There is a huge amount of internalized oppression among nerds. In spite of all the benefits that the internet and computers have brought to humanity, and in spite of all the benefits that AI has and will bring, it's very hard for people in tech to overcome the idea that nerds are bad people. This cognitive dissonance results in all kinds of rationalizations for why what we do is not actually good.
In this case researchers see an opportunity to sell out the practitioners of ML, by implying that typical ML practitioners aren't adding value to society and are just cashing in on hype.
I disagree, the law does provide these exceptions but I (and presumably the author) don't find these exceptions to be comprehensive enough to render the unqualified statement of the author "out of context".
How is a person supposed to prove that their views are "fair and accurate" or a "fair comment" and a "genuine belief"? These are highly subjective, and none of them helped Andrew Bolt, a reporter who was sued under these laws.
Note that you won't even grant that the author is quoting the law in good faith. How is a person supposed to show that their "racist" views are held in good faith?
I don't really see support for that in the article, but most of the details are in the individual studies. The study does say
Kanazawa notes that intelligence correlates positively with evolutionarily novel activities, but the correlation with ancient activities is zero or even negative. That is also evident in Table 25.1 , which mostly lists novel school- or job-related forms of success that have the expected positive correlation with intelligence, but one of the most ancient forms of success, number of children, has a negative correlation (−0.11).
I would guess that you are reading "social success" as "social skills" while in the article's terminology they mean by "social success" things like career success, education level etc.
As for mathematics, it's true that this is a very special case, and people select into mathematics based on both ability and personality. All I can say for certain is that I can identify a distinct group of people who are both intelligent and have autism spectrum traits, and they seem to occur more often than if these traits were uncorrelated.
In my experience, intelligence is correlated with bad dress sense, lack of hygiene, awkward personalities and poor motor skills. I know a lot of professional mathematicians, and they all would have been bullied for these things things (like I was) if they went to my high school, though many of them went to private high schools.
Before anyone downvotes me because presuming the existence of a group of people that is more intelligent than others is elitist or arrogant, I would point out that it is no more so that presuming the existence of a group of people with less social skills or motor skills.
I'm sure most people would not deny this mechanism exists. The distinction is whether one focuses on this mechanism (correct Bayesian inference) or the various biases and feedback loops described in the article. Personally I believe that progressives miss the forest for the trees: there is a huge gap between White and Black crime that encompasses almost every kind of crime[0]. While I am against any policy that exacerbates this gap, or otherwise discriminates against Black people, I feel that there is a huge effort by the progressive movement to promote an understanding of these subtleties, while at the same time actively repressing general knowledge of the basic facts about race and crime. For example, progressives like to point out that for drug charges this gap could be explained by uneven enforcement (though I don't know if this claim is accurate - the evidence is somewhat indirect) but fail to mention that for most other crimes this claim is not tenable.
And fyi, a very basic fact[1] in the field of criminology is that being black is predictive[2] of crime even after controlling for income and education. I'm not criticizing you for not knowing this since this fact is considered "racist" when expressed by non-experts, and experts only refer to it among themselves, in order to avoid the fact being misinterpreted.
[2] "predictive" is a term of art, meaning that it has a positive coefficient when used on the right hand side of a regression where "crime" is on the left hand side, along with other right hand side variables which depend on the context.
Furthermore, it's not just a matter of ISPs. Because of its refusal to censor various kinds of content, sites like 8chan have been refused service from various sites that process donations.
As someone with a PhD in economics, and a believer in the what the mainstream econ departments teach, I still found this article very reasonable. I hope no one will take this article to be saying that orthodox economics is fundamentally flawed because at no point is that argued. Instead they argue that behavioral biases exist and are well enough understood that we can in some cases craft policy based on them, instead of the standard economic assumptions.
My favorite points were
- Unpack ‘animal spirits’. These arise in the minds of economic actors. We can unpack the biases behind them and do something about them – an indeed BIT is currently working on such a project.
The debate on "animal spirits"[0] is ongoing, but the potential payoff from understanding them is huge. They deserve more research using more modern ideas and methods.
- Promote rainy-day saving. Recent work suggests that the behavioural and economic effects of having even small amounts of saving are even larger than previously thought.
There are two contradictory arguments often made in regard to poverty and rational behavior: (A) poor people are completely constrained by their poverty and unable to make the "right" decision to save and (B) poor people are unable to make rational decisions because poverty affects their decision making ability. I am mostly in the (B) camp and as such, I think that helping poor people to behave more rationally is a great idea. However it does require honestly stating that poor people do make bad decisions, even if anyone else in that situation would have done the same.
The weakest point IMO was
- Trial light-touch ways to improve estimates by key economic actors. Encourage the use of estimation frames.
This is based on a claim that is much more general, and therefore requires more evidence. I would like to see a lot more studies on improving estimation accuracy in general, before I accepted that there is some general formula to make people's estimates more accurate.
[0] A term of trade for Keynes' original, but discarded by the mainstream, idea that markets were moved by irrational exuberance/pessimism by society as a whole. The main advocate of this theory today is Robert Schiller.
I have a PhD in economics, and your claims about monopolies and competition aren't accurate.
Economic theory doesn't state that monopolies always arise, at least not under the circumstances you are describing. If you can buy your competitors, or make a legally binding contract to compete, the yes, monopolies are inevitable. And as you say, inelastic demand does make monopolies more likely, though your intuition that medical goods have inelastic demand may be wrong, e.g. see the RAND health care study where they randomly assign people insurance types, and find the high deductible group consume less healthcare even in emergency situations.
In the general situation, no theory guarantees that monopolies arise in the absence of regulation (apart from the above to cases which aren't the regulation you're discussing).
>Rational actors will spend up to their expected monopoly profits to create a Nash Equilibrium where new entrants into a market will be unprofitable.
In economics, anything that relies solely on Nash Equilibrium is doubtful. In most situations, Nash Equilbria are not unique, and therefore it's hard to say what will actually happen. If the Nash Equilibrium is unique, usually some stronger equilibrium concept applies like dominant strategy equilibrium.
In your case it would be more accurate to say that committing to drive out potential competitors can be a Nash Equilibrium for some parameters.
On what basis do you say that meta-analysis is not credible? From my stats background, (but without any direct experience in meta-analysis) I would say that they could be problematic because the N is very small and so have a lot less to work with, and more temptation to use fancy statistical techniques with hidden assumptions. On the other hand, what do you do when you have 50 studies of varying quality, no one of which is has such a compelling methodology as to eclipse the others? In that case it seems like meta-analysis is the least bad option.
One thing that is glossed over slightly in these discussions is the distinction between collections of sound-meaning compound characters where the rebus is the same but the words aren't cognate, and where the words are cognate.
I've read in some places that the scribes attempted to use the same rebus for cognate words but I everything I could find online was a re-hashing of wikipedia (or wherever the wikipedia article is sourced from) which states "However, the phonetic component is not always as meaningless as this example would suggest. Rebuses were sometimes chosen that were compatible semantically as well as phonetically."
I'm not sure how important this really is or how many characters that share a common rebus are cognate. But to my aesthetic senses I much prefer characters to contain etymological information than just the pronunciation when the character was first written.
Almost certainly. One fascinating aspect of language is that many metaphors that are baked into language appear in many languages. E.g. In English we can form the future tense with modal verbs, "I will..." and "I am going to..." and in Chinese there are similar modal verbs "我要..." and "我去...". In both languages the idea of intention, or motion, are used as a metaphor in forming the future tense. Or 加油, an expression of encouragement similar to "put your foot on it" which has no equivalent in English, but does in Danish, "giv det gas".
Proponents of diversity engage in non-Bayesian updating whereby if a non-diverse company/city/person does well, they update their prior that the system is rigged, but if a diverse company/city/person does well update their prior that diversity has economic benefits.
The problem with the Situationists is that they have no political program. They refuse to describe how they would like the world to be, instead coming up with convoluted explanations for why doing so is unnecessary and counterproductive. The assertion is basically that capitalism is so terrible that once we get rid of it, things will obviously be much better.
Apologists have tried to fill in the gaps with a utopian vision [1] where we maintain the a similar standard of living but without wasting energy on conspicuous consumption. I agree that developing a culture that avoids conspicuous consumption would probably mean we could get by with less work. However there would still be enough work leftover to either require capitalism, or socialist style forced labor, both of which situationists explicitly reject.
I'm not sure about that. I'm not saying this boy's parents pushed him into this path, but by virtue of their own education (mother has a PhD, not sure about the father) they would have provided him with many opportunities for intellectual growth that other kids lacked. So I would assume Jeremy is very smart but not as exceptional as his achievements would imply.
Being smart can be isolating, either from not being able to relate to people or act normal, or people assuming you are arrogant, or developing actual arrogance, but in the scheme if things this is just one of many issues that affect people, and not necessarily that serious. The super-smart shy people I know are not too different from the average intelligence shy people I know.
While I don't know if this is the right path for the kid, or if he really is a genius (from the article he seems very smart) your comment comes across as mean spirited.
Do you not believe in the existence of genius, or that people vary in intelligence? If not, why do you doubt his intelligence? Terrence Tao is an example of a child prodigy who became a famous mathematician, although I would say winning gold in the International Mathematics Olympiad is a more objective standard than admission to Cornell.
There is another source of animosity, which is by progressives whose ideology states that White middle class culture is qualitatively different to other cultures. While one might talk about Chinese culture or Jewish culture or Moroccan culture, when it comes to White culture the claim is either (1) that it does not exist (the bailey argument[0]) or (2) that unlike all other cultures in the world, it is not a genuine culture but a social construct designed to oppress people who aren't White and middle/upper class [1] (the motte argument[0]).
So when middle class White people create distinctive houses, in this worldview it must be an expression of either their oppressive role in society, or the shallowness of their cultural roots.
[1] e.g. "Whiteness is not a culture... Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position. It is nothing but a reflection of privilege, and exists for no reason other than to defend it." in http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.html
I think that a "biological basis" means something different to you than to me. How exactly do these studies show that depression is different from being unhappy? Did they study the brains of merely unhappy people and find no such biological differences? Again, in my understanding psychiatrists and researchers make no attempt to differentiate between depression and unhappiness because they have no reason to make this distinction.
I'm going to assume that your argument is that if depression is caused by biological factors then it must be treated differently from unhappiness that is caused by life events. But in that case you will have to explain how this is consistent with the fact that "...depressive episodes are strongly correlated with adverse events..."[0]. This fact seems more consistent with either reverse causation (depression causes biological changes) or that depression can have multiple causes, and can occur in the absence of a biological cause.
In this case researchers see an opportunity to sell out the practitioners of ML, by implying that typical ML practitioners aren't adding value to society and are just cashing in on hype.