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The Inequality Taboo

bible-researcher.com

6 pointsby rkts17 lat temu2 comments

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16 lat temudiscuss

If your claim is that the book you have recommended ... is the last word on the subject

That would be an audacious claim, considering the book is rather old and only 200 pages. I recommend it because it is a model of concise and accessible prose, good for laymen (like me) who want to get the basic facts with minimal fluff. As far as I know, none of its main points has been invalidated by intervening research. But I can see why its blunt statements of fact might be unpalatable to some.

16 lat temudiscuss

I have not read Stanovich's book but it does not appear to be an appropriate introduction to the subject of intelligence. I suspect you recommend these "newer and better" books because they suit your ideological purposes, not because they are better researched or more informative.

16 lat temudiscuss

There is a lot of data on this question, and it flatly contradicts Asimov's claims. IQ scores correlate not only with academic performance but also with job performance as well as others' intuitive impression of how "smart" a person is. That's why the army gives intelligence tests to new recruits: high-IQ soldiers (and mechanics and carpenters) do better, on average, than their low-IQ counterparts. Other types of tests, such as the hypothetical test devised by Asimov's mechanic, either have no predictive power or are predictive only as far as they correlate with g, or general intelligence, which is currently best measured by IQ tests. The physiological basis of g is unknown, but it is highly heritable and correlates with a number of physical variables such as brain volume and myelination.

If you want to learn more about the subject, I suggest this book, which concisely disposes of these and other popular anti-IQ arguments:

http://www.amazon.com/Question-Intelligence-IQ-Debate-Americ...

17 lat temudiscuss

The combination of IQ and "chutzpah" is the essence of the entrepreneurial personality. If Jews are (for whatever reason) disposed to be high on these traits, it's certainly a sufficient explanation.

17 lat temudiscuss

A related theory (PDF): http://homepage.mac.com/harpend/.Public/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocs...

17 lat temudiscuss

It's pretty simple. People who think in personal, emotional terms tend to explain the world that way, while people who think more logically/mechanically explain the world that way. That's where religion and science, respectively, come from.

17 lat temudiscuss

Dawkins is a classic yellowist (http://paulgraham.com/say.html). Megawatts of brain power spent on arguing with idiots.

17 lat temudiscuss

Ritalin. Only thing that's ever worked for me.

17 lat temudiscuss

No one has proved that technology won't one day make everyone grow to 6 feet and live 200 years. In fact that could quite plausibly happen. But you'd still be a fool to count on it.

17 lat temudiscuss

Course catalogs tell you nothing. They're stuffed with appealing descriptions of courses which may or may not end up on the schedule, and when they do, may or may not resemble the description in the catalog. Not to mention the teachers' knowledge level; I once attended a cryptography lecture by a professor who didn't know the difference between public and private keys...

17 lat temudiscuss

If you want to learn, then going to a Respected Research University is a waste of time and money. The quality of teaching at such places is often pathetically bad. Prestige comes from research, not teaching, and every dollar spent on research is a dollar not spent on teaching. You'll learn more for your money at a middling state school or private college, in part because these places attract professors who actually like to teach.

Predictable objections:

1. I had some great teachers at RRU: I did too. But they are the exception rather than the rule.

2. You'll make more money with a degree from RRU: The statistics don't support this. Harvard students end up with the same average income as students who get admitted to Harvard but then go to a less prestigious school.

3. You'll meet more smart people at RRU: Yes, but you can find smart people anywhere, and a few years of college classes is as good a filter as any admissions department, at least in technical majors. The kind of people you meet in a topology course is about the same no matter what school you're at.

I think the most important thing is to find a place where you'll fit in and be happy for 4-5 years. Visit a few places, and go with your gut.

See also: http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html

17 lat temudiscuss

Zero is not defined to be even. A number is even if it's twice some integer. Zero is twice an integer (namely 0), so it's even.

If you try to bring personal intuition into mathematics, you'll just repeatedly shoot yourself in the foot

I disagree. Intuition should always be foremost in mathematical understanding. You may have gotten a different impression from your math classes, and that IMO is a consequence of bad teaching.

I had a similar problem with accepting that 1/inf = 0

As you should; the statement is false. The limit of 1/x as x->infinity is zero, but there is no x at which the quotient "reaches" zero. In non-standard analysis, if x is positive infinite, then 1/x is positive infinitesimal, meaning it is infinitely close to, but still greater than zero.

17 lat temudiscuss

Haskell does well in benchmarks but this hides the fact that its performance is very unpredictable. Try it and you'll see what I mean. Also, Common Lisp does well in benchmarks but only after a lot of declarations are added which make the code nearly unreadable.

Personally I get the best results from the MLton SML compiler. OCaml is also pretty fast and more practical. YMMV.

17 lat temudiscuss

http://www.springerlink.com/content/6dydh0fawxuuhg1r/

The African American adolescents had a lower birth weight, a lower verbal IQ, and a higher number of sexual partners than did White adolescents. For each characteristic, the mixed race mean fell between the means of the two parental populations.

17 lat temudiscuss

Body size varies more within dog breeds than between them

I have never understood what this means. "Within-group" variation can be quantified as standard deviation (among other metrics). How do you measure "between-group" variation? Sample the group means and find the standard deviation? But that's obviously meaningless.

17 lat temudiscuss

True, but in this case, the template serves a different purpose from the macro. It's there to make zap polymorphic, and would be unnecessary in a dynamic or type-inferred language. The main point is that pg's macro can be implemented as an ordinary function in a language that has references.

17 lat temudiscuss

C++ version:

  template<typename T>
  void zap (T (*f)(T x), T &x) { x = f(x); }

Example:

  int square (int x) { return x*x; }

  int foo[5] = {1,2,3,4,5};

  zap<int>(square, foo[3]);   // foo is now {1,2,3,16,5}

Admittely, the <int> is a little ugly, but that can probably be fixed with Hindley-Milner (or just plain dynamic typing).

17 lat temudiscuss

behaving in ways that maximise achievment of your goal(s)

But that's exactly what IQ tests measure, at least in the context of academic and job performance. IQ tests are used because they are the most economical predictor of achievement in certain areas.

Stanovich seems to be saying that he can predict some kind of achievement (or "well-being," whatever that is) by examining people's susceptibility to certain mental quirks like the sunk cost fallacy. Ok, it's a fine hypothesis, but where's the data?

17 lat temudiscuss

So how is rationality defined and how is it measured? Does it correlate with any important life outcomes such as income, academic performance or law-abidingness? He says that irrationality can be "fixed." Does this fix result in measurable changes in peoples' lives?

He says that IQ and rationality are "very imperfectly" correlated. What is the number, exactly?

You seem pretty determined to persuade us that IQ is unimportant. I don't claim to be an expert on the subject, but HN readers should know there's more to the debate:

http://www.sullivan-county.com/id5/murrey.htm

17 lat temudiscuss

Are you related to this Stanovich guy, or do you just like repeating yourself?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=536558

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=565842

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=588797

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518828

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=559054

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=514086

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=480331

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=497733

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=483771

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=514856

This is just from a quick Google search. I'm sure there are more.