1) Noah Smith on immigration (among other things in a recent post):
5. A really good idea on immigration
I’m very pro-immigration, and I think high-skilled immigration is the most important kind. But I recognize that amid all the hyperpartisan shouting and scare-mongering, there are important and real challenges to be overcome when bringing large numbers of skilled workers into our country.
The biggest is the housing problem — when a bunch of high-earning workers flood into already expensive coastal cities like San Francisco and L.A., it exacerbates the NIMBY-driven housing crunch in those areas. Yes, we should build more housing and overcome the NIMBYs, but that’s much easier said than done — skilled immigration to superstar coastal metros makes YIMBY politics into a bit of a treadmill. Meanwhile, Rust Belt areas that could benefit the most from skilled immigration often languish, because immigrants don’t move there.
One way to solve this is to help direct immigrants to areas other than San Francisco and Los Angeles. Canada does this by allowing provinces to sponsor immigrants like employers do. The U.S. should do something along these lines. And the Economic Innovation Group, one of my favorite policy think tanks, has a proposal for how we could send skilled immigrants to Rust Belt areas where they’re needed most. They call it the Heartland Visa:
The Heartland Visa is an innovative proposal that gives communities the choice to opt-in to a new immigration pathway for highly skilled workers, entrepreneurs, and innovators. Prioritizing higher-earning applicants and those with local ties, the Heartland Visa would serve as a key component of economic revitalization in participating places.
In exchange for living in a Heartland Visa community, workers with sufficient earnings will gain permanent residency, cutting through burdensome red tape and bureaucracy embedded in the status quo immigration system. Building on our 2019 concept paper, this report details how we can make Heartland Visas a reality on the ground.
Key Features of a Heartland Visa
Dual opt-in: Counties experiencing economic decline or stagnation can decide to opt in or out of the program, while applicants select their own destinations.
Prioritize applicants with high-wage job offers: Applicants are allocated quarterly to those with the highest job offers or earnings histories, adjusted for age and local ties.
Pathway to permanent residency: Heartland Visa holders, in exchange for living in a participating community for six years, should have an expedited path to a green card.
Scale: Heartland Visas should be large enough to fundamentally change the economic trajectory of participating communities for the better.
And here’s a picture of the areas that would be eligible for Heartland Visas:
This is a great idea, and we should adopt it as soon as we can. Declining regions in the U.S. can greatly benefit from having talented workers. Their high salaries mean that they will be a huge fiscal boon to struggling cities and states. And these workers’ presence will lure corporate investment, boosting local tax revenues and causing positive multiplier effects throughout local economies.
2) Really enjoyed this interview with George Miller, creator of the Mad Max movies. So much good filmmaking discussion.
3) This Ian Milhiser takedown of Samuel Alito is thorough and fantastic. If you are interested in Constitutional and legal issues at all, it’s a must read. Here’s the conclusion:
So let’s dispel this fiction that Alito takes a principled, Burkean approach to the law and the Constitution. Alito does often use the sort of rhetoric that is associated with traditionalist forms of conservatism, but that rhetoric only drives his actual decisions when it leads to the outcome he prefers.
Samuel Alito is one of the worst judges of his generation. He rejects the very basic idea that courts must decide cases based on the law, and not based on their partisan views. He routinely embarrasses himself in oral arguments, and in his published opinions, with legal reasoning that no sensible lawyer can take seriously. And he even tries to distort public debate and silence critics.
But most of all, Alito is one of the most uninteresting thinkers in the country. Here he is, in one of the most powerful and intellectually rigorous jobs on the planet — a philosopher king, presiding over the mightiest nation that has ever existed — and his only big idea is “Republicans should win.”
Researchers in 2021 examined over time the correlation between the personality traits of progeny and parenting measures, and found that, in most aspects, parenting mattered about as much as birth order—which is to say, its effect was little to none.
The exceptions were in two dimensions of personality: conscientiousness and agreeableness. Children were more conscientious when parents were more involved in their lives and worked to provide cultural stimulation (such as taking them to museums); and children were more agreeable when their parents raised them with more structure and goals…
This tour through the research provides a set of parenting rules to act upon—one that I could very much have used when my kids were little. Better late than never, and I can still try to follow these rules now that I am a grandfather. Try them out and see if they make parenting easier and better for you. If your goal is virtue and happiness for your kids, keep these three things in mind.
1. Even a hot mess can be a good parent. It is easy to despair at being a parent—or to give yourself a pass—if you struggle with your own happiness or with a troublesome personality. I have heard many young adults say they’re afraid to have kids because they don’t want to pass on their own problems. True, much of your personality is transmitted to your offspring without your volition. As noted above, you may not be able to do much about their degree of extroversion, which seems largely a genetic given. But when it comes to conscientiousness and agreeableness (which, again, are what we really want for our children), parenting choices to be involved in their lives, and provide structure and goals, make a significant difference. And parenting does have a huge impact on their happiness.
2. When you don’t know what to do, be warm and loving. For happiness, the parenting technique that truly matters is warmth and affection. As my wife used to say when we were at wit’s end with our son, “I guess we should just love him.” This might sound like a hippie recipe for disaster, but it isn’t. Your kids don’t need a drill sergeant, Santa Claus, or a helicopter mom; they need someone who loves them unconditionally, and shows it even when the brats deserve it the least. Especially when they’re at their most brattish. Remember: That is what they will remember and give to your grandchildren (who will never be brats) when they themselves become parents.
3. Be the person you want your kids to become. The data don’t lie, but as parents we do. Kids—who are walking BS-detectors—always notice when we say one thing and do another. Of course, deciding how to act to create the right example for them to follow isn’t always easy. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself how you’d like your son or daughter to behave as an adult in a given situation—and then do that yourself. When you’re driving and get cut off in traffic, you would like it not to bother them—so don’t let them see it bothering you. You would prefer they don’t get drunk, so don’t drink too much yourself. You’d like them to be generous to others, so be generous too.
5) An interview on the H5N1 spreading in cattle. Not great!
To go back to the actual virus itself, is there something particular you’re looking for as a next signal that this is getting more serious? You mentioned pigs. Johns Hopkins did this really great risk assessment of the different levels of risk and when our concerns should really go up. Basically, the next level is whether we start seeing it in pigs. After that, it’s small human clusters, and then the alarm-five scenario is when we see sustained human-to-human transmission. We’re definitely in the beginning, but if this is any indication on how we’re going to do when there’s an alarm five, I think that’s very concerning.
Have you seen any other world governments do a better job on this particular thing? Is it like COVID in that way? The rest of the world is very nervous because they’re watching how the U.S. responds.
They’re nervous about everything in the U.S. right now. Cow-to-cow transmission is only in the United States. Canada has been testing their cows because a lot of our cows go there.. They haven’t detected anything, but it’s really unfolding in the United States. And that’s where a lot of the frustration comes from, because this is a global threat, and so other countries need data, and when and how to start testing and getting that sort of transparency. And so that adds a whole other level of pressure to this response.
We’ve had so many influenza epidemics in the past. Is it just inevitable that we’ll have another one in the future? I wouldn’t say 100 percent. But if you ask ten epidemiologists, nine of them would say the next pandemic is flu. It was surprising to a lot of us that the last pandemic was COVID, honestly. We always expect it to be flu, just because of how much this jumps.
COVID was something people hadn’t nearly as much experience with. We know what flu is. Would making a vaccine for that actually be easier in that regard since we sort of have an idea of what we’re dealing with? You make a really good parallel here — COVID was completely novel. The good news is we’ve been following H5 for the past 25 years, down to the point where we know exactly where on the virus it needs to mutate to become more human-to-human transmissible. In fact, we have a stockpile of vaccines against H5N1. Now, how fast we can create, manufacture, and distribute vaccines is a whole different question.
The bad news is we think the H5N1 is far more fatal than COVID-19. COVID, with just a 1 to 2 percent fatality rate, already overwhelmed our hospital systems. And so we really don’t want this.
6) David Leonhardt with a big essay on the new bipartisan consensus of what he calls neopopulism. You should read it, so it’s a gift link. That said, Claude’s summary:
In recent years, despite the deep polarization in American politics, Washington has experienced a surprisingly productive period of bipartisan cooperation. This “new centrism” represents a rejection of the failed neoliberal consensus that dominated the post-Cold War era, which failed to deliver broad-based prosperity at home or spread democracy abroad.
In its place, a “neopopulist” approach has emerged, skeptical of free trade and supportive of industrial policy. This shift reflects public opinion more closely, as many Americans lean left on economic issues but right on social and cultural matters. Key factors enabling this change include the rise of China as a unifying threat, Trump’s break with Republican economic orthodoxy, and Biden’s patient pursuit of bipartisanship.
Significant legislation, such as bills addressing infrastructure, semiconductor chips, and foreign policy challenges, have passed with support from both parties. The forces driving this neopopulist consensus, including economic discontent and the need to compete with global rivals, are likely to persist.
However, challenges remain, including Trump’s hostility to democratic norms and the potential for populism to veer into authoritarianism. Nonetheless, the two parties are finding common ground on policies that respond to voters’ actual preferences, marking a shift away from the elitist neoliberal agenda. While the country remains polarized, this unexpected bipartisan productivity suggests that Washington is attempting to adapt to the new realities and frustrations of the American electorate.
7) I really wanted to write a post on this story this past week and didn’t. It’s so depressing. You should read Eric Levitz’s take, “Why a GOP governor’s pardon of a far-right murderer is so chilling: A Texas man who killed a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020 was pardoned yesterday. Here’s what it says about politics in 2024.”
Texas just let a far-right radical get away with murder
First, in Texas, you can commit murder without suffering the legal consequences of that crime, so long as your victim’s politics are loathed by the right and your case is championed by conservative media. Or at least, this is the message sent by Gov. Greg Abbott’s pardoning of Daniel Perry.
In the weeks after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the proliferation of Black Lives Matter protests had filled Perry with apparent bloodlust. Then an active-duty Army officer, Perry texted and messaged friends, among other things:
“I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.”
“I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex … No protesters go near me or my car.”
“I wonder if they will let [me] cut the ears off of people who’s decided to commit suicide by me.”
When a friend of Perry asked him if he could “catch me a negro daddy,” Perry replied, “That is what I am hoping.”
Weeks later, Perry was driving an Uber in Austin, Texas, when he came upon a Black Lives Matter march. According to prosecutors, Perry ran a red light and drove his vehicle into the crowd, almost hitting several protesters. Activists gathered angrily around Perry’s car. Garrett Foster, a 28-year-old Air Force veteran who was openly carrying an AK-47 rifle, approached Perry’s window.
Perry then shot Foster dead.
At trial, Perry’s defense team alleged that Foster had pointed his rifle at the defendant. But witnesses testified that Foster never brandished his weapon, only carried it, which is legal in Texas. And Perry corroborated that account in his initial statement to the police, saying, “I believe he was going to aim at me. I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.” A jury convicted Perry of murder last year.
But this week, the governor of Texas used his pardoning power to release Perry from prison.
In a statement, Abbott said, “Texas has one of the strongest ‘stand your ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive district attorney.” He noted that in the Lone Star State, a person is justified in using deadly force against another if they “reasonably believe the deadly force is immediately necessary” for averting one’s own violent death. The Texas governor argued that it was reasonable for Perry to believe his life was at stake since Foster had held his gun in the “low-ready firing position.”
Yet this claim is inconsistent with Perry’s own remarks to the police, which indicated that Foster did not aim a rifle at his killer, but merely carried it. Needless to say, seeing a person lawfully carrying a firearm cannot give one a legal right to kill them.
But pesky realities like this carry less weight than conservative media’s delusional grievances. Shortly after Perry’s conviction in April 2023, then-Fox News anchor Tucker Carlsonaired a segment portraying Perry as a helpless victim of “a mob of rioters” and a “Soros-funded” district attorney. Carlson decried the jury’s verdict as a “legal atrocity” and lambasted Abbott for standing idly by while his state invalidated conservatives’ right to defend themselves. “So that is Greg Abbott’s position,” he said. “There is no right of self-defense in Texas.”
The next day, Abbott pledged to work “as swiftly as Texas law allows regarding the pardon of Sgt. Perry.”
8) And a great take on the same issue in the Bulwark:
The case had everything Republicans love: A peaceful protest with people exercising their First Amendment rights. A veteran lawfully exercising his Second Amendment right. And before the murder the killer had been searching the internet for young girls and sending sexually explicit texts to a minor.
The only problem was the protest itself: It was a Black Lives Matter protest.
And so Daniel Perry—a groomer who was convicted of murder by a jury of his peers—became a conservative cause célèbre.
We should be clear that there is no reasonable legal defense of Perry. He initially claimed that Foster had not pointed his weapon at him. Here was Perry’s initial statement to police: “I believe he was going to aim at me. I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.” Other eyewitnesses confirmed that Foster did not raise his weapon. No witnesses testified that Foster did raise his gun.
At the time of the confrontation, Perry’s car was surrounded by protestors—remember, he had intentionally driven into them. Witnesses testified that Perry attempted to get out of his car, but that Foster, standing by the driver’s door, told him not to get out and motioned for him to move on. Had Perry exited the vehicle, it is reasonable to believe that the confrontation would have escalated. Foster seemed—by all testimony—to have been trying to protect the pedestrians from Perry’s vehicle and also protect Perry from the angry people he had assaulted with his car.
But Perry shot and killed Foster anyway. Why?
First off, Perry is a racist. And when I say “racist” I don’t mean in the Archie Bunker sense. This is a guy who *hates* black people so much that he frequently talked about killing them for sport. The prosecution presented a mountain of evidence on this point and I won’t quote any of it here, but you can read about it if you like.
Second, there is ample evidence that Perry had been working himself up to seeking out a Black Lives Matter protest for the purpose of killing. Radley Balko has the full rundown on this here.
For instance, here is a something Perry wrote in June of 2020: “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work, they are rioting outside my apartment complex.”
At trial, prosecutors presented an exchange Perry had with a friend in which he had mused on how to create a situation in which he would be justified to kill:
Perry speculated about how he might get away with such a killing – by claiming self-defense, as he is now doing. Prosecutors presented a Facebook Messenger chat between Perry and a friend, Michael Holcomb, which occurred two weeks before he shot Foster. In it, Perry argued that shooting protesters was legal if it was in self-defense. Holcomb, who was called to the stand Wednesday afternoon, seemed to try to talk Perry down. “Aren’t you a CDL holder too?” he asked, referring to the men’s licenses to carry concealed handguns. “We went through the same training … Shooting after creating an event where you have to shoot, is not a good shoot.”
And while it doesn’t have any bearing on the case, I’ll mention it again: Perry was also actively pursuing underaged girls.
There is no legal or moral justification for pardoning Perry. His trial was fair. The jury acted reasonably. The laws he broke were well-defined and serious. He is not a good guy who had one bad moment. There is no indication that he has repented and become a different man than the one who fantasized about murder and then carried it out.
The only reason to pardon Perry is political. Pardoning Perry creates political gain for Gov. Abbott because his constituents like Perry. And these voters like Perry precisely because of who he murdered.
9) Loved this video on the business of donuts. Thanks DJC!
10) It’s safe to say this police office should not be a police officer. “An officer was called to help a blind, deaf dog. He shot him instead.: Teddy, a 13-pound pet, had escaped his outdoor kennel and was found by a neighbor. Residents are furious with the city, which found no wrongdoing.”
11) Of course you should get enough sleep during the week, but catching up on the weekends really does help, though it cannot completely ameliorate the negative effects of chronic sleep deprivation, “Trying to catch up on lost sleep? It may not help with sleep deprivation: Sleeping in on weekends and holidays helps, but nothing beats consistent, sufficient rest for cognitive performance.”
12) Yglesias wrote a great (paywall) piece on “Zionism” this week. Drum largely agreed with it and, unsurprisingly, so do I. Drum’s summary:
Matt Yglesias had a long rumination about Israel and Zionism yesterday that matches a lot of my thinking. My shorter version is more or less this:
Zionism was solely a movement of the first half of the 20th century. In 1948, when the UN created Israel, Zionism won—and thereby wrote itself out of existence. There is now nothing more to Zionism than the belief that Israel was legitimately created and has a right to exist. Arabs initially refused to accept this and declared war on Israel, but they lost in 1949 and that was that—or should have been. Instead they kept on starting wars and losing even more territory to Israel every time they were defeated. That’s hardly exceptional: Gaining territory by war is mankind’s oldest way of creating states, and peace treaties after losing a war are a close second—from the Congress of Vienna to Versailles to Yalta to Camp David and beyond.
Even the PLO finally accepted this in the ’90s. Ditto for Jordan and Egypt. On the other hand, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, a bunch of dead-ender Arab states—and, apparently, a lot of US college students—still don’t accept Israel’s right to exist. It’s kind of ridiculous, like not accepting the right of the US to exist even though, obviously, it does and has no intention of stopping.
The short version of all this is that the question “Are you a Zionist” is no more sensible than “Do you support independence for the United States?”¹ It’s a question that made sense once upon a time, but no longer. All that’s left is whether you refuse to accept something that even the PLO has accepted for more than three decades.
13) Yglesias’ intern, Maya Bodnick, did Friday mailbag yesterday. OMG did I love this AI-based assignment she had. I am totally going to modify and use this:
Eric Wilhelm: Maya, how are professors dealing with AI in the classroom?
With its current capabilities, LLMs are posing a clear threat to academic writing and programming assignments.
I mostly take classes that assess students with take-home essays, which are clearly at risk for AI-enabled plagiarism. As I wrote about last summer, ChatGPT-4 can already get a mix of As and Bs in Harvard classes. This year, I’ve been struck by how most of my professors have completely ignored artificial intelligence in their pedagogy and syllabi. The few professors that did mention AI tended to simply warn students not to plagiarize using the technology.
One of my professors, historian Jane Kamensky, went beyond telling students not to cheat using AI and used the technology to enrich our learning. Professor Kamensky gave us the assignment of writing an essay prompt for ChatGPT and fact-checking and analyzing its output. This assignment helped me approach the class material from a novel perspective and was also an opportunity to learn about the comparative writing abilities of ChatGPT-3.5 and ChatGPT-4. Here’s a link to my final paper for this assignment.
As with writing, LLMs are demonstrating increasingly sophisticated programming capabilities. Just as students can use the models to write their essays for them, they can also use the technology to complete much of their programming projects and problem sets.
While I have less experience with computer science classes, I took a programming data science class this year which did not attempt to use AI to enhance students’ learning. However, this year Professor David Malan incorporated AI into his large introductory computer science course and created a model for the class that he hoped would lead students “toward an answer rather than handing it to them.”
I applaud teachers like Kamensky and Malan for creatively incorporating AI into the classroom. Another one of my professors also took this approach and used artificial intelligence to help generate fascinating international relations simulations for our class to talk through. Sometimes we’d use human-written simulations (e.g., from the Council of Foreign Relations), but LLMs helped Dr. Imparato easily generate custom simulations that were tailored to the needs of our class. I hope other teachers will follow this path in the coming years and take advantage of the opportunities offered by AI, without allowing the technology to replace student learning.
With that said, almost a year after I warned about the risks of AI cheating in my article, Harvard and other universities have made little progress in preventing these offenses. Professors warn students not to use artificial intelligence to write or code their homework, but they can’t consistently prevent this cheating because the software for detecting AI-generated content is still deeply flawed.
14) Apparently, google’s new AI overiew is making all kinds of awful mistakes. That said, in my experience with Perplexity for many months now, I never see mistakes like this, “Why Google’s AI might recommend you mix glue into your pizza: Hilariously wrong AI responses show that chatbots can’t tell jokes from facts and they can invent confident-sounding answers.”
15) Jessica Grose, “The Gender Pay Gap Is a Culture Problem”
American women made significant progress toward closing the gender pay gap in the second half of the 20th century, but that gap has barely budged over the past two decades. In 2022, according to Pew Research, “American women typically earned 82 cents for every dollar earned by men. That was about the same as in 2002, when they earned 80 cents to the dollar.”
In a country where women are now a (slight) majority of the college-educated labor force and the annual earnings median for college degree holders is 55 percent more than that of those with high school diplomas, the stickiness of this gap is frustrating. While there are several factors at play, one of the key contributors to the gap is what’s known as the motherhood penalty and the corresponding fatherhood premium: Women’s pay decreases when they have children, while men’s pay increases.
This dynamic isn’t just an American phenomenon. “In general, women don’t recover. They don’t catch back up to men, even many years after first childbirth,” said Henrik Kleven, the lead author of a 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “The Child Penalty Atlas,” in which he and his co-authors, Camille Landais and Gabriel Leite-Mariante, reviewed wage gap data from 134 countries. “Now, that basic pattern is true essentially everywhere, but the quantitative magnitudes of the effects vary greatly across countries,” he told me recently.
Somewhat surprisingly to me, his research, which builds on years of earlier scholarship, suggests that a country’s family policy has relatively little to do with how big the parenthood pay gap is. A society’s culture and norms seem to be much bigger factors in how big the motherhood penalty is: The more egalitarian the culture, the lower the gap…
I asked one of the paper’s co-authors, Cecilia Machado, an economist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, to summarize the state of the motherhood penalty in the United States. If we wanted to take steps to improve the pay gap as a society, what would we do? Via email, she said that there might be a limited scope of what public policy and workplace policy can do. But she added that federal and workplace policy that encouraged both men and women to take paid parental leave could help; creating the political conditions for involved fatherhood in a child’s first year can set egalitarian patterns that last a lifetime. Still, Machado said, “Both of these combined are important policies, but maybe them alone, by themselves, will not work if we don’t see culture and gender norms changing.”
My take is that we’re in a time when cultural norms around motherhood in the United States seem particularly contradictory and in flux. While a record high percentage of women with children under 5 work, a large subset of Americans still thinks society would be better off if they didn’t.
I asked 2,000 parents from across the U.S., “Do you think children are better off if their mother is home and doesn’t hold a job, or are children just as well off if their mother works for pay?” Fifty-two percent of dads and 47 percent of moms said it’s better for kids if their moms aren’t working for pay. Those attitudes are somewhat more common among Republicans (60 percent of dads and 48 percent of moms), but they’re pretty common among Democrats, too (53 percent of dads and 41 percent of moms).
Until we reconcile our cultural ambivalence toward working mothers, I don’t think the gap is going to get any better. Maybe in another 20 years, we’ll get another two cents.
16) This is really good, “Why are we suckers for Astrology, the Meyers-Briggs, and other shaky psychology tests?”
Yet psychologists have repeatedly argued that the Myers-Briggs has dubious predictive ability and is grounded in debunked theory. To make matters worse, it’s unreliable. Which means that if you take the test more than once to learn more about your “true self”, it’s quite likely to give you different answers each time. As Laith Al-Shawaf notes, “any psychologist will tell you, it’s mostly bullshit.”
A recent report in Scientific American compared the results of the Meyers-Briggs to other personality scores, ranging from the Big 5 to Astrological signs (see their results in the figure below). They investigated an MBTI-style test and a Big Five test to see how well each predicted 37 life outcomes (see their full report for details), ranging from how many close friends they had to how often they exercised to how satisfied they were with life. Here is what they found:
On average, the Big Five test was about twice as accurate as the MBTI-style test for predicting these life outcomes, placing the usefulness of the MBTI-style test halfway between science and astrology—literally. When we tried predicting these same life outcomes using astrological sun signs (e.g., whether someone is a Pisces or Aries), we achieved zero prediction accuracy. In other words, sun sign astrology didn’t appear to work at all for predicting people’s lives. And while the MBTI-style test fared better, it was still often wrong in its predictions. What’s more, adding MBTI-style personality results to Big Five ones didn’t lead to predictions that were any more on the mark than Big Five ones alone…
What is it about this scientific mess that people so readily buy into? We believe that one of the bugs that drives psychologists crazy is actually a feature that explains the test’s enduring popularity.
After you complete the Myers-Briggs test, you get sorted into one of 16 categories. Each group is often given an appealing name: the “logical pragmatist”, “compassionate facilitator”, or “insightful visionary” — providing a perfect new title for a professional development seminar or your online dating profile.
The problem is that these categories contradict how contemporary psychologists think about personality. Most experts agree that human personality can be boiled down to five or so fundamental traits—the BIG 5: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and neuroticism. Each trait is a continuous dimension, so that someone can score high, low, or anywhere in between.
Unfortunately, however, it is quite hard (even if you’re a psychologist) to conceive of yourself in five-dimensional space. It’s also awkward to tell people at a conference event or cocktail party that you have a moderate score on extraversion, moderate-to-high on agreeableness and conscientiousness, high on openness, and moderate-to-low on neuroticism. This is hardly sparkling dinner party conversation!
This is why assigning people to Myers-Briggs’ categories is compelling. Scoring low on extraversion and high on openness doesn’t sound particularly impressive, but being a “mastermind” does. People would much rather claim a group identity that includes Sun Tzu, Isaac Newton, Jane Austen and Arthur Ashe (setting aside the fact that none of these people ever took the Meyers-Briggs and several were deceased hundreds of years before the test was even invented).
The use of categories is a great marketing maneuver and a big part of the reason behind the popularity of many dubious personality tests from the Myers-Briggs to the infamous TIME Harry Potter Quiz or Cosmo’s quiz to help you learn what kind of lover you are. The same logic also applies to Astrology signs! All these tests operate a bit like the Sorting Hat from Harry Potter, slotting us into different groups. People crave self-definition and social identities provide this for us. We are attracted to group memberships that provide both a sense of connection to people just like us and distinction from others—what Marilynn Brewer termed “Optimal Distinctiveness”.
17) Drafting NHL goalies is a crapshoot compared to position players. I wonder if they could have a rule that goalkeepers alone could not be drafted till age 22. That would largely solve the problem, I think. Jack Han:
An NHLer’s development path is seldom a straight, upward-trending line.
This is even more true when it comes to goaltenders.
Draft pedigree of NHL-regular goalies (top 64 by 2023-24 regular season games played):
Third Round (15 goalies)
Second Round (14 goalies)
Undrafted (12 goalies)
Fourth Round (7 goalies)
First Round (5 goalies)
Fifth Round (4 goalies)
Seventh Round (4 goalies)
Sixth Round (3 goalies)
Few teams reach to select a netminder with their first-round picks, while many goalies end up making the league despite being passed over entirely.
Out of the 64 regulars, only 23 played for the team that originally drafted them…
Even when teams are able to identify goaltenders with NHL potential, they routinely trade or give up on them. Most drafted NHL goaltenders are now on their second, third or even fourth organizations.
I suspect that the apparent lack of success in NHL goalie development stems from the unique demands of the position.
A prototypical NHL starting goaltender combines size, athleticism, technique and tactical understanding (save selection).
For juniors, these qualities are oftentimes contradictory:
Tall, lanky goalies may lack the muscle mass to move explosively while staying healthy
Naturally athletic goalies may thrive at lower levels despite sub-standard habits
All 15-20 year olds, goalies and skaters alike, are still figuring out how to deploy their skills tactically
Early-maturing U20 goalies may lack the upsides craved by NHL organizations
NHL teams would likely experience more consistent success with their goalie scouting/development if the draft age was pushed back from 18 to 21. As things stand, they instead manage risk by taking goalies later and tapping into free agency for older, more proven NCAA/European prospects.
About Steve Greene
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