Sugar crystal is about 1.5 grams per ml, while human fat is about .9 grams per ml, but fat has more than twice the calories per gram.
Desrtopa
Karma: 12,986
we already know European and East Asian populations are probably the smartest genetically because they are the smartest now phenotypically; this has already been conditioned on, so it’s illogical to say ‘well, we should expect an African subpopulation to be higher’. The race has already been run and the first and second place prizes handed out, it makes no sense to say ‘there were a lot of other runners so maybe one of them is in first place’.
It’s likely, but I think it’s important to remember that there are a lot of environmental factors which can depress IQ, and some populations may have high genetic potential which is being depressed by circumstance.
The Dutch are the tallest nationality in the world today, but 150 years ago, they were among the shorter ones; as average height has risen in Western nations, the Dutch significantly overtook various populations that used to be much taller than they were.
Insurance companies are in a much better negotiating position than private buyers, because they’re dealing in bulk, so their expenses are based on paying much lower prices for services than their members would get if they bought individually.
Other commenters have already addressed the difference between expected utility and expected monetary return, but in fact having insurance can have a positive expected monetary return simply because you’re forced to pay more when buying the services privately.
The evidence with the Swedish doctors versus the lottery winners though, is that it’s something other than just the amount of money they have that leaves their descendants better off.
If the reason that the poor are poor is only that they don’t have enough money, then it shouldn’t be necessary to keep funneling in more money to keep them from being poor. That is, if a person has a low-paying job, but has income supplementation which gives them the same level of money as someone with a better job, then their children should be as likely to be well off as the children of the person with the better job, because both have the same access to money. But in practice this appears not to be the case.
There’s a lot of middle ground between “the poor have less money because they’re morally lacking and deserve to have as little as they do” and “the poor have less money only because they started out with less money, and the key to being able to make money is already having money.
Having worked as an educator for some persistently poverty-stricken school districts, I have to say that there being a “human capital” element is definitely attested to in my experience, and I don’t mean this simply as a euphemism for “genes.” I’ve seen plenty of intelligent, conscientious young people who are going to be seriously disadvantaged in achieving future financial success, because they
Haven’t been exposed to standards and expectations that prepare them for how hard they’ll have to work to compete with similarly intelligent people from more functional environments.
Have absorbed disadvantageous social norms about how to manage money (flaunting it via conspicuous consumption, living ahead of paychecks, not investing for future needs or building up a buffer for unforeseen situations, etc.) because these were the examples that everyone they knew who had any money set with it.
Engage in a lot of avoidable conflict, because high conflict interpersonal styles are the norm in the social circles they grew up with (but are not the norm in the social circles they’re going to have to move in in more lucrative careers.)
Have had their learning opportunities sabotaged, because even when they were capable and willing to engage in a high level of learning, they were surrounded by peers who disrupt their teachers’ attempts to create an educational environment.
...And so on.
Not just on a personal level, but on a community level, there are different reasons for being poor, and some poor communities may have very different social norms and values (see Kiryas Joel for instance,) but the norms still tend to perpetuate poverty.
I can’t claim it constitutes a large data set, but I’ve watched a couple of people in these communities regress from being financially well off (due to payouts from having won lawsuits) to being poor again in just a couple of years. And I tried to talk them out of the money management habits that were inevitably leading to that. But while they recognized my cause for concern, they made it clear that they wanted to use the money to gain a few short years living in a way that would make them pinnacles of admiration in their community. Neither of them were dumb, but they were reasoning according to the social norms they’d grown up with.
I don’t think program paternalism is necessarily a good solution, since being forced to use resources pragmatically doesn’t mean that people will learn to use their resources effectively when they have autonomy over them. But I think it’s incorrect to suppose that poor people and more affluent people in general are separated only by the amount of money they have access to, and not by any sort of cultural gaps that act to perpetuate their differences in wealth.
As far as simple wealth transfers having a lasting impact, I think it’s likely that the impact will tend to be different in different places. With the cash transfers to poverty-stricken Ugandan women, for instance, as the article says, most of them used the money to set some kind of retail operation in motion. They had the motivation to use the money entrepreneurially, but also, crucially, they had access to markets with relatively low competition and barriers to entry. Give a couple hundred thousand dollars to a poor person in an American city, and they might want to use it to start a business, but not many would be able to start a business with those resources which would turn a profit given the level of existing competition they’d have to face.
In the short term, giving people money makes them less poor, but in the long term, it may not be so effective.
However, our expected healthspan (the amount of time for which a person is capable of substantial physical activity and not beset by ailments) has gone up considerably in the last few centuries. Perhaps the relatively few people who made it to old age in hunter-gatherer societies might have had similar healthspans, but they constituted a dramatically smaller fraction of the total populace. The average 35 year old today has decades longer of healthy, productive living to look forward to than the average 35 year old 300 years ago (sources available in this book) and while people occasionally remark on, say, 50 being the new 30, it doesn’t seem to leave most people dazzled or mentally unequipped for their new environment.
I’m highly skeptical that most people actually run out of stuff they take pleasure in over the course of a natural lifespan, or anticipate themselves doing so. Most people may have interests less “open ended” than are the norm here, but I haven’t found that people interested in, say, football, tend to find that by their latter years they’ve had enough of football.
If immortality was available on asking, and some people chose to live forever to pursue their interests indefinitely, I think people who refused to follow their lead because they had simply had enough would be very much in the minority.
I think most people here are aware that there’s a gap between how we tend to communicate on Less Wrong or in other rationalist circles, and how people tend to communicate in various other circles. I think that’s a component of the concept of inferential distance.
But separating out various types of beliefs into categories such as “empirical truth” and “affective truth” also has a gap of inferential distance from most of the people we’d be using such concepts to communicate with, and I think it’s questionable whether it’s a step along the direction that brings them closest to the position we’re trying to get to.
I have read the first three since I left that comment (so all but I Shall Wear Midnight,) and I thought they were, at least pretty good, as all the Discworld books were, but as far as younger-readers’ Discworld books go, I rate The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents more highly.
This seems a bit hard to isolate from confounding variables though.For example, China might breed and groom basketball players for elite competition (my understanding is they do have some kind of athlete breeding system going on,) but not have access to as high level of basketball coaches and trainers as a country like the United States where basketball is more entrenched in the culture, and it would be hard to measure the impact of these influences separately.
I think there’s an important distinction here this doesn’t address though.
Both selection and grooming feature education, but in cases of grooming, a person is being educated for a specific role which they’re intended to fill. In cases of selection, the person is acquiring qualifications which will promote them as a candidate for a variety of different positions. Within a system of selection, some people may receive significantly better or more prestigious educations, and this gives them preferential candidacy for higher level positions, but it’s not the same as grooming, where a person is selected for the position they’re meant to fill before they’re educated for it.
Most people haven’t read the original untranslated versions in order to understand them better, but a lot of academics, such as classics professors, have. I’ve learned about Greek culture from a few professors who would discuss at length how the Greek conceptions of, say, honor or cunning differed from our modern conceptions. But if they were also of the impression that the ancient and classical Greeks did not have a concept of morality, then that would have been a very conspicuous and relevant omission from their instruction. So I’m inclined to suspect that this is a minority interpretation.
I’ve been teaching part time at a community center for a while now, and it’s been interesting for me to see how the first impressions I had of the various students stacked up against the experiences I had knowing them over an extended period.
I can put numbers to it- out of a bit over 50 students, there were three for whom I found my first impressions to be substantial misjudgments of their habitual character, and one who I came to suspect I had misjudged, but for whom it turned out that the evidence that let me to suspect my initial judgment was wrong was actually uncharacteristic of him, whereas the behavior that formed my first impression was not. Of course, there’s a likelihood of confirmation bias here, but since I discuss the students’ personalities and behavior extensively with the other teachers, our assessments of them tend towards agreement over time.
Of course, error rates are going to depend strongly on context, but it’s nice to have some idea of my expected error rate in this particular context.
Ghosts specifically seem like too complicated a hypothesis to extract from any experimental results I’m aware of. If we didn’t already have a concept of ghosts, I doubt any parapsychology experiments that have taken place would have caused us to develop one.
I think that pretty much everyone who knows any number of mathematicians and has talked to them at any length about their work has received exactly this sort of counterbalancing. As someone in a similar position to Scott, I’ve heard it more times than I can count, and I’ve honestly come to resent it somewhat. I’ve been told no end of times about how the beauty and elegance of “real” math, and how unrepresentative the sort of calculating work done at lower levels is of that sort of mathematics, but this is pretty much always being expressed by people who didn’t have certain difficulties with the work at lower levels that the people they’re expressing it to did.
I’ve been on the other end of this a lot, trying to teach stuff to people which seems to me to be so intuitively, even beautifully obvious once you look at it from the right perspective, that it seems impossible for a person of any intellectual capacity not to grasp it, only to find that it takes a herculean effort on both our parts for them to make any sense of it at all. It’s forced me to accept that there’s a lot more human variability than I once thought in the capacity to be really bad at things.
Like Scott, there are some kinds of “real math” which I have a reasonable amount of familiarity with and fluency in. And I have a fair amount of curiosity about and enthusiasm for mathematical curiosities of a certain sort. But I’ve never been able to muster the slightest bit of enthusiasm for doing math except to the extent that it lets me work out non-math things I’m interested in the answers to. I would love to like math more for its own sake, because there are times when figuring things out which I’m interested in the answers to requires learning more math which is a lot easier if I can appreciate it for its own sake throughout the steps I have to make it through. But lacking that immediate motive, I find much of the necessary learning incredibly dull and frustrating.
That is to name but a few. Money is a good barometer of the first four because higher demand jobs generally give you more options for where you work.
Not necessarily, See this comment for some opposing considerations. Some highly lucrative jobs can be pretty restrictive in terms of where you have to live to do them.
Reminds me of this essay by Scott/Yvain where he mentions a reddit thread of over 10,000 comments specifically looking for people who opposed gay marriage, but with practically nobody who opposed gay marriage participating.
The prosecutor claimed that from the number of stab wounds, it was unlikely that a single person could have inflicted them all. However, the number of stab wounds was by no means an outlier among murders known to have a single perpetrator (I do not have detailed statistics on this subject, but merely from my limited experience with case studies on the subject I have encountered quite a few cases which involved many more stab wounds from a single perpetrator.) Considering the pervasive incompetence their forensics teams demonstrated over the course of the case, I would assign very little weight to this.
The prosecution also presented pieces of “evidence” such as Knox placing extremely short phone calls to Kercher, too short to transmit any message. This and many other points raised by the prosecution fit the pattern of behavior that seems unusual, and so is presented as evidence for suspicion of murder, despite the fact that the behavior doesn’t make more sense if we suppose she was involved in the murder.
If Knox had a murder likelihood of 1/1000 after conditioning on the evidence that Kercher had been murdered, but before accounting for other evidence, and she’s then observed to have engaged in unusual actions with a 1/1000 probability, it makes no difference towards her likelihood as a culprit if they’re not actions which are more likely in the event that she’s actually guilty. We can come up with post-hoc explanations for why the unusual things might be related to involvement in the murder, and this kind of reasoning appears to have constituted a large part of the prosecution’s case, but if we don’t have any prior reason to suppose that guilt of murder is associated with such behaviors, then these explanations will tend only to be rationalizations of preexisting suspicion.
There’s all sorts of complicated details that are completely missing from the US coverage of the trials, which make the prosecution’s position much more understandable. Perhaps the prosecution did not have sufficient evidence, but neither did the prosecution come up with some batshit insane theory out of the blue for no reason when they had everything explained with Guede.
Komponisto is Italian and translated documents from the prosecution for the benefit of the community.
So, it’s been a long time since I actually commented on Less Wrong, but since the conversation is here...
Hearing about this is weird for me, because I feel like, compared to the opinions I heard about him from other people in the community, I kind of… always had uncomfortable feelings about Mike Vassar? And I say this without having had direct personal contact with him except, IIRC, maybe one meetup I attended where he was there and we didn’t talk directly, although we did occasionally participate in some of the same conversations online.
By all accounts, it sounds like he’s always been quite charismatic in person, and this isn’t the first time I’ve heard someone describe him as a “wizard.” But empirically, there are some people who’re very charismatic who propagate some really bad ideas and whose impacts on the lives of people around them, or on society at large, can be quite negative. As of last I was paying attention to him, I wouldn’t have expected Mike Vassar to have that negative an effect on the lives of the people around him, but I was always stuck in an awkward position of feeling like I was surrounded by people who took him more seriously than I felt like he ought to be taken. He evoked in a lot of people that feeling of “if these ideas are true, this is really huge,” but… there’s no shortage of ideas of ideas you can say that about, and I was always confused by the degree of credence people gave that his ideas were worth taking seriously. He always gave me a cult leaderish impression, in a way that, say, Eliezer never did, as encouraging other people to take seriously ideas which I couldn’t understand why they didn’t treat with more skepticism.
I haven’t thought about him in quite some time now, but I still distinctly remember that feeling of “why do these smart people around me take this person so seriously? I just don’t see how his explanations of his ideas justify that.”