"Are British people stupider than the Chinese?"

Via Marginal Revolution, an amusingly-dry memoir from Puzhong Yao. Here's an extract:

"It was the summer of 2000. I was 15, and I had just finished my high school entrance exam in China. I had made considerable improvements from where I started in first grade, when I had the second- worst grades in the class and had to sit at a desk perpendicular to the blackboard so that the teacher could keep a close eye on me. I had managed to become an average student in an average school.

My parents by then had reached the conclusion that I was not going anywhere promising in China and were ready to send me abroad for high school. Contrary to all expectations, however, I got the best mark in my class and my school. The exam scores were so good that I ranked within the top ten among more than 100,000 students in the whole city. My teacher and I both assumed the score was wrong when we first heard it.

As a consequence, I got into the best class in the best school in my city, and thus began the most painful year of my life. My newfound confidence was quickly crushed when I saw how talented my new classmates were. In the first class, our math teacher announced that she would start from chapter four of the textbook, as she assumed, correctly, that most of us were familiar with the first three chapters and would find it boring to go through them again.

Most of the class had been participating in various competitions in middle school and had become familiar with a large part of the high school syllabus already. Furthermore, they had also grown to know each other from those years of competitions together. And here I was, someone who didn’t know anything or anyone, surrounded by people who knew more to begin with, who were much smarter, and who worked just as hard as I did. What chance did I have?

During that year, I tried very hard to catch up: I gave up everything else and even moved somewhere close to the school to save time on the commute, but to no avail. Over time, going to school and competing while knowing I was sure to lose became torture. Yet I had to do it every day. At the end-of-year exam, I scored second from the bottom of the class—the same place where I began in first grade.

But this time it was much harder to accept, after the glory I had enjoyed just one year earlier and the huge amount of effort I had put into studying this year. Finally, I threw in the towel, and asked my parents to send me abroad. Anywhere else on this earth would surely be better.

So I came to the UK in 2001, when I was 16 years old. Much to my surprise, I found the UK’s exam-focused educational system very similar to the one in China. What is more, in both countries, going to the “right schools” and getting the “right job” are seen as very important by a large group of eager parents. As a result, scoring well on exams and doing well in school interviews—or even the play session for the nursery or pre-prep school—become the most important things in the world. Even at the university level, the undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge depends on nothing else but an exam at the end of the last year.

On the other hand, although the UK’s university system is considered superior to China’s, with a population that is only one-twentieth the size of my native country, competition, while tough, is less intimidating. For example, about one in ten applicants gets into Oxbridge in the UK, and Stanford and Harvard accept about one in twenty-five applicants. But in Hebei province in China, where I am from, only one in fifteen hundred applicants gets into Peking or Qinghua University.

Still, I found it hard to believe how much easier everything became. I scored first nationwide in the GCSE (high school) math exam, and my photo was printed in a national newspaper. I was admitted into Trinity College, University of Cambridge, once the home of Sir Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and Prince Charles.

I studied economics at Cambridge, a field which has become more and more mathematical since the 1970s. The goal is always to use a mathematical model to find a closed-form solution to a real-world problem. Looking back, I’m not sure why my professors were so focused on these models. I have since found that the mistake of blindly relying on models is quite widespread in both trading and investing—often with disastrous results, such as the infamous collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. Years later, I discovered the teaching of Warren Buffett: it is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong. But our professors taught us to think of the real world as a math problem.

The culture of Cambridge followed the dogmas of the classroom: a fervent adherence to rules and models established by tradition.  For example, at Cambridge, students are forbidden to walk on grass. This right is reserved for professors only. The only exception is for those who achieve first class honors in exams; they are allowed to walk on one area of grass on one day of the year.

The behavior of my British classmates demonstrated an even greater herd mentality than what is often mocked in American MBAs. For example, out of the thirteen economists in my year at Trinity, twelve would go on to join investment banks, and five of us went to work for Goldman Sachs.

Three years later, I graduated with first class honors and got a job offer from Goldman’s Fixed Income, Currency and Commodity division, the division founded by my hero Rubin. It seemed like whatever I wished would simply come true. But inside, I feared that one day these glories would pass. After all, not long ago, I was at the bottom of my class in China. And if I could not even catch up with my classmates in a city few people have even heard of, how am I now qualified to go to Cambridge University or Goldman? Have I gotten smarter?

Or is it just that British people are stupider than the Chinese?"

So, words of wisdom here from Puzhong Yao. But is his final assertion plausible?

He states, "I ranked within the top ten among more than 100,000 students in the whole city". In a normal distribution this represents 1/10,000 of the whole area, on the extreme right hand side.

How many standard deviations is that?   3.72.

If we assume the mean north-east asian IQ to be around 106, then with standard deviation 15, this makes our author's IQ 160+.

This would not be an elite IQ in China*, but since the IQ threshold for Oxbridge is reckoned to be 145 (3 standard deviations above the lower British norm), he's plainly going to excel there!

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* If Puzhong Yao is in the intellectual top 0.01%, then in a Chinese population of one billion he's in the top 100,000.

But the really top elite, say the top thousand people in the country, would be more than 4.75 standard deviations out, with IQs around 180.

How unfair is access to university education?

The Times today has a leader, "First-Degree Burn", where they state:

"With notable exceptions, Britain’s universities are still not doing enough to attract poor students. English 18-year-olds from the most advantaged 20 per cent of backgrounds are still more than six times more likely to attend a top university than those from the least advantaged 20 per cent.

"Jo Johnson, the universities’ minister, calls this unacceptable and he is right."

In fact he is quite wrong.

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Suppose 'advantage' is normally distributed in the UK population (it is not - more later) and suppose it correlates pretty well with IQ (which seems more reasonable).

Then the top 20% would have a mean IQ of 121 and their children (regressing to the mean) an average IQ of 117. *

The bottom 20% would be a symmetrical story, the left side of the bell curve. Their mean IQ would be 79 and their children's an improving 84 (83.2 but let's round up).

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The Times mentions 'a top university', by which they most likely mean the Russell Group. The IQ needed to get into a Russell Group university is estimated to be 120.

 - Given a population with average IQ of 117, you would expect 42% to be eligible to meet the 120 cut-off.

 - Given a population with an average IQ of 84, you would expect 0.8% to be smart enough to meet the IQ 120 cut-off for the Russell Group.

That's a ratio of 42/0.8 = 52.5 - far worse than the lamentable six to one quoted by The Times.

The problem is with the financial-advantage model. The disadvantage-advantage distribution is far from normal; a small minority are very well off while a very large minority share a lowish level of income which is conventionally described as 'disadvantaged'.

What IQ amongst the 'disadvantaged' would replicate The Times' statistic of six to one?

A 'disadvantaged ' IQ of 98.

A population with an average child's IQ of 98 would have around 7% with an IQ at or above 120 - and thus be eligible to attend a 'top university'.

Since 98 is pretty much the average IQ of the mass of people in the UK, The Times' figures do not surprise me at all - they're exactly what we should expect.

And for that reason, despite any confected outrage or exciting new policies, I don't expect them to alter at all, short of crashing admission standards. **

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* If you're wondering where all these figures came from, we're applying truncation selection ideas which were explained in detail here.

The first part of the calculation goes like this:

Talking about the top 20% of the population for IQ (mean = 100, std. dev. = 15) we have p = 20% = 0.2. This is the area we are 'breeding from', the top 20%.

The mean IQ of this group S = 100 + std. dev. * i(p) = 100 + 15 * 1.4 = 121,

... where we look up i = i(p) = i(0.2) = 1.4  in the table.

Using an IQ heritability of 0.8, the mean children's IQ = R = 100 + 0.8 * 21 = 116.8 = 117,

... reversion to the mean.

A symmetrical calculation give us the story for the bottom 20%

The rest is just putting numbers into the normal distribution.

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** If pushed I'd say that the above analysis makes both the affluent and disadvantaged children too smart. As a reality check, what if we made the mean IQ of the advantaged kids 115 (1 sigma up) and the disadvantaged kids 95 (one third of a sigma down)? That sounds more like it.

Then 40% of the 'rich' kids could get into a Russell Group university, and 5% of the 'poor' kids. That's a ratio of eight to one. And The Times did hint that the ratio was worse than 6:1 ...

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More bad science from The Times.

ISIS infosec seems to be rubbish

How ISIS does information security

CNN reports:

"Last summer, a French student was arrested in Paris on suspicion of a plot to take hostages at a concert hall. His name was Reda Hame. According to a transcript of his interrogation obtained by CNN, Hame claimed he had been provided weapons training, including in the use of Kalashnikovs, by Abaaoud in a park in Raqqa in early June. But he'd backed out of the plot when he arrived in France."

According to security researcher the grugq, CNN further reported:

"Hame also revealed to interrogators that ISIS had set up an elaborate encrypted communication system so that it could keep in touch with its European operatives.

"While with ISIS in Raqqa, he said he was instructed to encrypt communications with a software tool called “Truecrypt,” which authorities found on a thumb drive he had been given by Abaaoud. Hame said he had been taught to copy a message into the software, select an encryption option and then paste the message into a password-protected sharing site."

The grugq asks: "How Crap Is This System?"

It's pretty bad - Errata Security has a post suggesting how any half-decent intelligence agency might hack into this ISIS protocol.

ISIS won't have any autonomous cryptographic capabilities - you have to be a first-world state to do that kind of thing right. It's forced to use third party tools and systems. But it's very, very difficult as amateurs to design a system that the NSA, GCHQ or half a dozen other competent organisations can't address.

If the ISIS operatives are not using a VPN, then a 'listener on the wire' will get the IP addresses of dead-drop users. As Errata Security explained, TrueCrypt volumes are not hard to detect in transit. Metadata like IP addresses lead straight to identities. But I doubt that most VPNs are safe either, not when their logs and traffic can also be monitored.

Perhaps the bad guys should just send a courier, clunky as that sounds. But last I heard, couriers speak in plain, not ciphertext; they say that bugging with microphones is pretty good these days.

I like a one-time pad, but distributing it is the trick. If you send those very long random bit sequences on a USB drive, how do you know the intelligence services haven't covertly grabbed and copied it in transit? And then you're toast.

I begin to see why ISIS has been so singularly unsuccessful in the UK this last decade.

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Note: from one of the comments: "Counterterror experts who reviewed this protocol tell me it reminds them of what al-Qaeda did for yrs: saving "drafts" in Yahoo inboxes" - (these were apparently in plaintext).

*Head-in-hands*.

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Our transition to a Planetary Hospital

Interesting and reasonably accessible article via Jess Riedel, "Mutation and Human Exceptionalism: Our Future Genetic Load" by Michael Lynch, GENETICS March 1, 2016. From the abstract:

"What is exceptional about humans is the recent detachment from the challenges of the natural environment and the ability to modify phenotypic traits in ways that mitigate the fitness effects of mutations, e.g., precision and personalized medicine.

"This results in a relaxation of selection against mildly deleterious mutations, including those magnifying the mutation rate itself. The long-term consequence of such effects is an expected genetic deterioration in the baseline human condition, potentially measurable on the timescale of a few generations in westernized societies, and because the brain is a particularly large mutational target, this is of particular concern.

"Ultimately, the price will have to be covered by further investment in various forms of medical intervention. "

The famous population geneticist W. D. Hamilton coined the phrase "Planetary Hospital", explained by Bruce Charlton like this:

"It is becoming hard to avoid the conclusion that we have been, for several generations, living in what WD Hamilton (in Narrow Roads of Gene Land, Volume 2) called the Planetary Hospital - in other words, a world in which almost everyone is suffering from significant genetic damage, and an increasing proportion of the population are suffering from genetic disease. "

The dystopian effects of relaxed selection and the removal of purifying selection are well-documented in the population genetics literature. The effects in just a few generations are, however, slight (c. 1% per generation).

Despite Dr Charlton's vividly-expressed concerns. I like to think we may still avoid Idiocracy.

Social class differences in IQ

Since life is an IQ test it follows that in a meritocracy the upper echelons of society will be brighter than those at the bottom. How much brighter?

Details were documented by Bruce Charlton (see below). You would have thought that the public policy implications would be of great importance leading to intense public debate. But then, that might make some people feel bad.

Anyway, here's Charlton's answer to the question posed above.

"Typically, the average IQ of the highest occupational Social Class (SC) - mainly professional and senior managerial workers such as professors, doctors and bank managers - is 115 or more when social class is measured precisely, and about 110 when social class is measured less precisely (eg. mixing-in lower status groups such as teachers and middle managers).

"By comparison, the average IQ of the lowest social class of unskilled workers is about 90 when measured precisely, or about 95 when measured less precisely (eg. mixing-in higher social classes such as foremen and supervisors or jobs requiring some significant formal qualification or training)."

And here's an excerpt from his paper.

Social class differences in IQ: implications for the government’s ‘fair access’ political agenda

Bruce G Charlton

"Since ‘the Laura Spence Affair’ in 2000, the UK government has spent a great deal of time and effort in asserting that universities, especially Oxford and Cambridge, are unfairly excluding people from low social class backgrounds and privileging those from higher social classes. Evidence to support the allegation of systematic unfairness has never been presented, nevertheless the accusation has been used to fuel a populist ‘class war’ agenda.

"Yet in all this debate a simple and vital fact has been missed: higher social classes have a significantly higher average IQ than lower social classes.

"The exact size of the measured IQ difference varies according to the precision of definitions of social class – but in all studies I have seen, the measured social class IQ difference is substantial and of significance and relevance to the issue of university admissions.

The existence of substantial class differences in average IQ seems to be uncontroversial and widely accepted for many decades among those who have studied the scientific literature. And IQ is highly predictive of a wide range of positive outcomes in terms of educational duration and attainment, attained income levels, and social status (see Deary – Intelligence, 2001).

"This means that in a meritocratic university admissions system there will be a greater proportion of higher class students than lower class students admitted to university.

"What is less widely understood is that – on simple mathematical grounds – it is inevitable that the differential between upper and lower classes admitted to university will become greater the more selective is the university.

***

"There have been numerous studies of IQ according to occupational social class, stretching back over many decades. In the UK, average IQ is 100 and the standard deviation is 15 with a normal distribution curve.

"Social class is not an absolute measure, and the size of differences between social classes in biological variables (such as health or life expectancy) varies according to how socio-economic status is defined (eg. by job, income or education) and also by how precisely defined is the socio-economic status (for example, the number of categories of class, and the exactness of the measurement method – so that years of education or annual salary will generate bigger differentials than cruder measures such as job allocation, postcode deprivation ratings or state versus private education).

"In general, the more precise the definition of social class, the larger will be the measured social class differences in IQ and other biological variables.

"The non-symmetrical distribution of high and low social class around the average of 100 is probably due to the fact that some of the highest IQ people can be found doing unskilled jobs (such as catering or labouring) but the lowest IQ people are very unlikely to be found doing selective-education-type professional jobs (such as medicine, architecture, science or law).

"In round numbers, there are differences of nearly two standard deviations (or 25 IQ points) between the highest and lowest occupational social classes when class is measured precisely; and about one standard deviation (or 15 IQ points) difference when social class (SC) is measured less precisely.

"I will use these measured social class IQ differences of either one or nearly two standard deviations to give upper and lower bounds to estimates of the differential or ratio of upper and lower social classes we would expect to see at universities of varying degrees of selectivity.

"We can assume that there are three types of universities of differing selectivity roughly corresponding to some post-1992 ex-polytechnic universities; some of the pre-1992 Redbrick or Plateglass universities (eg. the less selective members of the Russell Group and 1994 Group), and Oxbridge.

"The ‘ex-poly’ university has a threshold minimum IQ of 100 for admissions (ie. the top half of the age cohort of 18 year olds in the population – given that about half the UK population now attend a higher education institution), the ‘Redbrick’ university has a minimum IQ of 115 (ie. the top 16 percent of the age cohort); while ‘Oxbridge’ is assumed to have a minimum IQ of about 130 (ie. the top 2 percent of the age cohort).
...
"When social class is measured precisely, it can be seen that the expected Highest SC to Lowest SC differential would probably be expected to increase from about three-fold (when the percentages at university are compared with the proportions in the national population) in relatively unselective universities to more than thirty-fold at highly selective universities.

"When using a more conservative assumption of just one standard deviation in average IQ between upper (IQ 110) and lower (IQ 95) social classes there will be significant differentials between Highest and Lowest social classes, increasing from two-fold at the ‘ex-poly’ through four-fold at the ‘Redbrick’ university to nine-fold at ‘Oxbridge’.

"In other words, according to social class definitions, the average child from the highest social class is from nine-to-thirty times more likely to qualify for admission to a highly selective university than the average child from the lowest social class."

So that was back in 2008. And seven years later, politicians are still not conceding the inevitability of elitism or that the unskilled labouring classes are, on average, not too bright.

Amazing.