Ross Douthat introduces The Table: Atlantic Voices in Conversation. I dig the head bob! Very professional.
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The Atlantic runs this regular column where they ask people about their reading habits — this time, they asked Aaron Sorkin, who sneers at the web and announces that he reads a couple of newspapers…or at least, he reads the front page and the op-eds in a couple of newspapers.
When I read the Times…
You should read Ross Douthat's obnoxious eulogy for Christopher Hitchens just so you can enjoy this magnificent takedown from Charles Pierce, over at Esquire. Pierce writes:
For the sheer magnitude of its horsepucky, this column may well stand forever. Generations yet unborn will come and read it…
Ross Douthat is reputed to be a pretty smart guy. He blogged for the Atlantic before being given Bill Safire's old op-ed column at the New York Times. Safire, despite being wrong in may ways, was a sharp observer with good sources in DC, an analytical eye, and a sparkling intellect. Safire was…
I have two blogs from The Atlantic's small flotilla, Ross Douthat & M. Yglesias, in my RSS reader. Now, one thing I notice is that there is a faux-tab1 at the top that allows you to toggle between these two blogs, as well as James Fallow's & Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. But here's the…
Are smart guys nearly always fug? What is the percentage of beauty w/ brains?
uhh, a little tasteless because it's irrelevant but (1) relatively attractive people are less numerous (2) probably less likely to be as motivated as a less attractive person to pursue expertise in some topics because of the social effects of attractiveness; hence professors and talking heads tending to be average or less than average in appearance; introversion is a positive quality in intellectual expertise and there's a surplus of it in less attractive people
one might ask then why there's nonsense in the media about more attractive people being smarter and attractiveness being a signal of intelligence. imo, the studies concluding this are misleading; (a) they typically compare the top and bottom cohort in attractiveness which greatly exaggerates the effect and (b) it runs together positive and negative social effects (c) the bottom cohort is much more likely than any other to have physical abnormalities affecting intelligence and socialization that others do not share; (d) in fact, the modest difference after accounting for those other factors is as readily explained by social biases like attractiveness halo causing (unfair) differential investment as some of the other hypotheses about attractiveness being a signal for quality (independent of social biases). Unfortunately most of the people working on this type of research aren't competent so they tend to defer to people like Randy Thornhill who continue to make (sometimes outlandish) claims years after they are falsified (e.g. his 1990 confuses structural abnormality with bilateral symmetry and continues to repeat a non replicated conclusion because of coherence with fitness of bodily symmetry in insect data)
Ugly people tend to be criminals, or criminals tend to be ugly, or good looking people don't have to pay for their crimes. Link.