http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7404730.stm
Professor Alan Bittles, director for the centre for human genetics in Perth, Australia has collated data on infant mortality in children born within first-cousin marriages from around the world and found that the extra increased risk of death is 1.2%.
In terms of birth defects, he says, the risks rise from about 2% in the general population to 4% when the parents are closely related.
Heh. Qualify this under “crazy ideas”. Chinese tech companies are motivating programmers by hiring cheerleaders. It would be interesting to know if this increases productivity. Do cheerleaders help improve results sports teams?
ethically okay
Dude, be a consequentialist. Don’t use expressions like “ethically okay” or “morally wrong”. Use “superior to”, “inferior to”.
If there’s one thing I enjoy about this site, it’s reading practical advice from its members.
*fixed the 3AM typo
If Ra sees this as a voting game, getting into politically charged arguments with newbies and then down voting them is efficient.
They give him a target that lets him post a lot of replies, and with low karma they can’t down vote him back.
He can use a second account to vote up 30% of his replies, giving him a good amount of karma at low risk of discovery.
He gets a chance to run off a newbie that doesn’t agree with him.
And we all gain from this. We don’t need users that can’t ignore a troll.
Please don’t post image macros.
My approach was very simple: find the best public school system in my area and move there. “Best” is defined mostly by IQ of high-school seniors proxied by SAT scores. What colleges the school graduates go to mattered as well, but it is highly correlated with the SAT scores.
What I find important is not the school curriculum which will suck regardless. The crucial thing, IMHO, is the attitude of the students. In the school that my kids went to, the attitude was that being stupid was very uncool. Getting good grades was regarded as entirely normal and necessary for high social status (not counting the separate clusters of athletes and kids with very rich parents). The basic idea was “What, are you that dumb you can’t even get an A in physics??” and not having a few AP classes was a noticeable negative. This all is still speaking about social prestige among the students and has nothing to do with teachers or parents.
I think that this attitude of “it’s uncool to be stupid” is a very very important part of what makes good schools good.
Having these organic experiences lead to the development of skills which don’t exist in isolation, but instead play a role in knowing how to deal with women successfully in the rest of life.
I often hear claims like that here on LW, but they sound very implausible to me. I never had a girlfriend until I was 26 but I’m not under the impression that before then I was deficient in otherwise dealing with female friends/professors/etc. in a way that I no longer am, or in a way that I was not with male friends/professors/etc. (In particular, in most of my late teens and early twenties I had many more female friends than male friends.) Do you (or anybody else who’s been making such claims) have any evidence (that could be easily shared on a Web forum) of that?
The Puzzle of the Self-torturer talks about transitive and intransitive preferences.
Bentham’s Fallacies, Then and Now by Peter Singer
Bentham collected examples of fallacies, often from parliamentary debates. By 1811, he had sorted them into nearly 50 different types, with titles like “Attack us, you attack Government,” the “No precedent argument,” and the “Good in theory, bad in practice” fallacy. (One thing on which both Immanuel Kant and Bentham agree is that this last example is a fallacy: If something is bad in practice, there must be a flaw in the theory.)
Bentham was thus a pioneer of an area of science that has made considerable progress in recent years. He would have relished the work of psychologists showing that we have a confirmation bias (we favor and remember information that supports, rather than contradicts, our beliefs); that we systematically overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs (the overconfidence effect); and that we have a propensity to respond to the plight of a single identifiable individual rather than a large number of people about whom we have only statistical information.
The good, the bad, and the ineffective: social programs in America
Do people know which social interventions work just from hearing about them?
To do a test, we made the following game. We’ve described ten major US social interventions, and you’ll have to guess whether they had a positive effect, no effect or negative effect.
The interventions were taken from those reviewed by the Campbell Collaboration, which brings together all the highest-quality research that’s available on major social interventions to decide whether they’re effective or not. We chose the top ten interventions that were easiest to explain and had the clearest conclusions, so it’s clear what the answers are. There’s no trick!
Remote Exploitation of anUnaltered Passenger Vehicle by Dr. Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek
Target – 2014 Jeep Cherokee
The 2014 Jeep Cherokee was chosen because we felt like it would provide us the best opportunity tosuccessfully demonstrate that a remote compromise of a vehicle could result in sending messages thatcould invade a driver’s privacy and perform physical actions on the attacker’s behalf. As pointed out inour previous research [6], this vehicle seemed to present fewer potential obstacles for an attacker. Thisis not to say that other manufacturer’s vehicles are not hackable, or even that they are more secure,only to show that with some research we felt this was our best target. Even more importantly, the Jeepfell within our budgetary constraints when adding all the technological features desired by the authorsof this paper.
Network Architecture
The architecture of the 2014 Jeep Cherokee was very intriguing to us due to the fact that the head unit(Radio) is connected to both CAN buses that are implemented in the vehicle.
We speculated that if the Radio could be compromised, then we would have access to ECUs on both theCAN-IHS and CAN-C networks, meaning that messages could be sent to all ECUs that control physicalattributes of the vehicle. You’ll see later in this paper that our remote compromise of the head unit doesnot directly lead to access to the CAN buses and further exploitation stages were necessary. With thatbeing said, there are no CAN bus architectural restrictions, such as the steering being on a physicallyseparate bus. If we can send messages from the head unit, we should be able to send them to everyECU on the CAN bus
....
Conclusion
This paper was a culmination of three years of research into automotive security. In it, wedemonstrated a remote attack that can be performed against many Fiat-Chrysler vehicles. The numberof vehicles that were vulnerable were in the hundreds of thousands and it forced a 1.4 million vehiclerecall by FCA as well as changes to the Sprint carrier network. This remote attack could be performedagainst vehicles located anywhere in the United States and requires no modifications to the vehicle orphysical interaction by the attacker or driver. As a result of the remote attack, certain physical systems such as steering and braking are affected. We provide this research in the hopes that we can learn tobuild more secure vehicles in the future so that drivers can trust they are safe from a cyber attack whiledriving. This information can be used by manufacturers, suppliers, and security researchers to continuelooking into the Jeep Cherokee and other vehicles in a community effort to secure modern automobiles
Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases by Scott O. Lilienfeld1, Katheryn C. Sauvigné, Steven Jay Lynn, Robin L. Cautin, Robert D. Latzman and Irwin D. Waldman
The goal of this article is to promote clear thinking and clear writing among students and teachers of psychological science by curbing terminological misinformation and confusion. To this end, we present a provisional list of 50 commonly used terms in psychology, psychiatry, and allied fields that should be avoided, or at most used sparingly and with explicit caveats. We provide corrective information for students, instructors, and researchers regarding these terms, which we organize for expository purposes into five categories: inaccurate or misleading terms, frequently misused terms, ambiguous terms, oxymorons, and pleonasms. For each term, we (a) explain why it is problematic, (b) delineate one or more examples of its misuse, and (c) when pertinent, offer recommendations for preferable terms. By being more judicious in their use of terminology, psychologists and psychiatrists can foster clearer thinking in their students and the field at large regarding mental phenomena.
Murder is basically a victimless crime, because when you murder someone, there is no one left to be a victim. Murderers should be punished only for inconveniences that murder caused to other people who are still living.
Causing extinction of humanity would be a perfect victimless crime.
As far as I can see, VoiceOfRa is the lone neoreactionary actively posting.
He isn’t. Neoreactionaries are normal people.
Metrication of kitchen units: no.
Why?
WELP.
Tacit Knowledge: A Wittgensteinian Approach by Zhenhua Yu
In the ongoing discussion of tacit knowing/knowledge, the Scandinavian Wittgensteinians are a very active force. In close connection with the Swedish Center for Working Life in Stockholm, their work provides us with a wonderful example of the fruitful collaboration between philosophical reflection and empirical research. In the Wittgensteinian approach to the problem of tacit knowing/knowledge, Kell S. Johannessen is the leading figure. In addition, philosophers like Harald Grimen, Bengt Molander and Allan Janik also make contributions to the discussion in their own ways. In this paper, I will try to clarify the main points of their contribution to the discussion of tacit knowing/knowledge.
...
Johannessen observes:
It has in fact been recognized in various camps that propositional knowledge, i.e, knowledge expressible by some kind of linguistic means in a propositional form, is not the only type of knowledge that is scientifically relevant. Some have, therefore, even if somewhat reluctantly, accepted that it might be legitimate to talk about knowledge also in cases where it is not possible to articulate it in full measure by proper linguistic means.
Johannessen, using Polanyi’s terminology, calls the kind of knowledge that cannot be fully articulated by verbal means tacit knowledge.
Scott Adams tweeted that you can’t be with someone less happy than you. I’m trying it anyway.
Does anyone have any experience with this? In particular, is there a way to not always sacrifice my happiness for theirs at rapidly diminishing rates of return until we are equally (un)happy?