Answers in that thread were mostly totally misguided and most people didn’t even bother to read the Kamin and Goldberger study before restating their cached beliefs.
taw
Karma: 2,537
You’re too lazy, no shortcuts this time.
Caplan’s claim doesn’t depend on this line of argumentation, but if it was true (which it’s not) it would make his point extremely strongly. Weaker claim that normal parenting styles don’t affect outcomes much, because the rest of environment (and genes) together have much greater impact is perfectly defensible.
As we know from natural experiment of Dutch famine of 1944 mother’s health is extremely important. This brief event had significant effects on two generations.
Caplan’s arguments are totally wrong, it doesn’t make his thesis wrong. I’d expect his thesis to be very likely to be at least mostly correct.
If a feature is “100% genetically determined”, then it cannot possibly change overnight with no underlying genetic change, and it should be possible to predict from just genetic information.
There are features like that—gender for example is nearly 100% genetically determined. Eye color is pretty much genetically determined. Skin color is reasonably genetically determined.
There’s no way in hell to predict IQ, height, weight, or behavior from just genes, and considering entire populations they change drastically in a couple of generations. These are not genetically determined features in any conceivable way.
The very concept of “X% heritable” relies on awful statistical shenanigans, and is best forgotten.
The way I see it all heredity studies (adoption, twins etc.) are pretty much universally worthless due to ridiculously wrong methodology (see this for details).
It is trivially observable that populations change drastically in every conceivable way without any genetic change, including along every single behavioral axis claimed to be “highly hereditary” (and the same even applies to many physical features like height, but not others like skin or eye color). Heredity studies are entirely incompatible with this macro reality, regardless of their (universally awful) methodology.
The best argument for Caplan’s thesis is that even if we accept that environmental effects totally overwhelm genetic effects (which we should), there’s still very little evidence that parental effort within range of typical first world middle class parenting make a big difference.
Caplan is drastically overinterpretting evidence for heredity of features, and his main thesis relies on them far too much.
Solar panel prices are on long term downward trend, but in the short term they were very far from smooth over the last few years, having very rapid increases and decreases as demand and production capacity mismatched both ways.
This issue isn’t specific to solar panels, all commodities from oil to metals to food to RAM chips had massive price swings over the last few years.
There’s no long term problem since we can make solar panels from just about anything—materials like silicon are available in essentially infinite quantities (manufacturing capacity is the issue, not raw materials), and for thin film you need small amounts of materials.
Prisoner’s Dilemma relies on causality, Newcomb’s Paradox is anti-causality. They’re as close to each other as astronomy and astrology.
Philosophy contains some useful parts, but it also contains massive amounts of bullshit. Starting let’s say here.
Decision theory is studied very seriously by mathematicians and others, and they don’t care at all for Newcomb’s Paradox.
Not counting philosophers, where’s this academic interest in Newcomb’s paradox?
Crackpot Decision Theories popular around here do not solve any real problem arising from laws of causality operating normally, so there’s no point studying them seriously.
Your question is like asking why there’s no academic interest in Harry Potter Physics or Geography of Westros.
The diagram comes from Wikipedia (tineye says this) but it seems they recently started merging and reshuffling content in all energy-related articles, so I can no longer find it there.
That’s total energy available of course, not any 5 year projection.
Solar is probably easiest to estimate by high school physics. Here’s Wikipedia’s.
Here are some wind power estimates. This depends quite significantly on our technology (see this for possible next step beyond current technology)
Wikipedia didn’t get hundreds of millions of visitors until after it got so big.
I know it’s hard to believe, but when we started in 2001, it was a very tiny very obscure website people were commonly making fun of, and we were excited with any coverage we could get (and getting omg slashdotted—that was like news of the month).
No, humans living in very poor countries or in remote past also always tried to have at least basic understanding of neighbouring tribe’s language. It’s hard to come with hard data but modern nation states might probably be about the only large monolingual societies in history, other than small and very isolated places.
In modern Africa it’s entirely normal for people to speak 3+ languages. (not necessarily to a very high standard, just to get by)
Evidence that this works better than other methods being...
Seriously, with such a huge number of people trying to learn a second language (like 90% of all humans) we should have some proper studies by now.
They are incorrect. Here’s a helpful diagram of available energy.
Strong orthogonality hypothesis is definitely wrong—not being openly hostile to most other agents has enormous instrumental advantage. That’s what’s holding modern human societies together—agents like humans, corporations, states etc. - have mostly managed to keep their hostility low. Those that are particularly belligerent (and historical median has been far more belligerent towards strangers than all but the most extreme cases today) don’t do well by instrumental standards at all.
Of course you can make a complicated argument why it doesn’t matter (someone’s end goals might be extremely hostile, but they act in mostly non-hostile ways for instrumental reasons), but there’s not that much difference practically.
You’d pretty much need to postulate infinitely powerful AI (like Eliezer’s AI foom idea, which is totally wrong of course) before you can disregard this argument from every single observation we can make of every single intelligent agent in the real world.
Sadly there are many blind spots here where groupthink rules, and people will just happily downvote anybody who has a different opinion. They are not worth replying to. I see the downvote brigade found this thread as well.