sevenless

Why is not working a bad thing? Considering productivity gains in the last century, our employment rate is far too high.

Yet you're arguing that mobilities can't be compared, in response to my post, not to the original article claiming Europe's mobility is worse... :-)

It seems a little like special pleading. The ease of transition from bottom to top quintile is an accepted index of how mobile or stratified a society is, not how wealthy individuals are. Of course different nations will be better or worse off, or will have different Gini indices as a result of social policy, but that doesn't mean we can't meaningfully compare their mobilities. Pointing out the figures isn't "propaganda".

> a 40%er in the USA is better off than a 40%er in Europe

Generalizing about "Europe" doesn't make much sense. Between (say) the UK and Albania, there's a vast economic gap (about 10 fold lower GDP/capita). If you're talking about Western Europe, what do you mean by "is better off"?

The USA's social mobility is much worse than the EU's, though. If you're born in the bottom 20% by household income your chance of making it to the top 20% is lower. The proportion of billionaires who inherited their wealth doesn't make any odds to the economic mobility of an ordinary person. It is ridiculous to go from "Overall, heirs and heiresses make up about half of Western Europe's billionaires" to claim "The lack of social mobility is more of a concern" in Europe.

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21595437-america...

> The study confirms previous findings that America’s social mobility is low compared with many European countries. (In Denmark, a poor child has twice as much chance of making it to the top quintile as in America.)

Science is probably the least scary thing that an Excel bug can affect. JPMorgan Chase's "London Whale" venture lost $2 billion in part because spreadsheet modelers divided by a sum instead of an average to get a value at risk.

https://baselinescenario.com/2013/02/09/the-importance-of-ex...

Then there was the infamous Reinhart-Rogoff paper in economics, used to justify harmful austerity policies worldwide post-2008, that came to false conclusions using a row formula that wasn't updated.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/04/16/is-th...

You seem to be asking why people shouldn't do data analysis without knowing anything about data analysis.

At the very least using the t-test in Excel should require a unique key that you only get after doing a few hours of classwork.

"And I hope you've learned to sanitize your database inputs."

Fucking Excel! They haven't fixed this utterly egregious bug in over a decade.

I'm going to make a sign and picket Microsoft when I'm next in the area.

I don't think so, not with that humidity. People can't live in conditions where wet bulb temperature exceeds body temperature for long. You simply can't cool down by sweating.

There's the possibility of geo-engineering.

To which I'd add, the fact 'ADHD' symptoms are stereotypically behaviors of male children. I don't think it might be a total coincidence that we have a trend of drugged-up little boys for behavior deemed unacceptable, at the same time childrens' education is dominated by women.

Shorn of all pretense you're essentially wondering if you'd benefit from or enjoy taking drugs. This is quite possible. People take drugs for all kinds of reasons. What I object to is calling this a disease.

The problem with this is that offering people the treatment can create the disease, in some sense.

Indeed. Here's to psychiatry, the one medical specialty with a consistent record of creating more diseases for themselves to treat every year.

Interesting link, thank you.

We aren't morally obliged to treat people for things that aren't diseases.

Like I said elsewhere - does that mean that being ugly/unattractive is a disease? Or having an awkward personality, or having a low IQ? Or for that matter, being a member of any discriminated-against minority?

It seems unjust and coercive to tell people they have a disease and should be medicated simply because society demands it.

> It's a perfectly fine analogy. They're both problems which are problems because of our society.

One is a disease caused by conforming with our sedentary society. The other is what we label those who refuse to go along with our expectations for school, work and conformity. Really, they are more like opposites of one another.

> You're suggesting physical illness is more "real" than mental illness.

That's right. It's pretty hard to rigorously define a mental illness outside of the context of a given society. Mental illnesses are not real in the same sense that, say, a broken leg is real. They are socially determined. Other societies outside the West don't have the same kind of mental illnesses we do.

> ADHD affects many aspects of a person's life—and adults too. Living independently with unmedicated ADHD can be incredibly difficult. Everything from social life, working, to driving, is harder/riskier.

Being ugly makes life hard, too. Does that mean being ugly is a disease? Should all of us ugly people get plastic surgery to treat our disease, as a matter of course?

Ultimately, none of this shows ADHD is an objective disease. In the anthropological view of mental illness, it is a disease - because our society claims that it is, and for no other reason. Psychiatrists are not that much different from witch doctors. (https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1755&dat=19710325&id=...)

This analogy doesn't really work, because obesity is caused by living a modern sedentary lifestyle, whereas I'm suggesting ADHD is what we're labeling kids with for not living, or rebelling against, that sedentary lifestyle.

Obesity is a disease in an objective sense because it directly causes ill health. There's lots of studies to show that. The symptoms of what we call ADHD seem to simply be caused by unhappiness and boredom with the way we live today. We're demanding kids do something that makes them unhappy, and any reaction to it, is labeled a disease.

> take medication to help our bodies [...] function properly in this society, because we agree its advantages vastly outweigh its disadvantages.

This seems like a problematic kind of statement, because the implication is that people who don't fit into society should somehow be coercively medicated. What about their rights and bodily autonomy?

I'm sure some people's school grades benefit from taking amphetamine-like drugs, but that still doesn't imply they are suffering from a disease in the first place.

It's far from clear why having the symptoms of ADHD should be considered a disease, in any objective sense. If kids are suffering because school is boring or society is restrictive, that doesn't mean there's something wrong with them.

But what does "real" mean, exactly? That it's a recognizable pattern of behavior? That doesn't necessarily mean it should be treated as a disease.

It seems likely. 500 million years ago, atmospheric CO2 was hundreds of times higher than even the worst projections allow humans to create. CO2 eventually weathers into limestone and gets subducted under continental plates. Ultimately, geological activity renews the balance, and stops us turning into Venus.

I take it the world isn't going to be 'saved'. The question is how we respond to that.

Why do you see 'saving the world' as a priority? The natural (non-human) environment doesn't have any right to exist. Our priority should be to avoid harming humans, and people born into a world that's mostly uninhabitable for them will have pretty shit lives.

Long term, the world will be fine, we won't.

> People who care about their childrens future should start planning now.

If you believe this, wouldn't the ethical thing be to not have kids?

Besides, global warming-derived refugee flows into Europe could well put it in a much worse position than the US.

Yeah. I don't think thermodynamics works like that.

Ignorance of the (irreversible) consequences is sufficient reason to avoid messing with the composition of the atmosphere, no?

These maps are based on emission trends continuing, assuming no political action will be taken. But wouldn't a hotter world tend to exacerbate emission trends, with human needs for AC and desalination rising, plus forest fires? Moreover, there might be some tipping point for large scale methane release. The 'tail risk' to global warming has appreciable density a long way out.

It's interesting how Americans act horrified at the word collectivism, when a market is nothing if not a collectivist decision making process.

"Moses's discriminatory activity wasn't limited to Long Island. As Parks Commissioner of New York City, he imported his racist building methods to an area dense with people of color in need of relief from overcrowded neighborhoods. Almost all of Moses's public works projects—among them Jacob Riis Park, Alley Pond, and Riverside Park, as well as 255 of the 256 playgrounds he built in the 1930s—were placed out of reach of the poor, and, as Caro points out, the one pool built anywhere near a black or Hispanic neighborhood was kept at a “deliberately icy” temperature, because “Moses was convinced that Negroes did not like cold water.” And as Schindler points out in her paper, Moses also went out of his way to clog Harlem with cars: He placed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge's exit ramp there, when the sensible location would have been the Upper East Side, as almost all traffic at that time came from below 100th street. As a consequence, wealthier neighborhoods remained untouched by traffic, while Harlem’s streets were overrun with bridge-bound vehicles."

You can dissolve wood, if you have the right solvent.

That sounds like as close as we'll get to melting the stuff.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17907779