wycs

Also, money works pretty well. Bitcoin is not 10x better. Maybe 0.1x. Bitcoin is not even useful for illicit transactions anymore.

And permiting indenture is better? College is a signalling racket status good. Cut the loans and watch as tuition magically decreases to maintain equilibrium.

In a democracy the electorate must be bribed with there own money. It is in practice nearly impossible to cut spending in any way that matters if you want to stay in office. I suspect there we are just stuck in an equilibrium in which this is what we spend.

That and they brutality exterminated many of their most talented mathematicians.

Presumably these white collar workers are valuable and employeeing them with confiscated money on a useless task is much worse for the economy than both the counterfactual in which the government does not bid for their labor and the one in which these resources are used to subsidize public goods such as basic science research and merit goods such as public infrastructure.

My point is Foolrush would.

I guess I am worried that as the societal norm for allowing ideological differences to be expressed degrades that it will leak into politics in the form of hate speech laws. We are starting to have fully private struggle sessions on Twitter, using such tools to sick the mob on opponents. A new sort of bully pulpit.

I am not sure any populist politician has quite realized this power. Trump has to an extent but he has no backing from anyone in media, education, or most government employees. Now that Trump has broken so many tacit rules, I fear a charismatic leftist populist would be able to nationalize these private struggle sessions and vastly amplify his or her power.

The mob has not been a force in politics for a long time. I fear a resurgence.

Ok. So you don’t support laws against hate speech?

That’s pretty terrible.

Do you care at all about free speech? You are willing kill this beautiful freedom we have for that?

deleted.

What exactly is embarrassing about this study:

http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2017/01/10/1612113114.

The Flynn effect is mostly hollow gains and seems to have stopped: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028960.... And cognitive genomics is starting to show a decline: http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2017/01/10/1612113114.

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>SAT scores among admitted students is the highest it's ever been.

And the GDP of Venezuela as measured in bolívar is the highest it's ever been!

"More comparisons on new SAT scores versus critical reading and math scores on the old SAT:

A new 1200 corresponds to an old 1130. A new 1300 corresponds to an old 1230. A new 1400 corresponds to an old 1340. A new 1500 corresponds to an old 1460. But a new 1600 is just as perfect as an old 1600."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/05/1...

>College education and healthcare /should/ be free for all in this country(USA). They are fundamental to the social mobility and freedom that our founding principles were created for.

We had this. It was called high school. But then standards were lowered so it was no longer a good filter for intelligence and conscientiousness. Standards were lowered to increase "social mobility." This did not work. Now college performs the same function. But the average IQ of college graduates will continue to decline as the percent of the population that graduates approaches 100, and so masters degrees are becoming increasingly common.

Will this, too, increase social mobility?

Social mobility in a meritocratic society is hard given the heritability of valuable mental traits. If we keep sacrificing our schools on the alter of social mobility, we will end up burning the first 30 years of or lives getting Phds in mopping floors.

Publicly adjusting your beliefs in response to evidence is super rare and and extremely important skill. I really respect that you took the time to do this throughout the thread.

You claim the majority of HIV patients in the United States are heterosexual. Do you have any evidence of this? It cuts against everything I have ever read on the topic and everything I and other people in this thread can churn up.

Yes. This matches what I found. Jacquesm writes with such assurance and from such a high ground. It will be interesting to see if he replies.

It’s possible I am wrong, but everything I am Googling seems to say that more than 50% of new HIV transmissions are among gay men alone. Perhaps this is changing, as I would not be surprised if extremely unsafe sexual practices are becoming more common among heterosexuals - and even a small effect here would have outsized impact given the relative proportions. I would be happy to adjust my prior on this if you have some accurate demographic information you would like to link to.

If you randomly select an HIV positive person from a Western country and know no other facts about them, it is correct to update your belief towards thinking they are either homosexual or a user of IV drugs. If their gender is revealed male this is especially true.

Obviously you cannot update this strongly if you are selecting from the global population but you would still update in that direction. Making these priors explicit is extremely taboo.

It is taboo in Western culture to make certain priors explicit, especially when they are accurate.

It is a beautifully written book but incredibly dishonest.

I would much prefer direct IQ correlates rather than using education as a proxy for something better measured with IQ tests.

>This seems to prove that intelligence influenced by genetics but is affected by many thousands of genetic variations. There is no "smart" gene, just lots and lots of randomness.

Not quite how I would put it. There is no one smart gene, just thousands and thousands of smart alleles.

Money seems like an extremely good coordination mechanism to me. Name something that can perform the purpose of money that is not more coercive and less efficient than money.

What a delightfully Kafkaesk way to make a living.

Of course they are subject to power dynamics. The question is whether the dysfunctions of informal power dynamics are worse than the dysfunctions of formalized power dynamics in their economic niche.

We should praise people for speaking truth. Power has nothing to do with it. Cognitive genomics will confirm or disconfirm all the really shocking and offensive stuff very shortly. I have my priors and you have yours. We will see how it pans out.

In general we should do our best not to be offended by descriptive claims and hypotheses, as reality is not constrained by ideology, though we may pretend it is.

Yes, I find those are extremely shocking and offensive.

Then provide some examples.