Thomas is extremely conservative, far out of the mainstream of American legal thought.
As are Rehnquist, Scalia, and others, yet Thomas is by far the least respected, least cited, and least noted. (Of all the people you had to cite as accomplished black people, you had to pick Clarence Thomas...) If Thomas is still so ‘extreme’ despite his bully pulpit for expounding & enforcing his views, that also says a lot about how good a justice he has been.
That said, worse Supreme Court Justice is roughly like worst tenured physicist at MIT.
Not really. The tenure process at MIT can be trusted a lot more than ‘whatever candidate is young, politically expedient, and can be pushed through Congress’, especially considering that justice nominations used to be relatively deferential. A candidate has to be as bad as, say, Harriet Miers to get rejected. I don’t know how many physicists would make tenure with a similar slate of accomplishments and, to illustrate the relative looseness, highly public accusations of sexual harassment.
In particular, not-talking-during-oral-argument doesn’t mean not involved
That would be reasonable to note if he wrote many majority opinions, played a large role in changing the others’ opinions (of course, then he’d look less ‘extreme’ if he was contributing behind the scenes, wouldn’t he?), or in any way was not a ghost who could be replaced by his clerks with no one the wiser.
Your reference to his position on affirmative action is particularly confusing to me, because his point is a standard, fairly mainstream argument against AA.
You misunderstood my point. My point there was that I agree with the criticisms of AA as harmful and pernicious through its effects in promoting people to positions and degrees they are not fully qualified for (the relevance of which should be obvious), and I was noting that far from being a nasty personal attack by me on Thomas, he himself says it played a part in his career, and who are we to disagree?
I can only point to my professional work as an attorney for special education students to give you a sense of my experience with what an 80 IQ student is like.
That’s not an answer to any of my other questions. Why do you think your limited, bubble-filled experience is good evidence for overriding a century of carefully constructed tests drawing on millions of nationally representative people and exhaustively vetted for bias as documented in books like Jensen’s Bias in Mental Testing?
(Even if we granted your special ed beliefs accurate status, although I don’t know about that either—I too was a special ed kid, but any lawyer who spent some time with me as my family fought the school district would not have had a representative impression of special ed kids, both because I was unrepresentative (and that’s why I was mainstreamed), and because the long cumulative day to day interactions are different from occasional interactions. My mom still works with special ed kids and mentioned that one of her teachers had her nose broken by one of her kids who was handleable right up until he broke her nose; one of my best friends was also in special ed, and he could be a pretty decent guy for weeks or months at a time until his anger problems finally exploded at you—we drifted apart so I’m not sure what happened to him but last I heard he was in prison, which did not surprise me in the least bit. Life is as much about the lowest points as the average points.)
Thomas is the “least respected” because the left has a special hatred for black people who don’t toe the line and take the political side that they want black people to take, not because he is actually less worthy of respect than the other conservative justices.
I think this is almost certainly the case, as well as the fact that Thomas is even more extremely conservative than the others. So I found Gwern’s comment surprising, since he really seems to be attacking Thomas for his politics alone. As for the fact that he doesn’t get involved in the questions, he has said himself that the reason is that he already knows his opinion and it isn’t going to change. We have no reason to doubt this assertion, which is arrogant and overconfident, but which does not even come close to proving that he’s stupid. As for behind-the-scenes influence, it is very possible that he has had quite a bit, e.g. with the interpretation of the Second Amendment.
But it’s also obvious that Thomas is no legal genius. (Unlike, say, Scalia, who I actually abhor more, probably for that reason). Why no black legal geniuses, theoretical physicists, abstract mathematicians, or analytic philosophers? This is more telling than fishing about in the superior range, which, even on the assumptions, is only as rare as falling in the general population’s very-superior range.
There are lots of brilliant black scientists, I collaborate closely with one. You guys are toxic idiots, you should get out more and meet more smart people.
You know, sometimes the troll doesn’t even need to make people believe their point to win; they just need to make people treat their point as if it was seriously worth debating.
I don’t disagree, but I think LW (and slatestar actually) is too passive about these guys. There are nrx communities out on the net where they can debate their perfect society.
I can only remember one instance in which I noticed a black person in a CS class*. He clearly wasn’t connecting with anyone else there on a cultural level, but he was making much better observations and comments than most anyone else (some of the people who sounded like a Racial Realist’s dream programmers were answering simple questions with facepalm-worthy wonkiness).
What stuck out to me most, though, was whenever the teacher would elaborate on or correct any of that black student’s responses, the student would respond to everything with a very submissive and depressed-sounding “Yes sir.” He didn’t sound quite so broken in any other context as that. He disappeared halfway through the semester and I have no idea why (was he better at in-class discussion than tests or homework? Did he drop the class because he didn’t like it? Were there other classes he wanted/needed into which conflicted with it? Did he quit school entirely?)
It seemed abundantly clear to me that, of all the students that spoke up during class, this one was probably in the top 3 in terms of understanding the material, at least in a classroom context. There might have been problems, but I wouldn’t dare pin them on intelligence. Culture seemed dramatically and obviously a source of tension. If there were others, they were not where I could observe them.
* There could have been others I missed, or that were in previous classes who I just forgot about. I can only identify race based on accent (which I should point out is not genetic) or if someone else points it out without being contradicted by other evidence. … Well, and names, sometimes, but those aren’t genetic, either.
That would be reasonable to note if he wrote many majority opinions, played a large role in changing the others’ opinions (of course, then he’d look less ‘extreme’ if he was contributing behind the scenes, wouldn’t he?), or in any way was not a ghost who could be replaced by his clerks with no one the wiser.
You are repeating a Democratic Party talking point as fact. A particularly stupid talking point. One of the reasons I used Thomas as an example is to try to push against this stupid assertion by those who are otherwise my political allies.
In point of fact, Thomas writes about 1⁄9 of the Supreme Court opinions and deals with about 1⁄9 of the other legal work (motions, etc), as would be expected of a body with nine members. I can’t speak to behind-the-scenes influence. As a lawyer, I don’t think any of the current Justices has historically notable intellectual influence except Scalia (Rehnquist also was unusually influential, by he is no longer on the court).
Speaking of which, neither Rehnquist nor Scalia are outside the mainstream of American legal thought. Their legal theories are notably on the conservative side, but well within the current Overton window of legal thought. To say Rehnquist and Scalia are as extreme as Thomas is another Democratic Party talking point.
I can only point to my professional work as an attorney for special education students to give you a sense of my experience with what an 80 IQ student is like.
That’s not an answer to any of my other questions. Why do you think your limited, bubble-filled experience is good evidence for overriding a century of carefully constructed tests drawing on millions of nationally representative people and exhaustively vetted for bias as documented in books like Jensen’s Bias in Mental Testing?
(Even if we granted your special ed beliefs accurate status, although I don’t know about that either—I too was a special ed kid, but any lawyer who spent some time with me as my family fought the school district would not have had a representative impression of special ed kids, both because I was unrepresentative (and that’s why I was mainstreamed), and because the long cumulative day to day interactions are different from occasional interactions. My mom still works with special ed kids and mentioned that one of her teachers had her nose broken by one of her kids who was handleable right up until he broke her nose; one of my best friends was also in special ed, and he could be a pretty decent guy for weeks or months at a time until his anger problems finally exploded at you—we drifted apart so I’m not sure what happened to him but last I heard he was in prison, which did not surprise me in the least bit. Life is as much about the lowest points as the average points.)
I see a wide range of students in my practice with many different profiles. It would be a mistake to conclude that a student with your profile was representative of all special education students. Given the broad scope of special education coverage, no special education student is truly “typical” of special education in general. At best, one student might be typical of a sub-population of a particular eligibility category, but likely not.
My experience with special education is presented to justify my conclusion that a student with an IQ of 80 is incapable of producing the kind of work Thomas routinely produces. I’m skeptical whether many 100 IQ students could create a career path like Thomas’ path. That’s relevant to the argument because the number of “black swan” high IQ people we observe should be related to the mean IQ of the population.
Separately, I’m well aware that an 80 IQ student is not typical of a special education student. In point of law, an 80 IQ by itself is not likely to lead a student to be formally included in special education. At a minimum, student must be within a particular category of need, such as autism spectrum or emotional dysfunction, to be entitled to legal classification as a special education student.
a student with an IQ of 80 is incapable of producing the kind of work Thomas routinely produces [...] I’m skeptical whether many 100 IQ students could create a career path like Thomas’s path.
No one’s denying that. The “race realists” claim not that all black people in the US have an IQ in the 80-90 range, but that the average IQ of black people in the US is in the 80-90 range. That’s perfectly consistent, as gwern said, with plenty of those people being very smart.
Clearly you don’t get onto the Supreme Court without being distinctly cleverer than average. For all his negative comments about Clarence Thomas, gwern is not (so far as I can see) denying that.
That’s relevant to the argument because the number of “black swan” high IQ people we observe should be related to the mean IQ of the population.
Yup. But “smart enough to be on the Supreme Court” doesn’t seem to me like black-swan IQ, even in a (real or hypothetical) subpopulation with an average IQ in the eighties. Unusual, sure. But well within the range we should expect there to be plenty of.
In point of fact, Thomas writes about 1⁄9 of the Supreme Court opinions and deals with about 1⁄9 of the other legal work (motions, etc), as would be expected of a body with nine members.
My understanding was that Thomas only writes his fair share when you include all his idiosyncratic one-man dissents which influence no one and have failed to move the Overton Window. Is that wrong?
I can’t speak to behind-the-scenes influence.
Kind of important a thing to leave out in a political role like that of the nine.
As a lawyer, I don’t think any of the current Justices has historically notable intellectual influence except Scalia (Rehnquist also was unusually influential, by he is no longer on the court). Speaking of which, neither Rehnquist nor Scalia are outside the mainstream of American legal thought. Their legal theories are notably on the conservative side, but well within the current Overton window of legal thought.
Gee, I wonder why. Could it have something to do with Rehnquist and Scalia’s opinions actually being more persuasive, as I already suggested?
Personally, I am not bothered by Thomas’s originalism, as you seem to think; if I had to classify myself, I’d have to admit to considerable sympathy with his positions as I’ve noted in the past on LW (I think, possibly I argued it elsewhere), originalism is the only position which makes any kind of sense, and the attempts to move away from it and reinterpret it as liberals wish reflects the fact that the Constitution is atrociously outdated and irrelevant because the updating mechanisms have failed completely due to the continual growth of the USA. (When was the last Constitutional amendment which mattered? Do you expect to see another meaningful amendment in your lifetime? I don’t.) But the American political system is unable to acknowledge this or come up with any solution, and so we get absurdities like the Supreme Court saying the Constitution protects a right to gay marriage or trying to ban the death penalty, which makes about as much sense as saying the Bible or the Koran protect a right to gay marriage or disapprove of the death penalty.
What I am bothered by is his apparent failure to contribute much to the Court in asking questions to get to the heart of issues, mold or at least influence the thinking of his peers, and influence the majority opinions which matter. A justice who neither is influenced nor influences is a waste of space, and even harmful—like IE6 or Google’s neglect of Google Reader. In contrast, I much prefer to read Rehnquist or Scalia’s opinions because they were not so blind or irrelevant.
I’m skeptical whether many 100 IQ students could create a career path like Thomas’ path.
I’m sure they couldn’t, at least not without extenuating circumstances like very able aids or an extremely gross imbalance of verbal and other skills. (IQs are just of the general factor, individual skills can be much higher or lower than the mean; someone can write very well even if they wouldn’t understand a statistic if it bit them on the arse.)
But Thomas could easily be one of the 80k that the normal distribution implies, or be a bit below, maybe 97th or 98th percentile or something, which increases the numbers of candidates substantially (more than 3x) while still being plausible. (When I look at thresholds on IQ and characteristics broken down by deciles, I get the impression that for anything which is a fraction of a standard deviation, it is more a difference of quantity than quality; someone 1⁄3 or 2⁄3 SDs lower can do just about anything the other person can do, but with more time and effort, perhaps, while at 1 SD it starts to seem like there are things the lower person just won’t get with any reasonable amount of time/effort. So a lot of 130 is just plain out of reach for 100, but not for 120.)
As well, the normal distribution is rarely exactly true; for example, when it comes to intelligence, very rare or de novo mutations mean there is an excess of retarded or very disabled people than the calculations would predict, because one mutation in the wrong place can break a mind, and there are a few phenomenon which might create little bumps in the black tail as well—most obviously, given your mentioned examples, immigrants from Africa or the Caribbeans, but a few other things like assortative mating might also happen.
My understanding was that Thomas only writes his fair share when you include all his idiosyncratic one-man dissents which influence no one and have failed to move the Overton Window. Is that wrong?
Yes. Check out Scotusblog if you want to look at other terms.
What I am bothered by is his apparent failure to contribute much to the Court in asking questions to get to the heart of issues
Oral argument is performance, not persuasion. The evidence of influence is citation of majority decisions in future terms and future courts. In other words, the rest of that paragraph would be just as true without reference to questions at oral argument. Please stop repeating the stupid talking point.
Personally, I am not bothered by Thomas’s originalism, as you seem to think
Thomas is an originalist only if one thinks that the US Constitution is intended to codify natural law. Many originalists across the political spectrum don’t. Further, I’m much more of a textualist, and textualism and natural law get together like oil and water.
But Thomas could easily be one of the 80k that the normal distribution implies, or be a bit below, maybe 97th or 98th percentile or something, which increases the numbers of candidates substantially (more than 3x) while still being plausible. (When I look at thresholds on IQ and characteristics broken down by deciles, I get the impression that for anything which is a fraction of a standard deviation, it is more a difference of quantity than quality; someone 1⁄3 or 2⁄3 SDs lower can do just about anything the other person can do, but with more time and effort, perhaps, while at 1 SD it starts to seem like there are things the lower person just won’t get with any reasonable amount of time/effort. So a lot of 130 is just plain out of reach for 100, but not for 120.)
This is the heart of the issue. I think an 85 IQ would have difficulty consistently simulating a 100 IQ in professional life. But the evidence on this is too sparse for me to persuasively present in this forum. So I’m trying to highlight how we see too many black swans. Which itself is complicated by the difficulty in distinguishing between 120 &130.
The Constitution protects all rights that are originally retained by the people:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
If there is a natural right to gay marriage, the Constitution protects it. That is, the Constitution protects gay marriage to the extent that recognition of gay marriage is in some sense naturally required as a precondition of fostering “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; as are the rights to free speech and free exercise of religion, to self-defense and self-organized collective defense, and all of the other rights recognized in the U.S. Constitution. A natural right “is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.” (United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542, 553 (1876))
I like the Ninth Amendment too, but it’s worth noting that the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges cited the due process and equal protection clauses, not natural rights: one could argue that the rationale was absurd even if the outcome was correct.
So, the 14th Amendment protects “privileges or immunities.” There’s some of historical evidence of what those might include. But in the Slaughterhouse cases, the Supreme Court drained the phrase of any legal significance. There are many legal scholars across the political spectrum who think the Slaughterhouse cases are inconsistent with original public meaning.
Those scholars who think Obergefell, Roe, and such are consistent with original public meaning tend to say that “substantive” due process should be understood as code for “privileges or immunities.”
It’s a controversial position that natural rights are what the Constitution protects, even among legal scholars who think the Constitution should be interpreted according to original public meaning (most “originalists”).
As are Rehnquist, Scalia, and others, yet Thomas is by far the least respected, least cited, and least noted. (Of all the people you had to cite as accomplished black people, you had to pick Clarence Thomas...) If Thomas is still so ‘extreme’ despite his bully pulpit for expounding & enforcing his views, that also says a lot about how good a justice he has been.
Not really. The tenure process at MIT can be trusted a lot more than ‘whatever candidate is young, politically expedient, and can be pushed through Congress’, especially considering that justice nominations used to be relatively deferential. A candidate has to be as bad as, say, Harriet Miers to get rejected. I don’t know how many physicists would make tenure with a similar slate of accomplishments and, to illustrate the relative looseness, highly public accusations of sexual harassment.
That would be reasonable to note if he wrote many majority opinions, played a large role in changing the others’ opinions (of course, then he’d look less ‘extreme’ if he was contributing behind the scenes, wouldn’t he?), or in any way was not a ghost who could be replaced by his clerks with no one the wiser.
You misunderstood my point. My point there was that I agree with the criticisms of AA as harmful and pernicious through its effects in promoting people to positions and degrees they are not fully qualified for (the relevance of which should be obvious), and I was noting that far from being a nasty personal attack by me on Thomas, he himself says it played a part in his career, and who are we to disagree?
That’s not an answer to any of my other questions. Why do you think your limited, bubble-filled experience is good evidence for overriding a century of carefully constructed tests drawing on millions of nationally representative people and exhaustively vetted for bias as documented in books like Jensen’s Bias in Mental Testing?
(Even if we granted your special ed beliefs accurate status, although I don’t know about that either—I too was a special ed kid, but any lawyer who spent some time with me as my family fought the school district would not have had a representative impression of special ed kids, both because I was unrepresentative (and that’s why I was mainstreamed), and because the long cumulative day to day interactions are different from occasional interactions. My mom still works with special ed kids and mentioned that one of her teachers had her nose broken by one of her kids who was handleable right up until he broke her nose; one of my best friends was also in special ed, and he could be a pretty decent guy for weeks or months at a time until his anger problems finally exploded at you—we drifted apart so I’m not sure what happened to him but last I heard he was in prison, which did not surprise me in the least bit. Life is as much about the lowest points as the average points.)
Thomas is the “least respected” because the left has a special hatred for black people who don’t toe the line and take the political side that they want black people to take, not because he is actually less worthy of respect than the other conservative justices.
I think this is almost certainly the case, as well as the fact that Thomas is even more extremely conservative than the others. So I found Gwern’s comment surprising, since he really seems to be attacking Thomas for his politics alone. As for the fact that he doesn’t get involved in the questions, he has said himself that the reason is that he already knows his opinion and it isn’t going to change. We have no reason to doubt this assertion, which is arrogant and overconfident, but which does not even come close to proving that he’s stupid. As for behind-the-scenes influence, it is very possible that he has had quite a bit, e.g. with the interpretation of the Second Amendment.
But it’s also obvious that Thomas is no legal genius. (Unlike, say, Scalia, who I actually abhor more, probably for that reason). Why no black legal geniuses, theoretical physicists, abstract mathematicians, or analytic philosophers? This is more telling than fishing about in the superior range, which, even on the assumptions, is only as rare as falling in the general population’s very-superior range.
There are lots of brilliant black scientists, I collaborate closely with one. You guys are toxic idiots, you should get out more and meet more smart people.
You know, sometimes the troll doesn’t even need to make people believe their point to win; they just need to make people treat their point as if it was seriously worth debating.
I don’t disagree, but I think LW (and slatestar actually) is too passive about these guys. There are nrx communities out on the net where they can debate their perfect society.
I can only remember one instance in which I noticed a black person in a CS class*. He clearly wasn’t connecting with anyone else there on a cultural level, but he was making much better observations and comments than most anyone else (some of the people who sounded like a Racial Realist’s dream programmers were answering simple questions with facepalm-worthy wonkiness).
What stuck out to me most, though, was whenever the teacher would elaborate on or correct any of that black student’s responses, the student would respond to everything with a very submissive and depressed-sounding “Yes sir.” He didn’t sound quite so broken in any other context as that. He disappeared halfway through the semester and I have no idea why (was he better at in-class discussion than tests or homework? Did he drop the class because he didn’t like it? Were there other classes he wanted/needed into which conflicted with it? Did he quit school entirely?)
It seemed abundantly clear to me that, of all the students that spoke up during class, this one was probably in the top 3 in terms of understanding the material, at least in a classroom context. There might have been problems, but I wouldn’t dare pin them on intelligence. Culture seemed dramatically and obviously a source of tension. If there were others, they were not where I could observe them.
* There could have been others I missed, or that were in previous classes who I just forgot about. I can only identify race based on accent (which I should point out is not genetic) or if someone else points it out without being contradicted by other evidence. … Well, and names, sometimes, but those aren’t genetic, either.
Latinos as well—both Cruz and Rubio have been called “traitors”.
You are repeating a Democratic Party talking point as fact. A particularly stupid talking point. One of the reasons I used Thomas as an example is to try to push against this stupid assertion by those who are otherwise my political allies.
In point of fact, Thomas writes about 1⁄9 of the Supreme Court opinions and deals with about 1⁄9 of the other legal work (motions, etc), as would be expected of a body with nine members. I can’t speak to behind-the-scenes influence. As a lawyer, I don’t think any of the current Justices has historically notable intellectual influence except Scalia (Rehnquist also was unusually influential, by he is no longer on the court).
Speaking of which, neither Rehnquist nor Scalia are outside the mainstream of American legal thought. Their legal theories are notably on the conservative side, but well within the current Overton window of legal thought. To say Rehnquist and Scalia are as extreme as Thomas is another Democratic Party talking point.
I see a wide range of students in my practice with many different profiles. It would be a mistake to conclude that a student with your profile was representative of all special education students. Given the broad scope of special education coverage, no special education student is truly “typical” of special education in general. At best, one student might be typical of a sub-population of a particular eligibility category, but likely not.
My experience with special education is presented to justify my conclusion that a student with an IQ of 80 is incapable of producing the kind of work Thomas routinely produces. I’m skeptical whether many 100 IQ students could create a career path like Thomas’ path. That’s relevant to the argument because the number of “black swan” high IQ people we observe should be related to the mean IQ of the population.
Separately, I’m well aware that an 80 IQ student is not typical of a special education student. In point of law, an 80 IQ by itself is not likely to lead a student to be formally included in special education. At a minimum, student must be within a particular category of need, such as autism spectrum or emotional dysfunction, to be entitled to legal classification as a special education student.
No one’s denying that. The “race realists” claim not that all black people in the US have an IQ in the 80-90 range, but that the average IQ of black people in the US is in the 80-90 range. That’s perfectly consistent, as gwern said, with plenty of those people being very smart.
Clearly you don’t get onto the Supreme Court without being distinctly cleverer than average. For all his negative comments about Clarence Thomas, gwern is not (so far as I can see) denying that.
Yup. But “smart enough to be on the Supreme Court” doesn’t seem to me like black-swan IQ, even in a (real or hypothetical) subpopulation with an average IQ in the eighties. Unusual, sure. But well within the range we should expect there to be plenty of.
My understanding was that Thomas only writes his fair share when you include all his idiosyncratic one-man dissents which influence no one and have failed to move the Overton Window. Is that wrong?
Kind of important a thing to leave out in a political role like that of the nine.
Gee, I wonder why. Could it have something to do with Rehnquist and Scalia’s opinions actually being more persuasive, as I already suggested?
Personally, I am not bothered by Thomas’s originalism, as you seem to think; if I had to classify myself, I’d have to admit to considerable sympathy with his positions as I’ve noted in the past on LW (I think, possibly I argued it elsewhere), originalism is the only position which makes any kind of sense, and the attempts to move away from it and reinterpret it as liberals wish reflects the fact that the Constitution is atrociously outdated and irrelevant because the updating mechanisms have failed completely due to the continual growth of the USA. (When was the last Constitutional amendment which mattered? Do you expect to see another meaningful amendment in your lifetime? I don’t.) But the American political system is unable to acknowledge this or come up with any solution, and so we get absurdities like the Supreme Court saying the Constitution protects a right to gay marriage or trying to ban the death penalty, which makes about as much sense as saying the Bible or the Koran protect a right to gay marriage or disapprove of the death penalty.
What I am bothered by is his apparent failure to contribute much to the Court in asking questions to get to the heart of issues, mold or at least influence the thinking of his peers, and influence the majority opinions which matter. A justice who neither is influenced nor influences is a waste of space, and even harmful—like IE6 or Google’s neglect of Google Reader. In contrast, I much prefer to read Rehnquist or Scalia’s opinions because they were not so blind or irrelevant.
I’m sure they couldn’t, at least not without extenuating circumstances like very able aids or an extremely gross imbalance of verbal and other skills. (IQs are just of the general factor, individual skills can be much higher or lower than the mean; someone can write very well even if they wouldn’t understand a statistic if it bit them on the arse.)
But Thomas could easily be one of the 80k that the normal distribution implies, or be a bit below, maybe 97th or 98th percentile or something, which increases the numbers of candidates substantially (more than 3x) while still being plausible. (When I look at thresholds on IQ and characteristics broken down by deciles, I get the impression that for anything which is a fraction of a standard deviation, it is more a difference of quantity than quality; someone 1⁄3 or 2⁄3 SDs lower can do just about anything the other person can do, but with more time and effort, perhaps, while at 1 SD it starts to seem like there are things the lower person just won’t get with any reasonable amount of time/effort. So a lot of 130 is just plain out of reach for 100, but not for 120.)
As well, the normal distribution is rarely exactly true; for example, when it comes to intelligence, very rare or de novo mutations mean there is an excess of retarded or very disabled people than the calculations would predict, because one mutation in the wrong place can break a mind, and there are a few phenomenon which might create little bumps in the black tail as well—most obviously, given your mentioned examples, immigrants from Africa or the Caribbeans, but a few other things like assortative mating might also happen.
Yes. Check out Scotusblog if you want to look at other terms.
Oral argument is performance, not persuasion. The evidence of influence is citation of majority decisions in future terms and future courts. In other words, the rest of that paragraph would be just as true without reference to questions at oral argument. Please stop repeating the stupid talking point.
Thomas is an originalist only if one thinks that the US Constitution is intended to codify natural law. Many originalists across the political spectrum don’t. Further, I’m much more of a textualist, and textualism and natural law get together like oil and water.
This is the heart of the issue. I think an 85 IQ would have difficulty consistently simulating a 100 IQ in professional life. But the evidence on this is too sparse for me to persuasively present in this forum. So I’m trying to highlight how we see too many black swans. Which itself is complicated by the difficulty in distinguishing between 120 &130.
The Constitution protects all rights that are originally retained by the people:
If there is a natural right to gay marriage, the Constitution protects it. That is, the Constitution protects gay marriage to the extent that recognition of gay marriage is in some sense naturally required as a precondition of fostering “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; as are the rights to free speech and free exercise of religion, to self-defense and self-organized collective defense, and all of the other rights recognized in the U.S. Constitution. A natural right “is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.” (United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542, 553 (1876))
I like the Ninth Amendment too, but it’s worth noting that the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges cited the due process and equal protection clauses, not natural rights: one could argue that the rationale was absurd even if the outcome was correct.
So, the 14th Amendment protects “privileges or immunities.” There’s some of historical evidence of what those might include. But in the Slaughterhouse cases, the Supreme Court drained the phrase of any legal significance. There are many legal scholars across the political spectrum who think the Slaughterhouse cases are inconsistent with original public meaning.
Those scholars who think Obergefell, Roe, and such are consistent with original public meaning tend to say that “substantive” due process should be understood as code for “privileges or immunities.”
Huh? What would the word “protection” in the latter clause refer to, if not protection of natural rights?
It’s a controversial position that natural rights are what the Constitution protects, even among legal scholars who think the Constitution should be interpreted according to original public meaning (most “originalists”).