>an uncensorable mix of heterosexual and homosexual pornography (using the Kinsey Report as market research), gore (such as details of bullfights and photographic evidence from the Nuremberg trials), and communist propaganda.
So, basically early /b, which was close to having the most freedom of expression of anywhere ever. Just goes to show that true freedom actually leads to the opposite of what pampered intelligentsia imagines.
Because they were less free. In particular, the technical ease of spam coupled with the tolerance of it were unmatched outside of the chan culture as far as I can tell (for the better, as I'm sure most would agree).
I'm not sure that the lack of a tuskegee link means much. If authority figures do a lot of bad stuff to a group, that group is going to, pretty quick, learn not to trust authority figures. Knowing about specific historical events seems not especially important to that. It's not as if Tuskegee was the only event of this kind. If my parents, friends, family, neighbors all say don't trust X, I probably won't trust X! That's a lot of people! I don't need to know one of the many reasons I shouldn't trust X is because of Y.
That's good and fine, just for some reason there has (for quite a while) been a real mythology about Tuskagee being this really salient cause... and it turns out almost no-one who is vaccine hesistant directly cares about it.
My guess is that it's easier to tell an upper middle class white person "black people are suspicious of the medical establishment because of things like Tuskegee" than it is to go into detail about what "things like Tuskegee" actually means.
What's the thinking (if one can even call it that)? There's a conspiracy to secretly give black people a different vaccine to those safely received by >100 million white americans?
Black vaccine hesitancy is just as nutty as white vaccine hesitancy, and declaring "things *like Tuskgee" is just a way of rationalising the nuttiness of a politically protected group.
What is the explanatory value of it's "nutty?" Even if you choose to just accept that a certain percentage of people are going to have nutty beliefs, then what explains the relative distribution of nuttiness across different groups?
This was my thinking as well. I can't name other similar experiments off the top of my head, but I have heard of them and they influence my thinking on whether the government might try to experiment on people again. The obvious conclusion is that we cannot rule it out, because it's happened multiple times. If someone asked me on a survey if I've heard of [name of experiment] I might not know that name or the experiment specifically, but the idea of government experimentation is still floating around in my head.
[After looking it up] - Oh goody, there were dozens of experiments on US citizens without their knowledge or consent! This is the kind of stuff that really bolsters confidence in your government, though not all of these were related to government.
“Doctors treat black patients worse on some axis” (usually either “they don’t listen/trust black patients” or “they don’t treat black patient pain effectively”) was a plot point in multiple major network shows I’ve seen in the last year. So there is a definite message being pushed that black patients should find doctors untrustworthy, often in the same media outlets lamenting vaccine hesitancy.
In interviews of vaccine hesitant minorities, I’ve read multiple mentions of concerns about being experimented on (there is a conspiracy theory that the J&J vaccine was being pushed in majority black areas because it was less effective, and the fact that this vaccine was at one point pulled for side effects “proved” that there was an intention to use a riskier or more experimental drug on black people). I think this is a cultural meme at this point that may very well trace to Tuskegee originally, while a lot of people aren’t familiar with the actual origin.
Eh...it's not that much more than they already get, I think. For example, if you listen to media directed at black audiences, one thing that stands out is how much of the advertisement is from hucksters. Shady lawyers, exploitive financial offers, get-rich-quick schemes, payday loans, the whole nine yards. It's kind of horrifying, the vultures that circle around this community. and these are just those that can advertise legally.
So it would not surprise me if it were simultaneously true that (1) blacks trust doctors less than whites, but also (1) blacks trust doctors more than random ordinary people. Basically given their experience I wouldn't find it surprising if blacks trust *almost everybody* less than whites do.
Black Lives Matter isn't training black people to distrust the government - it grows out of that distrust. This gets the direction of the causality wrong.
How many people do you know personally who are part of that movement? I'm guessing zero. It's easy and fun to make people you don't know and disagree with into villains - we used to do the same thing with the Tea Parties - but you're usually going to get them wrong, they way you are here.
Of course, it's also easy and fun to make people you don't know and don't like into evil boogiemen, so feel free. I obviously don't expect to persuade you, but I do feel obligated to at least show up and tell you that you're wrong.
Are we certain that it's racial discrimination as opposed to socioeconomic discrimination? There could be some Simpson's paradox here were poor/stupid people are more likely to be dismissed, and that black people tend to be more poor/stupid than white people. That could result in this data, even if the causal factors are different.
We're definitely not *certain* that it's racial discrimination as *opposed* to socioeconomic discrimination. But it's quite plausible that racial discrimination is a part of it, *as well as* socioeconomic discrimination (and perhaps more relevantly, educational attainment discrimination).
There is more medical distrust among Black Americans. A useful explanation for this that comes up in the literature a lot is that Black Americans persistently face discrimination from medical providers relative to other racial groups.
It is also the case that there is a recent, as within the living memory of, examples of profound mistreatment of Blacks by medical providers symbolized by the most famous example of Tuskegee, that can have an impact simply by creating distrust that spreads through social networks even if individual actors don't understand the particulars of cases that prompted that distrust.
And, of course, distrust in medical providers is one of the on-the-table explanations for vaccine hesitancy in that group. A study showing that Blacks don't know the details of Tuskegee all that well or that such knowledge doesn't correlate with hesitancy doesn't really speak to that hypothesis.
What I'd further add is that knowing the details of Tuskegee is a sign of education and educational status is something that is positively correlated with getting vaccinated.
"I'm not sure that the lack of a tuskegee link means much. If authority figures do a lot of bad stuff to a group, that group is going to, pretty quick, learn not to trust authority figures. "
By that standard, Japanese-Americans must be among the most unvaccinated people of all, and Blacks must be voting for *intensely* anti-establishment candidates in Democratic primaries. And yet...
The real answer as to why Black people are less likely to get vaccinated is simply their lower average IQs (the IQ gap is also found within the GOP, judging from heavily Republican heavily college educated counties being much more heavily vaccinated than similarly Republican non-college-educated counties). The real question is why IQ is so important in propensity to get vaccinated in America and not, say, Brazil or Cambodia (or is it... I haven't actually looked at the Brazilian numbers by race, it's just that the % desiring to be vaccinated there seems to be almost universally high).
I don't really think my claim does imply that Japanese-Americans would be less trustworthy of the government, or less vaccinated. I don't think that authority figures have done worse to Japanese Americans than Black Americans. Japanese Americans were briefly confined to concentration camps during a war with the place they came from; later they were released and paid compensation. Black Americans were enslaved for hundreds of years, following which they were violently institutionally and legally oppressed for about a hundred more years. And today they are I would say mildly institutionally oppressed, though not legally. And they never got compensation! I really don't see how you can look at that pattern of facts and say that authority figures have done worse to Japanese Americans.
I also don't really see that it's necessary that distrust of authority figures implies a willingness to vote for anti-establishment candidates. There's no guarantee, after all, that the anti-establishment candidate would be more trustworthy once they were in power. If trust is your primary concern, I would expect you to vote for someone as much like yourself as possible -- which for many Black Americans is most definitely not the anti-establishment candidates.
Slavery ended more than 150 years ago; it has no relevance for the present except where Blacks prefer to live. Meanwhile, there are still Japanese people alive who experienced internment. Also, it was the Federal government which forced desegregation on the South. Major events closer to the present should have more relevance than those of the distant past.
"someone as much like yourself as possible -- which for many Black Americans is most definitely not the anti-establishment candidates."
Hillary Clinton is not someone much more similar to the typical Black American than Bernie Sanders. And yet...
>following which they were violently institutionally and legally oppressed for about a hundred more years
Segregation is not oppression. Is it "oppression" that we have separate countries where people who aren't citizens don't get to freely move around here and have equal rights etc?
And I'm sure you'll bring up "lynchings", which really just refers to 'execution by public hanging at the hands of a mob' and doesn't inherently have anything to do with race. Black people were lynched....and so were white people. And in fact the black/white lynching ratio was LOWER than the black/white incarceration ratio today. So either lynch mobs were less racist than today's criminal justice system, or black people commit less crime during a period where you say they were "oppressed" which contradicts the liberal narrative on the causes of crime disparities.
>And today they are I would say mildly institutionally oppressed, though not legally
Institutionally oppressed? You mean like elite universities engaging in overt and perfectly LEGAL racial discrimination to the benefit of black americans?
>And they never got compensation!
Compensation for what? From whom? Nobody alive is benefitting from slavery, and the eocnomics of american slavery makes it questionable that anybody (other than slave traders) actually did. Plantation owners were often wealthy, but the ROI for slavery has been demonstrated to be not significantly above the general RIO of the economy at the time, but these farmers weren't privy to modern accounting methods. Slavery retarded economic growth (because it diverted funds away from actually productive investments like factories and railroads etc) plus the civil war and its long-term impacts devastated the southern economy.
And what happened to American slaves? Well, they were slaves in America instead of being slaves in Africa or Arabia (where the men would most likely have been castrated and there would be no underclass of resentful slave descendants). I think getting to live in America is more than adequate compensation.
As for segregation, this is nothing to compensate for. Black economic equality was higher and increasing during segregation, there was ah igher employment rate and higher business ownership rate. Plus lower rates of single parenthood etc. These things all got worse after segregation ended, so cannot possibly we attributed to it.
I think the issue here is more of a tribal framing bias for an anti-vax stance. The red staters are anti-vax because of their own well earned stupidity and their own immoral politicians leading them astray. They deserve their fate. However my tribe's anti-vax stance is due to them being abused by society and they have little agency in their own decisions, which incidentally are in no small part caused by the previous and current systemic racism by red-staters. It's all a little too convenient.
Once you start seeing this framing bias it cannot be unseen. It's very common in the elite media.
I don't know that I've seen a distrust of authority in general. Of people currently in authority in the United States, I'd say I've seen it. I'm not sure if it's moreso than the mean, because I'm not sure what the mean is. Black distrust of US authority figures definitely seems higher than my social circle but my social circle's mean is probably different from the general population mean.
This is an underrated point. Getting vaxxed twice is a nontrivial inconvenience (and it genuinely puts a lot of people under the weather for a couple days).
There are probably a lot of people who just can’t be bothered, and honestly for the vast majority of otherwise healthy people, it’s quite possibly NOT worth it, on an individual level, to get vaccinated.
For that group, maybe “mumble mumble something about Tuskegee or freedom or whatever” is easier to personally justify than “meh, I’m lazy”. There are some true believer anti-vaxxers out there, but I’m not sure they represent the median unvaxxed person.
I respect Heckman but he is a good example of someone who grabbed hold of an idea early on and held on tenaciously in the face of alternative explanations. He has a paper out earlier this year showing that Denmark has no higher educational mobility than the United States despite vastly great socioeconomic equality and lower poverty. He spends a great deal of time explaining the various ways that family effects might influence educational mobility, without once mentioning genes or heritability - because genetic influence cuts against his narrative of the supremacy of early environmental influence. I always find it a little frustrating.
Why is that frustrating? Despite what a lot of commenters here seem to think, most people accept as common sense that some people are "naturally" smarter than others, ie that intelligence has a strong heritable component.* That kind of "natural" inequality among individuals isn't a problem policymakers could or should fix, any more than we as a society need to fix the fact that some individuals are more beautiful or more athletic than others. Those are cosmic unfairnesses, not injustices. The fact that some large groups of people are significantly less likely to succeed academically than other large groups points to an injustice, one that has to be tackled by addressing environmental variables.
I think it's possible that someone like Heckman is underestimating more neutral cultural influences on educational outcomes - for example, a very intelligent child from a family with a traditional business they're expected to inherit might be less likely to achieve in school than a similarly intelligent child of two professors. But he's right not to focus on genetic influence, because there's really nothing to be done about it.
*You can accept that intelligence is largely heritable and still understand that there is no such thing as inherent racial or socioeconomic differences in intelligence.
I think you should read the paper. When you specifically are asking, in a research paper, why children so resemble their parents in educational outcomes, and you have a whole section devoted to explaining what "family effects" might be, but don't once consider genetic heritage... it's unhelpful. https://www.nber.org/papers/w28543
I read the paper. I agree that Heckman brings up the specter of "family effects" without taking the time to dig into what he really means. But the observations he lays out don't require an investigation into "family effects" to make sense.
It's important to keep in mind that:
1) Not everyone seeks social mobility, since people adapt to and tend to feel most comfortable in the environments they were raised in. This is a practical, emotional reality that has nothing to do with intelligence. Even in a society with perfect equality of opportunity, you would not expect to see people moving freely between neighborhoods and subcultures. (Think of the upper middle class Americans you know - are they all striving as hard as they can to become multimillionaires, or are they content working jobs their parents can tell their friends about? Those same people may moan about how America is so much worse than Canada or Sweden, but do they pack up and move?)
2) An overall increase in educational attainment in Denmark, coupled with the expansion of the welfare state, means that people looking to achieve social mobility through education would see diminishing returns on their efforts after the late 20th century. Heckman's graphs help show that whatever social mobility exists is mostly a middle-class phenomenon - poor people tend to stay poor, and rich people tend to stay rich, because
3) Any class system is designed to prevent mobility - it functions by keeping a small, stable group at the top, with some modest ladder climbing in the middle. Just because Heckman can't clearly see the mechanisms blocking mobility doesn't mean they aren't there. There's a glimpse of this when he points out that schools in wealthier areas mysteriously tend to have better teachers.
I think people get really turned around when they make a series of linked assumptions: that measures like cognitive tests and grades can capture population-wide differences in intelligence, that people who obtain more schooling are more intelligent, and that because people with higher-paying jobs tend to have higher educational attainment, they must also be smarter.
You need to work instead from the realization that while inherited intelligence differences among individuals are real, these differences don’t map on to large populations. And while intelligence tends to be an advantage in basically all contexts, it’s an incredibly weak predictor of any specific life outcome.
Cooper's take on Greenwald is pretty bad. He writes "Greenwald is treating the revelation of new information as proof that people were lying, when in fact these journalists were just reporting what was available to them at the time. He pulled this same childishly dishonest trick with the publication of the D.C. medical examiner's report on Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick. 'Watch how easily and often and aggressively and readily they just spread lies,' he writes of a CNN segment with Erin Burnett and Don Lemon from the day of the assault."
But it is perfectly clear from this quote that Greenwald accused them of aggressively and readily spreading lies, not of "consciously lying." In other words, running with an convenient narrative that they couldn't be bothered to interrogate critically. The fact that Cooper can't make this distinction reflects very poorly on his writing and critical thinking skills. It is possible to aggressively spread lies through indifference to the truth without concsiously lying.
I'm reminded of Scott's post about whether unintentionally saying something which makes your partner sad is "abusive". I have no idea which definition of the word "lying" would cover the scenario "reporting something which, as best they can tell, is in fact true, although they readily believe it to be true in part because of their own biases". That's not lying, that's just being wrong.
I think the intended point was that "spreading lies" does not require "lying". If A invents a lie, L, and tells it to B, and B believes it and repeats it to C, then B is helping to spread L, which is a lie, even though B is not lying.
Kind of like saying "the Internet helps spread lies". The Internet can't lie; it's just infrastructure. But the Internet helps spread all information, including lies.
Sure, but first: is there an 'A' in this situation? Did some malicious actor make up a lie that the CNN reporters then picked up? I would have thought any inaccuracies would simply be biased assumptions all the way down, I don't think we need to posit a willful liar in this process.
And second: the Greenwald quote given above is "how easily and often and aggressively and readily they just spread lies". That doesn't read like he's just saying the CNN reports passively echoed lies; he's assigning very direct moral blame to the reporters. The "just" in "just spread lies", in particular, is a phrasing that evokes the idea of bald-faced, inexcusable lying; to "readily just spread lies" carries very different connotations from "inadvertently signal-boosting lies" or something of the kind.
Honestly, it feels a bit like a motte-and-bailey to me. Greenwald plays on the ambiguity of "spread lies" so that, if called out, he (or defenders of his) can fall back to the motte that he's just saying the CNN reporters are reporting fraudulent claims in good faith, though they should exercise more diligence in fact-checking; when the bailey is the assumption that they are "often" "aggressively" "just" plain *lying* themselves.
In between deliberately lying and innocently repeating a lie, there is the very common case where someone believes a falsehood on inadequate grounds because it fits what he wants to believe. In the case of a reporter, part of whose job is supposed to be providing information to people, acting that way is irresponsible even if not as bad as a deliberate lie.
Greenwald is making the very reasonable point that reporters should check sources, confirm information, and fact check prior to publicizing information. He's harped on reporters acting as pass throughs for information instead of journalists many times, and it's a regular point on his Substack.
What value does a CNN reporter mindlessly sharing an MSNBC reporter's unsourced story provide to society? Sharing by a reporter implies the story is true, despite the second reporter having no better knowledge of it than a random person.
You are questioning whether it is a reasonable point that journalists should do journalism? Is fact-checking a passé relic of the past? Greenwald is reporting a comprehensive report that interviewed a ton of people. It's not the same as just parroting some assertion some CIA stooge or even some other journalist made.
Also, if B doesn't even bother to figure out whether L is true or false but just accepts it at face value because it's convenient in their argument with C, while not technically lying they are still bullshitting, in Harry Frankfurt's sense.
And the valid criticism of CNN et al is surely that they accept and repeat things that are too flattering to their view of the world far too easily and far too often without interrogating them, not that they are willfully lying (sure there is some of that too). Like think Nick Sandmann, or Jussie Smollett, or how the shooter in Colorado a few months back was a white male until he was an Arab, and so forth. When everything is about "the narrative" you end up spreading a lot of "too good to check" stories (also c.f. Alleged-Covid-Medicine-That-Should-Not-Be-Named and horses - I'm actually blanking on the name of the medicine right now and I think it's funnier that way so shan't look it up to correct).
I think if you say someone is "aggressively and readily spread[ing] lies" it's reasonable to assume that you're intentionally leading your readers to assume they were deliberately lying, unless you specify that you don't think it was deliberate. Greenwald's "not technically lying" here isn't really any better than CNN's "not technically lying;" either way they're either deliberately or recklessly leading their audience to a false conclusion.
I would describe much of the coverage of Nick Sandman et al. as "aggressively and readily spreading lies", and would defend such a description of it. If you say something as if it is true beyond doubt, and you could easily verify/investigate it but choose not to (instead, leaving the actual journalistic work to Robby Soave), and instead just trust your "primary/original witness" (who is presumptively the one lying), then yeah, I think you are "spreading lies". I don't want to debate pedantry but I think there is a real difference between "willfully lie" and "spread lies" and the distinction exists to cover stuff like useful idiots repeated stuff that is false.
Yes, this. Greenwald’s argument is that these outlets are spreading falsehoods, maybe not necessarily knowingly, but with a reckless disregard for their actually veracity. A recklessness (or laziness?) that they would not apply for stories that didn’t flatter their preferred narrative. Publishing something that is “too good to verify” is, maybe not exactly “willfully lie”, but it’s a lot closer to “lying” than “responsible journalism”.
Greenwald is actually very clear about this so I don't think this is an issue. He consistently hammers the same point about spreading lies by accepting assertions without fact-checking.
Greenwald is really aggressive about this stuff but I think his general points only make sense if you have the background the media is claiming they're trustworthy truth tellers who you can offload some verification work onto. Outside of that context Cooper's argument makes sense. The issue is I do think that context is there.
"But it is perfectly clear from this quote that Greenwald accused them of aggressively and readily spreading lies, not of "consciously lying." In other words, running with an convenient narrative that they couldn't be bothered to interrogate critically."
Funnily enough I think this is exactly what Greenwald did. His 'convenient narrative' is that the media lies to hurt trump, and so applied it here when (as Cooper shows) it isn't true.
Meanwhile Bill Barr said at the time, with a bit of lawyerly language, that he ordered it.
So many variants of the swiping model. Somebody needs to teach a neural net how to matchmake. There must be somebdy around who has the technical ability and also the trustworthiness to be handling corpora of sensitive data.
Then write a paper once it surpasses the benchmark of neo-trad adj twitter.
Maybe the ability of human beings to read the nonverbals in other humans' actual presence is still way beyond what computers can tell from the marks we make in their world. See the way humans can gravitate in a crowded room towards others that they have something in common with. Hendrix's models for romantic attraction in 'Getting the love you want' might also be relevant. Almost all those nonverbals are out of range for computer models.
4. The write up doesn't convince me. I think intergenerational transmission of general medical hesitancy is possible, even if the original source is forgotten.
That said, I do think Tuskegee is a convenient way to rationalize different reactions to the same behavior by blacks and by deplorables.
Spike Lee once said on Bill Maher's show, not long after Katrina, that he thought the federal government had intentionally blown up New Orleans's dykes. When he was asked why he thought that, he said "the Tuskegee experiment."
It's also quite possible that "Tuskegee" is really being used as shorthand for a general feeling of disrespect from doctors, and experience with them lying to you, whether or not you're aware of a very famous institutionalized case of doctors disrespecting and lying to black people.
Perhaps. I think that our tendency to over apply racial explanations often leads us astray. My speculative theory is that blacks share similar levels of mistrust of authority as poor whites, though for different reasons. This leads to similar hesitancy to trust government mandated or promoted vaccines.
Underrated point. Like when we talk about mistrust of authority, obviously it's bad (on some object level) that the authorities aren't perfectly trustworthy and perfectly trusted. But is it remotely clear that given the authorities we have, that they are trusted too little? (Maybe, idk).
Between Donald Trump and Joe Biden (or pick your favorite boogeyman from the opposite tribe) almost everyone has plenty of reason not to trust government leaders. Really good reasons, in fact.
Definitely underrated point. I hear tons of people of all races complain that their doctors don’t listen to them, are too quick to ascribe their complicated issues to simple causes (you’re fat / you’re old / you’re menopausal), don’t give them the meds or treatment they want, are generally dismissive or disrespectful, etc. etc. Sometimes I think they have a good point, sometimes they are probably overreacting. Of course, when white people do this, they often just get called “Karens”.
In May 2020 the Navajo Nation had the highest Covid infection rate among US states (even though it is not a state it is comparably sized.) Lack of infrastructure such as running water in some places made pandemic hygiene really difficult. Covid hit Native communities very hard for reasons that are downstream of racism/colonization, but are physical and practical - lack of water, shared housing makes isolation difficult, etc. I think there was very little emotional place to say “we can beat this with what we have, we don’t need a vaccine.”
Health care access may be different as well - but IHS is famously overburdened. Also, cultural attitudes to the elderly may be different. Some people who were of the few remaining living links to old ways of life died from Covid and that represents profound loss for numerically small cultural groups which have undergone tremendous change. I think the context is different for many African American individuals and communities.
Native Americans, apart from their history of awful treatment by the US government, also have a history of being annihilated on an apocalyptic level by infectious disease. Historical memory cuts both ways in their case.
Early in the pandemic, I saw an exchange between two tribal members on social media. One claimed that traditional medicine was all you needed to ward off disease, but a second rebutted that traditional medicine wasn't enough to save their great-great grandparents from smallpox, closing with "...unless you think you know our traditions better than they did?"
Access? You are perhaps not aware that vaccines were preferentially distributed to neighborhoods with higher percentages of minorities? There were many reports of whites only getting appointments in minority neighborhoods, then showing up to the local equivalent of CVS and finding mostly white people in line. That is a little hard to ascribe to access when people are not willing to get vaccines right in their neighborhood.
Part of the problem was people not being able to schedule time off work for appointments and/or afraid of losing their jobs if they were knocked out for a day by side effects of the vaccine.
I can believe that, although I don't know how much of an impact it has. It seems that employers were/are more keen to require vaccines than the other way around.
The side effects I could see being a driving force too. I have known some people who had really bad side effects, basically a moderate case of COVID, from getting vaxxed, so I wouldn't be surprised if people who already had the disease would be disinclined to get vaxxed, on top of distrusting various authorities.
You're skeptical that "many people" work jobs where they often don't get 2 days off in a row? Are you not in the US? Here it's very common for low wage workers to only get days off one at a time. And that's not even considering the fact that many of those people work more than 1 job, or have to be able to cover child care on their days off so their partners can work.
One out of ten people are unbanked, but when we talked about that here a couple of months ago, people had trouble believing that someone could operate in the modern world without a bank account. This board skews white and affluent, and it's hard for us to imagine the lives of people who aren't like us.
My own parents got their vaccinations on a reservation, so that's not a difference in favor of African Americans... and there are no IHS clinics in the ghetto, last time I checked
Is the ghetto you are referring to any specific ghetto, or just ghettos in general? It is a bit hard to check up on your claim when you are so vague. IHS clinics are also not the only place to get vaccines, depending on where you are; that sort of thing varies a lot by state and county.
In the Tuskegee study, the scientists did not give the black men safe and effective treatment, thereby prolonging their suffering. Why would knowing about that cause someone to be more in favor of the scientific establishment preventing access to a claimed treatment?
Yeah Tuskagee mythology is strange. The most common form of the story (using it to blame govt for vaccine hesistancy among Black people) appears to get a bunch of facts wrong!
I think the real winner from the Violent Language list is "picnic". Apparently some terrible people used to picnic during horrible acts of racial violence, so now we should all say "outdoor eating". I guess we're lucky the rule isn't that decent people should no longer eat outdoors, which would be an equally valid conclusion to draw from the example.
Yeah that one stood out so much that, I went to check that one on Wikipedia, and it does get a mention in the etymology section:
> Black American communities have long believed there to be a link between the word picnic and lynching parties. This false etymology claims that the term picnic referred to the N-word and the "picking" of a target to lynch. Scholars argue that this myth persists due to a hint of truth; white Americans frequently ate and picnicked at lynchings. Some white Americans referred to lynchings as "barbecues.
So this is definitely A Thing, rather than just being some 'woke-era one-upmanship'. But I imagine most here would rather people focused on correcting the false etymology rather than eternally propagating it by banning the word.
(I'm not trying to make a point or an argument, I'm genuinely curious here)
Can someone explain to me how this can be reconciled with the huge disparities in IQ over time in countries like Ireland and Greece as they became wealthier.
Also, if this data is meaningful, in what mechanism can the Flynn effect be impacting IQ if its not measurable as environmental?
For your second question, it is always important to remember that Flynn himself did not doubt the findings of the kinship studies and believed firmly that IQ was strongly heritable. His book Does Your Family Make You Smarter? is an attempt to find as much variance explainable by family effects as possible, but it's always framed in the shadow of the kinship studies - the conclusion starts by explicitly accepting their conclusions.
For the first question, think of someone with a particular genetic potential, then think of various environmental factors that limit that potential. Any given person's poor performance in a nutritionally deprived and intellectually unstimulating environment might be the produce of environment in that context, but this does not mean that there is no underlying cognitive tendency to be intelligent or unintelligent. It simply means that environmental confounds might be swamping the potential. The question is to what degree modern humans are living in environments that move most of us towards our genetic potential. If the people who claim the Flynn effect is slowing or stopped are correct, then perhaps we're nearing the limits of what an enriched environment can provide. But who knows?
The PISA differences between countries are implausibly large to be explained by genetics. "In Kosovo, Morocco and the Philippines, even the highest-performing students scored only around the OECD average. In these countries/economies, the 95th percentile of the reading distribution was close to the average score across OECD countries".
The framing of "percent variance explained by genes" is always within a given nation, basically always a developed one, and often only studies middle class and up for practical reasons - poor families usually aren't eligible to adopt children.
That does still provide a lot of useful information about the effect of different parenting styles and different schooling experiences, but you're right that when looking at countries where malnutrition or heavy metal poisoning are relatively common then environmental effects can be expected to be much than they are in the West
This would seem to imply that the environmental factor that caused the Flynn effect varied over time but does not vary in this sample. One scenario in which this would happen is if some infectious disease was making people stupid pre-Flynn but that disease has now been eradicated; another is if some lack of nutrients was causing stupidity but now everyone has enough nutrients; a third is if schools have uniformly become better at training for IQ tests or just that kids have started to be uniformly forced into going to school.
Perhaps I mis-remember, but I thought the Flynn effect was primarily observed in the abstract/pattern-based reasoning sections of the test, not so much in the natural language parts (the Raven's Matrices). This led to the theory that the effect was created by the rapidly increasing number of tasks in modern life that require abstract symbolic reasoning, i.e. machines with hidden internal state that must be manipulated by poking icons of various kinds in different orders. If you practice something you get better at it and the average farmer in 1920 would not need to identify patterns in sequences of symbols very often, but someone who has to work with computers or even a modern electric oven does.
I'm not sure if you're saying the Flynn Effect has been primarily observed in Raven's, or that progressive matrices fall under "natural language" — but either way that's wrong, AFAIK.
Talking about PISA, Ireland tends to do better on reading than on maths, and girls do better/reading while boys do better/maths. And a lot of the difference between our highest and lowest scoring students is down to socio-economic status?
In reading literacy, the main topic of PISA 2018, 15-year-olds in Ireland score 518 points compared to an average of 487 points in OECD countries. Girls perform better than boys with a statistically significant difference of 23 points (OECD average: 30 points higher for girls).
On average, 15-year-olds score 500 points in mathematics compared to an average of 489 points in OECD countries. Boys perform better than girls with a non statistically significant difference of 6 points (OECD average: 5 points higher for boys).
In Ireland, the average performance in science of 15-year-olds is 496 points, compared to an average of 489 points in OECD countries. Girls perform better than boys with a non statistically significant difference of 1 points (OECD average: 2 points higher for girls).
Socio-economic status explains 11% of the variance in reading performance in Ireland (OECD average: 12%).
The average difference between advantaged and disadvantaged students in reading is 75 points, compared to an average of 89 in OECD countries. However, 13% of disadvantaged students are academically resilient (OECD average: 11%)."
I agree with the point about Raven's Matrices, I think we are generally weaker on mathematical ability so if you're scoring Irish intelligence on that, we will score lower. But what the heck do I know?
So the big unaddressed caveat in every measure of heritability is that the number you get only applies to the population you tested, and populations sufficiently similar. This is because the notion of 'shared environment' is multi-layered, and directly affects the calculation.
If you are only testing kids in the US, then they do not have a 'shared environment' of being raised in the same house, but they do have a 'shared environment' of being raised in the US. There will be less variance in environment if you use a US-only sample than if you used an 'everywhere in the world' sample.
Therefore, you will get a higher heritability rating if you use a US-only sample, than if you use a whole-world sample.
Think about it this way: if two children have very similar upbringings: same school system, same culture, similarly loving and supportive parenting, etc., then environment will account for little of their variance in IQ, and you will decide that IQ is almost entirely heritable.
Now, compare those two children to one child who grew up in a poor third world country and was heavily malnourished throughout during infancy and early childhood and exposed to lots of lead and other pollutants, and another child with abusive parents who never sent them to school and locked them in a basement without books or toys most of their life and punished them whenever they asked questions or disobeyed orders. Suddenly, you're probably going to find that environment accounts for most of the variance in your sample, with heredity playing a distant second.
So, to your question: the high-heritability results come from studies with homogenous environments. Before-and-after-wealth Ireland and Greece are much more different from each other than what we see in these studies, so we'd expect less heritability and more environmental impact there.
> Therefore, you will get a higher heritability rating if you use a US-only sample, than if you use a whole-world sample.
No, you'll get a different heritability rating. There is no theoretical reason to assume it will be higher.
(You can argue that the US environment is characterized by homogeneity in all relevant dimensions compared to the world, which would necessarily drive heritability up. But that's a very fact-specific claim; many places are characterized by a higher environmental variance than the world average. We used to do fashionable lobotomies.)
The US might have higher variance than other places, but it would be pretty nuts if the whole world had less variance than US alone. We know that there are places in the world with radical differences in nutrition, schooling, culture, etc.
>many places are characterized by a higher environmental variance than the world average.
Many places may have higher within-region variance than other places, but what we're talking about here is between-region variance, ie US vs Afghanistan vs Switzerland vs South Africa vs etc. Hard to imagine that within-region variance of the US is greater than between-region variance across the board. Sure, it's a hypothesis you could make, but it so flies in the face of common sense that I think the burden of proof is heavily on the person making it, not the person eliding it.
Malnourishment is a really important thing to bring up. Shift to another trait that is basically entirely heritable: height. Have you ever heard the phrase "head and shoulders above the rest?" That dates back to pre-independence America, where your typical colonist was several inches taller than your typical native of England. It's generally thought to be due to Americans having far superior childhood nutrition. The principle is that you're never going to grow taller than your genes will allow. But a childhood filled with disease and hunger can keep you closer to Earth.
The same principle applied to intelligence explains pretty well most of the observations you bring up. Though nourishment might include the normal sort of teaching/stimulation of learning that good parents practice with their children.
Sure....but so what? Nobody denies the impact of malnourishment. It's just that malnourishment explains virtually NONE of the variance in these traits within the US because so very few people are malnourished. Heritability isn't impacted by every single environmental factor that could exist and impact a trait, it's impacted only by factors that actually exist and actually have an impact for a given population.
People who point to rural African IQ scores as evidence of 'biodiversity of IQ' absolutely elide the impact of malnourishment and other factors to make their argument, whether or not they directly reject it when challenged.
I' love to live in the world you do with regards to this topic, where everyone who discusses it is knowledgeable and honest. But I encounter lot of bad actors and bad pop-science out there on this one.
>So the big unaddressed caveat in every measure of heritability is that the number you get only applies to the population you tested, and populations sufficiently similar. This is because the notion of 'shared environment' is multi-layered, and directly affects the calculation.
It's not unaddressed at all. Most heritability studies specifically state 'heritability of X in the US' or wherever they're looking at. Everybody who is half-way knowledgeable about heritability studies is fully aware that heritability estimates are BY DEFINITION specific to the time and place the participants are from.
Like, seriously, I cannot overstate this: This is absolutely, 100% known, appreciated and acknowledged by intelligence researchers.
> Suddenly, you're probably going to find that environment accounts for most of the variance in your sample, with heredity playing a distant second.
This is news only to those who are patently oblivious to the intelligence research literature. Nobody disputes this.
All that matters is the scope of applying the findings. So if we're interested in IQ differences within the US, focusing on increasing the availability of food or providing free parenting classes is not going to do very much at all because the heritability of IQ in the US is very high.
It is vastly more accurate to use US heritability estimates for directing US policy. It's what we SHOULD be using. Having a representative 'whole world' IQ heritability study is only really useful for looking at IQ inequality on a global scale. It is totally useless for trying to reduce IQ inequality in the US, or any other trait we're interested in.
>Everybody who is half-way knowledgeable about heritability studies is fully aware
Yes, which I'd estimate makes up about .01% of the people who *talk* about heritability studies.
Listen, I've talked to lots of people, including IN THIS COMMENT SECTION, who are very happy to point out a very-limited-US-only sample of IQ research showing high heritability of IQ, then say that proves that the IQ differences between whites and blacks in the US must be genetic, or the differences in IQ between white Americans and people in poor African villages must be genetic. This is not an aberration, this is the bailey where most of the non-expert discussion of this topic takes place.
That's why I said this is 'unaddressed' not 'unknown'. You'll notice Scott didn't address it here (nor did he need to, it's not central to this post). It's not addressed in most comment sections discussing these things. It's not addressed in most articles written about these things.
Yes, a journal article tells you what sample they used, and a savvy reader knows that you can only make limited generalizations beyond that sample. But that's not the level that the popular-media discussion of this topic is at, at all.
>It is vastly more accurate to use US heritability estimates for directing US policy. It's what we SHOULD be using. Having a representative 'whole world' IQ heritability study is only really useful for looking at IQ inequality on a global scale. It is totally useless for trying to reduce IQ inequality in the US, or any other trait we're interested in.
Cool beans.
I was answering a question about Ireland and Greece over long time periods of great social change.
I think 100% of your comment is you imagining that I said things I didn't? I didn't say researchers don't know this, I didn't say US samples shouldn't be used to direct US policy.
I think you might be in an 'arguments as soldiers' thing where you think I'm on a different 'side' from you and making the types of arguments that 'side' would make.
It’s variance explained in current environment. Free public schooling combined with extensive programs to find gifted kids, libraries, the internet, and cities with all sorts of jobs and groups of people means smarter people can get trained and knowledge find their spots easily. Ireland in the 1800s did not have any of that, and had a lot of malnutrition, so that doesn’t apply.
Reckon it's the difference between moving a hungry person, deprived of essential nutrients, riddled with untreated diseases and worked close to death to a nice environment, and moving someone from a less nice to a nice environment.
The study and the Flynn effect are not in fact contradictory. Environment has a large influence on adult IQ, as demonstrated by the Flynn effect, but in which (non abusive) familly you were raised does not : what seems to count is the environment at the society level (food access, disease burden, schooling available) and not the type of parenting.
"Can someone explain to me how this can be reconciled with the huge disparities in IQ over time in countries like Ireland and Greece as they became wealthier."
The oft-quoted "Irish IQ is 90" result comes from Richard Lynn, who I have frequently criticised. He fudged together three tests, one done on adults and two done on school children in the 70s and took an average, then went off to tell the world that the rebellious Paddies were only rebels against the benevolent maternal British Empire because they were literally stupider than the loyal Unionists who in turn were less smart than the staunch mainlanders in Great Britain (er, I may be intruding some political commentary of my own here).
The important thing is that Lynn, in his books, didn't do any tests himself, he just scrabbled together results from all over the place. More recent national testing has not, so far as I know, been done but we do participate in PISA and have reasonably good scores there.
Luckily, somebody *has* done the work on those Irish schoolchildren IQ tests back in the 70s. Will you be astounded to hear that some of the children were from disadvantaged areas? Oh, and there's this little gem which I didn't know before:
"In considering the results of the comparisons reported here, it is important to keep
in mind that the standardization sample included children from schools for the
mentally handicapped, while the two surveys did not. Mentally handicapped
children with IQ's below 70 account for approximately 2.7% of the population
(Gelder et al., 1983, p. 688). Some of these, particularly the mildly mentally
handicapped with IQs between 50 and 70 are educated in ordinary primary
schools. Less than 0.5% of the population have IQs below 60. Altogether,
therefore it may be assumed that about 1% of children in the population attend
special schools for the mentally handicapped or that, what Jack Tizard called, the
administrative prevalence of mental handicap is 1% (Tizard, 1964). Thus the
omission of children from special schools from the recent surveys may have
inflated the median gain in IQ points on the RSPM by the equivalent of about 1
percentile point or less than 1 IQ point. Conservatively we may therefore state
that the mean gain in IQ points on the RSPM has been approximately 9 IQ points
over the past 15-17 years: that is, the periods 1972-1987 and 1972-1989."
So some of the kids involved in the Great IQ Tests were mildly mentally handicapped. Do you think this maybe, possibly, could have contributed to "Irish IQ score is 90" and that conversely, giving IQ tests to kids which exclude the mildly mentally handicapped in recent times could see the increase to "Irish have normal 100 IQ" changes? This is only my own view, but I imagine it could be a contributory factor.
"Precisely what the national and international gains on the RSPM means is
open to a variety of interpretations. If the RSPM is measuring intelligence (g),
then clearly Irish children are making the gains that their international
contemporaries are. If the RSPM is measuring the development of new test
taking strategies, then these new strategies are being developed by Irish children
at the same rate as their international counterparts. Both of these conclusions are
particularly important in view of previous claims that Irish children were
intellectually inferior to children from other countries a position discussed and
It's well established in psychology that IQ tests are not accurate outside of the community for whom the test was normed against. So when you give 10 year old Greeks an IQ test that is normed against 10 year old Greeks from 30 years ago and they tend to get more answers correct, does this mean they're smarter or does it mean that the questions have lost power to assess intelligence? This is not a question that we can really answer. All IQ tests do is rank you. There's no objective unit of intelligence, no milieinstein or whatever. What we need to know is if you got a time machine and brought the Greek kids from 30 years ago into the future, then normed an IQ test for the new batch of all 10 year olds, would the current 10 year olds still score higher? Your new test would not contain the same questions as the old one. So there's not really a way to know.
Second hot take. IQ tests include a lot of subtests for different strands of intelligence. Generally Verbal Comprehension, Visual Spatial, Fluid Reasoning, Working Memory, and Processing Speed. Four out of the five show basically no change between generations. Almost the entire Flynn effect is in Visual Spatial intelligence. That is conspicuous to me as the kind of intelligence you need to successfully drive a car. It's also the sort of intelligence that would be trained as kids ride around in cars and learn to make sense of the world zooming around them. And to a somewhat darker place, it's also the rare sort of thing that Darwinian selection would actually apply to, sometimes an entire family at a time.
Ok this is just wrong. There is a way to validate that you're measuring the same thing between two separate groups and that's measure invariance. There is internal structure to the patterns of answers on IQ tests, and that structure can be compared between cohorts to validate that the same construct is being measured. For example, if both groups demonstrate the same g-loadings on the same questions (i.e. they both agree on which questions are hard) and factor analysis shows that both groups have the same subfactor distributions, then you have a good argument that your test is measuring the same thing in both cohorts.
The Flynn effect is *not* measure invariant, which implies that it doesn't represent an increase in intelligence. There is some skill which is being learned, though I don't think anyone knows what it is - your idea about driving cars is a good candidate.
Heritability is a measure of the extent to which an observed variance is the result of genetic factors. That is to say, when you look at a group of people, what explains the differences between them? When you shift what groups of people you are looking at the answer can shift as well. People sometimes mistakenly read studies publishing on this question as stating to what extent X is genetic, but that's not what they're doing. Nutrition (for example) might explain differences in average height between two countries while explaining very little of the difference between height in one city in America.
On the AI media classification - it almost looks like the left-right political axis got mapped into a lower left-upper right axis in that graph. WSJ is still misplaced, but everything else looks more plausible.
On the IQ thing - do adoption agencies do a really good job of screening out adoptive families that live in places with high soil lead, or remnants of lead paint in the walls?
That's why I'm so surprised! Lead seems to me like it would be an environmental factor that is uncontrolled, and is said to explain some significant amount of variance in IQ in many other contexts. If it doesn't do so in the context of adoption, then this study must be measuring some conception of variance that is somewhat different from what I expect!
Adoption agencies do a good job of screening out certain bad family environments (criminals, people who couldn't provide basic necessities for the child(ren), active abusers). They do a fair job of following a basic checklist of things a house should and shouldn't have, for instance enough beds for the prospective adoptees, obvious hazards, etc. They definitely wouldn't pick up on soil lead, but they would usually pick up on problems with the drinking water. I don't think they would catch anything related to lead paint unless it was specifically disclosed.
I believe it's mainly tetraethyl lead, not reduced metallic lead. It got there from decades of burning leaded gasoline, so it is highest concentration in places that were urban neighborhoods in the period from 1930-1975 or so, though places that have had major redevelopment in recent years have often had extensive soil remediation to remove it.
However, as I dig into this, I'm learning that there's actually very little documentation of which locations do or don't have substantial lead contamination. I can find some detailed maps of lead concentration in properties in a small square mile region, or I can find national maps of estimated risk of high lead concentration based on proxies like building age.
I don’t understand why you are being so scornful of the idea that a toxic metal could be toxic at concentrations that would be low for some other substances.
Where I grew up, in the Lead Belt of Missouri, there were chat dumps. Big hills from the spoil of the lead mines. They sat in the area for decades. Bored locals would sled down them (not being particularly adventuresome, I never did). A few years ago, they were finally removed. Probably all through my region we had a few generations with low level lead poisoning.
What's funny, is that when I first visited home as they were coming down, I was shocked, and regretted never having climbed one. I know better, but I couldn't help it. Even now, thinking on it makes me sad.
Er...you do realize that the spoil from a lead mine necessarily contains much less lead than the surrounding rock, right? That's *why* they throw it away. For that matter, it's lead *ore* you mine, not metallic lead, galena would be typical, and the chemical properties of lead ore are as different from those of metallic lead as, say, the properties of rust are from iron, or carbon dioxide from charcoal.
No. I don't know much about the topic. Mining isn't really a thing there anymore, and hasn't been in a long time. I guess it stands to reason that if they were *highly* dangerous they wouldn't have stayed up for so long. This is a better article that I found after I posted. It says kids from the area had elevated lead levels, so the EPA ordered them down. If it's not true it's too bad, the article captures how much a part of the regions landscape they were.
2. There was something of the sort in Spinrad's _Bug Jack Baron_-- I think the conspiracy was killing black children for (the rejuvenating effects of?) their glands.
4. I believe without evidence that greater medical neglect and incompetence would be enough to explain black people tending not to trust the vaccines without needing to bring in older history. I'm not sure if there's been research.
For that matter, I don't know whether white people who've had bad experiences with the medical system are less likely to trust the vaccines.
It seems overly US focused. There are large variances between countries in the EU in vaccine uptake rates. UK very high without much coercion for example. In Italy they're forcing people out of the economy to make them take it: one step removed from just having the police tie them down and forcibly inject them. All white people though, more or less.
I suspect it's far more related to general cultural attitudes about government. The vaccination programme is at this point a Rorschach test. If you're already pre-disposed to view government agencies as unfair, power-crazed, uninterested in your life and kinda irrational ... and I'd say black Americans are more likely to hold this view than whites with PhDs ... then you'll look at this situation and see an unfair power-grab by irrational people who don't care about your life. Conclusion: stay the hell away. If you're pre-disposed to see government agencies as an alliance of technocratic rationalists who deeply care about your life, make the best decisions uninfluenced by profit, then you'll see some triumph of government planning and the need for social cohesion, etc.
"I suspect it's far more related to general cultural attitudes about government."
Maybe, but comparing countries as opposed to comparing various groups inside a single country introduces massive political confounders.
Both Spain and the UK, which I believe rate lowest in the EU with regard to vaccine hesitancy, report low general trust in government. ( https://data.oecd.org/gga/trust-in-government.htm ) But their health care agencies specifically are extremely well-regarded institutions.
France actually ranks slightly higher on the trust-in-government scale but it also had a big vaccine controversy in 2018 (number of mandatory vaccines for newborns went from 3 to 11) which may have primed the population for the Covid debate. It also has a media which tends to treat anti-vax views more leniently than in some other places. And its vaccine hesitancy is through the roof.
In Italy, the Five Star movement, a major political coalition, had been using vaccines as a proxy for civil liberties long before Covid. So, somewhat as above.
If we're going to look for the Tuskegee effect, perhaps it would be more useful to gauge the attitudes of racialised minorities relative to the general population in various other countries and then compare the results with the US.
I recall Luigi Zingales telling a very amusing anecdote on EconTalk regarding his amazement that Americans actually take what their government recommends seriously. The last line was to the effect of "In Italy if you do the opposite of what the government says, you are probably on the right track."
As to why there is no Journal of Datasets, well, dataset papers exist and do get published in fields like machine learning and computer vision. In biology and medicine it seems less common.
BUT, the main reason is not a technicality of whether a journal exists or whether you get a line for your CV. The publishability is a red herring and not the ultimate reason.
The issue is that scientists genuinely give you more "informal reputation" for coming up with interesting results, hypotheses and solutions to problems. Collecting data is boring grunt work that isn't really all that impressive from a subjective point of view. There are exceptions like the ImageNet dataset with did help Fei-Fei Li become really famous and successful, but that's computer vision again.
It's similar with all the complaints about publication bias, the file drawer effect etc. and the idea that a Journal of Negative Results will improve upon this state of affairs. However, the issue is not with whether there is a journal or not. The issue is that experts and scientists will learn your name and help your career if you find some interesting result that makes them go wow. Just because there's a journal for negative results won't mean that it actually gets you true recognition. And in academia informal connections are everything.
There's actually quite a lot of Data Journals, GigaScience (http://www.gigasciencejournal.com/) launched in 2012, and Nature (Scientific Data) and Elsevier (Data in Brief) followed with the same concept in 2014. Citations are a superficial metric, but at least provide a form of credit and they show people are using these datasets. Actually having something based on reusable data and software means you can place visualization tools on top of the underlying digital information and finally make papers more interactive. This is what GigaScience's new sister journal GigaByte is trying to do now https://youtu.be/ltlZ4HdJ1qY
This issue can also vary a lot by field. In astrophysics, and in some other physics fields, journals are starting to publish datasets as machine-readable tables. And when the data are too big to incorporate as a MRT, many groups are posting data for access online via dedicated servers, github, or through partnerships with government archives.
In materials science, dataset papers can be immensely popular. The Materials Project paper detailing the creation of a dataset of results from high throughput density functional theory calculations is the most cited paper of most of its authors. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4812323
Right, and taking it a step further, the problem at the root cause of many bad scientific papers is that academia is a reputation economy, not a market economy.
When I first heard about Whuffie and similar concepts I remember thinking, how novel, how cool. A world without money, who wouldn't find that appealing? Well ... I learned. Nowadays "reputation economy" as a term is falling out of use, and "social credit" is replacing it. The latter has far more dystopian overtones.
>However, the issue is not with whether there is a journal or not. The issue is that experts and scientists will learn your name and help your career if you find some interesting result that makes them go wow.
This kind attitude, of course, is a silly attitude. Coming up with a really good research design and collecting data correctly are the parts of the research process that test the skill of the scientists involved. It doesn't take much to download a data set (whether provided by a collaborator or online publication) and turn the crank, the scientist is the one who realizes what is needed to give an adequate answer and what questions can be asked from a given data set (if any).
The other issue is that a dataset publication still takes a lot of work beyond what it took to collect the data: the writeup itself is likely to be of a similar effort level to a typical publication and getting the data clean for all potential uses is often another paper's worth of effort. So you are using two paper's worth of effort to get a single paper that then allows competitors to pre-empt your other potential ideas.
Even if you are ideologically committed to open science, fast public data releases are competing with all your other time priorities, so it's likely to fall fairly far down the priority list even if you're not actively trying to hide it from other researchers.
The incentives are really bad around this. But there are two simple solutions: data releases with an agreed schedule as conditions of grant funding and data releases as condition of publication. Scientists really want grants and publications and will go through the effort of public data release if it's required to get them.
I work on a large research project and we consistently release our data within 3 months of collection because that's what we promised in our grant proposal. If those conditions weren't in there we would definitely release the data publicly, but I doubt we would be anywhere near as timely (a similar project in another country typically release their data 5 years after data collection).
Grant requirements are not a bad thing, but still feel an inadequate solution, like a stick that the wielder unsuccessfully insists is really a carrot (because one is tied to one end of it) while hitting the mule with it.
I think visionguy identified a correct problem in prevalent attitudes: while journals for data and open data publication requirements exist, they are going to be viewed as a hurdles to be passed (or gamed) with minimal effort as long as the underlying attitude itself doesn't change. And it won't, if inventing and running good data generating procedures (think of experiments, observational setups, identifying questions they can answer, any kind of such thing) is viewed less prestigious than / something that can be compensated by milking enough interesting results after one obtained one good source of data. I've been involved in a projects where I have felt a replaceable cog in an engine, and realized it is the design of the engine, which is quite difficult (and in those projects done by others), which should matter more as a scientific contribution.
I see those two solutions as complementary. You can signal and influence scientific values through the policies of institutions such as major funding agencies and journals.
To give contrasting examples. Political science has made major moves towards open science in its journal policies in the last decade (replication data is required for publication) and I've seen colleagues become much more open to these practices after being required to follow them. This contrasts with sociology where the journal editors explicitly state that they see no need for open science practices and most sociologists still see bothering to post data or replication files as a strange affectation.
Culture can be changed by convincing everyone that your preferred practices are the only legitimate way to do something and institutional rules are very effective at doing that.
Under point 15, the following is a poor conclusion.
"Plausibly SpaceX will still have to follow the rules of its host country, the US, so the big loser here will be China "
China will not be a loser. Tesla has significant assets within China, with the CCCP not distinguishing corporate fictions of Tesla and SpaceX. Additionally, China demonstrated anti-satellite capabilities in 2007, which lends itself to slightly more force more than a simply fist shake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test
Starlink as anti-censorship technology will only work in peripheral nations.
Perhaps that's overly harsh on the internet though. We're posting here on Substack, after all.
Censorship was traditionally used by people in power to suppress speech by the citizens. Nowadays censorship is used by the citizens to suppress speech of the people in power (cf. Trump vs the amorphous mobs who hated him).
The internet did not magically eliminate all information control: after all the phrase "the internet" is overloaded to mean both a technical substrate of protocols and equipment, plus the general US libertarian culture that took hold in the early days and built the upper layers. China has the first but not the second. But it pretty massively moved the dial.
There is nothing even close to truly subversive on substack* (that has any serious amount of eyes on it!).
Re. Trump speech: Was it ever actually suppressed? I'd say it wasn't until he became threatening to the status quo re. Businesses Doin' Business, at which point he was exiled to the outer darkness n'er to return.
Substack is an company that exists to make money by catering to a clientele that likes the perception of being rebellions or counter culture; of being autre in some way even while not being anything but firmly establishment.
The REAL shit is either a ethnonationalist militia that is 50% FBI, or socialist militia that is 50% CIA.
The internet absolutely was a pro-information-idea-sharing technology though, like you can just download any significant piece of information for free whether it be movies and tv or books or porn or science studies or leaked documents, so that’s a weird take. You can say anything you want on mainstream platforms and it takes years for the moderation team to figure out how to censor it quickly.
Also, China could fine or arrest its citizens for using Starlink (as Russia is planing to do). The equipment is fairly large and conspicuous during use even if you manage to smuggle it in (assuming China would ban sales of terminals if SpaceX refused to cave in), so there would be no real benefit to the Chinese would-be-users, just like Google's not caving in would give no real benefit to the Chinese users of Google search.
Is that still true? My understanding is that the GFW got pretty good at stopping VPN usage in recent years, and the government ramped up arrests of people caught using them as a consequence.
They have cracked down some but plenty of them still work and they’re very important for for instance business use so they can’t totally nuke them. That said I’m not Chinese nor do I have any friends who live there so I could be wrong, but I’m pre sure it’s still widely available
I think the question is whether "widely available" in practice means that a million Chinese people use VPNs, or ten million, or a hundred million, or five hundred million. There's a lot of things that are in theory widely available, but not actually used by more than a small fraction of people.
I live in China and am posting this through a VPN, bought from a Chinese dealer, who I contact through Chinese social media (WeChat). I would rate VPN availability in China at about the same level as the availability of illegal drugs in the UK when I was growing up. Obviously not there on the supermarket shelves, but if you ask around, you can generally find some.
Someone above suggested that 15+% of the Chinese population might be using them - that's definitely not right. I'd be very surprised if it's as high as 1%. The vast majority of people here do not see any need to obtain uncensored internet. (The possible exception to this is porn, but there are lots of workarounds for that inside the GFW.) I've never heard of anyone being arrested just for using a VPN. I don't think that's worth anyone's trouble.
Hm. If you google china vpn use you get 15-30% from various websites (and uhh illega drug use is way above 1%, somewhere around 11-7% of brits smoked the leaf last year per survey and probably 13-14% USA)
Hard to smuggle, although in a place like China I could imagine underground replication of the hardware as the antennae are complex but not unique -- pretty easy to hide though, you just need an EM-transparent structure about the size of an average trashcan. (a plastic trashcan would probably work, actually)
Likely it will be in some countries not large enough to affect SpaceX.
It will become harder for government to cut off internet in random African countries and Foobaristans. But China/USA/EU will be able to censor whatever the want.
> said the same thing about the Internet
It is less anti censorship than some expected, but still has serious power here.
SpaceX *could* go into the business of providing rogue internet, but those countries can seek remediation through bodies like the UN for violation of their sovereignty.
Ha ha yep. But among his other talents, Musk is a gifted salesman, and he knows exactly the community to which he's selling (stock if not Teslas and sat links). These are people who are *so* wired up to the complex world of technology that they are unusually dependent on the good-will of the big companies and big government that control its base and lifeblood. If the Internet tech companies to which they are so interconnected go titzup or get compromised in big ways or small -- e.g. because of some bobble in the financial markets, or a regulatory hissy-fit by a state actor -- they are uniquely vulnerable. Far more so than Joe Sixpack turning a wrench in a Caterpillar plant in Peoria, shopping weekly for staples in the local Piggly Wiggly, picking up a few eggs from a neighbor with hens, and whose connection to all the people he knows tends to revolve around a popular bar in town and conversations after church.
So along comes Musk to soothe their existential worries: not to worry! I have a technical solution to the inherent vulnerability of your situation. Vietnam will *not* be able to cut off your Internet, should you choose to visit or even live there. Plus we are building such bulletproof security that no conceivable hacking attempt that isn't based around quantum computing with a million qubits could succeed* -- here are some math-dense white papers proving that. And I will *only* comply with surveillance orders in your own jurisdiction if they're signed by an actual live sworn-in judge, or if I feel like it because it would not be a good idea to annoy the people who control my access to the bond market. Don't you feel much better? And they do.
Also re concerns about Kessler syndrome, the Starlink satellites are relatively low earth orbit at 550 kilometers, where atmospheric drag will naturally decay their orbits in several years. IDK how much time debris would persist if you blew them up, but it's much less of a concern than say a GPS satellite (20,200 km altitude)
At 550 kilometers, I think it would only be a couple years.
I feel like I should also add that Kessler Syndrome doesn't block you off from space, either. It just makes it harder to have stuff stay in orbit, since it will get damaged faster from impacts and deorbit sooner. You can still fly stuff through a cloud of such debris if you're launching missions to elsewhere.
Yeah, Kessler means LEO is not a viable place to keep satellites (and everything there is a write-off) and that's basically it. You can send stuff through it just fine.
Forgive the domain-ignorant question, but would a satellite takedown necessarily require blowing up a satellite in orbit? I know Astroscale is proposing to clean up low-orbit debris by way of magnetic capture and I've also read somewhere that the Russian military has been experimenting with lasers intended to disable rather than destroy.
Capturing satellites and deorbiting sounds like it would be expensive (if you want to gently catch a satellite, you have to match orbits, so you need a rocket as big as the one that put it in orbit in the first place). Disabling them in one piece seems fairly plausible to me, but I'm not an expert.
But no matter how you choose to do it, destroying its coverage in China would destroy it for everyone (since satellites move), and that would probably get some complaints from other countries.
I don't think they'd be willing short of an outright "we can win WWIII" hawk. Thousands of ASAT launches against LEO is basically guaranteed Kessler and "military action blowing up large amounts of other nations' infrastructure in international territory" is literally casus belli.
Also, there are much cheaper and effective ways of solving that. For example kidnapping Elon Musk/friends/family/employees etc.
Quite extreme but less extreme and cheaper and more effective than thousands of anti-satellite rockets. I am not sure is China even capable of shooting down all (or large part of) Starlink satellites.
I mean, none of the other bands are really susceptible to it at this point (hence why I specified LEO). MEO and HEO are far too sparsely populated, and GEO is immune because while there are a ton of satellites there, they're all on the same exact path (geostationary i.e. eccentricity = inclination = 0) and thus the hypervelocity collisions needed for Kessler propagation can't happen.
There are journals for datasets (e.g. Journal of Open Psychology Data), but they are not used much in most fields for two reasons: 1) Scientific culture of valuing exciting (often nonreplicable) discoveries over high-quality data; 2) New-ish journals are almost never popular because it takes a long time to get an impact factor and overturn the inertial prestige held by the older journals, thus almost no one submits to them.
The article linked about the Tuskegee issue was frustrating to read, because it never seemed to attempt to explain why, if not Tuskegee, would Black Americans be more *hesitant* to get a COVID vaccine. There was a lot of stuff in there about unequal access and the problems that Black Americans who *want* to be vaccinated face in achieving that goal, but that's a different issue. I suppose what the article could be implying is that if you've been dealing your whole life with a system that refuses or hesitates to treat you when you want to be treated, when it starts beating down your door begging you to let them treat you for something else, you get suspicious. But I would have liked to have seen some quotes or data that actually indicated that.
It could also be true that the article wasn't ever really trying to answer the question "why don't Black people trust the COVID vaccine", but instead was saying "if you're looking at overall vaccination rates by race and noticing that Black people have lower rates than Whites, don't conclude that it's because they don't want to be vaccinated because Tuskegee", but again, it never said that explicitly. Also, I got a chuckle when it described "religious reasons" as a "modern" objection to vaccines, and once again I think that certain White people are continually confused when Black people have conservative opinions/values even though they are the most reliable Democrat voting block.
RE:Geothermal - I can say that there isn’t any real fear of wind and solar within the oil and gas industry. But geothermal elicits a “yea that’s a thing that could actually work”. Part of that might be that building geothermal capacity looks mechanically similar to E&P (exploration and production) because they both involve sticking things into the earth.
Ultimately, geothermal will run into the same problem fasting does - there’s not really a product anyone can get rich making so the proponents aren’t all that financially incentivized.
It seems decentralisation will play a factor as well, making the new industries incomprehensible to the already wealthy and powerful oil elite. Luckily their understanding or support is not necessary.
A distributed solar network combined with a more advanced grid operator with battery or other energy storage. technology need not fixate on expanding the trust funds for the children of oil executives to function.
Geothermal is just another red herring of nonsense the press like to focus on that will have incredibly niche applications. Just like with hydrogen cars that never appeared or with just about whatever the MSM points at...the finger of the media is directed by the hand of big oil in terms of what they focus on.
As with the never ever ever ending coverage of 'breakthrough technology' as though we don't already have everything we need right now to end the use of oil and coal for transport and electricity in nearly all applications.
Oh my gosh looks like Clarke wrote the playbook for the weaponisation of social media. Good find. Must read to find out what happens next =D
>an uncensorable mix of heterosexual and homosexual pornography (using the Kinsey Report as market research), gore (such as details of bullfights and photographic evidence from the Nuremberg trials), and communist propaganda.
So, basically early /b, which was close to having the most freedom of expression of anywhere ever. Just goes to show that true freedom actually leads to the opposite of what pampered intelligentsia imagines.
A million other early internet sites were equally free but quite different from /b/
Because they were less free. In particular, the technical ease of spam coupled with the tolerance of it were unmatched outside of the chan culture as far as I can tell (for the better, as I'm sure most would agree).
I'm not sure that the lack of a tuskegee link means much. If authority figures do a lot of bad stuff to a group, that group is going to, pretty quick, learn not to trust authority figures. Knowing about specific historical events seems not especially important to that. It's not as if Tuskegee was the only event of this kind. If my parents, friends, family, neighbors all say don't trust X, I probably won't trust X! That's a lot of people! I don't need to know one of the many reasons I shouldn't trust X is because of Y.
That's good and fine, just for some reason there has (for quite a while) been a real mythology about Tuskagee being this really salient cause... and it turns out almost no-one who is vaccine hesistant directly cares about it.
My guess is that it's easier to tell an upper middle class white person "black people are suspicious of the medical establishment because of things like Tuskegee" than it is to go into detail about what "things like Tuskegee" actually means.
What's the thinking (if one can even call it that)? There's a conspiracy to secretly give black people a different vaccine to those safely received by >100 million white americans?
Black vaccine hesitancy is just as nutty as white vaccine hesitancy, and declaring "things *like Tuskgee" is just a way of rationalising the nuttiness of a politically protected group.
Bingo.
What is the explanatory value of it's "nutty?" Even if you choose to just accept that a certain percentage of people are going to have nutty beliefs, then what explains the relative distribution of nuttiness across different groups?
Er...that they're different? Why would it be logical to start out thinking different groups of people think the same about everything?
This was my thinking as well. I can't name other similar experiments off the top of my head, but I have heard of them and they influence my thinking on whether the government might try to experiment on people again. The obvious conclusion is that we cannot rule it out, because it's happened multiple times. If someone asked me on a survey if I've heard of [name of experiment] I might not know that name or the experiment specifically, but the idea of government experimentation is still floating around in my head.
[After looking it up] - Oh goody, there were dozens of experiments on US citizens without their knowledge or consent! This is the kind of stuff that really bolsters confidence in your government, though not all of these were related to government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States
“Doctors treat black patients worse on some axis” (usually either “they don’t listen/trust black patients” or “they don’t treat black patient pain effectively”) was a plot point in multiple major network shows I’ve seen in the last year. So there is a definite message being pushed that black patients should find doctors untrustworthy, often in the same media outlets lamenting vaccine hesitancy.
In interviews of vaccine hesitant minorities, I’ve read multiple mentions of concerns about being experimented on (there is a conspiracy theory that the J&J vaccine was being pushed in majority black areas because it was less effective, and the fact that this vaccine was at one point pulled for side effects “proved” that there was an intention to use a riskier or more experimental drug on black people). I think this is a cultural meme at this point that may very well trace to Tuskegee originally, while a lot of people aren’t familiar with the actual origin.
Eh...it's not that much more than they already get, I think. For example, if you listen to media directed at black audiences, one thing that stands out is how much of the advertisement is from hucksters. Shady lawyers, exploitive financial offers, get-rich-quick schemes, payday loans, the whole nine yards. It's kind of horrifying, the vultures that circle around this community. and these are just those that can advertise legally.
So it would not surprise me if it were simultaneously true that (1) blacks trust doctors less than whites, but also (1) blacks trust doctors more than random ordinary people. Basically given their experience I wouldn't find it surprising if blacks trust *almost everybody* less than whites do.
Black Lives Matter isn't training black people to distrust the government - it grows out of that distrust. This gets the direction of the causality wrong.
How many people do you know personally who are part of that movement? I'm guessing zero. It's easy and fun to make people you don't know and disagree with into villains - we used to do the same thing with the Tea Parties - but you're usually going to get them wrong, they way you are here.
Of course, it's also easy and fun to make people you don't know and don't like into evil boogiemen, so feel free. I obviously don't expect to persuade you, but I do feel obligated to at least show up and tell you that you're wrong.
Are we certain that it's racial discrimination as opposed to socioeconomic discrimination? There could be some Simpson's paradox here were poor/stupid people are more likely to be dismissed, and that black people tend to be more poor/stupid than white people. That could result in this data, even if the causal factors are different.
We're definitely not *certain* that it's racial discrimination as *opposed* to socioeconomic discrimination. But it's quite plausible that racial discrimination is a part of it, *as well as* socioeconomic discrimination (and perhaps more relevantly, educational attainment discrimination).
There is more medical distrust among Black Americans. A useful explanation for this that comes up in the literature a lot is that Black Americans persistently face discrimination from medical providers relative to other racial groups.
It is also the case that there is a recent, as within the living memory of, examples of profound mistreatment of Blacks by medical providers symbolized by the most famous example of Tuskegee, that can have an impact simply by creating distrust that spreads through social networks even if individual actors don't understand the particulars of cases that prompted that distrust.
And, of course, distrust in medical providers is one of the on-the-table explanations for vaccine hesitancy in that group. A study showing that Blacks don't know the details of Tuskegee all that well or that such knowledge doesn't correlate with hesitancy doesn't really speak to that hypothesis.
What I'd further add is that knowing the details of Tuskegee is a sign of education and educational status is something that is positively correlated with getting vaccinated.
Except anti-vaxxers are *specifically* pointing to Tuskegee as a cause, and this is absolutely incorrect.
"I'm not sure that the lack of a tuskegee link means much. If authority figures do a lot of bad stuff to a group, that group is going to, pretty quick, learn not to trust authority figures. "
By that standard, Japanese-Americans must be among the most unvaccinated people of all, and Blacks must be voting for *intensely* anti-establishment candidates in Democratic primaries. And yet...
The real answer as to why Black people are less likely to get vaccinated is simply their lower average IQs (the IQ gap is also found within the GOP, judging from heavily Republican heavily college educated counties being much more heavily vaccinated than similarly Republican non-college-educated counties). The real question is why IQ is so important in propensity to get vaccinated in America and not, say, Brazil or Cambodia (or is it... I haven't actually looked at the Brazilian numbers by race, it's just that the % desiring to be vaccinated there seems to be almost universally high).
So far as vaccination is concerned, I think poverty (precarious jobs, lack of access to information, lack of mobility) is enough to explain a lot.
I don't really think my claim does imply that Japanese-Americans would be less trustworthy of the government, or less vaccinated. I don't think that authority figures have done worse to Japanese Americans than Black Americans. Japanese Americans were briefly confined to concentration camps during a war with the place they came from; later they were released and paid compensation. Black Americans were enslaved for hundreds of years, following which they were violently institutionally and legally oppressed for about a hundred more years. And today they are I would say mildly institutionally oppressed, though not legally. And they never got compensation! I really don't see how you can look at that pattern of facts and say that authority figures have done worse to Japanese Americans.
I also don't really see that it's necessary that distrust of authority figures implies a willingness to vote for anti-establishment candidates. There's no guarantee, after all, that the anti-establishment candidate would be more trustworthy once they were in power. If trust is your primary concern, I would expect you to vote for someone as much like yourself as possible -- which for many Black Americans is most definitely not the anti-establishment candidates.
I don't really want to debate the IQ claim.
Slavery ended more than 150 years ago; it has no relevance for the present except where Blacks prefer to live. Meanwhile, there are still Japanese people alive who experienced internment. Also, it was the Federal government which forced desegregation on the South. Major events closer to the present should have more relevance than those of the distant past.
"someone as much like yourself as possible -- which for many Black Americans is most definitely not the anti-establishment candidates."
Hillary Clinton is not someone much more similar to the typical Black American than Bernie Sanders. And yet...
>following which they were violently institutionally and legally oppressed for about a hundred more years
Segregation is not oppression. Is it "oppression" that we have separate countries where people who aren't citizens don't get to freely move around here and have equal rights etc?
And I'm sure you'll bring up "lynchings", which really just refers to 'execution by public hanging at the hands of a mob' and doesn't inherently have anything to do with race. Black people were lynched....and so were white people. And in fact the black/white lynching ratio was LOWER than the black/white incarceration ratio today. So either lynch mobs were less racist than today's criminal justice system, or black people commit less crime during a period where you say they were "oppressed" which contradicts the liberal narrative on the causes of crime disparities.
>And today they are I would say mildly institutionally oppressed, though not legally
Institutionally oppressed? You mean like elite universities engaging in overt and perfectly LEGAL racial discrimination to the benefit of black americans?
>And they never got compensation!
Compensation for what? From whom? Nobody alive is benefitting from slavery, and the eocnomics of american slavery makes it questionable that anybody (other than slave traders) actually did. Plantation owners were often wealthy, but the ROI for slavery has been demonstrated to be not significantly above the general RIO of the economy at the time, but these farmers weren't privy to modern accounting methods. Slavery retarded economic growth (because it diverted funds away from actually productive investments like factories and railroads etc) plus the civil war and its long-term impacts devastated the southern economy.
And what happened to American slaves? Well, they were slaves in America instead of being slaves in Africa or Arabia (where the men would most likely have been castrated and there would be no underclass of resentful slave descendants). I think getting to live in America is more than adequate compensation.
As for segregation, this is nothing to compensate for. Black economic equality was higher and increasing during segregation, there was ah igher employment rate and higher business ownership rate. Plus lower rates of single parenthood etc. These things all got worse after segregation ended, so cannot possibly we attributed to it.
"Black economic equality was higher and increasing during segregation"
This is nonsense BTW.
I think the issue here is more of a tribal framing bias for an anti-vax stance. The red staters are anti-vax because of their own well earned stupidity and their own immoral politicians leading them astray. They deserve their fate. However my tribe's anti-vax stance is due to them being abused by society and they have little agency in their own decisions, which incidentally are in no small part caused by the previous and current systemic racism by red-staters. It's all a little too convenient.
Once you start seeing this framing bias it cannot be unseen. It's very common in the elite media.
Is your preception of black Americans that they are, as a group, more distrustful of authority in general than the mean?
I don't know that I've seen a distrust of authority in general. Of people currently in authority in the United States, I'd say I've seen it. I'm not sure if it's moreso than the mean, because I'm not sure what the mean is. Black distrust of US authority figures definitely seems higher than my social circle but my social circle's mean is probably different from the general population mean.
An alternative hypothesis is that Vaccine hesitancy in the aggregate is driven more by apathy than a firm ideological opposition to being vaccinated.
This is an underrated point. Getting vaxxed twice is a nontrivial inconvenience (and it genuinely puts a lot of people under the weather for a couple days).
There are probably a lot of people who just can’t be bothered, and honestly for the vast majority of otherwise healthy people, it’s quite possibly NOT worth it, on an individual level, to get vaccinated.
For that group, maybe “mumble mumble something about Tuskegee or freedom or whatever” is easier to personally justify than “meh, I’m lazy”. There are some true believer anti-vaxxers out there, but I’m not sure they represent the median unvaxxed person.
I respect Heckman but he is a good example of someone who grabbed hold of an idea early on and held on tenaciously in the face of alternative explanations. He has a paper out earlier this year showing that Denmark has no higher educational mobility than the United States despite vastly great socioeconomic equality and lower poverty. He spends a great deal of time explaining the various ways that family effects might influence educational mobility, without once mentioning genes or heritability - because genetic influence cuts against his narrative of the supremacy of early environmental influence. I always find it a little frustrating.
Why is that frustrating? Despite what a lot of commenters here seem to think, most people accept as common sense that some people are "naturally" smarter than others, ie that intelligence has a strong heritable component.* That kind of "natural" inequality among individuals isn't a problem policymakers could or should fix, any more than we as a society need to fix the fact that some individuals are more beautiful or more athletic than others. Those are cosmic unfairnesses, not injustices. The fact that some large groups of people are significantly less likely to succeed academically than other large groups points to an injustice, one that has to be tackled by addressing environmental variables.
I think it's possible that someone like Heckman is underestimating more neutral cultural influences on educational outcomes - for example, a very intelligent child from a family with a traditional business they're expected to inherit might be less likely to achieve in school than a similarly intelligent child of two professors. But he's right not to focus on genetic influence, because there's really nothing to be done about it.
*You can accept that intelligence is largely heritable and still understand that there is no such thing as inherent racial or socioeconomic differences in intelligence.
I think you should read the paper. When you specifically are asking, in a research paper, why children so resemble their parents in educational outcomes, and you have a whole section devoted to explaining what "family effects" might be, but don't once consider genetic heritage... it's unhelpful. https://www.nber.org/papers/w28543
I read the paper. I agree that Heckman brings up the specter of "family effects" without taking the time to dig into what he really means. But the observations he lays out don't require an investigation into "family effects" to make sense.
It's important to keep in mind that:
1) Not everyone seeks social mobility, since people adapt to and tend to feel most comfortable in the environments they were raised in. This is a practical, emotional reality that has nothing to do with intelligence. Even in a society with perfect equality of opportunity, you would not expect to see people moving freely between neighborhoods and subcultures. (Think of the upper middle class Americans you know - are they all striving as hard as they can to become multimillionaires, or are they content working jobs their parents can tell their friends about? Those same people may moan about how America is so much worse than Canada or Sweden, but do they pack up and move?)
2) An overall increase in educational attainment in Denmark, coupled with the expansion of the welfare state, means that people looking to achieve social mobility through education would see diminishing returns on their efforts after the late 20th century. Heckman's graphs help show that whatever social mobility exists is mostly a middle-class phenomenon - poor people tend to stay poor, and rich people tend to stay rich, because
3) Any class system is designed to prevent mobility - it functions by keeping a small, stable group at the top, with some modest ladder climbing in the middle. Just because Heckman can't clearly see the mechanisms blocking mobility doesn't mean they aren't there. There's a glimpse of this when he points out that schools in wealthier areas mysteriously tend to have better teachers.
I think people get really turned around when they make a series of linked assumptions: that measures like cognitive tests and grades can capture population-wide differences in intelligence, that people who obtain more schooling are more intelligent, and that because people with higher-paying jobs tend to have higher educational attainment, they must also be smarter.
You need to work instead from the realization that while inherited intelligence differences among individuals are real, these differences don’t map on to large populations. And while intelligence tends to be an advantage in basically all contexts, it’s an incredibly weak predictor of any specific life outcome.
Cooper's take on Greenwald is pretty bad. He writes "Greenwald is treating the revelation of new information as proof that people were lying, when in fact these journalists were just reporting what was available to them at the time. He pulled this same childishly dishonest trick with the publication of the D.C. medical examiner's report on Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick. 'Watch how easily and often and aggressively and readily they just spread lies,' he writes of a CNN segment with Erin Burnett and Don Lemon from the day of the assault."
But it is perfectly clear from this quote that Greenwald accused them of aggressively and readily spreading lies, not of "consciously lying." In other words, running with an convenient narrative that they couldn't be bothered to interrogate critically. The fact that Cooper can't make this distinction reflects very poorly on his writing and critical thinking skills. It is possible to aggressively spread lies through indifference to the truth without concsiously lying.
I'm reminded of Scott's post about whether unintentionally saying something which makes your partner sad is "abusive". I have no idea which definition of the word "lying" would cover the scenario "reporting something which, as best they can tell, is in fact true, although they readily believe it to be true in part because of their own biases". That's not lying, that's just being wrong.
I think the intended point was that "spreading lies" does not require "lying". If A invents a lie, L, and tells it to B, and B believes it and repeats it to C, then B is helping to spread L, which is a lie, even though B is not lying.
Kind of like saying "the Internet helps spread lies". The Internet can't lie; it's just infrastructure. But the Internet helps spread all information, including lies.
Sure, but first: is there an 'A' in this situation? Did some malicious actor make up a lie that the CNN reporters then picked up? I would have thought any inaccuracies would simply be biased assumptions all the way down, I don't think we need to posit a willful liar in this process.
And second: the Greenwald quote given above is "how easily and often and aggressively and readily they just spread lies". That doesn't read like he's just saying the CNN reports passively echoed lies; he's assigning very direct moral blame to the reporters. The "just" in "just spread lies", in particular, is a phrasing that evokes the idea of bald-faced, inexcusable lying; to "readily just spread lies" carries very different connotations from "inadvertently signal-boosting lies" or something of the kind.
Honestly, it feels a bit like a motte-and-bailey to me. Greenwald plays on the ambiguity of "spread lies" so that, if called out, he (or defenders of his) can fall back to the motte that he's just saying the CNN reporters are reporting fraudulent claims in good faith, though they should exercise more diligence in fact-checking; when the bailey is the assumption that they are "often" "aggressively" "just" plain *lying* themselves.
In between deliberately lying and innocently repeating a lie, there is the very common case where someone believes a falsehood on inadequate grounds because it fits what he wants to believe. In the case of a reporter, part of whose job is supposed to be providing information to people, acting that way is irresponsible even if not as bad as a deliberate lie.
To me, the quote sounds consistent with an accusation of "mere" reckless disregard for truth, rather than intentional fabrication.
Note: I know nothing about this debate other than what's in the comments here.
Greenwald is making the very reasonable point that reporters should check sources, confirm information, and fact check prior to publicizing information. He's harped on reporters acting as pass throughs for information instead of journalists many times, and it's a regular point on his Substack.
What value does a CNN reporter mindlessly sharing an MSNBC reporter's unsourced story provide to society? Sharing by a reporter implies the story is true, despite the second reporter having no better knowledge of it than a random person.
Of course, in defiance of his own, "reasonable point," Greenwald completely neglects to do his own due diligence.
You are questioning whether it is a reasonable point that journalists should do journalism? Is fact-checking a passé relic of the past? Greenwald is reporting a comprehensive report that interviewed a ton of people. It's not the same as just parroting some assertion some CIA stooge or even some other journalist made.
Also, if B doesn't even bother to figure out whether L is true or false but just accepts it at face value because it's convenient in their argument with C, while not technically lying they are still bullshitting, in Harry Frankfurt's sense.
If you say "X is certainly true", without knowing it, that is lying; it doesn't even matter if X turns out to be true, you were lying still.
> "reporting something which, as best they can tell, is in fact true, although they readily believe it to be true in part because of their own biases"
1. Were they "reporting", or were they propagandizing a favoured narrative to get views?
2. Was it really "as best they could tell"?
3. Isn't it their job to uncover lies, and so be more cautious before "reporting"? At the time, they were making a big deal out of "fact checking".
I think we all know the answers, and the case for calling this "spreading lies" isn't so flimsy.
This is a good point.
And the valid criticism of CNN et al is surely that they accept and repeat things that are too flattering to their view of the world far too easily and far too often without interrogating them, not that they are willfully lying (sure there is some of that too). Like think Nick Sandmann, or Jussie Smollett, or how the shooter in Colorado a few months back was a white male until he was an Arab, and so forth. When everything is about "the narrative" you end up spreading a lot of "too good to check" stories (also c.f. Alleged-Covid-Medicine-That-Should-Not-Be-Named and horses - I'm actually blanking on the name of the medicine right now and I think it's funnier that way so shan't look it up to correct).
I think if you say someone is "aggressively and readily spread[ing] lies" it's reasonable to assume that you're intentionally leading your readers to assume they were deliberately lying, unless you specify that you don't think it was deliberate. Greenwald's "not technically lying" here isn't really any better than CNN's "not technically lying;" either way they're either deliberately or recklessly leading their audience to a false conclusion.
I would describe much of the coverage of Nick Sandman et al. as "aggressively and readily spreading lies", and would defend such a description of it. If you say something as if it is true beyond doubt, and you could easily verify/investigate it but choose not to (instead, leaving the actual journalistic work to Robby Soave), and instead just trust your "primary/original witness" (who is presumptively the one lying), then yeah, I think you are "spreading lies". I don't want to debate pedantry but I think there is a real difference between "willfully lie" and "spread lies" and the distinction exists to cover stuff like useful idiots repeated stuff that is false.
Yes, this. Greenwald’s argument is that these outlets are spreading falsehoods, maybe not necessarily knowingly, but with a reckless disregard for their actually veracity. A recklessness (or laziness?) that they would not apply for stories that didn’t flatter their preferred narrative. Publishing something that is “too good to verify” is, maybe not exactly “willfully lie”, but it’s a lot closer to “lying” than “responsible journalism”.
Greenwald is actually very clear about this so I don't think this is an issue. He consistently hammers the same point about spreading lies by accepting assertions without fact-checking.
Greenwald is really aggressive about this stuff but I think his general points only make sense if you have the background the media is claiming they're trustworthy truth tellers who you can offload some verification work onto. Outside of that context Cooper's argument makes sense. The issue is I do think that context is there.
"But it is perfectly clear from this quote that Greenwald accused them of aggressively and readily spreading lies, not of "consciously lying." In other words, running with an convenient narrative that they couldn't be bothered to interrogate critically."
Funnily enough I think this is exactly what Greenwald did. His 'convenient narrative' is that the media lies to hurt trump, and so applied it here when (as Cooper shows) it isn't true.
Meanwhile Bill Barr said at the time, with a bit of lawyerly language, that he ordered it.
So was Greenwald lying when he spread misinformation about a potential lie that turned out to be true. It's lie-ception. Lies all the way down...
How dangerous is Semaglutide? Is it a good candidate for use as a nootropic?
I'd first worry about how you're going to pay for it. It's $700/injection in the US.
A sufficiently good nootropic can pay for itself. But it's probably not that good.
don’t see at all why it would be better than nicotine or addys or w/e, and presumably a lot worse
I guess it doesn't matter so much where the rain in Spain falls if you've got sprinklers.
PSA: Michaël Trazzi created a version of the "rationalist dating/friending" site reciprocity.io for Twitter. It's called "Twinder".
- pick mutuals to chat with
- they DM you if there's a match
http://twinder.me/
https://twitter.com/MichaelTrazzi/status/1438533888540766210
That's great, thanks for letting me know.
(is "a version of Reciprocity for Twitter" his wording or yours?)
Oh, it's my own wording, I guess I should have been clear about that. I don't know if he even knows about reciprocity.io.
So many variants of the swiping model. Somebody needs to teach a neural net how to matchmake. There must be somebdy around who has the technical ability and also the trustworthiness to be handling corpora of sensitive data.
Then write a paper once it surpasses the benchmark of neo-trad adj twitter.
Maybe the ability of human beings to read the nonverbals in other humans' actual presence is still way beyond what computers can tell from the marks we make in their world. See the way humans can gravitate in a crowded room towards others that they have something in common with. Hendrix's models for romantic attraction in 'Getting the love you want' might also be relevant. Almost all those nonverbals are out of range for computer models.
4. The write up doesn't convince me. I think intergenerational transmission of general medical hesitancy is possible, even if the original source is forgotten.
That said, I do think Tuskegee is a convenient way to rationalize different reactions to the same behavior by blacks and by deplorables.
Spike Lee once said on Bill Maher's show, not long after Katrina, that he thought the federal government had intentionally blown up New Orleans's dykes. When he was asked why he thought that, he said "the Tuskegee experiment."
It's also quite possible that "Tuskegee" is really being used as shorthand for a general feeling of disrespect from doctors, and experience with them lying to you, whether or not you're aware of a very famous institutionalized case of doctors disrespecting and lying to black people.
Perhaps. I think that our tendency to over apply racial explanations often leads us astray. My speculative theory is that blacks share similar levels of mistrust of authority as poor whites, though for different reasons. This leads to similar hesitancy to trust government mandated or promoted vaccines.
The black jeopardy SNL skit w/ Tom Hanks gets at this shared mistrust of authority: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7VaXlMvAvk
Maybe not even that different reasons - doctors disrespect and lie to lots of people.
Underrated point. Like when we talk about mistrust of authority, obviously it's bad (on some object level) that the authorities aren't perfectly trustworthy and perfectly trusted. But is it remotely clear that given the authorities we have, that they are trusted too little? (Maybe, idk).
Between Donald Trump and Joe Biden (or pick your favorite boogeyman from the opposite tribe) almost everyone has plenty of reason not to trust government leaders. Really good reasons, in fact.
Definitely underrated point. I hear tons of people of all races complain that their doctors don’t listen to them, are too quick to ascribe their complicated issues to simple causes (you’re fat / you’re old / you’re menopausal), don’t give them the meds or treatment they want, are generally dismissive or disrespectful, etc. etc. Sometimes I think they have a good point, sometimes they are probably overreacting. Of course, when white people do this, they often just get called “Karens”.
anyone with a hot take on why African Americans have low vax rates need to account for the fact that the one ethnic group with even less reason to trust the American government, Native Americans, have one of the highest vax rates: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/native-americans-highest-covid-vaccination-rate-us/
the boring cold take is to simply point at health care access as probably being the most important difference
In May 2020 the Navajo Nation had the highest Covid infection rate among US states (even though it is not a state it is comparably sized.) Lack of infrastructure such as running water in some places made pandemic hygiene really difficult. Covid hit Native communities very hard for reasons that are downstream of racism/colonization, but are physical and practical - lack of water, shared housing makes isolation difficult, etc. I think there was very little emotional place to say “we can beat this with what we have, we don’t need a vaccine.”
Health care access may be different as well - but IHS is famously overburdened. Also, cultural attitudes to the elderly may be different. Some people who were of the few remaining living links to old ways of life died from Covid and that represents profound loss for numerically small cultural groups which have undergone tremendous change. I think the context is different for many African American individuals and communities.
Health care access may also play a role.
Native Americans, apart from their history of awful treatment by the US government, also have a history of being annihilated on an apocalyptic level by infectious disease. Historical memory cuts both ways in their case.
Early in the pandemic, I saw an exchange between two tribal members on social media. One claimed that traditional medicine was all you needed to ward off disease, but a second rebutted that traditional medicine wasn't enough to save their great-great grandparents from smallpox, closing with "...unless you think you know our traditions better than they did?"
So you might have a piece of it here.
Access? You are perhaps not aware that vaccines were preferentially distributed to neighborhoods with higher percentages of minorities? There were many reports of whites only getting appointments in minority neighborhoods, then showing up to the local equivalent of CVS and finding mostly white people in line. That is a little hard to ascribe to access when people are not willing to get vaccines right in their neighborhood.
Part of the problem was people not being able to schedule time off work for appointments and/or afraid of losing their jobs if they were knocked out for a day by side effects of the vaccine.
I can believe that, although I don't know how much of an impact it has. It seems that employers were/are more keen to require vaccines than the other way around.
The side effects I could see being a driving force too. I have known some people who had really bad side effects, basically a moderate case of COVID, from getting vaxxed, so I wouldn't be surprised if people who already had the disease would be disinclined to get vaxxed, on top of distrusting various authorities.
I think it very much depends on the employer whether they're going to push to have their employees vaxxed.
That's why I got the vaccine on Saturday morning. I'm skeptical that this could be a huge problem for many people.
There are people whose jobs require them to be on call. They may not know their schedule a week in advance.
You're skeptical that "many people" work jobs where they often don't get 2 days off in a row? Are you not in the US? Here it's very common for low wage workers to only get days off one at a time. And that's not even considering the fact that many of those people work more than 1 job, or have to be able to cover child care on their days off so their partners can work.
Maybe he's skeptical that there are many people who haven't gotten 2 days off in a row any time in the last 6 months.
One out of ten people are unbanked, but when we talked about that here a couple of months ago, people had trouble believing that someone could operate in the modern world without a bank account. This board skews white and affluent, and it's hard for us to imagine the lives of people who aren't like us.
My own parents got their vaccinations on a reservation, so that's not a difference in favor of African Americans... and there are no IHS clinics in the ghetto, last time I checked
Is the ghetto you are referring to any specific ghetto, or just ghettos in general? It is a bit hard to check up on your claim when you are so vague. IHS clinics are also not the only place to get vaccines, depending on where you are; that sort of thing varies a lot by state and county.
I don't really think you understand what I'm saying here and I don't feel like walking you through it. Peace!
I think I understand your point: it's easier to get the vaccine on a reservation than a ghetto. Is that right?
If so, I don't think you've made a good argument for that position.
In the Tuskegee study, the scientists did not give the black men safe and effective treatment, thereby prolonging their suffering. Why would knowing about that cause someone to be more in favor of the scientific establishment preventing access to a claimed treatment?
You're assuming that people know what actually happened. Lots of people think the men were deliberately infected.
Yeah Tuskagee mythology is strange. The most common form of the story (using it to blame govt for vaccine hesistancy among Black people) appears to get a bunch of facts wrong!
I think the real winner from the Violent Language list is "picnic". Apparently some terrible people used to picnic during horrible acts of racial violence, so now we should all say "outdoor eating". I guess we're lucky the rule isn't that decent people should no longer eat outdoors, which would be an equally valid conclusion to draw from the example.
Yeah that one stood out so much that, I went to check that one on Wikipedia, and it does get a mention in the etymology section:
> Black American communities have long believed there to be a link between the word picnic and lynching parties. This false etymology claims that the term picnic referred to the N-word and the "picking" of a target to lynch. Scholars argue that this myth persists due to a hint of truth; white Americans frequently ate and picnicked at lynchings. Some white Americans referred to lynchings as "barbecues.
So this is definitely A Thing, rather than just being some 'woke-era one-upmanship'. But I imagine most here would rather people focused on correcting the false etymology rather than eternally propagating it by banning the word.
I'm surprise to see this, given that Freaknik was named after picnicking.
Let's not get into habit of proclaiming "A Thing" based on unsourced wiki reference.
When some different horrible people shall "outdoor eat" during some racial violence, we shall retire "outdoor eating" too.
re: 34
(I'm not trying to make a point or an argument, I'm genuinely curious here)
Can someone explain to me how this can be reconciled with the huge disparities in IQ over time in countries like Ireland and Greece as they became wealthier.
Also, if this data is meaningful, in what mechanism can the Flynn effect be impacting IQ if its not measurable as environmental?
For your second question, it is always important to remember that Flynn himself did not doubt the findings of the kinship studies and believed firmly that IQ was strongly heritable. His book Does Your Family Make You Smarter? is an attempt to find as much variance explainable by family effects as possible, but it's always framed in the shadow of the kinship studies - the conclusion starts by explicitly accepting their conclusions.
For the first question, think of someone with a particular genetic potential, then think of various environmental factors that limit that potential. Any given person's poor performance in a nutritionally deprived and intellectually unstimulating environment might be the produce of environment in that context, but this does not mean that there is no underlying cognitive tendency to be intelligent or unintelligent. It simply means that environmental confounds might be swamping the potential. The question is to what degree modern humans are living in environments that move most of us towards our genetic potential. If the people who claim the Flynn effect is slowing or stopped are correct, then perhaps we're nearing the limits of what an enriched environment can provide. But who knows?
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2020/03/intelligence-and-pisa-timss-etc-at-the-individual-level/
Is it possible to try to make the logical jumps.
PISA strongly correlates with IQ.
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/28450521-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/28450521-en
The PISA differences between countries are implausibly large to be explained by genetics. "In Kosovo, Morocco and the Philippines, even the highest-performing students scored only around the OECD average. In these countries/economies, the 95th percentile of the reading distribution was close to the average score across OECD countries".
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5754247/
The "genetic" effects are nearly completely gene-environment?
If true I believe the framing of the % claimed genetic is misleading.
The framing of "percent variance explained by genes" is always within a given nation, basically always a developed one, and often only studies middle class and up for practical reasons - poor families usually aren't eligible to adopt children.
That does still provide a lot of useful information about the effect of different parenting styles and different schooling experiences, but you're right that when looking at countries where malnutrition or heavy metal poisoning are relatively common then environmental effects can be expected to be much than they are in the West
This would seem to imply that the environmental factor that caused the Flynn effect varied over time but does not vary in this sample. One scenario in which this would happen is if some infectious disease was making people stupid pre-Flynn but that disease has now been eradicated; another is if some lack of nutrients was causing stupidity but now everyone has enough nutrients; a third is if schools have uniformly become better at training for IQ tests or just that kids have started to be uniformly forced into going to school.
Perhaps I mis-remember, but I thought the Flynn effect was primarily observed in the abstract/pattern-based reasoning sections of the test, not so much in the natural language parts (the Raven's Matrices). This led to the theory that the effect was created by the rapidly increasing number of tasks in modern life that require abstract symbolic reasoning, i.e. machines with hidden internal state that must be manipulated by poking icons of various kinds in different orders. If you practice something you get better at it and the average farmer in 1920 would not need to identify patterns in sequences of symbols very often, but someone who has to work with computers or even a modern electric oven does.
I'm not sure if you're saying the Flynn Effect has been primarily observed in Raven's, or that progressive matrices fall under "natural language" — but either way that's wrong, AFAIK.
The former. My editing was bad, that's all.
Talking about PISA, Ireland tends to do better on reading than on maths, and girls do better/reading while boys do better/maths. And a lot of the difference between our highest and lowest scoring students is down to socio-economic status?
https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?primaryCountry=IRL&treshold=10&topic=PI
"Ireland
Student performance (PISA 2018)
In reading literacy, the main topic of PISA 2018, 15-year-olds in Ireland score 518 points compared to an average of 487 points in OECD countries. Girls perform better than boys with a statistically significant difference of 23 points (OECD average: 30 points higher for girls).
On average, 15-year-olds score 500 points in mathematics compared to an average of 489 points in OECD countries. Boys perform better than girls with a non statistically significant difference of 6 points (OECD average: 5 points higher for boys).
In Ireland, the average performance in science of 15-year-olds is 496 points, compared to an average of 489 points in OECD countries. Girls perform better than boys with a non statistically significant difference of 1 points (OECD average: 2 points higher for girls).
Socio-economic status explains 11% of the variance in reading performance in Ireland (OECD average: 12%).
The average difference between advantaged and disadvantaged students in reading is 75 points, compared to an average of 89 in OECD countries. However, 13% of disadvantaged students are academically resilient (OECD average: 11%)."
I agree with the point about Raven's Matrices, I think we are generally weaker on mathematical ability so if you're scoring Irish intelligence on that, we will score lower. But what the heck do I know?
So the big unaddressed caveat in every measure of heritability is that the number you get only applies to the population you tested, and populations sufficiently similar. This is because the notion of 'shared environment' is multi-layered, and directly affects the calculation.
If you are only testing kids in the US, then they do not have a 'shared environment' of being raised in the same house, but they do have a 'shared environment' of being raised in the US. There will be less variance in environment if you use a US-only sample than if you used an 'everywhere in the world' sample.
Therefore, you will get a higher heritability rating if you use a US-only sample, than if you use a whole-world sample.
Think about it this way: if two children have very similar upbringings: same school system, same culture, similarly loving and supportive parenting, etc., then environment will account for little of their variance in IQ, and you will decide that IQ is almost entirely heritable.
Now, compare those two children to one child who grew up in a poor third world country and was heavily malnourished throughout during infancy and early childhood and exposed to lots of lead and other pollutants, and another child with abusive parents who never sent them to school and locked them in a basement without books or toys most of their life and punished them whenever they asked questions or disobeyed orders. Suddenly, you're probably going to find that environment accounts for most of the variance in your sample, with heredity playing a distant second.
So, to your question: the high-heritability results come from studies with homogenous environments. Before-and-after-wealth Ireland and Greece are much more different from each other than what we see in these studies, so we'd expect less heritability and more environmental impact there.
> Therefore, you will get a higher heritability rating if you use a US-only sample, than if you use a whole-world sample.
No, you'll get a different heritability rating. There is no theoretical reason to assume it will be higher.
(You can argue that the US environment is characterized by homogeneity in all relevant dimensions compared to the world, which would necessarily drive heritability up. But that's a very fact-specific claim; many places are characterized by a higher environmental variance than the world average. We used to do fashionable lobotomies.)
The US might have higher variance than other places, but it would be pretty nuts if the whole world had less variance than US alone. We know that there are places in the world with radical differences in nutrition, schooling, culture, etc.
>many places are characterized by a higher environmental variance than the world average.
Many places may have higher within-region variance than other places, but what we're talking about here is between-region variance, ie US vs Afghanistan vs Switzerland vs South Africa vs etc. Hard to imagine that within-region variance of the US is greater than between-region variance across the board. Sure, it's a hypothesis you could make, but it so flies in the face of common sense that I think the burden of proof is heavily on the person making it, not the person eliding it.
Malnourishment is a really important thing to bring up. Shift to another trait that is basically entirely heritable: height. Have you ever heard the phrase "head and shoulders above the rest?" That dates back to pre-independence America, where your typical colonist was several inches taller than your typical native of England. It's generally thought to be due to Americans having far superior childhood nutrition. The principle is that you're never going to grow taller than your genes will allow. But a childhood filled with disease and hunger can keep you closer to Earth.
The same principle applied to intelligence explains pretty well most of the observations you bring up. Though nourishment might include the normal sort of teaching/stimulation of learning that good parents practice with their children.
Sure....but so what? Nobody denies the impact of malnourishment. It's just that malnourishment explains virtually NONE of the variance in these traits within the US because so very few people are malnourished. Heritability isn't impacted by every single environmental factor that could exist and impact a trait, it's impacted only by factors that actually exist and actually have an impact for a given population.
People who point to rural African IQ scores as evidence of 'biodiversity of IQ' absolutely elide the impact of malnourishment and other factors to make their argument, whether or not they directly reject it when challenged.
I' love to live in the world you do with regards to this topic, where everyone who discusses it is knowledgeable and honest. But I encounter lot of bad actors and bad pop-science out there on this one.
>So the big unaddressed caveat in every measure of heritability is that the number you get only applies to the population you tested, and populations sufficiently similar. This is because the notion of 'shared environment' is multi-layered, and directly affects the calculation.
It's not unaddressed at all. Most heritability studies specifically state 'heritability of X in the US' or wherever they're looking at. Everybody who is half-way knowledgeable about heritability studies is fully aware that heritability estimates are BY DEFINITION specific to the time and place the participants are from.
Like, seriously, I cannot overstate this: This is absolutely, 100% known, appreciated and acknowledged by intelligence researchers.
> Suddenly, you're probably going to find that environment accounts for most of the variance in your sample, with heredity playing a distant second.
This is news only to those who are patently oblivious to the intelligence research literature. Nobody disputes this.
All that matters is the scope of applying the findings. So if we're interested in IQ differences within the US, focusing on increasing the availability of food or providing free parenting classes is not going to do very much at all because the heritability of IQ in the US is very high.
It is vastly more accurate to use US heritability estimates for directing US policy. It's what we SHOULD be using. Having a representative 'whole world' IQ heritability study is only really useful for looking at IQ inequality on a global scale. It is totally useless for trying to reduce IQ inequality in the US, or any other trait we're interested in.
>Everybody who is half-way knowledgeable about heritability studies is fully aware
Yes, which I'd estimate makes up about .01% of the people who *talk* about heritability studies.
Listen, I've talked to lots of people, including IN THIS COMMENT SECTION, who are very happy to point out a very-limited-US-only sample of IQ research showing high heritability of IQ, then say that proves that the IQ differences between whites and blacks in the US must be genetic, or the differences in IQ between white Americans and people in poor African villages must be genetic. This is not an aberration, this is the bailey where most of the non-expert discussion of this topic takes place.
That's why I said this is 'unaddressed' not 'unknown'. You'll notice Scott didn't address it here (nor did he need to, it's not central to this post). It's not addressed in most comment sections discussing these things. It's not addressed in most articles written about these things.
Yes, a journal article tells you what sample they used, and a savvy reader knows that you can only make limited generalizations beyond that sample. But that's not the level that the popular-media discussion of this topic is at, at all.
>It is vastly more accurate to use US heritability estimates for directing US policy. It's what we SHOULD be using. Having a representative 'whole world' IQ heritability study is only really useful for looking at IQ inequality on a global scale. It is totally useless for trying to reduce IQ inequality in the US, or any other trait we're interested in.
Cool beans.
I was answering a question about Ireland and Greece over long time periods of great social change.
I think 100% of your comment is you imagining that I said things I didn't? I didn't say researchers don't know this, I didn't say US samples shouldn't be used to direct US policy.
I think you might be in an 'arguments as soldiers' thing where you think I'm on a different 'side' from you and making the types of arguments that 'side' would make.
I'm only making the arguments I actually made.
It’s variance explained in current environment. Free public schooling combined with extensive programs to find gifted kids, libraries, the internet, and cities with all sorts of jobs and groups of people means smarter people can get trained and knowledge find their spots easily. Ireland in the 1800s did not have any of that, and had a lot of malnutrition, so that doesn’t apply.
Reckon it's the difference between moving a hungry person, deprived of essential nutrients, riddled with untreated diseases and worked close to death to a nice environment, and moving someone from a less nice to a nice environment.
The study and the Flynn effect are not in fact contradictory. Environment has a large influence on adult IQ, as demonstrated by the Flynn effect, but in which (non abusive) familly you were raised does not : what seems to count is the environment at the society level (food access, disease burden, schooling available) and not the type of parenting.
"Can someone explain to me how this can be reconciled with the huge disparities in IQ over time in countries like Ireland and Greece as they became wealthier."
The oft-quoted "Irish IQ is 90" result comes from Richard Lynn, who I have frequently criticised. He fudged together three tests, one done on adults and two done on school children in the 70s and took an average, then went off to tell the world that the rebellious Paddies were only rebels against the benevolent maternal British Empire because they were literally stupider than the loyal Unionists who in turn were less smart than the staunch mainlanders in Great Britain (er, I may be intruding some political commentary of my own here).
The important thing is that Lynn, in his books, didn't do any tests himself, he just scrabbled together results from all over the place. More recent national testing has not, so far as I know, been done but we do participate in PISA and have reasonably good scores there.
Luckily, somebody *has* done the work on those Irish schoolchildren IQ tests back in the 70s. Will you be astounded to hear that some of the children were from disadvantaged areas? Oh, and there's this little gem which I didn't know before:
https://researchrepository.ucd.ie/bitstream/10197/6437/1/%29._Chapter_3._Twenty_years_a_growing-_gains_in_the_intelligence_test_scores_of_Irish_children_over_two_decades.pdf
"In considering the results of the comparisons reported here, it is important to keep
in mind that the standardization sample included children from schools for the
mentally handicapped, while the two surveys did not. Mentally handicapped
children with IQ's below 70 account for approximately 2.7% of the population
(Gelder et al., 1983, p. 688). Some of these, particularly the mildly mentally
handicapped with IQs between 50 and 70 are educated in ordinary primary
schools. Less than 0.5% of the population have IQs below 60. Altogether,
therefore it may be assumed that about 1% of children in the population attend
special schools for the mentally handicapped or that, what Jack Tizard called, the
administrative prevalence of mental handicap is 1% (Tizard, 1964). Thus the
omission of children from special schools from the recent surveys may have
inflated the median gain in IQ points on the RSPM by the equivalent of about 1
percentile point or less than 1 IQ point. Conservatively we may therefore state
that the mean gain in IQ points on the RSPM has been approximately 9 IQ points
over the past 15-17 years: that is, the periods 1972-1987 and 1972-1989."
So some of the kids involved in the Great IQ Tests were mildly mentally handicapped. Do you think this maybe, possibly, could have contributed to "Irish IQ score is 90" and that conversely, giving IQ tests to kids which exclude the mildly mentally handicapped in recent times could see the increase to "Irish have normal 100 IQ" changes? This is only my own view, but I imagine it could be a contributory factor.
"Precisely what the national and international gains on the RSPM means is
open to a variety of interpretations. If the RSPM is measuring intelligence (g),
then clearly Irish children are making the gains that their international
contemporaries are. If the RSPM is measuring the development of new test
taking strategies, then these new strategies are being developed by Irish children
at the same rate as their international counterparts. Both of these conclusions are
particularly important in view of previous claims that Irish children were
intellectually inferior to children from other countries a position discussed and
criticized by Benson (1987). "
Exactly. The idea Irish had Uruguayan IQ levels in the 1970s is questionable to the extreme.
Two of my hot takes on the Flynn effect:
It's well established in psychology that IQ tests are not accurate outside of the community for whom the test was normed against. So when you give 10 year old Greeks an IQ test that is normed against 10 year old Greeks from 30 years ago and they tend to get more answers correct, does this mean they're smarter or does it mean that the questions have lost power to assess intelligence? This is not a question that we can really answer. All IQ tests do is rank you. There's no objective unit of intelligence, no milieinstein or whatever. What we need to know is if you got a time machine and brought the Greek kids from 30 years ago into the future, then normed an IQ test for the new batch of all 10 year olds, would the current 10 year olds still score higher? Your new test would not contain the same questions as the old one. So there's not really a way to know.
Second hot take. IQ tests include a lot of subtests for different strands of intelligence. Generally Verbal Comprehension, Visual Spatial, Fluid Reasoning, Working Memory, and Processing Speed. Four out of the five show basically no change between generations. Almost the entire Flynn effect is in Visual Spatial intelligence. That is conspicuous to me as the kind of intelligence you need to successfully drive a car. It's also the sort of intelligence that would be trained as kids ride around in cars and learn to make sense of the world zooming around them. And to a somewhat darker place, it's also the rare sort of thing that Darwinian selection would actually apply to, sometimes an entire family at a time.
I doubt there’s no way to do it, although probably there are pitfalls, but I think scores increasing is pretty proven by now
And is that really true? Ravens matrices tests don’t have sub tests. Have a hard time believing that the first three didn’t increase
Ok this is just wrong. There is a way to validate that you're measuring the same thing between two separate groups and that's measure invariance. There is internal structure to the patterns of answers on IQ tests, and that structure can be compared between cohorts to validate that the same construct is being measured. For example, if both groups demonstrate the same g-loadings on the same questions (i.e. they both agree on which questions are hard) and factor analysis shows that both groups have the same subfactor distributions, then you have a good argument that your test is measuring the same thing in both cohorts.
The Flynn effect is *not* measure invariant, which implies that it doesn't represent an increase in intelligence. There is some skill which is being learned, though I don't think anyone knows what it is - your idea about driving cars is a good candidate.
Heritability is a measure of the extent to which an observed variance is the result of genetic factors. That is to say, when you look at a group of people, what explains the differences between them? When you shift what groups of people you are looking at the answer can shift as well. People sometimes mistakenly read studies publishing on this question as stating to what extent X is genetic, but that's not what they're doing. Nutrition (for example) might explain differences in average height between two countries while explaining very little of the difference between height in one city in America.
I believe it should be "Sitzkrieg" and not "Sitzkreig". Except if there a second-level pun going on (with "Sitzkreis"), which seems unlikely to me.
*is
Sorry, my mistake.
On the AI media classification - it almost looks like the left-right political axis got mapped into a lower left-upper right axis in that graph. WSJ is still misplaced, but everything else looks more plausible.
On the IQ thing - do adoption agencies do a really good job of screening out adoptive families that live in places with high soil lead, or remnants of lead paint in the walls?
LOL no
I imagine those factors would correlate with income, and income would correlate with adoption rates.
I mean a negative correlation between lead and income.
Unless you live in one of those trendy redeveloped industrial areas.
Lead is really, really unlikely to be a factor here.
That's why I'm so surprised! Lead seems to me like it would be an environmental factor that is uncontrolled, and is said to explain some significant amount of variance in IQ in many other contexts. If it doesn't do so in the context of adoption, then this study must be measuring some conception of variance that is somewhat different from what I expect!
Adoption agencies do a good job of screening out certain bad family environments (criminals, people who couldn't provide basic necessities for the child(ren), active abusers). They do a fair job of following a basic checklist of things a house should and shouldn't have, for instance enough beds for the prospective adoptees, obvious hazards, etc. They definitely wouldn't pick up on soil lead, but they would usually pick up on problems with the drinking water. I don't think they would catch anything related to lead paint unless it was specifically disclosed.
I'm curious where you think one might find high concentrations of metallic lead in the soil. How would it have gotten there?
I believe it's mainly tetraethyl lead, not reduced metallic lead. It got there from decades of burning leaded gasoline, so it is highest concentration in places that were urban neighborhoods in the period from 1930-1975 or so, though places that have had major redevelopment in recent years have often had extensive soil remediation to remove it.
However, as I dig into this, I'm learning that there's actually very little documentation of which locations do or don't have substantial lead contamination. I can find some detailed maps of lead concentration in properties in a small square mile region, or I can find national maps of estimated risk of high lead concentration based on proxies like building age.
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=d45c8610b7364b8f931fdbb748d607c1
https://www.vox.com/a/lead-exposure-risk-map
Ah I see. So by "high" soil concentrations of lead you mean 400 parts per million. Oookay. It's a point of view, I guess.
I don’t understand why you are being so scornful of the idea that a toxic metal could be toxic at concentrations that would be low for some other substances.
Where I grew up, in the Lead Belt of Missouri, there were chat dumps. Big hills from the spoil of the lead mines. They sat in the area for decades. Bored locals would sled down them (not being particularly adventuresome, I never did). A few years ago, they were finally removed. Probably all through my region we had a few generations with low level lead poisoning.
What's funny, is that when I first visited home as they were coming down, I was shocked, and regretted never having climbed one. I know better, but I couldn't help it. Even now, thinking on it makes me sad.
https://dailyjournalonline.com/news/local/special-projects/sixty-images/sept-19-chat-piles/article_72ce9be6-55f4-5cd0-8a73-8d4c81581162.html
Er...you do realize that the spoil from a lead mine necessarily contains much less lead than the surrounding rock, right? That's *why* they throw it away. For that matter, it's lead *ore* you mine, not metallic lead, galena would be typical, and the chemical properties of lead ore are as different from those of metallic lead as, say, the properties of rust are from iron, or carbon dioxide from charcoal.
No. I don't know much about the topic. Mining isn't really a thing there anymore, and hasn't been in a long time. I guess it stands to reason that if they were *highly* dangerous they wouldn't have stayed up for so long. This is a better article that I found after I posted. It says kids from the area had elevated lead levels, so the EPA ordered them down. If it's not true it's too bad, the article captures how much a part of the regions landscape they were.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna8132449
2. There was something of the sort in Spinrad's _Bug Jack Baron_-- I think the conspiracy was killing black children for (the rejuvenating effects of?) their glands.
4. I believe without evidence that greater medical neglect and incompetence would be enough to explain black people tending not to trust the vaccines without needing to bring in older history. I'm not sure if there's been research.
For that matter, I don't know whether white people who've had bad experiences with the medical system are less likely to trust the vaccines.
Anecdotally, my cousin who was a victim of some bad medical malpractice is not vaccinated and is not a Trumpster.
It seems overly US focused. There are large variances between countries in the EU in vaccine uptake rates. UK very high without much coercion for example. In Italy they're forcing people out of the economy to make them take it: one step removed from just having the police tie them down and forcibly inject them. All white people though, more or less.
I suspect it's far more related to general cultural attitudes about government. The vaccination programme is at this point a Rorschach test. If you're already pre-disposed to view government agencies as unfair, power-crazed, uninterested in your life and kinda irrational ... and I'd say black Americans are more likely to hold this view than whites with PhDs ... then you'll look at this situation and see an unfair power-grab by irrational people who don't care about your life. Conclusion: stay the hell away. If you're pre-disposed to see government agencies as an alliance of technocratic rationalists who deeply care about your life, make the best decisions uninfluenced by profit, then you'll see some triumph of government planning and the need for social cohesion, etc.
"I suspect it's far more related to general cultural attitudes about government."
Maybe, but comparing countries as opposed to comparing various groups inside a single country introduces massive political confounders.
Both Spain and the UK, which I believe rate lowest in the EU with regard to vaccine hesitancy, report low general trust in government. ( https://data.oecd.org/gga/trust-in-government.htm ) But their health care agencies specifically are extremely well-regarded institutions.
France actually ranks slightly higher on the trust-in-government scale but it also had a big vaccine controversy in 2018 (number of mandatory vaccines for newborns went from 3 to 11) which may have primed the population for the Covid debate. It also has a media which tends to treat anti-vax views more leniently than in some other places. And its vaccine hesitancy is through the roof.
In Italy, the Five Star movement, a major political coalition, had been using vaccines as a proxy for civil liberties long before Covid. So, somewhat as above.
If we're going to look for the Tuskegee effect, perhaps it would be more useful to gauge the attitudes of racialised minorities relative to the general population in various other countries and then compare the results with the US.
I recall Luigi Zingales telling a very amusing anecdote on EconTalk regarding his amazement that Americans actually take what their government recommends seriously. The last line was to the effect of "In Italy if you do the opposite of what the government says, you are probably on the right track."
Re: 33. My brother keeps talking to me about that greenhouse plain. It looks quite uncanny on google maps. Does anyone know what is being grown there?
Mainly vegetables (especially tomatoes) for the EU market.
Where does the rain fall in a region like that?
The rain just falls on the greenhouse and gets directed away. In Holland, there are quite a few water basins next to greenhouses to store the water, to be used in watering. Like so: https://www.jokri.com/thumbs/600x600/uploads/bassin_dscn0314_1394698505.jpg
I'm sorry, the correct answer is that the rain falls mainly on the plain, this being Spain.
👏👏👏
@Aapje, in case you're not aware, "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain" is a well known rhyme among native English speakers.
Ok, I thought it was a question about where the rain goes, given how much land is covered by glass.
Known but false. The rain in Spain falls mostly on the mountains.
As to why there is no Journal of Datasets, well, dataset papers exist and do get published in fields like machine learning and computer vision. In biology and medicine it seems less common.
BUT, the main reason is not a technicality of whether a journal exists or whether you get a line for your CV. The publishability is a red herring and not the ultimate reason.
The issue is that scientists genuinely give you more "informal reputation" for coming up with interesting results, hypotheses and solutions to problems. Collecting data is boring grunt work that isn't really all that impressive from a subjective point of view. There are exceptions like the ImageNet dataset with did help Fei-Fei Li become really famous and successful, but that's computer vision again.
It's similar with all the complaints about publication bias, the file drawer effect etc. and the idea that a Journal of Negative Results will improve upon this state of affairs. However, the issue is not with whether there is a journal or not. The issue is that experts and scientists will learn your name and help your career if you find some interesting result that makes them go wow. Just because there's a journal for negative results won't mean that it actually gets you true recognition. And in academia informal connections are everything.
There is a journal for datasets though, it's called Scientific Data and it's quite popular:
https://www.nature.com/sdata/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Data_(journal)
There's actually quite a lot of Data Journals, GigaScience (http://www.gigasciencejournal.com/) launched in 2012, and Nature (Scientific Data) and Elsevier (Data in Brief) followed with the same concept in 2014. Citations are a superficial metric, but at least provide a form of credit and they show people are using these datasets. Actually having something based on reusable data and software means you can place visualization tools on top of the underlying digital information and finally make papers more interactive. This is what GigaScience's new sister journal GigaByte is trying to do now https://youtu.be/ltlZ4HdJ1qY
This issue can also vary a lot by field. In astrophysics, and in some other physics fields, journals are starting to publish datasets as machine-readable tables. And when the data are too big to incorporate as a MRT, many groups are posting data for access online via dedicated servers, github, or through partnerships with government archives.
In materials science, dataset papers can be immensely popular. The Materials Project paper detailing the creation of a dataset of results from high throughput density functional theory calculations is the most cited paper of most of its authors. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4812323
Right, and taking it a step further, the problem at the root cause of many bad scientific papers is that academia is a reputation economy, not a market economy.
When I first heard about Whuffie and similar concepts I remember thinking, how novel, how cool. A world without money, who wouldn't find that appealing? Well ... I learned. Nowadays "reputation economy" as a term is falling out of use, and "social credit" is replacing it. The latter has far more dystopian overtones.
>However, the issue is not with whether there is a journal or not. The issue is that experts and scientists will learn your name and help your career if you find some interesting result that makes them go wow.
This kind attitude, of course, is a silly attitude. Coming up with a really good research design and collecting data correctly are the parts of the research process that test the skill of the scientists involved. It doesn't take much to download a data set (whether provided by a collaborator or online publication) and turn the crank, the scientist is the one who realizes what is needed to give an adequate answer and what questions can be asked from a given data set (if any).
The other issue is that a dataset publication still takes a lot of work beyond what it took to collect the data: the writeup itself is likely to be of a similar effort level to a typical publication and getting the data clean for all potential uses is often another paper's worth of effort. So you are using two paper's worth of effort to get a single paper that then allows competitors to pre-empt your other potential ideas.
Even if you are ideologically committed to open science, fast public data releases are competing with all your other time priorities, so it's likely to fall fairly far down the priority list even if you're not actively trying to hide it from other researchers.
The incentives are really bad around this. But there are two simple solutions: data releases with an agreed schedule as conditions of grant funding and data releases as condition of publication. Scientists really want grants and publications and will go through the effort of public data release if it's required to get them.
I work on a large research project and we consistently release our data within 3 months of collection because that's what we promised in our grant proposal. If those conditions weren't in there we would definitely release the data publicly, but I doubt we would be anywhere near as timely (a similar project in another country typically release their data 5 years after data collection).
Grant requirements are not a bad thing, but still feel an inadequate solution, like a stick that the wielder unsuccessfully insists is really a carrot (because one is tied to one end of it) while hitting the mule with it.
I think visionguy identified a correct problem in prevalent attitudes: while journals for data and open data publication requirements exist, they are going to be viewed as a hurdles to be passed (or gamed) with minimal effort as long as the underlying attitude itself doesn't change. And it won't, if inventing and running good data generating procedures (think of experiments, observational setups, identifying questions they can answer, any kind of such thing) is viewed less prestigious than / something that can be compensated by milking enough interesting results after one obtained one good source of data. I've been involved in a projects where I have felt a replaceable cog in an engine, and realized it is the design of the engine, which is quite difficult (and in those projects done by others), which should matter more as a scientific contribution.
I see those two solutions as complementary. You can signal and influence scientific values through the policies of institutions such as major funding agencies and journals.
To give contrasting examples. Political science has made major moves towards open science in its journal policies in the last decade (replication data is required for publication) and I've seen colleagues become much more open to these practices after being required to follow them. This contrasts with sociology where the journal editors explicitly state that they see no need for open science practices and most sociologists still see bothering to post data or replication files as a strange affectation.
Culture can be changed by convincing everyone that your preferred practices are the only legitimate way to do something and institutional rules are very effective at doing that.
Under point 15, the following is a poor conclusion.
"Plausibly SpaceX will still have to follow the rules of its host country, the US, so the big loser here will be China "
China will not be a loser. Tesla has significant assets within China, with the CCCP not distinguishing corporate fictions of Tesla and SpaceX. Additionally, China demonstrated anti-satellite capabilities in 2007, which lends itself to slightly more force more than a simply fist shake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test
Starlink as anti-censorship technology will only work in peripheral nations.
Perhaps that's overly harsh on the internet though. We're posting here on Substack, after all.
Censorship was traditionally used by people in power to suppress speech by the citizens. Nowadays censorship is used by the citizens to suppress speech of the people in power (cf. Trump vs the amorphous mobs who hated him).
The internet did not magically eliminate all information control: after all the phrase "the internet" is overloaded to mean both a technical substrate of protocols and equipment, plus the general US libertarian culture that took hold in the early days and built the upper layers. China has the first but not the second. But it pretty massively moved the dial.
There is nothing even close to truly subversive on substack* (that has any serious amount of eyes on it!).
Re. Trump speech: Was it ever actually suppressed? I'd say it wasn't until he became threatening to the status quo re. Businesses Doin' Business, at which point he was exiled to the outer darkness n'er to return.
Substack is an company that exists to make money by catering to a clientele that likes the perception of being rebellions or counter culture; of being autre in some way even while not being anything but firmly establishment.
The REAL shit is either a ethnonationalist militia that is 50% FBI, or socialist militia that is 50% CIA.
>n'er to return
Citation needed.
source:<my hopes and dreams>
The internet absolutely was a pro-information-idea-sharing technology though, like you can just download any significant piece of information for free whether it be movies and tv or books or porn or science studies or leaked documents, so that’s a weird take. You can say anything you want on mainstream platforms and it takes years for the moderation team to figure out how to censor it quickly.
Also, China could fine or arrest its citizens for using Starlink (as Russia is planing to do). The equipment is fairly large and conspicuous during use even if you manage to smuggle it in (assuming China would ban sales of terminals if SpaceX refused to cave in), so there would be no real benefit to the Chinese would-be-users, just like Google's not caving in would give no real benefit to the Chinese users of Google search.
also more conspicuously Chinese citizens already have VPNs
Is that still true? My understanding is that the GFW got pretty good at stopping VPN usage in recent years, and the government ramped up arrests of people caught using them as a consequence.
They have cracked down some but plenty of them still work and they’re very important for for instance business use so they can’t totally nuke them. That said I’m not Chinese nor do I have any friends who live there so I could be wrong, but I’m pre sure it’s still widely available
I think the question is whether "widely available" in practice means that a million Chinese people use VPNs, or ten million, or a hundred million, or five hundred million. There's a lot of things that are in theory widely available, but not actually used by more than a small fraction of people.
I live in China and am posting this through a VPN, bought from a Chinese dealer, who I contact through Chinese social media (WeChat). I would rate VPN availability in China at about the same level as the availability of illegal drugs in the UK when I was growing up. Obviously not there on the supermarket shelves, but if you ask around, you can generally find some.
Someone above suggested that 15+% of the Chinese population might be using them - that's definitely not right. I'd be very surprised if it's as high as 1%. The vast majority of people here do not see any need to obtain uncensored internet. (The possible exception to this is porn, but there are lots of workarounds for that inside the GFW.) I've never heard of anyone being arrested just for using a VPN. I don't think that's worth anyone's trouble.
Hm. If you google china vpn use you get 15-30% from various websites (and uhh illega drug use is way above 1%, somewhere around 11-7% of brits smoked the leaf last year per survey and probably 13-14% USA)
Hard to smuggle, although in a place like China I could imagine underground replication of the hardware as the antennae are complex but not unique -- pretty easy to hide though, you just need an EM-transparent structure about the size of an average trashcan. (a plastic trashcan would probably work, actually)
Likely it will be in some countries not large enough to affect SpaceX.
It will become harder for government to cut off internet in random African countries and Foobaristans. But China/USA/EU will be able to censor whatever the want.
> said the same thing about the Internet
It is less anti censorship than some expected, but still has serious power here.
SpaceX *could* go into the business of providing rogue internet, but those countries can seek remediation through bodies like the UN for violation of their sovereignty.
Does SpaceX really want to go to war?
Ha ha yep. But among his other talents, Musk is a gifted salesman, and he knows exactly the community to which he's selling (stock if not Teslas and sat links). These are people who are *so* wired up to the complex world of technology that they are unusually dependent on the good-will of the big companies and big government that control its base and lifeblood. If the Internet tech companies to which they are so interconnected go titzup or get compromised in big ways or small -- e.g. because of some bobble in the financial markets, or a regulatory hissy-fit by a state actor -- they are uniquely vulnerable. Far more so than Joe Sixpack turning a wrench in a Caterpillar plant in Peoria, shopping weekly for staples in the local Piggly Wiggly, picking up a few eggs from a neighbor with hens, and whose connection to all the people he knows tends to revolve around a popular bar in town and conversations after church.
So along comes Musk to soothe their existential worries: not to worry! I have a technical solution to the inherent vulnerability of your situation. Vietnam will *not* be able to cut off your Internet, should you choose to visit or even live there. Plus we are building such bulletproof security that no conceivable hacking attempt that isn't based around quantum computing with a million qubits could succeed* -- here are some math-dense white papers proving that. And I will *only* comply with surveillance orders in your own jurisdiction if they're signed by an actual live sworn-in judge, or if I feel like it because it would not be a good idea to annoy the people who control my access to the bond market. Don't you feel much better? And they do.
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* Oblig xkcd: https://xkcd.com/538/
Also re concerns about Kessler syndrome, the Starlink satellites are relatively low earth orbit at 550 kilometers, where atmospheric drag will naturally decay their orbits in several years. IDK how much time debris would persist if you blew them up, but it's much less of a concern than say a GPS satellite (20,200 km altitude)
At 550 kilometers, I think it would only be a couple years.
I feel like I should also add that Kessler Syndrome doesn't block you off from space, either. It just makes it harder to have stuff stay in orbit, since it will get damaged faster from impacts and deorbit sooner. You can still fly stuff through a cloud of such debris if you're launching missions to elsewhere.
Yeah, Kessler means LEO is not a viable place to keep satellites (and everything there is a write-off) and that's basically it. You can send stuff through it just fine.
Forgive the domain-ignorant question, but would a satellite takedown necessarily require blowing up a satellite in orbit? I know Astroscale is proposing to clean up low-orbit debris by way of magnetic capture and I've also read somewhere that the Russian military has been experimenting with lasers intended to disable rather than destroy.
Capturing satellites and deorbiting sounds like it would be expensive (if you want to gently catch a satellite, you have to match orbits, so you need a rocket as big as the one that put it in orbit in the first place). Disabling them in one piece seems fairly plausible to me, but I'm not an expert.
But no matter how you choose to do it, destroying its coverage in China would destroy it for everyone (since satellites move), and that would probably get some complaints from other countries.
A powerful laser shot at a satellite should still fuck it up.
china shooting down starlink sats would certainly be quirky. not sure how plausible that is tbh
I don't think they'd be willing short of an outright "we can win WWIII" hawk. Thousands of ASAT launches against LEO is basically guaranteed Kessler and "military action blowing up large amounts of other nations' infrastructure in international territory" is literally casus belli.
Also, there are much cheaper and effective ways of solving that. For example kidnapping Elon Musk/friends/family/employees etc.
Quite extreme but less extreme and cheaper and more effective than thousands of anti-satellite rockets. I am not sure is China even capable of shooting down all (or large part of) Starlink satellites.
This is particularly true because LEO is not geosynchronous.
I mean, none of the other bands are really susceptible to it at this point (hence why I specified LEO). MEO and HEO are far too sparsely populated, and GEO is immune because while there are a ton of satellites there, they're all on the same exact path (geostationary i.e. eccentricity = inclination = 0) and thus the hypervelocity collisions needed for Kessler propagation can't happen.
There are journals for datasets (e.g. Journal of Open Psychology Data), but they are not used much in most fields for two reasons: 1) Scientific culture of valuing exciting (often nonreplicable) discoveries over high-quality data; 2) New-ish journals are almost never popular because it takes a long time to get an impact factor and overturn the inertial prestige held by the older journals, thus almost no one submits to them.
The article linked about the Tuskegee issue was frustrating to read, because it never seemed to attempt to explain why, if not Tuskegee, would Black Americans be more *hesitant* to get a COVID vaccine. There was a lot of stuff in there about unequal access and the problems that Black Americans who *want* to be vaccinated face in achieving that goal, but that's a different issue. I suppose what the article could be implying is that if you've been dealing your whole life with a system that refuses or hesitates to treat you when you want to be treated, when it starts beating down your door begging you to let them treat you for something else, you get suspicious. But I would have liked to have seen some quotes or data that actually indicated that.
It could also be true that the article wasn't ever really trying to answer the question "why don't Black people trust the COVID vaccine", but instead was saying "if you're looking at overall vaccination rates by race and noticing that Black people have lower rates than Whites, don't conclude that it's because they don't want to be vaccinated because Tuskegee", but again, it never said that explicitly. Also, I got a chuckle when it described "religious reasons" as a "modern" objection to vaccines, and once again I think that certain White people are continually confused when Black people have conservative opinions/values even though they are the most reliable Democrat voting block.
RE:Geothermal - I can say that there isn’t any real fear of wind and solar within the oil and gas industry. But geothermal elicits a “yea that’s a thing that could actually work”. Part of that might be that building geothermal capacity looks mechanically similar to E&P (exploration and production) because they both involve sticking things into the earth.
Ultimately, geothermal will run into the same problem fasting does - there’s not really a product anyone can get rich making so the proponents aren’t all that financially incentivized.
It seems decentralisation will play a factor as well, making the new industries incomprehensible to the already wealthy and powerful oil elite. Luckily their understanding or support is not necessary.
A distributed solar network combined with a more advanced grid operator with battery or other energy storage. technology need not fixate on expanding the trust funds for the children of oil executives to function.
Geothermal is just another red herring of nonsense the press like to focus on that will have incredibly niche applications. Just like with hydrogen cars that never appeared or with just about whatever the MSM points at...the finger of the media is directed by the hand of big oil in terms of what they focus on.
As with the never ever ever ending coverage of 'breakthrough technology' as though we don't already have everything we need right now to end the use of oil and coal for transport and electricity in nearly all applications.