What I meant is that it is possible the things that Von Neumann discovered were easier to discover than anything that is still undiscovered, so new Von Neumann’s won’t be as impressive.
Timothy Underwood
Karma: 416
Budapest, Hungary – ACX Meetups Everywhere Spring 2023
“this is something that the data has to actually exist for since several percent of US children have been homeschooled for the last several decades.”
Never mind. There aren’t particularly good studies. But what exists seems to say that homeschooled students do much better than average for all students, but maybe somewhat worse than the average for students with their parent’s SES backgrounds.
But the data mostly comes from non-random samples, so it is hard to generate firm conclusions.
So this is based on my memory of homeschooling propaganda articles that I saw as a kid. But I’m pretty sure the data they had there showed most kids went to college. In my family three of us got University of California degrees, and the one who only got a nursing degree in his thirties authentically enjoyed manual labor jobs until he decided he also wanted more money.
Perhaps these numbers do stop at college, and so we don’t see in them children who get a good college education, but then fail in some important way later on in life, but I’ve never gotten an impression from anywhere that homeschooled children have generally worse life outcomes—anyways, this is something that the data has to actually exist for since several percent of US children have been homeschooled for the last several decades.
I did have substantial social problems, even as an adult, and they have led me to be less successful in career terms than I probably would have been with stronger social skills. But this might be driven by a selection effect: The reason my parents actually started homeschooling me was because I was being bullied and having severe social problems in third grade.
oops, that was supposed to be something like ‘low hanging fruit’, I’m pretty sure it was a typo.
I recently looked through the wikipedia list of the thirty richest Americans, and then tried to dig back into their class background (or the class background of the founder of the family fortune for heirs, like the Walton family). In almost every single case where I could identify the class background, they were from a top couple of percent background, but in only a few cases were they from an old money background. So a lot of the founders of big fortunes have backgrounds like ‘father was a lawyer/ stockbroker/ ran a grocery store/ dentist/ college professor/ middle manager’.
One interesting feature here was that there were several Russian immigrants or children of immigrants on the list (usually they moved to the US before they were a teenager, and usually they were Jewish). In these cases I found that I have generally no idea what class status is implied by the descriptions of their parent’s work in the Soviet Union. But I sort of suspect it usually was still top couple of percent.
I then looked at the European numbers, which were an interesting constrast in that:
A) A lot of the European super fortunes start with people who are as rich as far back as wikipedia tracks it. Ie the founder of the company got his money from his rich textile factory father (who doesn’t have a wikipedia account) in the late nineteenth century.
B) Weirdly, there were also more actual rags to riches stories in among the European superrich. The Zara founder is the one that stuck in my head. He seems to have been from definitely a lower two thirds of the income distribution household, and possibly even genuinely poor family in early Franco era Spain. There were several other stories that felt very much like ‘person with a totally normal family background somehow builds a giant fortune’, while again that seemed to not happen in the US listings.
I probably should make a post based on this at some point.
Or von Neumann and his contemporaries and predecessors stole all the insights that someone with merely Neumann’s intellect could develop independently, leaving future geniuses to have to be part of collaborative teams?
What specifically do you think is really high variance as opposed to the main downside being that it is expensive? If it is the ‘not going to school thing’ at least when I was growing up as a religiously homeschooled kid in the 90s, the strong impression that I got was that homeschooled kids systematically did better than other kids in terms of college success and other legible metrics—of course this has a gargantuan selection bias going on. But that does give a strong lower bound for how bad that specifically can be for kids.
The other stuff I recall from the article (ie being from a high resource background, having an intellectual mentor, being surrounded by intellectual conversations, getting one on one tutoring, good intrinsic capability) all seem to be things that either you can’t pick whether a child has or not, or where it would be weird if they left the child worse off.One on one tutoring, for example, just doesn’t seem like a high variance thing, it seems like a positive expected value thing that might not actually be that causally important or have that big of impact, but where it will only make things worse in exceptional cases.
Prime age labor force participation rate is the standard measure the econobloggers I’ve followed (most notably Krugman and Brad DeLong, who are part of the community also pushing for this interpretation of monetary policy) tend to use to measure economic health, and there are reasons to see it as pointing most closely to what we actually care about (that and hourly productivity, which isn’t in these charts).
EA novel published on Amazon
This makes me think it is more likely that there is some problem specifically with EA that is driving this. Or maybe something wrong with the sorts of people drawn to EA? I’ve burned out several times while following a career that is definitely not embedded in an EA organization. But it seems more likely there is something going on there.
Less Wrong/ACX Budapest Feb 4th Meetup
Perhaps the key question is what does research on burnout in general say, and are there things about the EA case that don’t match that?
Also to what extent is burnout specifically a problem, vs pepole from different places bouncing and moving onto different social groups (either wihtin a year or two, or after a long relationship)?
One part of this issue: The answer to the question is literally unknowable with our current scientific tools (though as we develop better models for simulating biology and culture this might change). We can’t run experiments that are not contaminated by culture/biology.
What is left is observational evidence.
Proving causality with observational evidence usually doesn’t work. This is especially the case with an issue like this with only a moderate effect size (a one SD effect on test scores is tiny compared to the impact of smoking on lung cancer, or stomach sleeping on SIDS), and where both factors are always present and connected.
What is left is reasoning from priors.
Personally I think HBD is unlikely because the observed outcome differences are exactly the sort of thing the known cultural forces would create even if there was no genetic difference, so the existence of these outcome differences does not serve as additional evidence of genetic differences. This means that while it is totally possible there could be major intelligence differences between groups, I don’t have any particular reason to think they actually exist.
But this argument is simply not a robust or rigorous proof. I give it around a 1⁄100 chance of being wrong, while things that I actually know, like the name of the president, have a far, far smaller chance of being wrong.
Yeah, except it is bad to be forced to do things you don’t want to.
Hahaha
That’s actually a good idea. I just had my first who is 7 weeks old right now. So I should probably start making some up for her in a year or so.
Actually, I think someone is trying to make EA themed children’s books. I saw an example cover for one from a friend, but I have no idea if this was just a cover, or an actual project.
And Mother of Learning is likely to be better—but with less EA themed philosophical arguments and streams of thought.
I’ve started publishing the novel I wrote to promote EA
Request for feedback on sample blurbs for the EA fantasy novel I wrote
So I’m just reasoning off the general existence of a really strong demographic transition effect where richer populations that among other things are way, way less likely to die in childbirth have way fewer children than poor populations.
The impression I get, without having looked into this very deeply, is that the two most common models for what is going on is a female education effect, which correlates with wealth and thus lower mortality, but where the lower mortality effect is not having a direct causal influence on having fewer children, and a certainty of having surviving children effect, where once child mortality is low enough, there isn’t a perceived need to have lots of births to ensure having some kids who survive to adulthood.
I’m sure there are other theories, and I don’t know the literature trying to disentangle from observational studies and ‘natural experiments’ exactly what component of the changes that are involved with becoming a rich industrialized society causes birthrates to collpase.
The basic point though is that whatever the causal story, empirically you will find an extremely strong association between low childhood mortality rates and low birth rates. This is why people who are concerned with overpopulation generally see reducing childhood death rates as a good thing from an overpopulation perspective: There is a good chance that it is causal for fewer people being born, and it definitely in the historical record doesn’t seem to drive rapid population growth.
Having said that, when I was more interested in demographics ten years ago, I got the impression that Africa was seen as transitioning slower than Asia, Europe, Latin America or the Middle East had.
My experience is that it is like having extra in laws, who you may or may not like, but have to sort of get along with occasionally.
I don’t think most people actually talk very much with their in laws, or assume that people who the in law dislikes should be disliked.