Moore was released in 2007 and then put back in jail in 2019 for violating her parole (she left the country without getting permission). She’s still in jail:
2001 – Wikipedia, a free wiki content encyclopedia, goes online.
It’s Wikipedia’s 20th birthday! Reader Enrico noticed that there’s an article in The Economist (paywalled) celebrating the occasion. For years Greg Mayer has been promising to write an article about the errors in Wikipedia, an article to be called “What’s the Matter with Wikipedia?” But, as I tell him, it’s like Casaubon’s “Key to all Mythologies”: it will never appear.
2019 – Theresa May’s UK government suffers the biggest government defeat in modern times, when 432 MPs voting against the proposed European Union withdrawal agreement, giving her opponents a majority of 230.
Notables born on this day include:
1622 – Molière, French actor and playwright (d. 1673)
1850 – Leonard Darwin, English soldier, eugenicist, and politician (d. 1943)
Leonard (below) was the son of Charles Darwin. He doesn’t look much like his dad:
1891 – Osip Mandelstam, Russian poet and translator (d. 1938)
1908 – Edward Teller, Hungarian-American physicist and academic (d. 2003)
1909 – Gene Krupa, American drummer, composer, and actor (d. 1973)
1919 – Maurice Herzog, French mountaineer and politician, French Minister of Youth Affairs and Sports (d. 2012)
Herzog and Louis Lachenal were the first mountaineers to climb an 8000-meter peak, Annapurna I. They didn’t have the right boots, though, and Herzog lost all of his toes and most of his fingers on a difficult descent. He wrote a best-selling book, Annapurna, about the ascent, which remains the best-selling book about mountaineering. Here he is before they snipped off his digits:
Photo: E. P. Dutton
1929 – Martin Luther King Jr., American minister and activist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1968)
Those who breathed their last on January 15 include:
1896 – Mathew Brady, American photographer and journalist (b. 1822)
Here’s Brady’s photo of Abraham Lincoln:
1919 – Rosa Luxemburg, German economist, theorist, and philosopher (b. 1871)
1964 – Jack Teagarden, American singer-songwriter and trombonist (b. 1905)
1987 – Ray Bolger, American actor, singer, and dancer (b. 1904)
1994 – Harry Nilsson, American singer-songwriter (b. 1941)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili proposes Meow-Based Reforms:
Hili: We have to change the world.
A: OK, but how to do it?
Hili: By meowing loudly.
In Polish:
Hili: Musimy zmienić świat.
Ja: Dobrze, ale jak to zrobić?
Hili: Trzeba miauczeć donośnie.
Also in Dobrzyn, Kulka, always jumping and running, disports herself in the snow. Here are four pictures, with the caption, “Paulina’s hijinks with Kulka”. (In Polish: Szaleństwa Pauliny z Kulką).
From Woody:
From Jesus of the Day. Would Velveeta work?
A groaner from Bruce:
Titania isn’t at all distressed at her loss of followers. But Twitter must have really cleaned out its “deplorables”:
I am FURIOUS. 😡
I’ve only lost 16,400 followers so far in this latest Twitter purge.
I won’t be satisfied until the only ones left on Twitter are me and Kamala Harris. pic.twitter.com/X2CaWnaksc
From Simon, who says this is “A thought on punishing Trump”. Does this mean Trump has to serve a very long time?
Hitler was found guilty of treason and sentenced to five years in prison after the Beer Hall Putsch. He served nine months before he was pardoned in the name of "unity and healing." And after that, as we all know, everything was fine.
This weevil looks like it was just entombed yesterday, but has been preserved in amber for 35 million years. The second tweet links to the paper with the description:
Image from Bukejs and Legalov, 2020. The first record of Brentidae (Coleoptera) in Eocene Rovno amber with description of a new fossil species of Toxorhynchus Scudder, 1893. @fossil_record, 23, 169-177. https://t.co/t2bxqxj7Hg
I’m not squeamish, but I have to say that this is disgusting:
Enjoyed this story about a millipede irruption so dense that it used to literally stop trains (although is now declining, alas). Any other great examples of invertebrate swarms large enough to prevent the use of linear infrastructure?#roadecologyhttps://t.co/RK5SXFR5Qw
Part of the Woke Program is dispelling meritocracy, as demonstrations of “merit” are often seen as byproducts of “privilege”, while lower assessments of merit, especially when instantiated by minority groups, are seen as instantiations of bigotry. It’s well known, for example, that the standard ACT and SAT tests show dramatically different average scores among racial groups. Below is a table of 2018 scores from the National Center for Education Statistics, with data drawn from the U.S. Department of Education. The standard deviations in the U.S. overall are about 200; this figure would be lower for separate groups because that estimate comes from combined data of groups having different means.
As is well known, there are big differences between groups—on the order of half to a full standard deviation, with Asians at the top followed by whites, mixed-race students, Hispanics, Pacific Islanders and then Native Americans and blacks nearly tied on the lowest rung.
The ordering is seen as reflecting racism, and that may well be true if you take “racism” as meaning “the historical oppression of minority groups which had created at present an impoverished cultural environment with bad schools.” And that would be my own explanation for the differences. A culture of pushing for achievement and high grades would then account for Asians getting the highest scores on average.
Some people, however, attribute racism more directly, arguing that the questions themselves are racially biased, favoring white and Asian “knowledge” over the knowledge held by other groups. I don’t think such an explanation holds much water, especially for math; and the SAT company has made efforts to examine the possibility of bias and eliminate those questions that smack of it.
Because of the racial disparities, people have argued successfully to eliminate SATs and ACTs (another standardized test) as requirements for college admission. I can’t see a good reason for that. SATs, in particular, are just as correlated with success in college as are high-school grade point averages, but the latter are specific to schools. Why would you not want to put all students on the same scale, evaluated by the same test, when you’re judging students? The best thing to do, as I’ve argued, is use a multivariate index, combining grades and standardized-test scores.
The reason schools are eliminating tests, of course, is largely because racial disparities in scores don’t look good on their face (I’d argue that they highlight a problem of inequality), and, if used as one criterion for college admission, would reduce the chances of minorities like blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans getting into selective colleges, exacerbating inequities (inequality of representation). But there’s a solution: colleges wanting more racial balance can use various legal affirmative-action strategies, strategies that, in general, I approve of. Also, there’s a benefit for minorities taking standardized tests: it enables colleges to pick out those students who are likely to do well (remember the correlation between SAT scores and college success) but didn’t have high grade-point averages, perhaps because they were bored or not turned on by the curriculum.
But you can only push affirmative action so far before unequal admissions treatment starts getting people upset. That’s why a group of Asian students sued Harvard (and lost, at least for the time being), claiming that Harvard deliberately downgraded their assessments to avoid having too many Asians on campus. If you have standardized-test numbers to attach to different groups, the disparities are glaring and not only can incite resentment, but can lead to lawsuits arguing that schools are using a “quota system,” a strategy ruled out in the Bakke case.
Recently, the University of California decided to eliminate tests like SATs as requirements for in-state applicants, making them optional for the next two years. Then, in 2023, students will not be allowed to even submit those scores. This happened despite the recommendation of both its own Chancellor and a panel convened by the University system itself, both of which recommended that SAT-like tests be retained as mandatory for applicants. The only reason that the University could possibly have for overriding its own panel’s recommendation is that test scores highlight racial disparities and could exacerbate at the U of C if considered in a largely meritocratic admissions system.
For reasons I can’t fathom, the University of California, after ditching the SATs and ACTs, recommended that the system devise its own standardized test, to be implemented in 2025. But according to this article from the Los Angeles Times (click on screenshot, and inquire for a copy if paywalled), they’ve decided they can’t do that in a timely fashion, and so the U of C is likely to ditch all standardized tests—for good. This has already happened in over 1,000 other colleges and universities (roughly a quarter of higher-education institutions in the U.S.), a wholesale dismantling of the meritocracy. (n.b.: I don’t think that test-scores or grades should be the sole criterion for college admissions, as there are other criteria of achievement that aren’t measured by these statistics.)
See if you can open this, and ask if you can’t:
Because the proposed UC-specific test isn’t practicable, they’ve explored another alternative:
The UC Board of Regents unanimously voted last year to eliminate the SAT and ACT — as more than 1,000 other colleges and universities have done — amid decades of research showing test performance is heavily influenced by race, income and parent education levels.
But the regents accepted a faculty recommendation to explore whether a new UC test without those biases could be developed, saying it would have to be ready in time for fall 2025 applicants.
The UC panels, in their reports released Monday, said it was not feasible for UC to develop its own test because it would take too long and recommended that the university instead explore using a modified version of the state’s high school assessment — but only as an optional “data point” in comprehensive applicant reviews.
The new replacement:
The group of UC faculty, admissions directors, testing experts and other educational and community representatives focused on whether Smarter Balanced, the California assessment given annually to 11th graders, could be retooled for UC use. Any use of a modified state test, however, should be optional and limited so as not to create the inequities and high-stakes pressures associated with the SAT and ACT, according to the recommendation to UC President Michael V. Drake from a second panel.
This is just replacing one standardized test with another, and one that can’t be used to compare in-state applicants with out-of-state applicants who don’t take “Smarter Balanced.” Note the concern with “inequities and high-stakes pressures”. Well, you’re still going to get those, because Smarter Balanced testing produces the same disparities as does the SAT:
But members from both groups also expressed concerns about racial and ethnic disparities in state test results. For instance, about 70% of students classified as Asian meet or exceed the 11th-grade standard for math compared with 45% of whites and 20% of Black and Latino students, the work group said.
So you’ve still got those substantial inequities in exactly the same direction. Proponents of the California-specific test, however, argue that it has a few advantages over SATs. For one thing, it’s free, while I believe it costs a lot to take the standardized SAT and ACT tests. Also, proponents argue that a California-specific test will somehow “better align [the University of California] with the K-12 system, leading to better educational preparation for university work.”
But do you really want California-wide uniformity of educational desiderata, especially when assessed with a test not available to those outside California? It all sounds too cumbersome to me.
And, in the end, the committees assessing this issue decided that, for the time being, the University system should not use Smarter Balanced as an admission criterion, instead using the test scores “for related purposes, such as validating GPA [JAC: that is a criterion by the way], providing context about the school’s educational environment or helping determine placement in freshman courses and summer preparation programs.”
In the end, I think that a mandatory standardized test for all applicants, including those from outside the state, is useful, and I can’t see any good arguments against it save the cost, which can be obviated. As I wrote last year, concurring with Scott Aaronson that standardized tests have real value in singling out smart kids who didn’t get good grades (Aaronson was one of those):
If you want greater racial equity, though, it seems to me best not to eliminate test scores, but to calculate a multivariate index of “academic achievement,” and then use other criteria, like “diversity points” to increase racial balance. This is, in effect, what is being done now by schools like Harvard. The reason, as I’ve said before, is as a form of reparations for those held back by their sociopolitical history in America.
You can have greater equity and some meritocratic criteria at the same time. What you cannot have is greater equity and purely meritocratic admissions, assuming that you base the merit on grades, test scores, and criteria like achievements not measured by grades and scores. (I don’t recommend using Harvard’s “personality index”!) Eventually, when equality of opportunity is achieved for all groups—and that is the real goal, but one that will take decades to achieve—there will be no good arguments against using standardized tests as criteria for college admission.
The book below is scheduled to be published in about two weeks, which means it’s not even out yet—unless they released it beforehand. It’s by Andy Ngo, a conservative journalist who’s described by Wikipedia as “editor-at-large of The Post Millennial, a Canadian conservative news website”. We’ve encountered him before in several posts on this site, many of them covering Antifa in a negative light (Ngo is from Portland: Antifa Central); but I haven’t followed his reporting or writing in a long while, and didn’t know that he wrote a book on Antifa. It’s due out February 2.
But although the book hasn’t yet been released, it is in fact #1 among all Amazon books (Obama’s memoir is number 5), so It’s already a bestseller and will haul in a lot of dosh for Ngo. But its Amazon site (click on cover below) is curiously devoid of descriptions, and has no endorsements. That’s highly unusual for a #1-ranked book. I haven’t read it, but I suppose its popularity is due to the public’s increased interest in Antifa, alleged—falsely—to have participated in last week’s storming of the Capitol.
Portland is of course the wokest town in America, and is also home to Powell’s Books, one of America’s best bookstores, which also has a reputation for wokeness. I spent a lot of time in Powell’s on my two visit to Portland, and actually bought some books there despite my own bookshelves being jammed full. It’s an excellent store. Portland would of course carry Ngo’s bestseller, but it poses a dilemma for them. The town is woke, the bookstore is woke, yet the book is anti-woke and anti-Antifa. What to do?
The good citizens of Portland (and I use that adjective ironically) decided to picket the bookstore—not because it actually had the physical book in its store, but because it was carrying it online. There were protests in front of the chain’s flagship store on Sunday and Monday, and eventually they closed the store. Here are two photos from OregonLive: though it’s not much of a demonstration.
I don’t think Powell’s closed its store to send a message to the protestors so much as to protect its property from Antifa’s well-known propensity to do damage. But they did issue a statement about why they are carrying the book—a statement that asserts Powell’s commitment to free speech but, at the same time, emphasizing that the book is basically against the store’s values and causes “pain” to the community. In other words, Powell’s sent a mixed message, trying to satisfy everyone.
Further, the store has emphasized that it won’t be carrying the physical book in its store: you can get it only by ordering online. That’s part of the mixed message as well. You can see Powell’s high-sounding statement by clicking on the screenshot below.
Now in fact this would be an excellent statement if it didn’t go out of its way to denigrate the book. Here’s a statement from the store’s owner, and there’s more on the site. The emphasis is mine.
Dear Powell’s community,
At Powell’s, a lot of our inventory is hand-selected, and hand-promoted. And a lot of our inventory is not. Unmasked by Andy Ngo came to us via one of our long-term and respected publishers, Hachette Book Group. We list the majority of their catalogue on Powells.com automatically, as do many other independent and larger retailers. We have a similar arrangement with other publishers.
Since Sunday, Powell’s has received hundreds of emails, calls, and social media comments calling for us to remove Unmasked from Powells.com. Demonstrations outside our Burnside store have forced us to close to ensure the safety of employees, protestors, and neighbors. If we need to remain closed, we will not hesitate to do so.
As many of you may be following these events, I want to offer additional context about our decision to allow this book to remain online.
Since the first published texts there have been calls to disown different printed work, and at Powell’s we have a long history of experiencing these calls, and the threats they bring with them, firsthand. Until recently the threats were from those who objected that we carried books written by authors we respected or subjects we supported. The threats were real but we could feel virtuous — we were bringing the written word to the light of day. We could feel proud of our choices, even when the choices created conflict.
Our current fight does not feel virtuous. It feels ugly and sickening to give any air to writing that could cause such deep pain to members of our community. But we have always sold books that many of us would reject. We have fought for decades, at Powell’s, for the right of a book to stand on its own. Doing so is one of our core values as booksellers.
In our history we have sold many copies of books we find objectionable. We do that in spite of all the reasons not to, because we believe that making the published word available is an important and crucial step in shedding light on the dark corners of the public discourse. It is actually a leap of faith into the vortex of the power of the written word and our fellow citizens to make sense of it.
That leap of faith is inextricably woven into our existence as Powell’s: faith in our customers is what first propelled us from a small corner store into who we are today. We recognize that not every reader has good intentions, or will arrive at a writer’s intended destination, but we do believe that faith must extend to our community of readers. That offering the printed word in all its beauty and gore, must ultimately move us forward. As my father says, if your principles are only your principles sometimes, they’re not principles at all.
Read more about our commitment to free speech below.
Warmly,
Emily Powell
President and Owner
Powell’s Books
Get that bit about the book causing “deep pain to members of our community”! If the book isn’t out yet, and people haven’t read it, then where does the “deep pain” even come from? Presumably from Ngo’s reputation alone. It’s typical of of the censorious Left to demand the banning—for that’s what they want here—of books they haven’t read. In fact, they don’t care what’s in the book; they’re trying to prevent people from reading anything by Ngo. And that is cancel culture.
Now there’s a FAQ section of Powell’s response as well, which has virtuous statements like the following:
Booksellers are not censors. We have the privilege to curate, promote, and act as guides to the books and ideas we value, but it is antithetical to our core mission of free speech to impose limits on what our customers read. At the end of the day, making space for books and readers with whom we disagree is the nonviolent antithesis to the dominant impulse to shout down (or worse) anyone who doesn’t support your worldview, something we see daily on social media and, more terrifyingly, in America’s seats of power. Given the choice between holding our noses over a book and bowing to pressure to begin banning them, we will always choose the former.
and this:
As an independent bookstore, Powell’s believes that it is our responsibility to respect your choice of reading material. We are dedicated to providing a wide array of books, authors, viewpoints, and voices, and our selection is one of the things that sets Powell’s apart from our peers in bookselling. We provide these options out of deference to the First Amendment, but just as importantly, because we believe that exposure to a multiplicity of writing — in fiction and nonfiction alike — facilitates critical thinking and spurs conversation and growth.
That is all good stuff. But why did they have to ruin it by saying stuff like this?:
Why wouldn’t you make an exception to your policy for a book as inflammatory as Unmasked?
Unmasked was written by a provocateur who has made a career of inciting violence over inflammatory and inaccurate ideas that divide people into factions. It is natural that his supporters and detractors have passionate, emotional responses to our carrying his book online.
Talk about inciting violence! That’s Antifa’s modus operandi!
The next question they answer is “Why would you carry books you find deplorable?”, implying that Powell’s does indeed find Ngo’s book deplorable. You can read the answer for yourself.
The most arrant hypocrisy is the failure of the store to carry the physical book so that people can go into the store, look at it, and decide whether to buy it. Now you’re saying, “Well, the Antifa folks would just damage or destroy any physical books on the shelves.” That may be true—and of course shows that Ngo has a point, for exercising censorship is eroding democracy—but Powell’s could always keep the book behind the counter. Here’s Powell’s unconvincing explanation for why it’s selling the book only online.
Why would you sell the book online but not in stores?
Even a store as large as the City of Books can’t carry every book on the market. To expand our offerings for our customers, Powell’s and many other retailers make their distributors’ and publishing partners’ catalogs available for purchase online. This is how a book like Unmasked, which our buyers did not purchase for the stores, finds its way onto Powells.com.
Yeah, right. They can’t carry the #1 book on Amazon in the store? Who on earth believes that explanation? And of course they could order more copies to sell in the stores. No, they aren’t carrying the book either because they’re afraid of Antifa or because they are exercising some kind of restricted access—censorship. Either alternative bespeaks cowardice and undermines the eloquent defense of free speech given elsewhere in Powell’s statement.
Reader “Sherfolder” sent some lovely street photos from India. The captions are indented, and you can click the photos to make them bigger. These really make me want to get back there!
The first two photos are from Rishikesh, a man sitting on banks of the river Ganges and the Hanuman Temple.
This photo shows a farmer transporting load of leaves of meetha neem (Murraya koenigii) also known as curry tree. It is widely used in Indian cuisine as a spice, even though it has nothing directly to do with the preparation of curry.
The next one shows a cattle herder giving her buffalos a short rest at a bus stop.
The following photos show people staying overnight at the train station of New Delhi, residents of a village in Rajasthan I met on a Sunday morning, cleaners of the Amber Fort in Jaipur, local visitors to the Jodphur Palace, flower sellers, and finally the Golden Temple of Amritsar.
