Newton gave out reading lists like that too. Geniuses are always the worst teachers.
newerspeak
Karma: 145
What are your best arguments against the reality/validity/usefulness of IQ?
Improbable or unorthodox claims are welcome; appeals that would limit testing or research even if IQ’s validity is established are not.
Safe at any Speed: Fundamental Challenges in the Development of Self-Improving Artificial Intelligence
We’re talking about what might have happened if WWII didn’t get fought. No reasonable person would demand mathematical precision under those circumstances, and you’re assuming I’ve done just that.
This kind of pedantry makes it feel like work to talk to you any further.
The technologies that were developed for the war are indeed impressive, but what of the technologies that would have been developed had WWII not occurred? How would we know if the seen outweigh the unseen in this case?
It’s impossible to prove that WWII did not prevent the development of arbitrarily wonderful technology.
It is also impossible to prove that the Great Depression would have ended in the absence of an economic event like WWII.
Bertrand Russell, in his Autobiography records that his rather fearsome Puritan grandmother:
gave me a Bible with her favorite texts written on the fly-leaf. Among these was “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.” Her emphasis upon this text led me in later life to be not afraid of belonging to small minorities.
It’s rather affecting to find the future hammer of the Christians being “confirmed” in this way. It also proves that sound maxims can appear in the least probable places.
-- Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian
Agreed. But if Californian baby boomers won’t vote to legalize a widespread safe and therapeutically useful drug when it’s also a magic wand that will disappear their impending budget crisis...
They say people overestimate what changes are possible in the short term, and underestimate in the long term. Let’s hope.
“people eat what they prefer”.
No, because preferences are revealed by behavior. Using revealed preferences is a good heuristic generally, but it’s required if you’re right that explanations for behavior are mostly post-hoc rationalizations.
So:
People eat what they prefer. What they prefer is what they wind up having eaten. Ergo, people eat what they eat.
Hm. Your total karma is 0, but you have posts scored 2, 1, 7, 1, 1, and 4 just in this thread. What’s up with that?
At any rate, you’re putting words in my mouth. I described the employer as “setting up hoops for prospects to jump through.” You rephrased that as “hoops [they are] making us jump through.” Why the attitude?
Also, I don’t think it’s a complaint (or particularly imaginative) to say that a company that won’t even confirm the existence of the job in public, but still wants your personal information and work history, might be more than ordinarily likely to take advantage of its employees.
I might be willing to negotiate with a guy who calls me up and claims he’s kidnapped my girlfriend. I’d do just about anything to get her back safely. But If he asked me to pay for proof she was still alive, I’d start making funeral plans.
People who are serious about making a deal go out of their way to demonstrate they’re acting in good faith. Withholding information and setting up hoops for prospects to jump through are not the actions of someone who expects a mutually beneficial arrangement.
If they’re willing to impose this much on strangers, how do they treat their employees?
The quarterback is responsible for scoring points. He has decision-making latitude and delegates responsibility to other players. His skills are a superset of theirs.
The punter is the only player on the team who kicks the ball [1]. He’s only on the field for a few minutes in any game. The job he does is important and failures are disastrous, but It’s hard to tell the difference between a below-average punter and an excellent one.
[1] I know. But if it made sense it wouldn’t work as a stand-in for industrial warfare:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om_yq4L3M_I [language NSFW]
Can you point to documents that were pushed off of university servers or corrected due to political pressure in the context of that backlash?
Er, shouldn’t wrong papers be corrected or withdrawn, even in the absence of political pressure?
Anyway, I’m not insinuating anything here. I’m just pointing out that controversial statements get aggressive fact-checking
“Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men.”
I think this difference is the single most underappreciated fact about gender. To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.
From an address to the APA on gender differences delivered shortly after the Harvard/Summers business. Long and only tangentially related, but worth a full reading, IMHO.
It’s not bulletproof in present context. The author doesn’t cite primary sources and isn’t an authority in the field. Still, given the extent and… energy of the backlash underway when it was delivered, I doubt that an uncorrected version would still be available from FSU’s official web servers if an easy refutation was available.
I honestly don’t understand the resistance to conceding me this point.
Surmise: that’s because you’ve only gotten around to mentioning your real objection in this post, two replies down from the top of the thread. It’s not the inconsistency. You mean to say you object to the prof’s use of his greater power in this situation to frame the conversation to his benefit.
You’re right that “I will not grade it” is the wrong phrase to use. The correct one is “I will fail you on this assignment,” which the prof is deliberately avoiding because being honest makes him look more responsible for the student’s bad outcome than necessary.
Standard Divisive Topic Warning: I suspect there are some here who object to the power dynamics in academia, which are covert for reasons both good and ideological. I know there are also academics here who will naturally take issue with that characterization.
Regarding your three bullet points above:
It’s rude to start refuting an idea before you’ve finished defining it.
One of these things is not like the others. There’s nothing wrong with giving us a history of constructive thinking, and providing us with reasons why outdated versions of the theory were found wanting. It’s good style to use parallel construction to build rhetorical momentum. It is terribly dishonest to do both at the same time—it creates the impression that the subjective reasons you give for dismissing point 3 have weight equal to the objective reasons history has given for dismissing points 1 and 2.
Your talk in point 3 about “map-territory confusion” is very strange. Mathematics is all in your head. It’s all map, no territory. You seem to be claiming that constructivsts are outside of the mathematical mainstream because they want to bend theory in the direction of a preferred outcome. You then claim that this is outside of the bounds of acceptable mathematical thinking, So what’s wrong with reasoning like this:
“Nobody really likes all of the consequences of the Axiom of Choice, but most people seem willing to put up with its bad behavior because some of the abstractions it enables—like the Real Numbers—are just so damn useful. I wonder how many of the useful properties of the Real Numbers I could capture by building up from (a possibly weakened version of) ZF set theory and a weakened version of the Axiom of Choice?”
However, the supposed similarity does break down quickly: while property rights have a definite owner, there generally isn’t someone I can go to in order to buy back my right to own a tank, no matter what precautions I agree to take.
Actually, it’s legal for private individuals to own tanks in the US, so long as the main gun has been decommissioned. You can get a Soviet T-72 starting at around 50k Euro. Know your rights, you sheeple!!!!111
Those who are against easy organ donation often argue that it would provide incentives for doctors to strive less to save people in accidents or suffering from issues like brain tumors, since on strict utilitarian grounds, that person’s death might save several others.
Unless there are technical subtleties in the organ transplantation process I’m not aware of, this sounds completely insane to me.
Whatever accidental cognitive goldbricking doctors are guilty of, they’re most likely to be guilty of it now, when organs are very scarce, making it highly likely that each organ recovered from a goldbricked patient will be given to some other needy person. If organ donation were the norm, the supply would outstrip demand, and recovering organs wouldn’t be a big enough deal to (accidentally) risk your career and your humanity over.
It sounds to me like opponents of organ donation [1] are just voicing squeamish emotions without bothering to make sense.
[1] I think this phrase is actually a complete, isomorphic formulation of the problem. “Who could possibly oppose organ donation?” and so on.
[2] I’ve restricted my commenting to HN for too long. How do I make pretty superscript footnotes?
I’ve done the googling that Annoyance considers so vital to our moral development. Here are the results, for those who wish to remain slothful and debased. For the truly pious, youtube has a video of the so-called icepick psychosurgery from a PBS documentary.
Googling “effect of lobotomy on IQ” returns a Google Books excerpt from a Neuroscience textbook. The author is professor of Neuroscience at MIT. The text claims that ”...lobotomy can be performed with little decrease in IQ...” It also says that in the most popular lobotomy technique, it was impossible for the doctor to see what sections of the frontal lobe he was “treating.”
An online psychology textbook here describes the behavior of lobotomy patients as “stimulus-bound,” and reports that they were easily distracted by their immediate surroundings and had little ability to plan or set goals.
This site and this book (see p. 20) have more information on the general effects of damage to the frontal lobe.
Bond is being caustic so people will pay attention to him. It’s his schtick. He reviews Ender’s Game and calls it ‘pornography’.
His claim is backwards. People instinctively share their favorite stories for signaling reasons. Read Comeuppance if you don’t believe me. The urge is probably strong enough that they’ll drive across several states to get to a convention to find a receptive group of people with whom they can signal their approval. Indiana Jones fans don’t have conventions because they aren’t atypical—most people like Indiana Jones movies.
He is sort of right, though. Anything that’s good enough to attract a rabid fan base but still alienate the general public in spite of its virtues is pretty obviously going to have some even bigger faults.
Proust’s following is small, rabid, and (being composed mostly of literary critics) is very far out of touch with reality. Why don’t we call them a fandom?
Interestingly,