If some populations purportedly have "lower average IQ" how come they all speak multiple languages when the "higher IQ" ones struggle with what they learn at school? Surely learning and being able to communicate in multiple languages requires a modicum of intelligence above the 75-to-90 scores reported by the "national IQ" studies?
There's mounting research suggesting we teach languages in school astoundingly poorly. Traditional instruction puts a heavy emphasis on simply memorizing grammar patterns, which are (not quite but) close to useless. With massive amounts of input, your brain will just automatically do all the pattern matching for you in the background.
Terry Waltz claims that when she teaches using comprehensible input instead of traditional methods, there is basically no bell curve. That might be a slight exaggeration, but it sounds like other teachers have similar experiences. JFK High School switched to a mass immersion (extensive reading) approach, brought their AP Chinese pass rate from 50% to 100%. SEG Private School in Japan switched to a similar approach, the average student now scores in the top 2% on the national English exam, with their lowest scoring still in the top quartile. It tracks with family members I know who say that after moving abroad, they learned more in six months than from eight years of traditional study. It tracks with self reports from the second language learning community about the critical importance of high volumes of input.
So it seems to me like there is still a lot of low hanging fruit in institutional language learning, and some of the independent learners (with high metis!) are figuring this out on their own. There's still a profound open question as to why high schools and universities are not switching to CI methods more quickly. (I think there's like a <10% chance they have been right all along, >90% that some weird institutional pressures or switching costs have prevented adaptation.)
Even if Terry Waltz was exaggerating a bit, these methods leave little room for IQ to explain progress. Maybe it matters at the margins, but in general, the person with the most exposure to the language, especially comprehensible chunks, will develop the fastest.
I was confused on whether he was saying that we DO teach language well, and we still can't learn despite our average higher IQs, or that we have such higher IQs and still can't figure out how to teach well.
Another reason for the US in particular not being the best at teaching second languages through schools is that there isn't really a huge need for the average American to learn one. We have a ton of Hispanic immigrants yes, but most of them speak at least a little English and even if they don't, their kids do. And even if ALL hispanic immigrants spoke absolutely no english, that leaves huge swaths of the country that don't have many immigrants, meaning that students won't have any real need to use a second language. Add on top that as you said, we teach it poorly anyway and almost certainly we teach it too late.
Yes. If you want to learn a language, read up on a bit of the basics, and then just drown yourself in comprehensible input - the comprehensible part there is key. You won't learn shit from say, translated analytical philosophy. Everyday situations are a wonderful teacher. Our brains are pattern-matching machines, all you really need to do is give that machinery lots and lots of food.
I believe so. There are various debates on the specifics, but there's significant overlap across self taught communities: Enormous volumes of input, both reading and listening, supplemented by, but not over reliant on, spaced repetition software. It is a very long, time intensive process. Time on target matters a lot (that's why moving to a country is so useful, constant moments of opportunity to learn throughout each day).
I think he means Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Philippines, and much of Sub-Saharan Africa (DRC, Nigeria, Tanzania, etc.). Linguistic diversity is fairly typical for traditional societies.
A possibly relevant example datum gleaned from reading a book about Romani (AKA 'Gypsy') musicians in Northern Greece - as professional musicians serving multiple ethnic groups (this is the Balkans) they have to be fluent in Greek, Albanian, Vlach, and Bulgarian/Macedonian. Their native language that they speak at home, also called Romani, is related to Sanskrit. They are greatly discriminated against, much like African Americans are in the US, and it's possible that generations of suffering prejudice and poverty causes an IQ loss.
IQ is tested in some medium other than the subject's own oral culture, so the ability to function effectively in that medium is going to be important. I would suggest that prejudice and poverty are always going to make individuals less adept at using various media than their non-discriminated against, richer peers (note the obvious exceptions here like East European urban Jews were not poor). But then again I believe IQ testing to be a self-fulfilling justification for bourgeoisie domination of society, so I have a clear bias here...
The Romani situation is directly comparable to the Ashkenazi Jewish situation (they existed in the same circumstances in the same location), so assuming that they're low-IQ just because of that seems pretty premature
It's hard to say anything without knowing more about what you're referring to, but language acquisition has a critical period when it must be acquired, after which it becomes much more difficult. I would presume your polyglot population has repeated and (critically) early exposure to multiple languages, which is atypical among much of the West. Studies of "feral" children and deaf children suggest this critical period begins to close around age 5, typically, and is fully closed by puberty.
I'd also be curious how "can speak multiple languages" is measured. Do they have basic proficiency, ie can conduct basic business? Or are they fully fluent? The people I've known who were polyglots due to growing up in countries where many languages were spoken freely admit that they only speak one or two with any proficiency, but I'm not sure how typical that is.
No there are plenty of people learning languages past teenagehood. The only thing we know for sure becomes more difficult after childhood is getting the pronunciation right to "sound like a native".
>Do they have basic proficiency, ie can conduct basic business? Or are they fully fluent?
Usually they use those languages as vehicular devices to conduct business transactions, follow media, interact with the government and so on so I expect a fairly high level of proficiency in any of them even if they don't write novels in it.
I'm not really sure what you're talking about. My impression is that how many languages you easily speak mostly has to do with how many you're frequently exposed to. I would expect higher-IQ people to pick up languages they're exposed to slightly more easily, conditional on the same amount of exposure, but I'm not even sure about that.
Is any part of the standard IQ testing array about language ability? If not, I'm not sure that that expectation is well-founded. Intelligence need not equate to language-learning ability; the assumption it should is dangerous in that it conflates different intellectual processes into one basket labelled 'intelligence' without considering if there are very different things happening between e.g. language learning and ability to understand maths. I think the labelling of computing coding conventions as languages might help confuse this further as well: a language is not simply a logical system to be learnt and applied but rather a framing of thought and reality in a shared framework of concepts such that perfect translation is never possible. Intelligence may not necessarily correlate with the requirements to cope with multiple such frameworks.
They do test vocabulary and facility with manipulating concepts. But the vocab part is more things like ability to whip up definitions of words and knowing more esoteric ones - a less bright person exposed to many languages could be expected to be able to speak simply in many languages like he does in his native one.
But language comprehension is based on the language of the test, not different languages. Testing the ability of someone in one language tells us nothing about their ability in others. Again this seems to be an issue of labelling: whilst it's not inaccurate to call this language comprehension, it is not about comprehension of languages, just the one the test is in.
Yeah, I think I said as much. Perfectly reasonable to think that someone who's capable of complexity is in principle capable of it in many languages and someone who lacks that firepower can still manage his level in others. We mostly just teach foreign languages like shit.
You know the US have won the women's world cup (foitball/soccer) 5 times in 9 editions. That's 5 of the 17 possible world cup wins in the last 30 years, so way over 25%.
That's pretty good going for a nation bad at the sport...
As usual, the person means that American *men* are bad at soccer.
But my understanding is that the US dominates women's soccer so much because of Title IX - US schools are required to spend something on girl's sports, and soccer has become a girl's sport here, while in the rest of the world, old-fashioned sexism keeps girls out of sports, so the US just has a much deeper pool than other countries do for the women's team.
The mensteam aren't that bad either. They've been to 6 out of the last 7 finals which is as good a record as Italy or England for example. Came third in 1930 as well, so the idea this is a new thing can be out to bed. They're currently ranked 20th in the world, which translates as pretty good at football.
I think the main reason the women's game does so well is that there's so many kids playing so a huge talent pool. Note England's women's team has started to do well half a generation after a concerted effort to get more girls playing football, and traditional strong women's football nations such as Norway have very established female leagues at youth level. I think there's success us based on the popularity of soccer as a kids sport regardless of gender. Whilst the college thing undoubtedly helped I suspect few top-class footballers go that route nowadays as that's three years of peak earnings passed up on in the various women's professional leagues.
Not sure there's a correlation here. It could be argued that one of the effects of a high-IQ population is they develop the efficiency of a unified language via cities, trade, schools etc.
That's an interesting notion. Does openness to new experience, which correlates with high IQ, lead to language convergence? The question is outside my experience. And there seems like too many feedback loops and confounders (wealth -> better nutrition -> increased IQ -> wealth -> better nutrition and so on) to eek out much more than a correlation.
Who knows. I just think the utility of shared language (for trade, social trust, sharing ideas etc) is likely greater than any utility from exposing the brain to new languages.
Openness itself is not driven by a unitary mechanism. The more aesthetic receptivity side is at least partially grounded in latent inhibition - an unconscious mechanism that basically decides if connections are bullshit or not. The higher the inhibition, the more concrete a connection has to be to register as real and meaningful and not fanciful nonsense. Lower it, and more and more tenuous connections start seeming like there's something there.
If that sounds like presuming that things that aren't real are real, you're absolutely right: aesthetic openness is linked to things that are a risk factor for psychosis and mental illness tends to run in artists' families. The artists themselves have obviously been selected so they're not the most crippling sufferers.
The other half of the trait domain is the one more directly related to intelligence, and more than that to a willingness to expend effort in processing things even without external reward. It also contains narrower traits like self-assessed intelligence (which is not merely an inaccurate/noisy measure of the person's intelligence, it's a personality trait with its own network of correlations)
1. This is orthogonal to the point. Most regions *do* have a unified language for communication purposes, but their populations speak it *in addition* to their local language.
2. China is among the higher-IQ nations according to the "national IQ data" yet it features a lot of linguistic diversity, so even the point you're trying to make falls apart.
I don't want to beat the IQ point too hard because it's confounded to heck, but Mandarin has pretty good adoption in the higher IQ areas of China (central and the Eastern seaboard) and lower adoption in the lower IQ areas. I certainly don't want to push a 'one cause' model. But looking within China, adoption of Mandarin seems moderately well predicted by IQ in a relative sense. There's probably a good correlation with things like nutrition, industrialization, economic opportunity, etc.
That's just looking at a province-level map. There's also a pretty big divide between urban and rural areas in China, even within a province.
(I say this as someone who has taught English in China)
Do you mean they speak multiple languages approximately natively? First-language acquisition is hardcoded into the brain and is more or less unrelated to the processing needed for IQ tests. General intelligence varies a lot, but ability to understand grammatical rules necessary for communication varies very little (ability to understand grammatical rules for signalling prestige is a different thing). There are many instances of people with severe intellectual disabilities but normal language processing skills, and conversely people with high intelligence but disorders that make them unable to use language; for more detail read The Language Instinct or similar.
"Surely learning and being able to communicate in multiple languages requires a modicum of intelligence above the 75-to-90 scores reported by the "national IQ" studies"
Speaking multiple languages at a 16th percentile level by first world standards is hardly the same as speaking one language at a 99th percentile level by first world standards.
There's no such thing as "percentile level" for language acquisition; you're either able to function in a given language environment, or you're not. There *are* tests that assess your ability to function in increasingly "difficult" environments, such as the CEFR scale (A1 to C2) or the DLI grading but they do not use percentiles because ranking people relatively doesn't make sense, it's an absolute thing.
Sure. If you want a slightly more meaningful one, compare Japan and Indonesia. When Japan had the same GDP per capita as a % of the U.S. Indonesia has now, it was making real progress in science. Today, despite having more than twice the population of Japan, Indonesia is a vast wasteland when it comes to scientific accomplishment (to such a degree that it's not even in the top 50 in the Nature Index): https://www.natureindex.com/annual-tables/2020/country/all
I don’t know enough to agree or disagree but a more useful comparison would be Singapore. It’s not only in the same area of the world, it started from a similar base point as Indonesia and even contains a microcosm of Indonesia within its borders with ethnic Malays. So just as Singapore has outpaced Indonesia so have the ethnic Singaporean Chinese outpaced ethnic Singaporean Malays, much to the chagrin of the Singaporean govt which has done so much to erase the differences.
I feel like this argument doesn't quite cut the way you want it to.
Suppose we assume that:
1) IQ in a population follows a normal distribution
2) A country's scientific advancement is driven by the number of high-IQ outliers produced.
3) Different ethnic groups have genetic differences that cause them to have different mean IQs.
In this world, I would expect the high IQ ethnicities to punch above their weight technologically, but I wouldn't expect them to totally dominate. Bigger populations just have more chances to roll the dice, even when those dice are loaded against them.
Also, Indonesia is quite ethnically diverse, and therefore very diverse genetically, so you'd expect a place like Indonesia to have a greater chance of coughing up occasional outliers than a place like Japan that has a lot less genetic diversity.
I think the historical record suggests a very different model of technological advancement: every once in a while a geographical zone will, for complex reasons, become a hotbed of scientific activity, and end up drawing lots of people into a mutually supportive web. This boom of technological developments eventually burns itself out, and the torch is passed to the next up-and-coming innovation zone. Japan was home to a post-war boom that has since largely fizzled out, with Chinese and Korean firms stepping in to pick things back up in that region (and meanwhile back in the states, the Bay Area is nearing the end of its explosive period).
The fact that Africa, home to large populations and significant human biodiversity, is so totally left behind in the global tech game, IMO suggests strongly that technological advancement is about a lot more than a gene pool's ability to cough up geniuses.
This sounds like a good argument, but like every argument in this space it is inconclusive.
It is completely plausible that urbanization/ the agricultural patterns in the big river basins created a selection pressure that led to the populations being much higher in the sort of intelligence that is useful for twenty-first century economic success.
Note, this is not what I think: What I think is that we don't know enough to be confindent.
The window for language learning is more or less "infancy to early childhood" for most of the population, and even in nations with "higher IQ", children of families or communities that speak multiple languages don't seem to have a problem with that. I don't believe in the "lower average IQ" thing, but I think the languages argument isn't a valid argument against it - that's exactly what you'd expect in countries where lots of people can get by in a single language.
Snarky answer: The smart people figured out early on that having everyone speak the same one or maybe two standard languages is more efficient than having everybody try to learn many languages, and then the smart people invented A: television and B: economies that could give every family a television set so that they could be exposed to the same 1-2 standard languages in early childhood.
Dialing back the snark, it's the economic part that is doing the heavy lifting there, and there are lots of reasons beyond average national IQ that a nation might not be able to afford to put a television set in every household.
Re: Georgia voting laws, I think the sole good pint made in the comment is about giving out water and food to people on line. A minor point as in who cares.
The rest of the comment seems like a hasty overreaction to the hasty overreaction by Democrats.
By far the most important point in the bill is taking away power form the Sec. of State. To use a purposefully bad pun, that trumps all.
Here's the NYT's point by point analysis. Admittedly, not objective politically, but has the merit of referencing text of the legislation
What that article doesn't mention is the blindingly obvious fact that Georgia is a Biden state with two Democratic senators that is zooming left at a rate of roughly a 1 point margin per year.
The most popular one so far (by a multiple of 3) was with Alex Tabarrok (Scott has reviewed his book) He wrote a review of the Parasite that went against the standard view. It is a fun read and it is on the Marginal Revolution site here:
It doesn't say much more than the review but if you liked the film Burning you might enjoy the podcast too.
By the way if anyone can suggest good guests either with or without an ACX connection (and that I have a chance of reaching!) that would be really nice. Either in the comments or at my email: hogg dot russell at gmail dot com.
Wow. That Parasite review is so off base it’s genuinely sad.
*** Spoilers for Parasite (one of the best movies of the past ten years)***
If you haven’t already, go see Parasite. Don’t read any further until you have. Seriously, the movie is great. Don’t ruin it for yourself. Okay, here we go.
Bong Joon Ho does two brilliant things in Parasite. One is that he indicts the system and not rich people. A lesser artist would have made the rich couple the villains. Alex Taborrok is correct that that rich couple are not the villains. Taborrok misses that the capitalist system is the villain. Each character at all financial levels is stuck in their respective position in the system. The poor feed off of the rich and the rich feed off of the poor. Both are correct. Taborrok only sees one parasitic relationship.
The second brilliant piece of writing that sets Parasite above the typical upstairs/downstairs narrative is that Bong Joon Ho adds a sub-basement. This clearly expresses that the poor feed off of the poor as well as the rich. We often think (or are told) that capitalism isn’t a zero sum game. And it isn’t, as long as we only look at a section of it. Amazon has made Jeff Bezos wealthy, but it’s also brought a lot of value to millions and millions of people. Win-Win. Not zero-sum. Bong Joon Ho is suggesting that when we see that, we are only looking at a piece of the picture. We need to pull the camera back and see the whole picture.
The movie is suggesting that we’ve been brainwashed into believing that the system works and can lift everybody out of poverty. This is probably most clearly expressed by the son, at the end of the movie, believing that he will grow up to become rich and then rescue his father from the sub-basement prison his father is in.
Some updates on things I learned since making the Georgia voting law comment:
1) Although you can *vote* absentee with only a SSN, you cannot *request* the absentee ballot with only a SSN. People without an ID can still request an absentee ballot, but they need to upload a photo of a utility bill, paycheck, or some other document that shows their name or address. This is burdensome enough that I now think it is reasonable to summarize the bill as saying you need an ID to vote absentee (even though you technically can get by with just a utility bill, paycheck, etc.).
2) Secretary of State Raffensberger clarified the new law will still permit nonpartisan groups to give unlabeled water bottles to poll workers, who can then distribute them. [1] I now feel more confident calling the claim that the law makes it illegal to distribute water "lacking important context."
3) Some people asked why existing voter intimidation laws didn't already ban political groups from distributing food or water at the polls. I think the answer is that they did, but in practice there were still issues because e.g. poll workers didn't realize this was illegal. See this comment [2] for some information about that.
4) I still overall feel that the law expands voting access, including in urban areas. However, it still might make sense to oppose it if you are very concerned about certain powers being stripped from the SoS and given to the legislature.
I would love to have an actual lawyer explain how the text of the bill supports SoS Raffensbergers claim. I've read the actual text, and it sure didn't seem to me that it allowed regular people, without any connections to campaigns, from giving out food/water. It seemed to pretty clearly prevent anyone from giving out anything in any context. If there is some special legal reason this isn't the case, then the text of the law, to a lay person, completely obscures this point.
Also, I generally agree with claims that the effects of the bill are dramatically overblown by the media/Democrats. I think the bill won't actually do very much, but I also think that the impulses behind the bill are pretty reprehensible (also, all that comparisons to other states convince me of is that _lots_ of states have really really bad laws around voter access)
I am an actual lawyer. Raffensberger is full of shit. The text of the law applies to any "person... giving... food and drink... to an elector" within 25 feet of any voter standing in line. There is no exception for nonpartisan groups. Given how easy it would be to prohibit electioneering activity (while still enabling nonpartisan groups), I don't see any way to avoid the conclusion that this provision was included, at least in part, to make voting in crowded districts less pleasant.
I wish we had a functioning media which could investigate the question of whether partisan groups handing out partisan-labelled water bottles to voters waiting in line is actually something that has happened or just some theoretical possibility.
What I _would_ say is that if there's regularly voting queues long enough that people need provisions while waiting in them, then _that's_ the problem that should be getting solved, and not all these other ones. The insistence on using expensive voting machines which limit the number of people who can vote in parallel rather than simple pencil-and-paper ballots seems to be a cause of a lot of voting problems in the US.
Take a look at link [2] above -- there were some cases of politicians handing out water or pizza, and Raffensperger was already trying to crack down on this before the 2020 election.
I agree that shortening voting lines should be a priority, and I also think the new law makes some changes aimed at shortening lines, like breaking up precincts where wait times get longer than an hour.
I think the point is that you need to give the water to poll workers, for them to distribute.
For an object-level account of why someone might want prohibitions on distributing food and water, take a look at link [2] above.
On a less object-level, I want to note that Raffensberger is someone whom I -- and I think most other observers -- trust a lot. He's the one who stood up to Trump's demands to find 11,000 more votes, and part of the new law seems to be a petty swipe at him for sending out absentee ballot applications to all Georgians against the legislature's will. He's also criticized the parts of the law which strip powers from the SoS. So when he voices support for the other parts of the law, including the parts that prevent distribution of food and water at polling places, I'm inclined to believe that he's not "full of shit" and defending laws whose only purpose is to "make voting in crowded districts less pleasant." I'm inclined to believe that he honestly thinks the laws are good (though it's always possible he's wrong).
That's a pretty gullible position. Raffensberger is desperately trying to hang on to his career as a Republican politician. I do not think that makes him a credible source. Regardless, I actually read the law, and it says the opposite of what he's claiming. Maybe he means certain people won't be prosecuted, but he's just wrong about what the law says.
Raffensberger* is seeing the consequences of his* integrity. I doubt he* anticipated them back in December/January. It's certainly plausible to expect that, in any future scenario, his* updated expectations may produce different behaviors. Whether their intent or not, this certainly seems to be a consequence of the new law.
*Really, this applies not just to Raffensberger but Republican elected officials.
I feel like we're talking past each other. Paragraph (e) makes an exception for poll workers making water available from an unattended receptacle. So I think the point is that if some election observers think people look dehydrated waiting in long lines, they are free to buy some water bottles, give them to the poll workers, and then the poll workers can put the water bottles out on a table or whatever. That's what I'm interpreting Raffensberger's clarification to mean, and I see no contradiction with the text of the law.
Anyway, someone pointed out below that this is a non-politics thread, so we should probably stop discussing here. Feel free to comment on the original comment from last week if you'd like to continue.
You don't think that decreasing the number of dropboxes and artificially requiring them to be only accessible during the hours that polling stations are open will have a very obvious effect on people's ability to vote? And reducing the number of drop boxes and polling places in general?
Some sort of divergence between local official results and local polling, or some example of someone getting caught doing something. If this is actually affecting results, you'd expect the former, and if this is common, you'd expect the latter.
The usual drop box for absentee ballots is a USPS box, of which there are thousands. “Drop boxes” outside polling stations would only come into play if you neglected to return your absentee ballot early enough for the mail. And installing, monitoring, and collecting a secure 24/7 temporary drop box away from a polling station seems a nontrivial challenge, for minimal gain.
Remember, the number of “drop boxes” in Georgia before 2020, and the number in the future had this law not passed, was zero.
Thanks, I was about to say this -- if the law were never passed (or if it were repealed now) then there wouldn't be any drop boxes at all.
Of course, you might still prefer for there to be even more drop boxes, or more accessible drop boxes. These are reasonable things to want. But I do think we should track the distinction between "this law is a too-small step in the right direction" and "this law is a big step in the wrong direction." Otherwise you end up punishing people for doing good things and rewarding them for doing nothing.
"People without an ID can still request an absentee ballot, but they need to upload a photo of a utility bill, paycheck, or some other document that shows their name or address."
I don't know if I'd call that voter suppression, though. In my previous job in local government, we required proof of residence to support applications, and one particular case was a pain because all they had as proof of independent residence was the mailing label from a mail order catalogue. Not good enough. Utility bills etc. were the standard.
So from that alone, I can't see the Georgian public service as being unreasonable, it sounds as if they are simply applying the kinds of standards that are commonplace when dealing with local government and requesting forms.
I don't think I would call that voter suppression either, or at least I don't think it's any more restrictive than the rules in most other states.
I just wanted to flag that I now consider "you need an ID to vote absentee" as a fair summary of that part of the law, whereas I previously thought it was a dishonest summary.
Many people from a design background think that the kinds of standards that are commonplace when dealing with local government and requesting forms are citizen services suppression. Making people file taxes in order to get their child support would be an example.
I think I was somewhat surprised by this diagram. Unsurprisingly the state I liv sin is one where it's easy to vote, but I found myself surprised that it was hard to vote in NH.
Yeah, that is strange. As a college student in NH I believe I could same-day register to vote with just my student ID, so I got the impression it was very easy. Now I'm wondering if the process is significantly harder for non-students.
Note that the most convenient state, Oregon, exclusively does mail-in ballots.
There is a massive difference in ease of voting between "I have to go to a place on a specific time/day", and "I have a full 2 weeks to find an hour to go through a bit of mail at my convenience".
Someone who works a job and has to juggle children will struggle to find a good time to go to a polling place, but that same person might be able to spend 30 minutes at 10pm on a Friday filling in a ballot, and then just dropping it in the mail.
Oregon's mail-in ballots are sent to registered voters who have a confirmed address. This is quite different from mail-ins in other states that sent ballots to any name and address found anywhere on a government database. An Australian friend in California received ballots for three different people at his home. And mail-ins are just one problem. 1) some states also weakened or removed the need for signature checks, 2) many drop boxes have zero chain of custody on the way to the counting centers, 3) counts are not done with observers present etc. Further, Oregon is now considering mailing ballots to anyone with a drivers license at the same time they issue drivers licenses to illegal immigrants. There is no modern county in the world that engages in such reckless abandonment of basic election security. Not one. The American embrace of insecure voting in the last year is an incredibly approach that is guaranteed to erode trust in the process.
I've now realized this one's a no-politics thread. I disagree with the gist of your comment, but let's pick up the discussion on next week's thread, where politics is allowed.
Check out the chart of what they count as contributing to the cost of voting. Ask yourself if all of those things are clearly a bad idea if you care about the integrity of your state's vote.
Consider also that a lot of attitudes and habits in NH might contribute to an average NH resident not thinking that certain things are a hardship. For example, except in a few cities, there is not a lot of public transportation, and so most people have to drive and thus automatically have a driver's license on them. Also, large parts of the map have neither DSL nor cable, and residents there are not really looking forward to doing things online.
(Yes, I also think it's really easy to vote in NH, and I don't think I ever met anyone who thought it was hard.)
Yeah it seem like the metrics are designed for a certain set of circumstances that don’t match NH. Eg NH has lots of small polling places so lines are not bad and registering in person day-of is quick and easy, so there’s no need to do it online. Vs MA where I frequently failed to vote because I would move around the city to a different voting area, and you have to update your registration well ahead of voting day, and you can only *actually* do it online if you have an in-state ID card.
BTW you don’t actually need any ID to vote in NH, you can just sign an affidavit asserting you are who you are.
Coming from NH, this Georgia debacle about giving water to voters waiting in line to vote looks really strange. Personally, I don't think I ever had to wait long enough to as much as study my surroundings.
Consider: if, according to that study, it's hard to vote in NH, can we believe that other claims in it reflect reality?
That study has some serious issues, but I don't want to go into these in an odd-numbered thread.
I think when evaluating whether a state makes it easy to vote, you shouldn't be looking at the median *voter*, but something like the median *non*-voter or the median *marginal* voter. 90% of people do have drivers licenses, but somewhere between 5 and 10% of citizens in the United States don't. Something that's really easy for the average upper middle class person might be really hard for the person that might actually swing between voting and non-voting.
Looking at the typical non-voter will tell you what improvements you need to make to make voting more accessible. It does not tell you how accessible voting is in the state, or provide a useful basis for ranking across states.
In that case the statement of the problem should be up front in the article. I can't spare the time to read through the article and everything linked to it carefully enough, so I can't figure out what, if anything, the computed index is supposed to be predictive of. It's supposed to be descriptive of something called "cost of voting", but they don't seem to tell us for whom or how aggregated over the voting population.
The following claim is in one of the appendices: "In particular, and with considerable emphasis, scholars find the amount of time in advance of the election that one has to register to vote influences the likelihood of voting" (hurray, an actual meaningful result!) but I'm not seeing anything like this for the other measures they included, nor am I seeing any attempts to correlate the resulting index with any actual numbers. (I'm guessing that, had they actually made those attempts, the index wouldn't have included everything and the kitchen sink.)
When practical purposes recede, partisanship can have greater determination. There's little evidence for these laws having any effect at all, making them a sort of symbolic security theater.
The fact that this is all based on rankings seems like it's next to worthless, as it gives no idea of the actual degree of difference.
Maybe Oregon is a voters utopia where merely thinking about your desired candidate automatically registers a vote in their favor, and Texas a dystopian hellscape where you've got to crawl under 6 feet of barbed wire to get to the polling booth.
Or maybe all states largely identical and it's just a small degree of difference separating them.
This article and map would look identical in both cases.
That description of voting in Oregon is not far off. Basically any contact with the state registers you to vote. The ballot and info book are mailed to you about two weeks early. You fill it out and drop it in a box whenever you feel like, and the boxes are like 2 miles away. For extra credit you can go to a web page to verify it's been counted. The last voting rights debates I heard were whether to include stamps for people who can't drive and don't have stamps laying around, and whether to allow people to vote while they are currently in jail.
I never missed an election in 15 years in California. I missed three or four elections in 7 years in Texas, because I didn't even know the election was happening until a week before, and couldn't be bothered to study up in those last few days, find out when it was happening, and go to a polling place.
I've never missed a *federal* election in Texas, but the fact that I, a relatively politically engaged and high status individual, have missed a significant fraction of elections suggests that it's really bad here.
I have several relatives on my dad's side who have been diagnosed with serious mental disorders. Between grandparents, dad, aunts, uncles, cousins, my siblings, and self, we’ve got 6 diagnoses of bipolar or schizoaffective disorder (five of whom have been institutionalized at some point) out of a sample size of 21.
The new Mrs. and I are eager to settle down and having fun family planning talks, so I am curious: What would the Biodeterminist’s Guide to Parenting suggest for reducing the chances that the family propensity for mental disorders materializes in our future kiddoes?
I know nothing about the biodeterminist guide but as someone who has lost three family members to schizophrenia and then suicide, I would do all you can to impress upon your kids the importance of avoiding drugs. It seems that psychotropic drug use + genetic predisposition was a trigger for two of the three.
I’m sorry for your loss. The anecdotes on my side are similar, and this is advice I practice. Even if the direction of the causal arrow is officially undetermined, it is just not worth the risk to me.
I've referenced the Living Well With Schizophrenia channel here before, and I should note that the woman behind that did a video about marijuana & schizophrenia. To her there was no question in her experience that it makes her psychosis significantly worse and this wasn't worth it. She didn't indicate any reluctance at giving it up either, in contrast to her pattern of fearing her own anti-psychotic medication. She's also currently pregnant with her first child and has discussed her decision to have one and the risks given the heritability of schizophrenia.
I should have noted that she reported a 10% risk of her child having it given that she has it and her husband is not known to have any predisposition for it. If you are merely related to others who have it rather than having it yourself, it would presumably be significantly lower (though still above the base rate).
Start sooner rather than later. Increased paternal age increases the risk of schizophrenia. (Sry couldn’t paste the link from my phone but google it. There’s a study from 2001.)
There might be someone doing genetic counseling at your local hospital. They'll be able to tell you what you can get tested for, what your odds are of passing it along, and what else can be done to avoid it. They wouldn't know everything, but it's probably better than nothing.
Also don't know about the BGP, so this may not be the kind of advice you're looking for. But, having a high ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences Score) has a substantial correlation with both incidence and outcomes in severe mental illness, that is not due to genetics alone. (Unsurprisingly, it's thought to be G x E interactions.) Since some ACE events are not controllable, and I also assume you are not planning to abuse your kids, the only actionable recommendation I can think is to be vigilant about others' behavior around them. I think there's a sunnier way to think about this, though, which is that a having a childhood in a healthy home is a protective factor, and if you can swing that you're already doing a lot "right".
Seconding discouraging your kids from using cannabis, at the very least while they are minors, preferably until they age out of the critical window in young adulthood where SMI tends to emerge. The research is a bit more equivocal than the consensus that comes from clinicians and patients who have direct experience. But your family history especially lends to this recommendation, considering some folks are winding up further along the BD-SCZ continuum than others, and psychotic morbidity is correlated with poorer outcomes.
I'm sure you'll have thought of this yourself, but knowledge is power. If none of those six folks are you or immediate family, your kids' risk will be lower, but you also might not have as much experience with the clinical picture of bipolar/schizoaffective. Bipolar-type illness is progressive: it's hard to detangle cause and effect, but there's thought be a "kindling" process (a metaphor that's sort of borrowed from epilepsy, although the process could be in fact be physiologically related) whereby every mood episode you have increases the likelihood of further, more severe episodes. People who go on to develop bipolar often have recurring episodes of depression in childhood. If your kids experience mental health difficulties, expeditious treatment from informed professionals who are aware of the family history is probably a really good idea.
The bad news about bipolar is that it's highly heritable, but the good news is that it's highly treatable, and the sooner you catch it, the better. A bit of a discursion, but it's unfortunate that so much morbidity comes from lack of timely diagnosis and treatment, because the treatments are so effective (grading on a psychiatry curve). The other big issue, as you probably know, is treatment compliance.
I expect we'll have a better idea of how to prevent SMI in the coming years, so stay abreast of the research.
Thanks for the thoughts. Our family has a lot of super-smart individuals in it, so I think especially among the last generation there was a lot of denial and temptation to write off adolescent warning signs as part and parcel of so and so's brilliance/being misunderstood/something she will grow out of. Hopefully that's an area will be more attuned to.
It might sound kind of redundant to say that I like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocketlab, etc because they actually launch stuff into space, but before them a lot of space startups tended to follow a depressingly predictable pattern: they'd found a company with some minimal seed money, make a big press release saying they were going to do XYZ, and then hope to somehow use that attention to get the funding to see if they could actually do XYZ. It never worked.
There's still a few of those now, but they mostly just get ignored.
I've become a lot more pessimistic about the prospects for nuclear power over the past few years. It just can't seem to get past the burden of too-expensive upfront costs, not even with new reactor designs (the NuScale Power Plant is predictably going into cost overruns and delays, and it's looking like they've got a bootstrap problem with the "modular" idea - they need enough orders to make it profitable to build the module factory to meet those orders). If there is going to be any nuclear renaissance in the US, it will probably have to be built and operated by a US federal agency.
There is hope, not a lot, but some. First, the two in Georgia will be finished, they had bunches of troubles, two big ones were an incomplete design (the Chinese ones had a completely different secondary side) and trades that hadn't built nuclear in a long time and had lost the undemanding of nuclear standards. After these are done, the next two should be much faster and therefore cheaper.
There is some news of Southern Company, Bechtel, and Westinghouse building more in Poland. We'll see what happens. Turkey Point in Fl hasn't ruled out building but I haven't seen any news lately. We'll see when the ones in GA come online what they say, they don't have many good options to power Miami at the very end of the grid surrounded by ocean and swamp with a lot of hurricane risk.
SMRs will likely be built for no other reason than the military (Army) has wanted one for a very long time but after SL1 gave up for 50 years, but an SMR fills a need for them and the Govment will push hard to get it done. There will be problems getting the NRC to adapt the regulations to allow one crew to operate multiple reactors so it may never actually be used on the civilian side, but the military doesn't answer to the NRC, even Naval Reactors have a different regulatory body obviously called Naval Reactors or NR.
I wonder about the Army SMRs. If they can get them small and compact enough to be flown in by plane (or carried by helicopter or truck) while generating a few megawatts of electrical power, they'd be tremendously useful. My only real concern would be the politics of allied governments being willing to support having them in their territory, plus the greater danger in having to potentially leave them behind in a hurry.
It'd be a lot easier and simpler to make those if they could use Highly Enriched Uranium or Plutonium-239 as fuel. HEU probably is too dangerous to use out in the field besides in ships or (obviously) nuclear weapons, because if you've stolen some putting together a "gun-type" nuclear weapon isn't tremendously difficult. But Plutonium-239 actually would be pretty safe - you need an "implosion-type" nuclear weapon to actually use it, and that's not something a terrorist group is going to put together.
Not to mention that even weapons-grade plutonium isn't weapons-grade anymore after it's been in a reactor for a few weeks - 240Pu contamination is treated as irreversible even by state-level actors. I'm not saying a terrorist group wouldn't appreciate having a free nuclear reactor - to state the obvious, they need electricity too, and also if you can manage to dust it plutonium's a decent chemical/radiological weapon - but you're not making a nuke with that even if you actually have both the know-how and manufacturing precision to construct a Swan.
I'm not sure that you'd find it useless after that short a time. A couple weeks was typical at Hanford during breeding, and while they were trying to get as much Pu 239 as they could, they probably weren't pushing it to the limits of possibility. Unless you're thinking of things like the low-burnup Pu they used in the W80-1.
That's the 239Pu obtained from a couple of weeks of burning uranium (which is the equivalent of a bit under one week of burning the Pu as far as 240Pu contamination goes - 240Pu production is proportional to the amount of 239Pu that exists in the fuel, and 239Np has a 2.4-day half-life). I'm saying that if you take your bred 239Pu (presumably reprocessed from that already) and then use that as fuel for your mini-reactor, after a few weeks in the latter it's going to be rather significantly more contaminated (after 3 weeks you'd have ~quintupled your chance of predetonation fizzle).
I mean, admittedly I'm not sure of the exact numbers on how close they cut it in actual fission primaries, so you might still have a decent chance of it going off.
Nuclear 'anything' is unreasonably feared and hated in the US. Until that changes nuclear power gets nothing. I was listening to B. Weinstein's podcast and he said he wouldn't eat fish from the pacific ocean, because you could see traces of Fukushima in the radioactivity of the fish. Assuming that's true, what's the banana equivalent dose? (https://blog.xkcd.com/2011/03/19/radiation-chart/)
I think this could confuse matters because some people would be getting more of their vitamin D from sunlight and also getting their nitric oxide, while other people would just be getting their vitamin D from supplements.
All the studies are confusing, but what I took away from them was that *if* you are deficient in Vitamin D *and* have other problems (old, fat, etc.) *and* manage to catch Covid-19, *then* supplementation helps (ideally before you get infected) because it's bringing you back up to where you should be with regards to Vitamin D levels, and Vitamin D has complicated role in blood pressure regulation, so having better blood pressure control etc. helps recovery from Covid-19, rather than Vitamin D *directly* affecting Covid-19.
I have no idea if that shakes out to "Vitamin D cures Covid" or not.
Georgia will be a blue state with or without the law; I don't even understand the hubbub. Rich suburbs used to be bastions of voter ID back in 2012; why do you guys think big companies have switched to opposing it now?
If some populations purportedly have "lower average IQ" how come they all speak multiple languages when the "higher IQ" ones struggle with what they learn at school? Surely learning and being able to communicate in multiple languages requires a modicum of intelligence above the 75-to-90 scores reported by the "national IQ" studies?
>when the "higher IQ" ones struggle with what they learn at school?
Do you mean that higher IQ nations struggle with learning another language at school?
There's mounting research suggesting we teach languages in school astoundingly poorly. Traditional instruction puts a heavy emphasis on simply memorizing grammar patterns, which are (not quite but) close to useless. With massive amounts of input, your brain will just automatically do all the pattern matching for you in the background.
Terry Waltz claims that when she teaches using comprehensible input instead of traditional methods, there is basically no bell curve. That might be a slight exaggeration, but it sounds like other teachers have similar experiences. JFK High School switched to a mass immersion (extensive reading) approach, brought their AP Chinese pass rate from 50% to 100%. SEG Private School in Japan switched to a similar approach, the average student now scores in the top 2% on the national English exam, with their lowest scoring still in the top quartile. It tracks with family members I know who say that after moving abroad, they learned more in six months than from eight years of traditional study. It tracks with self reports from the second language learning community about the critical importance of high volumes of input.
So it seems to me like there is still a lot of low hanging fruit in institutional language learning, and some of the independent learners (with high metis!) are figuring this out on their own. There's still a profound open question as to why high schools and universities are not switching to CI methods more quickly. (I think there's like a <10% chance they have been right all along, >90% that some weird institutional pressures or switching costs have prevented adaptation.)
Even if Terry Waltz was exaggerating a bit, these methods leave little room for IQ to explain progress. Maybe it matters at the margins, but in general, the person with the most exposure to the language, especially comprehensible chunks, will develop the fastest.
I was confused on whether he was saying that we DO teach language well, and we still can't learn despite our average higher IQs, or that we have such higher IQs and still can't figure out how to teach well.
Another reason for the US in particular not being the best at teaching second languages through schools is that there isn't really a huge need for the average American to learn one. We have a ton of Hispanic immigrants yes, but most of them speak at least a little English and even if they don't, their kids do. And even if ALL hispanic immigrants spoke absolutely no english, that leaves huge swaths of the country that don't have many immigrants, meaning that students won't have any real need to use a second language. Add on top that as you said, we teach it poorly anyway and almost certainly we teach it too late.
Is this information actionable if you're self-teaching?
Yes. If you want to learn a language, read up on a bit of the basics, and then just drown yourself in comprehensible input - the comprehensible part there is key. You won't learn shit from say, translated analytical philosophy. Everyday situations are a wonderful teacher. Our brains are pattern-matching machines, all you really need to do is give that machinery lots and lots of food.
I believe so. There are various debates on the specifics, but there's significant overlap across self taught communities: Enormous volumes of input, both reading and listening, supplemented by, but not over reliant on, spaced repetition software. It is a very long, time intensive process. Time on target matters a lot (that's why moving to a country is so useful, constant moments of opportunity to learn throughout each day).
Can you be more specific? What are these "low-IQ" nations that widely speak multiple languages?
I think he means Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Philippines, and much of Sub-Saharan Africa (DRC, Nigeria, Tanzania, etc.). Linguistic diversity is fairly typical for traditional societies.
A possibly relevant example datum gleaned from reading a book about Romani (AKA 'Gypsy') musicians in Northern Greece - as professional musicians serving multiple ethnic groups (this is the Balkans) they have to be fluent in Greek, Albanian, Vlach, and Bulgarian/Macedonian. Their native language that they speak at home, also called Romani, is related to Sanskrit. They are greatly discriminated against, much like African Americans are in the US, and it's possible that generations of suffering prejudice and poverty causes an IQ loss.
> it's possible that generations of suffering prejudice and poverty causes an IQ loss.
What would be the mechanism for that?
The inverse of whatever the Flynn effect is, I imagine.
IQ is tested in some medium other than the subject's own oral culture, so the ability to function effectively in that medium is going to be important. I would suggest that prejudice and poverty are always going to make individuals less adept at using various media than their non-discriminated against, richer peers (note the obvious exceptions here like East European urban Jews were not poor). But then again I believe IQ testing to be a self-fulfilling justification for bourgeoisie domination of society, so I have a clear bias here...
The Romani situation is directly comparable to the Ashkenazi Jewish situation (they existed in the same circumstances in the same location), so assuming that they're low-IQ just because of that seems pretty premature
> Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed.
I assume 'politics' includes culture war topics, which certainly includes comparative discussions involving population-level IQ.
I forgot to include that disclaimer on here until now, so I can't blame Pp.
Currently the even-numbered disclaimer appears above, but the thread is odd-numbered.
Thanks, fixed.
I do hope we have this discussion on an even thread sometime.
It's hard to say anything without knowing more about what you're referring to, but language acquisition has a critical period when it must be acquired, after which it becomes much more difficult. I would presume your polyglot population has repeated and (critically) early exposure to multiple languages, which is atypical among much of the West. Studies of "feral" children and deaf children suggest this critical period begins to close around age 5, typically, and is fully closed by puberty.
I'd also be curious how "can speak multiple languages" is measured. Do they have basic proficiency, ie can conduct basic business? Or are they fully fluent? The people I've known who were polyglots due to growing up in countries where many languages were spoken freely admit that they only speak one or two with any proficiency, but I'm not sure how typical that is.
No there are plenty of people learning languages past teenagehood. The only thing we know for sure becomes more difficult after childhood is getting the pronunciation right to "sound like a native".
>Do they have basic proficiency, ie can conduct basic business? Or are they fully fluent?
Usually they use those languages as vehicular devices to conduct business transactions, follow media, interact with the government and so on so I expect a fairly high level of proficiency in any of them even if they don't write novels in it.
I'm not really sure what you're talking about. My impression is that how many languages you easily speak mostly has to do with how many you're frequently exposed to. I would expect higher-IQ people to pick up languages they're exposed to slightly more easily, conditional on the same amount of exposure, but I'm not even sure about that.
Is any part of the standard IQ testing array about language ability? If not, I'm not sure that that expectation is well-founded. Intelligence need not equate to language-learning ability; the assumption it should is dangerous in that it conflates different intellectual processes into one basket labelled 'intelligence' without considering if there are very different things happening between e.g. language learning and ability to understand maths. I think the labelling of computing coding conventions as languages might help confuse this further as well: a language is not simply a logical system to be learnt and applied but rather a framing of thought and reality in a shared framework of concepts such that perfect translation is never possible. Intelligence may not necessarily correlate with the requirements to cope with multiple such frameworks.
They do test vocabulary and facility with manipulating concepts. But the vocab part is more things like ability to whip up definitions of words and knowing more esoteric ones - a less bright person exposed to many languages could be expected to be able to speak simply in many languages like he does in his native one.
But language comprehension is based on the language of the test, not different languages. Testing the ability of someone in one language tells us nothing about their ability in others. Again this seems to be an issue of labelling: whilst it's not inaccurate to call this language comprehension, it is not about comprehension of languages, just the one the test is in.
Yeah, I think I said as much. Perfectly reasonable to think that someone who's capable of complexity is in principle capable of it in many languages and someone who lacks that firepower can still manage his level in others. We mostly just teach foreign languages like shit.
Why are americans so bad at soccer? Why are brazilians so bad at hockey?
You know the US have won the women's world cup (foitball/soccer) 5 times in 9 editions. That's 5 of the 17 possible world cup wins in the last 30 years, so way over 25%.
That's pretty good going for a nation bad at the sport...
As usual, the person means that American *men* are bad at soccer.
But my understanding is that the US dominates women's soccer so much because of Title IX - US schools are required to spend something on girl's sports, and soccer has become a girl's sport here, while in the rest of the world, old-fashioned sexism keeps girls out of sports, so the US just has a much deeper pool than other countries do for the women's team.
The mensteam aren't that bad either. They've been to 6 out of the last 7 finals which is as good a record as Italy or England for example. Came third in 1930 as well, so the idea this is a new thing can be out to bed. They're currently ranked 20th in the world, which translates as pretty good at football.
I think the main reason the women's game does so well is that there's so many kids playing so a huge talent pool. Note England's women's team has started to do well half a generation after a concerted effort to get more girls playing football, and traditional strong women's football nations such as Norway have very established female leagues at youth level. I think there's success us based on the popularity of soccer as a kids sport regardless of gender. Whilst the college thing undoubtedly helped I suspect few top-class footballers go that route nowadays as that's three years of peak earnings passed up on in the various women's professional leagues.
Not sure there's a correlation here. It could be argued that one of the effects of a high-IQ population is they develop the efficiency of a unified language via cities, trade, schools etc.
That's an interesting notion. Does openness to new experience, which correlates with high IQ, lead to language convergence? The question is outside my experience. And there seems like too many feedback loops and confounders (wealth -> better nutrition -> increased IQ -> wealth -> better nutrition and so on) to eek out much more than a correlation.
Who knows. I just think the utility of shared language (for trade, social trust, sharing ideas etc) is likely greater than any utility from exposing the brain to new languages.
Oh, I agree.
Openness itself is not driven by a unitary mechanism. The more aesthetic receptivity side is at least partially grounded in latent inhibition - an unconscious mechanism that basically decides if connections are bullshit or not. The higher the inhibition, the more concrete a connection has to be to register as real and meaningful and not fanciful nonsense. Lower it, and more and more tenuous connections start seeming like there's something there.
If that sounds like presuming that things that aren't real are real, you're absolutely right: aesthetic openness is linked to things that are a risk factor for psychosis and mental illness tends to run in artists' families. The artists themselves have obviously been selected so they're not the most crippling sufferers.
The other half of the trait domain is the one more directly related to intelligence, and more than that to a willingness to expend effort in processing things even without external reward. It also contains narrower traits like self-assessed intelligence (which is not merely an inaccurate/noisy measure of the person's intelligence, it's a personality trait with its own network of correlations)
1. This is orthogonal to the point. Most regions *do* have a unified language for communication purposes, but their populations speak it *in addition* to their local language.
2. China is among the higher-IQ nations according to the "national IQ data" yet it features a lot of linguistic diversity, so even the point you're trying to make falls apart.
I don't want to beat the IQ point too hard because it's confounded to heck, but Mandarin has pretty good adoption in the higher IQ areas of China (central and the Eastern seaboard) and lower adoption in the lower IQ areas. I certainly don't want to push a 'one cause' model. But looking within China, adoption of Mandarin seems moderately well predicted by IQ in a relative sense. There's probably a good correlation with things like nutrition, industrialization, economic opportunity, etc.
That's just looking at a province-level map. There's also a pretty big divide between urban and rural areas in China, even within a province.
(I say this as someone who has taught English in China)
Do you mean they speak multiple languages approximately natively? First-language acquisition is hardcoded into the brain and is more or less unrelated to the processing needed for IQ tests. General intelligence varies a lot, but ability to understand grammatical rules necessary for communication varies very little (ability to understand grammatical rules for signalling prestige is a different thing). There are many instances of people with severe intellectual disabilities but normal language processing skills, and conversely people with high intelligence but disorders that make them unable to use language; for more detail read The Language Instinct or similar.
"Surely learning and being able to communicate in multiple languages requires a modicum of intelligence above the 75-to-90 scores reported by the "national IQ" studies"
Speaking multiple languages at a 16th percentile level by first world standards is hardly the same as speaking one language at a 99th percentile level by first world standards.
There's no such thing as "percentile level" for language acquisition; you're either able to function in a given language environment, or you're not. There *are* tests that assess your ability to function in increasingly "difficult" environments, such as the CEFR scale (A1 to C2) or the DLI grading but they do not use percentiles because ranking people relatively doesn't make sense, it's an absolute thing.
"There's no such thing as "percentile level" for language acquisition"
Sure there are; see the ACT and SAT.
Possibly illustrates that you shouldn't take population level IQ figures at face value as telling you anything very meaningful
They're meaningful.
Thank you for that detailed and informative response
Sure. If you want a slightly more meaningful one, compare Japan and Indonesia. When Japan had the same GDP per capita as a % of the U.S. Indonesia has now, it was making real progress in science. Today, despite having more than twice the population of Japan, Indonesia is a vast wasteland when it comes to scientific accomplishment (to such a degree that it's not even in the top 50 in the Nature Index): https://www.natureindex.com/annual-tables/2020/country/all
I don’t know enough to agree or disagree but a more useful comparison would be Singapore. It’s not only in the same area of the world, it started from a similar base point as Indonesia and even contains a microcosm of Indonesia within its borders with ethnic Malays. So just as Singapore has outpaced Indonesia so have the ethnic Singaporean Chinese outpaced ethnic Singaporean Malays, much to the chagrin of the Singaporean govt which has done so much to erase the differences.
"it started from a similar base point as Indonesia"
No it didn't; it was the richest part of Asia during the 1930s. Singapore is too small to extrapolate from, in my opinion.
I feel like this argument doesn't quite cut the way you want it to.
Suppose we assume that:
1) IQ in a population follows a normal distribution
2) A country's scientific advancement is driven by the number of high-IQ outliers produced.
3) Different ethnic groups have genetic differences that cause them to have different mean IQs.
In this world, I would expect the high IQ ethnicities to punch above their weight technologically, but I wouldn't expect them to totally dominate. Bigger populations just have more chances to roll the dice, even when those dice are loaded against them.
Also, Indonesia is quite ethnically diverse, and therefore very diverse genetically, so you'd expect a place like Indonesia to have a greater chance of coughing up occasional outliers than a place like Japan that has a lot less genetic diversity.
I think the historical record suggests a very different model of technological advancement: every once in a while a geographical zone will, for complex reasons, become a hotbed of scientific activity, and end up drawing lots of people into a mutually supportive web. This boom of technological developments eventually burns itself out, and the torch is passed to the next up-and-coming innovation zone. Japan was home to a post-war boom that has since largely fizzled out, with Chinese and Korean firms stepping in to pick things back up in that region (and meanwhile back in the states, the Bay Area is nearing the end of its explosive period).
The fact that Africa, home to large populations and significant human biodiversity, is so totally left behind in the global tech game, IMO suggests strongly that technological advancement is about a lot more than a gene pool's ability to cough up geniuses.
This sounds like a good argument, but like every argument in this space it is inconclusive.
It is completely plausible that urbanization/ the agricultural patterns in the big river basins created a selection pressure that led to the populations being much higher in the sort of intelligence that is useful for twenty-first century economic success.
Note, this is not what I think: What I think is that we don't know enough to be confindent.
The window for language learning is more or less "infancy to early childhood" for most of the population, and even in nations with "higher IQ", children of families or communities that speak multiple languages don't seem to have a problem with that. I don't believe in the "lower average IQ" thing, but I think the languages argument isn't a valid argument against it - that's exactly what you'd expect in countries where lots of people can get by in a single language.
Snarky answer: The smart people figured out early on that having everyone speak the same one or maybe two standard languages is more efficient than having everybody try to learn many languages, and then the smart people invented A: television and B: economies that could give every family a television set so that they could be exposed to the same 1-2 standard languages in early childhood.
Dialing back the snark, it's the economic part that is doing the heavy lifting there, and there are lots of reasons beyond average national IQ that a nation might not be able to afford to put a television set in every household.
Re: Georgia voting laws, I think the sole good pint made in the comment is about giving out water and food to people on line. A minor point as in who cares.
The rest of the comment seems like a hasty overreaction to the hasty overreaction by Democrats.
By far the most important point in the bill is taking away power form the Sec. of State. To use a purposefully bad pun, that trumps all.
Here's the NYT's point by point analysis. Admittedly, not objective politically, but has the merit of referencing text of the legislation
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/us/politics/georgia-voting-law-annotated.html
And here's Derek Thompson in The Atlantic with a "pox on both houses" article.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/georgia-voting-rights-fiasco/618537/
What that article doesn't mention is the blindingly obvious fact that Georgia is a Biden state with two Democratic senators that is zooming left at a rate of roughly a 1 point margin per year.
I was very happy that Scott mentioned the podcast. Thank you Scott! A lot of the guests do seem to have an ACX connection.
Here is the latest with Bean https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/8312646-bean-on-battleships-and-much-else-besides
I find my interviewing technique is still pretty poor though I think I did best on the one about the role of plague and climate change in the fall of the Roman Empire. https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/7554679-the-fate-of-rome-with-kyle-harper
The most popular one so far (by a multiple of 3) was with Alex Tabarrok (Scott has reviewed his book) He wrote a review of the Parasite that went against the standard view. It is a fun read and it is on the Marginal Revolution site here:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/06/the-gaslighting-of-parasite.html
If you have time for the podcast it is at:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/5262949-alex-tabarrok-versus-the-people-parasite-and-burning-reviewed
It doesn't say much more than the review but if you liked the film Burning you might enjoy the podcast too.
By the way if anyone can suggest good guests either with or without an ACX connection (and that I have a chance of reaching!) that would be really nice. Either in the comments or at my email: hogg dot russell at gmail dot com.
Thanks again Scott for the mention.
Wow. That Parasite review is so off base it’s genuinely sad.
*** Spoilers for Parasite (one of the best movies of the past ten years)***
If you haven’t already, go see Parasite. Don’t read any further until you have. Seriously, the movie is great. Don’t ruin it for yourself. Okay, here we go.
Bong Joon Ho does two brilliant things in Parasite. One is that he indicts the system and not rich people. A lesser artist would have made the rich couple the villains. Alex Taborrok is correct that that rich couple are not the villains. Taborrok misses that the capitalist system is the villain. Each character at all financial levels is stuck in their respective position in the system. The poor feed off of the rich and the rich feed off of the poor. Both are correct. Taborrok only sees one parasitic relationship.
The second brilliant piece of writing that sets Parasite above the typical upstairs/downstairs narrative is that Bong Joon Ho adds a sub-basement. This clearly expresses that the poor feed off of the poor as well as the rich. We often think (or are told) that capitalism isn’t a zero sum game. And it isn’t, as long as we only look at a section of it. Amazon has made Jeff Bezos wealthy, but it’s also brought a lot of value to millions and millions of people. Win-Win. Not zero-sum. Bong Joon Ho is suggesting that when we see that, we are only looking at a piece of the picture. We need to pull the camera back and see the whole picture.
The movie is suggesting that we’ve been brainwashed into believing that the system works and can lift everybody out of poverty. This is probably most clearly expressed by the son, at the end of the movie, believing that he will grow up to become rich and then rescue his father from the sub-basement prison his father is in.
And any thoughts on Burning? Which I preferred to Parasite.
I haven’t seen it yet. I’ll try to watch it this week and get back to you.
If you do please do get back to me. Will be very interested to hear.
Some updates on things I learned since making the Georgia voting law comment:
1) Although you can *vote* absentee with only a SSN, you cannot *request* the absentee ballot with only a SSN. People without an ID can still request an absentee ballot, but they need to upload a photo of a utility bill, paycheck, or some other document that shows their name or address. This is burdensome enough that I now think it is reasonable to summarize the bill as saying you need an ID to vote absentee (even though you technically can get by with just a utility bill, paycheck, etc.).
2) Secretary of State Raffensberger clarified the new law will still permit nonpartisan groups to give unlabeled water bottles to poll workers, who can then distribute them. [1] I now feel more confident calling the claim that the law makes it illegal to distribute water "lacking important context."
3) Some people asked why existing voter intimidation laws didn't already ban political groups from distributing food or water at the polls. I think the answer is that they did, but in practice there were still issues because e.g. poll workers didn't realize this was illegal. See this comment [2] for some information about that.
4) I still overall feel that the law expands voting access, including in urban areas. However, it still might make sense to oppose it if you are very concerned about certain powers being stripped from the SoS and given to the legislature.
[1] https://www.onlineathens.com/story/news/2021/03/30/georgia-gov-kemp-voting-chief-raffensperger-defend-election-overhaul-law/4810602001/
[2] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-166#comment-1666144
I would love to have an actual lawyer explain how the text of the bill supports SoS Raffensbergers claim. I've read the actual text, and it sure didn't seem to me that it allowed regular people, without any connections to campaigns, from giving out food/water. It seemed to pretty clearly prevent anyone from giving out anything in any context. If there is some special legal reason this isn't the case, then the text of the law, to a lay person, completely obscures this point.
Also, I generally agree with claims that the effects of the bill are dramatically overblown by the media/Democrats. I think the bill won't actually do very much, but I also think that the impulses behind the bill are pretty reprehensible (also, all that comparisons to other states convince me of is that _lots_ of states have really really bad laws around voter access)
I am an actual lawyer. Raffensberger is full of shit. The text of the law applies to any "person... giving... food and drink... to an elector" within 25 feet of any voter standing in line. There is no exception for nonpartisan groups. Given how easy it would be to prohibit electioneering activity (while still enabling nonpartisan groups), I don't see any way to avoid the conclusion that this provision was included, at least in part, to make voting in crowded districts less pleasant.
I wish we had a functioning media which could investigate the question of whether partisan groups handing out partisan-labelled water bottles to voters waiting in line is actually something that has happened or just some theoretical possibility.
What I _would_ say is that if there's regularly voting queues long enough that people need provisions while waiting in them, then _that's_ the problem that should be getting solved, and not all these other ones. The insistence on using expensive voting machines which limit the number of people who can vote in parallel rather than simple pencil-and-paper ballots seems to be a cause of a lot of voting problems in the US.
Take a look at link [2] above -- there were some cases of politicians handing out water or pizza, and Raffensperger was already trying to crack down on this before the 2020 election.
I agree that shortening voting lines should be a priority, and I also think the new law makes some changes aimed at shortening lines, like breaking up precincts where wait times get longer than an hour.
I think the point is that you need to give the water to poll workers, for them to distribute.
For an object-level account of why someone might want prohibitions on distributing food and water, take a look at link [2] above.
On a less object-level, I want to note that Raffensberger is someone whom I -- and I think most other observers -- trust a lot. He's the one who stood up to Trump's demands to find 11,000 more votes, and part of the new law seems to be a petty swipe at him for sending out absentee ballot applications to all Georgians against the legislature's will. He's also criticized the parts of the law which strip powers from the SoS. So when he voices support for the other parts of the law, including the parts that prevent distribution of food and water at polling places, I'm inclined to believe that he's not "full of shit" and defending laws whose only purpose is to "make voting in crowded districts less pleasant." I'm inclined to believe that he honestly thinks the laws are good (though it's always possible he's wrong).
That's a pretty gullible position. Raffensberger is desperately trying to hang on to his career as a Republican politician. I do not think that makes him a credible source. Regardless, I actually read the law, and it says the opposite of what he's claiming. Maybe he means certain people won't be prosecuted, but he's just wrong about what the law says.
Raffensberger* is seeing the consequences of his* integrity. I doubt he* anticipated them back in December/January. It's certainly plausible to expect that, in any future scenario, his* updated expectations may produce different behaviors. Whether their intent or not, this certainly seems to be a consequence of the new law.
*Really, this applies not just to Raffensberger but Republican elected officials.
(For those following along, the part of the law we're discussing is Section 33, on page 21 here: https://www.legis.ga.gov/api/legislation/document/20212022/201121 )
I feel like we're talking past each other. Paragraph (e) makes an exception for poll workers making water available from an unattended receptacle. So I think the point is that if some election observers think people look dehydrated waiting in long lines, they are free to buy some water bottles, give them to the poll workers, and then the poll workers can put the water bottles out on a table or whatever. That's what I'm interpreting Raffensberger's clarification to mean, and I see no contradiction with the text of the law.
Anyway, someone pointed out below that this is a non-politics thread, so we should probably stop discussing here. Feel free to comment on the original comment from last week if you'd like to continue.
You don't think that decreasing the number of dropboxes and artificially requiring them to be only accessible during the hours that polling stations are open will have a very obvious effect on people's ability to vote? And reducing the number of drop boxes and polling places in general?
Perhaps, but on the other hand surely it would provide a greater degree of security against ballot tampering/stuffing?
for which there is what evidence exactly?
What kind of evidence would you expect?
Some sort of divergence between local official results and local polling, or some example of someone getting caught doing something. If this is actually affecting results, you'd expect the former, and if this is common, you'd expect the latter.
The usual drop box for absentee ballots is a USPS box, of which there are thousands. “Drop boxes” outside polling stations would only come into play if you neglected to return your absentee ballot early enough for the mail. And installing, monitoring, and collecting a secure 24/7 temporary drop box away from a polling station seems a nontrivial challenge, for minimal gain.
Remember, the number of “drop boxes” in Georgia before 2020, and the number in the future had this law not passed, was zero.
Thanks, I was about to say this -- if the law were never passed (or if it were repealed now) then there wouldn't be any drop boxes at all.
Of course, you might still prefer for there to be even more drop boxes, or more accessible drop boxes. These are reasonable things to want. But I do think we should track the distinction between "this law is a too-small step in the right direction" and "this law is a big step in the wrong direction." Otherwise you end up punishing people for doing good things and rewarding them for doing nothing.
"People without an ID can still request an absentee ballot, but they need to upload a photo of a utility bill, paycheck, or some other document that shows their name or address."
I don't know if I'd call that voter suppression, though. In my previous job in local government, we required proof of residence to support applications, and one particular case was a pain because all they had as proof of independent residence was the mailing label from a mail order catalogue. Not good enough. Utility bills etc. were the standard.
So from that alone, I can't see the Georgian public service as being unreasonable, it sounds as if they are simply applying the kinds of standards that are commonplace when dealing with local government and requesting forms.
I don't think I would call that voter suppression either, or at least I don't think it's any more restrictive than the rules in most other states.
I just wanted to flag that I now consider "you need an ID to vote absentee" as a fair summary of that part of the law, whereas I previously thought it was a dishonest summary.
Many people from a design background think that the kinds of standards that are commonplace when dealing with local government and requesting forms are citizen services suppression. Making people file taxes in order to get their child support would be an example.
This is yet another instance of politics-in-an-odd-numbered-open-thread. Please take this to an even-numbered open thread.
https://newsroom.niu.edu/2020/10/13/how-hard-is-it-to-vote-in-your-state/
I think I was somewhat surprised by this diagram. Unsurprisingly the state I liv sin is one where it's easy to vote, but I found myself surprised that it was hard to vote in NH.
Yeah, that is strange. As a college student in NH I believe I could same-day register to vote with just my student ID, so I got the impression it was very easy. Now I'm wondering if the process is significantly harder for non-students.
Note that the most convenient state, Oregon, exclusively does mail-in ballots.
There is a massive difference in ease of voting between "I have to go to a place on a specific time/day", and "I have a full 2 weeks to find an hour to go through a bit of mail at my convenience".
Someone who works a job and has to juggle children will struggle to find a good time to go to a polling place, but that same person might be able to spend 30 minutes at 10pm on a Friday filling in a ballot, and then just dropping it in the mail.
Oregon's mail-in ballots are sent to registered voters who have a confirmed address. This is quite different from mail-ins in other states that sent ballots to any name and address found anywhere on a government database. An Australian friend in California received ballots for three different people at his home. And mail-ins are just one problem. 1) some states also weakened or removed the need for signature checks, 2) many drop boxes have zero chain of custody on the way to the counting centers, 3) counts are not done with observers present etc. Further, Oregon is now considering mailing ballots to anyone with a drivers license at the same time they issue drivers licenses to illegal immigrants. There is no modern county in the world that engages in such reckless abandonment of basic election security. Not one. The American embrace of insecure voting in the last year is an incredibly approach that is guaranteed to erode trust in the process.
I've now realized this one's a no-politics thread. I disagree with the gist of your comment, but let's pick up the discussion on next week's thread, where politics is allowed.
Oops. This seems to be a recurring pattern.
Check out the chart of what they count as contributing to the cost of voting. Ask yourself if all of those things are clearly a bad idea if you care about the integrity of your state's vote.
Consider also that a lot of attitudes and habits in NH might contribute to an average NH resident not thinking that certain things are a hardship. For example, except in a few cities, there is not a lot of public transportation, and so most people have to drive and thus automatically have a driver's license on them. Also, large parts of the map have neither DSL nor cable, and residents there are not really looking forward to doing things online.
(Yes, I also think it's really easy to vote in NH, and I don't think I ever met anyone who thought it was hard.)
Yeah it seem like the metrics are designed for a certain set of circumstances that don’t match NH. Eg NH has lots of small polling places so lines are not bad and registering in person day-of is quick and easy, so there’s no need to do it online. Vs MA where I frequently failed to vote because I would move around the city to a different voting area, and you have to update your registration well ahead of voting day, and you can only *actually* do it online if you have an in-state ID card.
BTW you don’t actually need any ID to vote in NH, you can just sign an affidavit asserting you are who you are.
Coming from NH, this Georgia debacle about giving water to voters waiting in line to vote looks really strange. Personally, I don't think I ever had to wait long enough to as much as study my surroundings.
Consider: if, according to that study, it's hard to vote in NH, can we believe that other claims in it reflect reality?
That study has some serious issues, but I don't want to go into these in an odd-numbered thread.
I think when evaluating whether a state makes it easy to vote, you shouldn't be looking at the median *voter*, but something like the median *non*-voter or the median *marginal* voter. 90% of people do have drivers licenses, but somewhere between 5 and 10% of citizens in the United States don't. Something that's really easy for the average upper middle class person might be really hard for the person that might actually swing between voting and non-voting.
Looking at the typical non-voter will tell you what improvements you need to make to make voting more accessible. It does not tell you how accessible voting is in the state, or provide a useful basis for ranking across states.
In that case the statement of the problem should be up front in the article. I can't spare the time to read through the article and everything linked to it carefully enough, so I can't figure out what, if anything, the computed index is supposed to be predictive of. It's supposed to be descriptive of something called "cost of voting", but they don't seem to tell us for whom or how aggregated over the voting population.
The following claim is in one of the appendices: "In particular, and with considerable emphasis, scholars find the amount of time in advance of the election that one has to register to vote influences the likelihood of voting" (hurray, an actual meaningful result!) but I'm not seeing anything like this for the other measures they included, nor am I seeing any attempts to correlate the resulting index with any actual numbers. (I'm guessing that, had they actually made those attempts, the index wouldn't have included everything and the kitchen sink.)
Surprised by how closely it correlates to partisanship.
When practical purposes recede, partisanship can have greater determination. There's little evidence for these laws having any effect at all, making them a sort of symbolic security theater.
The fact that this is all based on rankings seems like it's next to worthless, as it gives no idea of the actual degree of difference.
Maybe Oregon is a voters utopia where merely thinking about your desired candidate automatically registers a vote in their favor, and Texas a dystopian hellscape where you've got to crawl under 6 feet of barbed wire to get to the polling booth.
Or maybe all states largely identical and it's just a small degree of difference separating them.
This article and map would look identical in both cases.
That description of voting in Oregon is not far off. Basically any contact with the state registers you to vote. The ballot and info book are mailed to you about two weeks early. You fill it out and drop it in a box whenever you feel like, and the boxes are like 2 miles away. For extra credit you can go to a web page to verify it's been counted. The last voting rights debates I heard were whether to include stamps for people who can't drive and don't have stamps laying around, and whether to allow people to vote while they are currently in jail.
I never missed an election in 15 years in California. I missed three or four elections in 7 years in Texas, because I didn't even know the election was happening until a week before, and couldn't be bothered to study up in those last few days, find out when it was happening, and go to a polling place.
I've never missed a *federal* election in Texas, but the fact that I, a relatively politically engaged and high status individual, have missed a significant fraction of elections suggests that it's really bad here.
I have several relatives on my dad's side who have been diagnosed with serious mental disorders. Between grandparents, dad, aunts, uncles, cousins, my siblings, and self, we’ve got 6 diagnoses of bipolar or schizoaffective disorder (five of whom have been institutionalized at some point) out of a sample size of 21.
The new Mrs. and I are eager to settle down and having fun family planning talks, so I am curious: What would the Biodeterminist’s Guide to Parenting suggest for reducing the chances that the family propensity for mental disorders materializes in our future kiddoes?
I know nothing about the biodeterminist guide but as someone who has lost three family members to schizophrenia and then suicide, I would do all you can to impress upon your kids the importance of avoiding drugs. It seems that psychotropic drug use + genetic predisposition was a trigger for two of the three.
It could be that they had a predisposition to seek out drugs.
I’m sorry for your loss. The anecdotes on my side are similar, and this is advice I practice. Even if the direction of the causal arrow is officially undetermined, it is just not worth the risk to me.
I've referenced the Living Well With Schizophrenia channel here before, and I should note that the woman behind that did a video about marijuana & schizophrenia. To her there was no question in her experience that it makes her psychosis significantly worse and this wasn't worth it. She didn't indicate any reluctance at giving it up either, in contrast to her pattern of fearing her own anti-psychotic medication. She's also currently pregnant with her first child and has discussed her decision to have one and the risks given the heritability of schizophrenia.
Here's the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCENqBB_xNax3mLX_WGLf2Lg/videos
I should have noted that she reported a 10% risk of her child having it given that she has it and her husband is not known to have any predisposition for it. If you are merely related to others who have it rather than having it yourself, it would presumably be significantly lower (though still above the base rate).
Thanks. Appreciate the link.
Start sooner rather than later. Increased paternal age increases the risk of schizophrenia. (Sry couldn’t paste the link from my phone but google it. There’s a study from 2001.)
Autism as well, probably a lot of different disorders due to accumulating genetic damage or whatever the mechanism is.
I'm not an expert, but I'd seriously consider a sperm bank.
There might be someone doing genetic counseling at your local hospital. They'll be able to tell you what you can get tested for, what your odds are of passing it along, and what else can be done to avoid it. They wouldn't know everything, but it's probably better than nothing.
Also don't know about the BGP, so this may not be the kind of advice you're looking for. But, having a high ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences Score) has a substantial correlation with both incidence and outcomes in severe mental illness, that is not due to genetics alone. (Unsurprisingly, it's thought to be G x E interactions.) Since some ACE events are not controllable, and I also assume you are not planning to abuse your kids, the only actionable recommendation I can think is to be vigilant about others' behavior around them. I think there's a sunnier way to think about this, though, which is that a having a childhood in a healthy home is a protective factor, and if you can swing that you're already doing a lot "right".
Seconding discouraging your kids from using cannabis, at the very least while they are minors, preferably until they age out of the critical window in young adulthood where SMI tends to emerge. The research is a bit more equivocal than the consensus that comes from clinicians and patients who have direct experience. But your family history especially lends to this recommendation, considering some folks are winding up further along the BD-SCZ continuum than others, and psychotic morbidity is correlated with poorer outcomes.
I'm sure you'll have thought of this yourself, but knowledge is power. If none of those six folks are you or immediate family, your kids' risk will be lower, but you also might not have as much experience with the clinical picture of bipolar/schizoaffective. Bipolar-type illness is progressive: it's hard to detangle cause and effect, but there's thought be a "kindling" process (a metaphor that's sort of borrowed from epilepsy, although the process could be in fact be physiologically related) whereby every mood episode you have increases the likelihood of further, more severe episodes. People who go on to develop bipolar often have recurring episodes of depression in childhood. If your kids experience mental health difficulties, expeditious treatment from informed professionals who are aware of the family history is probably a really good idea.
The bad news about bipolar is that it's highly heritable, but the good news is that it's highly treatable, and the sooner you catch it, the better. A bit of a discursion, but it's unfortunate that so much morbidity comes from lack of timely diagnosis and treatment, because the treatments are so effective (grading on a psychiatry curve). The other big issue, as you probably know, is treatment compliance.
I expect we'll have a better idea of how to prevent SMI in the coming years, so stay abreast of the research.
Thanks for the thoughts. Our family has a lot of super-smart individuals in it, so I think especially among the last generation there was a lot of denial and temptation to write off adolescent warning signs as part and parcel of so and so's brilliance/being misunderstood/something she will grow out of. Hopefully that's an area will be more attuned to.
It might sound kind of redundant to say that I like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocketlab, etc because they actually launch stuff into space, but before them a lot of space startups tended to follow a depressingly predictable pattern: they'd found a company with some minimal seed money, make a big press release saying they were going to do XYZ, and then hope to somehow use that attention to get the funding to see if they could actually do XYZ. It never worked.
There's still a few of those now, but they mostly just get ignored.
I've become a lot more pessimistic about the prospects for nuclear power over the past few years. It just can't seem to get past the burden of too-expensive upfront costs, not even with new reactor designs (the NuScale Power Plant is predictably going into cost overruns and delays, and it's looking like they've got a bootstrap problem with the "modular" idea - they need enough orders to make it profitable to build the module factory to meet those orders). If there is going to be any nuclear renaissance in the US, it will probably have to be built and operated by a US federal agency.
There is hope, not a lot, but some. First, the two in Georgia will be finished, they had bunches of troubles, two big ones were an incomplete design (the Chinese ones had a completely different secondary side) and trades that hadn't built nuclear in a long time and had lost the undemanding of nuclear standards. After these are done, the next two should be much faster and therefore cheaper.
There is some news of Southern Company, Bechtel, and Westinghouse building more in Poland. We'll see what happens. Turkey Point in Fl hasn't ruled out building but I haven't seen any news lately. We'll see when the ones in GA come online what they say, they don't have many good options to power Miami at the very end of the grid surrounded by ocean and swamp with a lot of hurricane risk.
SMRs will likely be built for no other reason than the military (Army) has wanted one for a very long time but after SL1 gave up for 50 years, but an SMR fills a need for them and the Govment will push hard to get it done. There will be problems getting the NRC to adapt the regulations to allow one crew to operate multiple reactors so it may never actually be used on the civilian side, but the military doesn't answer to the NRC, even Naval Reactors have a different regulatory body obviously called Naval Reactors or NR.
I hope they work out.
I wonder about the Army SMRs. If they can get them small and compact enough to be flown in by plane (or carried by helicopter or truck) while generating a few megawatts of electrical power, they'd be tremendously useful. My only real concern would be the politics of allied governments being willing to support having them in their territory, plus the greater danger in having to potentially leave them behind in a hurry.
It'd be a lot easier and simpler to make those if they could use Highly Enriched Uranium or Plutonium-239 as fuel. HEU probably is too dangerous to use out in the field besides in ships or (obviously) nuclear weapons, because if you've stolen some putting together a "gun-type" nuclear weapon isn't tremendously difficult. But Plutonium-239 actually would be pretty safe - you need an "implosion-type" nuclear weapon to actually use it, and that's not something a terrorist group is going to put together.
Not to mention that even weapons-grade plutonium isn't weapons-grade anymore after it's been in a reactor for a few weeks - 240Pu contamination is treated as irreversible even by state-level actors. I'm not saying a terrorist group wouldn't appreciate having a free nuclear reactor - to state the obvious, they need electricity too, and also if you can manage to dust it plutonium's a decent chemical/radiological weapon - but you're not making a nuke with that even if you actually have both the know-how and manufacturing precision to construct a Swan.
I'm not sure that you'd find it useless after that short a time. A couple weeks was typical at Hanford during breeding, and while they were trying to get as much Pu 239 as they could, they probably weren't pushing it to the limits of possibility. Unless you're thinking of things like the low-burnup Pu they used in the W80-1.
That's the 239Pu obtained from a couple of weeks of burning uranium (which is the equivalent of a bit under one week of burning the Pu as far as 240Pu contamination goes - 240Pu production is proportional to the amount of 239Pu that exists in the fuel, and 239Np has a 2.4-day half-life). I'm saying that if you take your bred 239Pu (presumably reprocessed from that already) and then use that as fuel for your mini-reactor, after a few weeks in the latter it's going to be rather significantly more contaminated (after 3 weeks you'd have ~quintupled your chance of predetonation fizzle).
I mean, admittedly I'm not sure of the exact numbers on how close they cut it in actual fission primaries, so you might still have a decent chance of it going off.
Nuclear 'anything' is unreasonably feared and hated in the US. Until that changes nuclear power gets nothing. I was listening to B. Weinstein's podcast and he said he wouldn't eat fish from the pacific ocean, because you could see traces of Fukushima in the radioactivity of the fish. Assuming that's true, what's the banana equivalent dose? (https://blog.xkcd.com/2011/03/19/radiation-chart/)
I don't think this is a US thing. I think it's pretty universal, except maybe in France.
https://scitechdaily.com/sunlight-linked-with-lower-covid-19-deaths-and-not-because-of-vitamin-d/
I think this could confuse matters because some people would be getting more of their vitamin D from sunlight and also getting their nitric oxide, while other people would just be getting their vitamin D from supplements.
All the studies are confusing, but what I took away from them was that *if* you are deficient in Vitamin D *and* have other problems (old, fat, etc.) *and* manage to catch Covid-19, *then* supplementation helps (ideally before you get infected) because it's bringing you back up to where you should be with regards to Vitamin D levels, and Vitamin D has complicated role in blood pressure regulation, so having better blood pressure control etc. helps recovery from Covid-19, rather than Vitamin D *directly* affecting Covid-19.
I have no idea if that shakes out to "Vitamin D cures Covid" or not.
There was a comment with an alternative hypothesis about sunlight on an earlier open thread:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-160#comment-1328941
Georgia will be a blue state with or without the law; I don't even understand the hubbub. Rich suburbs used to be bastions of voter ID back in 2012; why do you guys think big companies have switched to opposing it now?