"Simon-pure" means completely genuine, unaffected, or utterly sincere.
Origin: The phrase comes from the character Simon Pure in Susanna Centlivre's 1717 play, "A Bold Stroke for a Wife". Simon Pure was impersonated, and the real Simon Pure had to prove his identity.
IIRC the fake Simon-Pure (Col Fainwell) gets the hand of Anne Lovely and the real Simon-Pure gets banished. Due to being a morally inflexible kill-joy even though the real thing.
I may be repeating myself, but I found my mother's school records from Manual Arts HS in LA. She graduated in 1936. Each year they tested her IQ and put the score on her report card.
She was the very definition of mid, ranging from 97 to 101. Sure fooled me though, since she wrote and spoke so well, and read novels.
Maybe it was the general orderliness of LA public schools at that time. There was one negro in her graduating class BTW.
It's an interesting question: where do we see the differences between different strata of IQ? If you have a group of friends with IQ 100, 115, 130, 145 and 160 where in conversation or task is each successive friend lost? I've known curious people of average intelligence and anti-intellectuals in the 130 range. Is the difference seen in speed of doing tasks that each friend can do (given sufficient time) or is it more that they have similar performance on most tasks but there are a handful that the lower IQ people could never do in a million years?
I’m convinced that physical ability and mental capacity are innate and measurable. I’m also convinced that the desire and sacrifice needed to achieve the potential of that high level of physical or mental ability is as necessary as the innate talent. If an average athlete has the desire and sacrifice they may achieve excellence to a certain level. An innately gifted athlete may reach a level much less than expected.
I was born with some above average intelligence but until I went to graduate school in a course that interested me my report cards always had the fun killing words,”does not work to potential “. My response today, how the hell do you know?
Is working to potential a measurable trait or just reflective of who we are as opposed to how society sees us ? The great fraud is that being at that finest University, or achieving a championship is open for everyone, regardless of innate ability and desire or are those prizes and positions reserved for those who have the natural aptitude combined with the desire to achieve that level. I have had a rich and enjoyable life contributing to society at the level of my desire and talent to do so.
The attempt to remove testing is analogous to the, everyone gets a prize, mentality currently in vogue. No good can come of that philosophy.
I agree for the vast majority but at the far ends of the curve it is surprising how little can be done (left side) and how easy it is for others (right side).
I see your point and it is the one that guides most politics. I have a different view. The force of expectations by society and the people on the right side is huge, much self created. The left side doesn’t have that pressure. This is not to equate great wealth with either innate intelligence or ability. Don’t know Jeff Bezos’ IQ but he had an idea in Seattle to sell used books and use the internet. I was the dumbass who didn’t see it and didn’t invest. He took the risk and I didn’t. Not his fault. Good job,Jeff. In that same moment a black friend of mine who grew up in Compton and worked at Microsoft sold his Microsoft stock and bought every share of Amazon he could. He’s one of the innate athletes with a career cut short by injury. His IQ is not known to me but if making a lot of money is the measure, and it’s not for me, then his IQ must be very high indeed.
All good points, and it's a good reminder that IQ across various social segments needs to be tempered with the fact that those are averages and as individuals we will run into a lot of outliers.
What does it mean? The internet is no help. I infer the general meaning from context.
I'm also fascinated by his grouping "vitamins and glands" into babu sciences. I can assure you that both vitamins and glands are real and humans would die if you removed either or both.
Babu seems to have been a somewhat respectful/disrespectful title used for natives in British India. Derived from the Hindi word for "father". Kind of like calling an American Indian guy "Chief", as far as I can tell.
"Over time, British colonists used "Babu" derisively to describe over-educated, pedantic, Westernized Indians who mimicked British manners, English speech, and intellectual pretensions—often without, in the colonial view, true understanding or originality."
There's an early scene in "The Man Who Would Be King" in which Peachey and Danny get annoyed sharing a train compartment with an Indian who introduces himself by his highest credential of having failed an exam for a bureaucratic office. They call him Babu and throw him off the train. (They explain to Kipling the train was only going 3 miles per hour on the upslope so the Babu wouldn't be hurt.)
It was a legitimate insult in the contex of the fact that were a lot of fanciful theories floating around various ideas of vitamins and glands 100 years ago--falling under the general heading of quackery.
I would not discount the possibility, as Terman suggests towards the end of his rebuttal, that Lippmann et al were really afraid of the wrong people being found to have high IQs.
Lippmann was progressive or socialist, which basically runs to a similar end. The problem for Lippmann was that IF IQ is that decisive, investing lots in people with IQ 100 doesn't make sense. It obviously makes sense to have them enjoy good schooling - because the bulk of the people who will be productive will scatter around 100. But it doesn't make sense to overinvest ie malinvest.
So even if the right people had high IQs, it would not be in accordance with his explicit convictions. To overindulge on schooling. We still see it 80 to 100 years later as no child left behind.
Yup. My first thought was that it's ironic to imagine that IQ tests might set up a class of technocrat-gatekeeper psychologists when that's exactly what not believing in IQ allows people to do.
Endless resources (both financial and psychological\*) are poured into schooling and into a class of psychologist/sociologists who are all there to help you get the best out of your education and provide alternative thesis to why people succeed.
It's much worse in fact, since there's essentially a lot of socially divisive crank explanations pushed as well as a result.
\* Everyone worries about what this means for low-IQ groups but what about median-IQ middle class people who get incredibly neurotic about their children's chances absent massive, outsized resources dedicated to their formative years. Can't be good for the birthrate.
It's even worse if you are in the +1SD to +2SD bracket and don't have a high paying job. How are you to get your similarly OK kids schooled? So it puts strong pressure to reduce fertility and to opt for a high paying even if not so academically demanding job. Hence the need to import tons of people from South and East Asia replacing the natural academic potential of the natives.
No. Lippman's issue is class. His German-Jewish high school probably excluded as many Jews as Columbia ever did. Even deducting a notch each for German and a further notch for Jewish, Lippman (Upper East Side, sailed through Harvard, government adviser) was a notch above mid-Western Terman. Hence Terman's jibe about Junckers: his parody Lippman fears that Terman aims to supplant the old upper class with a new, unassailably meritocratic one.
It is possible to argue that Lippman had the greater foresight, that he was Charles Murray to Terman's Richard Herrnstein, that he envisaged the world of Coming Apart and super-ZIPs. But did either of them foresee a high-IQ Silicon Valley positively eager to surround itself with a low-IQ California?
It is interesting that at the time of the great Lippmann vs Terman Debate one had not yet resolved the nature vs nurture controversy. One only knew that IQ runs in families.
Need a source for this claim: “Congress was moving toward limiting immigration in 1924 in part on the grounds that Yugoslav gentiles were excessively dumb.”
How could Congress not do that? My grandparents arrived at Ellis Island from the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in 1921! QED! Or whatever the plural of Res ipsa loquitur is!
I just want to point out a great and maximally Sailerian passage:
"A proposal to drop Lewis but keep Fred Terman as the namesake was rejected on the grounds that the hereditary taint of eugenics carried on unto the seventh generation. Or something.
"Then it was proposed to rename the school after a Japanese-American graduate war hero in the famous Fighting 442nd who’d died in combat versus the Nazis. But Chinese residents of Palo Alto objected that they hated the Japanese race, so that proposal was dropped. Eventually the school was renamed after a Jewish city councilwoman whose big accomplishment was introducing bike lanes."
That's it in a nutshell I'd say. Whatever "it" is...
Also, the Palo Alto school district might have the highest home property values per square foot in the country. (Places like Atherton have higher average costs but bigger houses.)
The rhetorical battle-lines between Nature and Nurture being set in place 100 years ago (although even then, Terman's statistical analysis seems better adapted to accept a 50/50 solution). Ironically, the most obvious cultural nurturing behaviors of Western Civilization that tend to equalize natural advantages--monogamy, work and saving ethic, literacy, scarcity of workers, internalized morality--have been effectively undermined by Progressives over the last 60 years. (To be fair, the shift from productive to consumer-driven capitalism has played a role in this, as well.) I don't know which is the greater failing of Progressivism: denial of the role nature plays in human inequality, or their practical destruction of every cultural institution-- religion, education, marriage, citizenship--that offers shelter from natural inequality.
Indeed. But well before that, we had the promotion of Black transgressive behavior by US elites from the Party at Lenny's onward through Rap music of the 90s, as well as the predictable (indeed, predicted by Moynahan) destruction of Black intact families by the Great Society welfare program.
"Eventually the school was renamed after a Jewish city councilwoman whose big accomplishment was introducing bike lanes."
We should do this to all middle schools; name them after people who did just kinda okay at life. Let them know what most of them are aiming for-- stay off drugs, get a decent but ultimately unsatisfying job, start a family if you're lucky. I'm tired of putting fool notions in these kids head that they can do something great.
You're setting those kids up for disappointment. I'd rather Constantine middle school be named for the comic book character. Kids would know he's not real and can't possibly be a life goal. I would love to have graduated from Spiderman High School.
or what about if we let companies sponsor the schools for naming rights? Let the kids know how the world really works. "When my older brother went here it was called Theranos High, but for some reason they took down all the blond lady pictures and now we are OpenAI High. Chatty, our mascot, sucks."
The problem with comprehension of IQ is that most people seem to think it is a testing of knowledge when it's actually a testing of the ability to think. Having a high IQ does not necessarily mean a person is going to do well in life. There are other factors involved, including culture. As it so happens, I always did extremely well on IQ tests in school and later on the Armed Forces Qualification Tests, which include an assessment of IQ. Based on my testing, I could have become a nuclear scientist (and my son was an officer on nuclear submarines after graduating from Annapolis with an engineering degree) but there were two things I knew I wanted - not to be a farmer as my folks were and to fly airplanes, which I did. I now occupy my time by writing books. As far as IQ goes, when my class was tested as seniors in high school there was a lot of discussion of where we stood. A close friend of mine at the time was studious and got good grades, but her IQ tested below average. Another girl tested very high and caught flak because she wanted ot marry and have a family - which she did.
I have been married twice and both of my wives were (one is dead) and are very intelligent, but neither of them lived up to their full potential due to insecurity. My first wife and I had four children. They were (one is dead) are intelligent. My oldest son tested off the scale on IQ tests. He went to Annapolis, spent 6 years in the Navy then got a Harvard MBA. My other son was also highly intelligent but he was born with a severe birth defect then developed a brain tumor. He died at 26. There's no telling what he could have done had he lived. My oldest daughter is very intelligent but she unfortunately inherited her mother's insecurity and has worked in the restaurant industry all her life. My other daughter didn't do as well on test but she got an MBA for all the good it's done here, but she married an intelligent man who is now a CEO. As for my siblings and cousins, I'd say I come from a family of underachievers, probably due to lack of encouragement by parents who were content to be farmers.
"Their real purpose is to set up a neoaristocracy, more snobbish, more tyrannical and on every count more hateful than any that has yet burdened the earth. "
Turned out it was the progressives who did this.
"I know of a certain modern Croesus ... raise one particular little girl from about 60 to 70 to a paltry 100 or so."
Was that Joe Kennedy and poor Rosemary (b. 1918)? More likely someone in California.
"But Chinese residents of Palo Alto objected that they hated the Japanese race, so that proposal was dropped. Eventually the school was renamed after a Jewish city councilwoman whose big accomplishment was introducing bike lanes."
Walter Lippmann was right about Americans being a "bewildered herd." But Lippmann's solutions were all wrong. The Best and the Brightest on the left are almost always wrong and always evil. My auto mechanic has more wisdom than Robert McNamara or Zohran Mamdani.
"The New Republic let Terman respond later that year, and it turned out he was much funnier than Lippmann:
After Mr. [William Jennings] Bryan had confounded the evolutionists, and … the astronomers, it was only fitting that some equally fearless knight should stride forth in righteous wrath and annihilate that other group of pseudo-scientists known as “intelligence testers.” Mr. Walter Lippmann, alone and unaided, has performed just this service. That it took six rambling articles to do the job is unimportant. It is done. The world is deeply in debt to Mr. Lippmann. So are the psychologists, if they only knew it, for henceforth they should know better than to waste their lives monkeying with those silly little “puzzles” or juggling IQ’s and mental ages.
What have intelligence testers done that they should merit such a fate? Well, what have they not done? They have enunciated, ex cathedra, in the guise of act, law and eternal verity, such highly revolutionary and absurd doctrines as the following; "
It does appear as though Mr Terman was channelling HL Menken's acerbic wit. Perhaps Menken "advised" Terman on some of the barbs when responding to Lipmann.
Does anyone know what “simon” mean? Not in my dictionary?
From Google AI
"Simon-pure" means completely genuine, unaffected, or utterly sincere.
Origin: The phrase comes from the character Simon Pure in Susanna Centlivre's 1717 play, "A Bold Stroke for a Wife". Simon Pure was impersonated, and the real Simon Pure had to prove his identity.
IIRC the fake Simon-Pure (Col Fainwell) gets the hand of Anne Lovely and the real Simon-Pure gets banished. Due to being a morally inflexible kill-joy even though the real thing.
Is that actually what Simon-(pure) said? Or what Simon-(pure) says?
Simon pure vs bar sinister. Hence in Underdog Simon Bar Sinister. Pure bastard.
I may be repeating myself, but I found my mother's school records from Manual Arts HS in LA. She graduated in 1936. Each year they tested her IQ and put the score on her report card.
She was the very definition of mid, ranging from 97 to 101. Sure fooled me though, since she wrote and spoke so well, and read novels.
Maybe it was the general orderliness of LA public schools at that time. There was one negro in her graduating class BTW.
It's an interesting question: where do we see the differences between different strata of IQ? If you have a group of friends with IQ 100, 115, 130, 145 and 160 where in conversation or task is each successive friend lost? I've known curious people of average intelligence and anti-intellectuals in the 130 range. Is the difference seen in speed of doing tasks that each friend can do (given sufficient time) or is it more that they have similar performance on most tasks but there are a handful that the lower IQ people could never do in a million years?
We need to bring back the term "Babu sciences".
I’m convinced that physical ability and mental capacity are innate and measurable. I’m also convinced that the desire and sacrifice needed to achieve the potential of that high level of physical or mental ability is as necessary as the innate talent. If an average athlete has the desire and sacrifice they may achieve excellence to a certain level. An innately gifted athlete may reach a level much less than expected.
I was born with some above average intelligence but until I went to graduate school in a course that interested me my report cards always had the fun killing words,”does not work to potential “. My response today, how the hell do you know?
Is working to potential a measurable trait or just reflective of who we are as opposed to how society sees us ? The great fraud is that being at that finest University, or achieving a championship is open for everyone, regardless of innate ability and desire or are those prizes and positions reserved for those who have the natural aptitude combined with the desire to achieve that level. I have had a rich and enjoyable life contributing to society at the level of my desire and talent to do so.
The attempt to remove testing is analogous to the, everyone gets a prize, mentality currently in vogue. No good can come of that philosophy.
I agree for the vast majority but at the far ends of the curve it is surprising how little can be done (left side) and how easy it is for others (right side).
I see your point and it is the one that guides most politics. I have a different view. The force of expectations by society and the people on the right side is huge, much self created. The left side doesn’t have that pressure. This is not to equate great wealth with either innate intelligence or ability. Don’t know Jeff Bezos’ IQ but he had an idea in Seattle to sell used books and use the internet. I was the dumbass who didn’t see it and didn’t invest. He took the risk and I didn’t. Not his fault. Good job,Jeff. In that same moment a black friend of mine who grew up in Compton and worked at Microsoft sold his Microsoft stock and bought every share of Amazon he could. He’s one of the innate athletes with a career cut short by injury. His IQ is not known to me but if making a lot of money is the measure, and it’s not for me, then his IQ must be very high indeed.
All good points, and it's a good reminder that IQ across various social segments needs to be tempered with the fact that those are averages and as individuals we will run into a lot of outliers.
It's also worth bearing in mind that IQ correlates with income, but not one to one.
When did he sell msft? Its done ok.
What does it mean? The internet is no help. I infer the general meaning from context.
I'm also fascinated by his grouping "vitamins and glands" into babu sciences. I can assure you that both vitamins and glands are real and humans would die if you removed either or both.
Babu seems to have been a somewhat respectful/disrespectful title used for natives in British India. Derived from the Hindi word for "father". Kind of like calling an American Indian guy "Chief", as far as I can tell.
ah- so a general insult just used for science. It's not like cargo cult science.
ChatGPT says:
"Over time, British colonists used "Babu" derisively to describe over-educated, pedantic, Westernized Indians who mimicked British manners, English speech, and intellectual pretensions—often without, in the colonial view, true understanding or originality."
There's an early scene in "The Man Who Would Be King" in which Peachey and Danny get annoyed sharing a train compartment with an Indian who introduces himself by his highest credential of having failed an exam for a bureaucratic office. They call him Babu and throw him off the train. (They explain to Kipling the train was only going 3 miles per hour on the upslope so the Babu wouldn't be hurt.)
It was a legitimate insult in the contex of the fact that were a lot of fanciful theories floating around various ideas of vitamins and glands 100 years ago--falling under the general heading of quackery.
Makes me wonder whether Babu Bhatt from Seinfeld was named for the same term.
he is a very bad man.
I would not discount the possibility, as Terman suggests towards the end of his rebuttal, that Lippmann et al were really afraid of the wrong people being found to have high IQs.
Lippmann was progressive or socialist, which basically runs to a similar end. The problem for Lippmann was that IF IQ is that decisive, investing lots in people with IQ 100 doesn't make sense. It obviously makes sense to have them enjoy good schooling - because the bulk of the people who will be productive will scatter around 100. But it doesn't make sense to overinvest ie malinvest.
So even if the right people had high IQs, it would not be in accordance with his explicit convictions. To overindulge on schooling. We still see it 80 to 100 years later as no child left behind.
Yup. My first thought was that it's ironic to imagine that IQ tests might set up a class of technocrat-gatekeeper psychologists when that's exactly what not believing in IQ allows people to do.
Endless resources (both financial and psychological\*) are poured into schooling and into a class of psychologist/sociologists who are all there to help you get the best out of your education and provide alternative thesis to why people succeed.
It's much worse in fact, since there's essentially a lot of socially divisive crank explanations pushed as well as a result.
\* Everyone worries about what this means for low-IQ groups but what about median-IQ middle class people who get incredibly neurotic about their children's chances absent massive, outsized resources dedicated to their formative years. Can't be good for the birthrate.
It's even worse if you are in the +1SD to +2SD bracket and don't have a high paying job. How are you to get your similarly OK kids schooled? So it puts strong pressure to reduce fertility and to opt for a high paying even if not so academically demanding job. Hence the need to import tons of people from South and East Asia replacing the natural academic potential of the natives.
No. Lippman's issue is class. His German-Jewish high school probably excluded as many Jews as Columbia ever did. Even deducting a notch each for German and a further notch for Jewish, Lippman (Upper East Side, sailed through Harvard, government adviser) was a notch above mid-Western Terman. Hence Terman's jibe about Junckers: his parody Lippman fears that Terman aims to supplant the old upper class with a new, unassailably meritocratic one.
It is possible to argue that Lippman had the greater foresight, that he was Charles Murray to Terman's Richard Herrnstein, that he envisaged the world of Coming Apart and super-ZIPs. But did either of them foresee a high-IQ Silicon Valley positively eager to surround itself with a low-IQ California?
It is interesting that at the time of the great Lippmann vs Terman Debate one had not yet resolved the nature vs nurture controversy. One only knew that IQ runs in families.
I always find this subject baffling but I'm glad Steve tries to make it accessible to the person of average intelligence.
Need a source for this claim: “Congress was moving toward limiting immigration in 1924 in part on the grounds that Yugoslav gentiles were excessively dumb.”
How could Congress not do that? My grandparents arrived at Ellis Island from the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in 1921! QED! Or whatever the plural of Res ipsa loquitur is!
I just want to point out a great and maximally Sailerian passage:
"A proposal to drop Lewis but keep Fred Terman as the namesake was rejected on the grounds that the hereditary taint of eugenics carried on unto the seventh generation. Or something.
"Then it was proposed to rename the school after a Japanese-American graduate war hero in the famous Fighting 442nd who’d died in combat versus the Nazis. But Chinese residents of Palo Alto objected that they hated the Japanese race, so that proposal was dropped. Eventually the school was renamed after a Jewish city councilwoman whose big accomplishment was introducing bike lanes."
That's it in a nutshell I'd say. Whatever "it" is...
Also, the Palo Alto school district might have the highest home property values per square foot in the country. (Places like Atherton have higher average costs but bigger houses.)
The rhetorical battle-lines between Nature and Nurture being set in place 100 years ago (although even then, Terman's statistical analysis seems better adapted to accept a 50/50 solution). Ironically, the most obvious cultural nurturing behaviors of Western Civilization that tend to equalize natural advantages--monogamy, work and saving ethic, literacy, scarcity of workers, internalized morality--have been effectively undermined by Progressives over the last 60 years. (To be fair, the shift from productive to consumer-driven capitalism has played a role in this, as well.) I don't know which is the greater failing of Progressivism: denial of the role nature plays in human inequality, or their practical destruction of every cultural institution-- religion, education, marriage, citizenship--that offers shelter from natural inequality.
The recent racial reckoning was a disaster at socially constructing black well-being as seen in homicides and traffic fatalities.
Indeed. But well before that, we had the promotion of Black transgressive behavior by US elites from the Party at Lenny's onward through Rap music of the 90s, as well as the predictable (indeed, predicted by Moynahan) destruction of Black intact families by the Great Society welfare program.
Don't forget promotion of Leonard Jeffries in the '80s.
"Eventually the school was renamed after a Jewish city councilwoman whose big accomplishment was introducing bike lanes."
We should do this to all middle schools; name them after people who did just kinda okay at life. Let them know what most of them are aiming for-- stay off drugs, get a decent but ultimately unsatisfying job, start a family if you're lucky. I'm tired of putting fool notions in these kids head that they can do something great.
Emperor Constantine Middle School.
You're setting those kids up for disappointment. I'd rather Constantine middle school be named for the comic book character. Kids would know he's not real and can't possibly be a life goal. I would love to have graduated from Spiderman High School.
or what about if we let companies sponsor the schools for naming rights? Let the kids know how the world really works. "When my older brother went here it was called Theranos High, but for some reason they took down all the blond lady pictures and now we are OpenAI High. Chatty, our mascot, sucks."
General Augusto Pinochet Middle School.
We should totally be in charge of this.
The problem with comprehension of IQ is that most people seem to think it is a testing of knowledge when it's actually a testing of the ability to think. Having a high IQ does not necessarily mean a person is going to do well in life. There are other factors involved, including culture. As it so happens, I always did extremely well on IQ tests in school and later on the Armed Forces Qualification Tests, which include an assessment of IQ. Based on my testing, I could have become a nuclear scientist (and my son was an officer on nuclear submarines after graduating from Annapolis with an engineering degree) but there were two things I knew I wanted - not to be a farmer as my folks were and to fly airplanes, which I did. I now occupy my time by writing books. As far as IQ goes, when my class was tested as seniors in high school there was a lot of discussion of where we stood. A close friend of mine at the time was studious and got good grades, but her IQ tested below average. Another girl tested very high and caught flak because she wanted ot marry and have a family - which she did.
I have been married twice and both of my wives were (one is dead) and are very intelligent, but neither of them lived up to their full potential due to insecurity. My first wife and I had four children. They were (one is dead) are intelligent. My oldest son tested off the scale on IQ tests. He went to Annapolis, spent 6 years in the Navy then got a Harvard MBA. My other son was also highly intelligent but he was born with a severe birth defect then developed a brain tumor. He died at 26. There's no telling what he could have done had he lived. My oldest daughter is very intelligent but she unfortunately inherited her mother's insecurity and has worked in the restaurant industry all her life. My other daughter didn't do as well on test but she got an MBA for all the good it's done here, but she married an intelligent man who is now a CEO. As for my siblings and cousins, I'd say I come from a family of underachievers, probably due to lack of encouragement by parents who were content to be farmers.
Lack of emotional well-being derailed a lot of my family members, including me.
That’s kind of the perfect Biden quote
"Their real purpose is to set up a neoaristocracy, more snobbish, more tyrannical and on every count more hateful than any that has yet burdened the earth. "
Turned out it was the progressives who did this.
"I know of a certain modern Croesus ... raise one particular little girl from about 60 to 70 to a paltry 100 or so."
Was that Joe Kennedy and poor Rosemary (b. 1918)? More likely someone in California.
I was thinking it had to be Rosemary.
Terman was indeed funny, but Sailer is funnier:
"But Chinese residents of Palo Alto objected that they hated the Japanese race, so that proposal was dropped. Eventually the school was renamed after a Jewish city councilwoman whose big accomplishment was introducing bike lanes."
Gold. Pure gold.
It could be a paragraph in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Walter Lippmann was right about Americans being a "bewildered herd." But Lippmann's solutions were all wrong. The Best and the Brightest on the left are almost always wrong and always evil. My auto mechanic has more wisdom than Robert McNamara or Zohran Mamdani.
"The New Republic let Terman respond later that year, and it turned out he was much funnier than Lippmann:
After Mr. [William Jennings] Bryan had confounded the evolutionists, and … the astronomers, it was only fitting that some equally fearless knight should stride forth in righteous wrath and annihilate that other group of pseudo-scientists known as “intelligence testers.” Mr. Walter Lippmann, alone and unaided, has performed just this service. That it took six rambling articles to do the job is unimportant. It is done. The world is deeply in debt to Mr. Lippmann. So are the psychologists, if they only knew it, for henceforth they should know better than to waste their lives monkeying with those silly little “puzzles” or juggling IQ’s and mental ages.
What have intelligence testers done that they should merit such a fate? Well, what have they not done? They have enunciated, ex cathedra, in the guise of act, law and eternal verity, such highly revolutionary and absurd doctrines as the following; "
It does appear as though Mr Terman was channelling HL Menken's acerbic wit. Perhaps Menken "advised" Terman on some of the barbs when responding to Lipmann.
What excellent writing by Terman, far superior to Lippman's work that prompted it.