SerialStateLineXer
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User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
3d ago
I think the reason for higher rates of comorbidities among low-IQ individuals from higher-IQ populations is that you're very unlikely to get an IQ two standard deviations below the mean purely because of additive genetic effects, so a large proportion of people with IQs this low are going to have some major developmental disorder causing the cognitive deficit. On the other hand, if an IQ of 70 is only one standard deviation below the population mean, then a sixth of the population is going to get there with additive genetic effects and a relatively small proportion will get there through some major developmental disorder.
I don't think it works the other way. The only way you get an IQ two standard deviations above the mean is with additive genetic effects. There's no anti-Down syndrome, where you can get an extra chromosome that gives you 30 extra IQ points.
However, it's worth noting that black students don't actually perform better in college than white students with the same test scores. They're just more likely to enroll and stick it out to the end. This is why I suspect that non-academic factors like higher family SES and athletics play a role. Unlike raw IQ, educational attainment has a substantial shared environment component in twin studies, probably due to a combination of cultural attitudes toward education and parents' ability to help pay for college.
Someone who spends their money by buying stuff gets hit by sales taxes, while someone who "spends" their money to make more money gets hit with capgains taxes.
And then gets hits by sales taxes anyway when he spends his money in the future.
Taxes on investment income distort the trade-off between present and future consumption in a way that neither taxes on consumption nor taxes on wage income do.
There's a superficial appearance of symmetry here, where it seems like taxes on investment income discourage investment and taxes on consumption discourage consumption, but the illusion goes away if you work through the math. The tax system really is set up in a way that penalizes saving and investing.
SerialStateLineXer
12d ago
I'm not here to stan for Big Wind, but there is a lack of quantitative reasoning ability when it comes to the public discussion of environmental issues.
There's a lack of quantitative reasoning in general. People just throw out qualitative claims and assume that the quantitative stuff works out to whatever is most convenient for their argument.
I wonder if there's a connection between this and schoolchildren's notorious aversion to word problems.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
God: Hey, I need you to turn my son over to the Romans so that can crucify him.
Jews: :-/
God: Trust me, it'll be awesome! You're my chosen people! Would I lead you astray?
Jews: Well, there were those forty years in the...
God: Oh, for my sakes! Will you let that go already? I gave you manna, didn't I?
Jews: Okay, fine, you're the god.
Jesus: X-(
A thousand years later...
Jews: :-(
SerialStateLineXer
7d ago
Oh, sorry, I didn't see this until now. It was about a year and a half, half because I wanted a break, and half because I really hate updating my resume and kept putting it off.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-12/measuring-shrinkflation-and-its-impact-on-inflation.htm
For example, if a half-gallon (64 oz) of Brand A vanilla ice cream is priced in January 2021 at $5.99, then the effective price per ounce is $5.99 divided by 64 oz or $0.093 per ounce. If, in February 2021, the same Brand A vanilla ice cream is reduced in size to 60 oz, but the price is still $5.99, the effective price per ounce would be $0.0998 per ounce. This results in a 6.7-percent increase in the price per ounce of the ice cream, and the CPI would include this price increase.
Our economists even adjust for items that do not have a weight, like toilet paper. For example, when the number of sheets per toilet paper roll changes from 220 per roll to 200, the economist will adjust the data to show a 10-percent price-per-sheet increase.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
I keep hearing about how great everyone feels after quitting drinking, and I kind of feel bad that I don't have a way to get that kind of improvement. For me, not being in a constant state of low-grade chronic alcohol poisoning is just normal, so I don't really appreciate it.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
To whence
This is even worse than "from whence!"
Hence/thence/whence mean "from this/that/which place," so "from whence" is redundant, and "to whence" is nonsensical.
Hither/thither/whither/yonder indicate destination, so you might ask a passerby "Whence have you come, and whither are you going," though I suppose the contemporary verb conjugations might have been different.
So the question is whither to roll back the clock. Whence to roll back the clock? Hence, obviously.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
Is there something serious there for Biden to answer?
Biden refused to collect interest on student loans for nearly three years, and tried to outright cancel them before the Supreme Court told him to cut it out, and then he immediately got to work on trying to do it again.
In a sane world, the President unilaterally misappropriating hundreds of billions of dollars to pay off his base would be clear grounds for impeachment and prosecution, but we don't live in that world, so I guess they're going to try to tie him to his son's shenanigans.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
I've done it. I had a lot of money saved up and needed a break. The hardest part was not getting through interviews for another job, but psyching myself up to update my resume, which I hate doing.
Ultimately it depends on how much money you have saved and how much of it you're willing to burn through and how tight the labor market in your industry is. If the labor market is tight, you can probably find another job without too much trouble even if you're not currently employed.
But I was applying for software engineering jobs in 2012, so my experience may be nonrepresentative. I wouldn't quit my current job without a replacement lined up.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
With programmers you can get some degree of bilateral monopoly power, where a long-time employee of a firm has a lot of firm-specific knowledge, which is very valuable to the firm but not to anyone else. This the programmer has something unique to offer the firm, and the firm is the only one willing to pay for it.
This is probably more likely to happen at non-tech firms, as tech firms are better at making sure that no crucial software is exclusively maintained by one person.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
Another approach is to bar public schools from requiring or giving pay premiums for advanced education degrees.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
I think that academic freedom does have some value, so I'm not sure I'm ready to throw my support behind government stepping in and regulating the research of academics, even at public universities.
However, there are totally reasonable ways governments can regulate public universities that do not infringe on academic freedom:
- Ban ideological indoctrination in required courses and orientation sessions.
- Regulate the activities of administrators and the number of staff which can be hired for certain roles.
- Ban the use of DEI statements and other ideological tests and discrimination in hiring.
These are broad principles, not blueprints for concrete laws. I'm well aware that "no ideological indoctrination in required courses and orientation sessions at public universities" sessions is unlikely to be an effective law; it needs to spell out the details, and multiple passes may be required to plug loopholes.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
On the other end of the spectrum, have you ever had any clients who you were fairly sure were innocent and being railroaded, but whom you were unable to get acquitted?
If so, is this a regular occurrence (say more than 2%), or extremely rare?
SerialStateLineXer
3mo ago
There are a couple of issues here.
First, seventy years is more than enough time for conditional convergence to work its magic. We saw this with the Asian Tigers. The reason that most European countries have not yet converged with the US is not that they need more time, but rather that they're not meeting the conditions required for convergence. In fact, in recent decades the US has actually been pulling away from Europe.
Second, saying that the US also has a welfare state is like saying that Europe also has fat people. Government spending is a smaller share of GDP in the US than it is in most Western European countries, by 10-20 percentage points. The main exception is Switzerland, which totally coincidentally is one of the wealthiest countries in Europe, surpassed only by a handful of microstates and one quasi-petrostate (Norway).
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
A video contains roughly 30 frames per second, each frame a picture.
A frame of video will, on average, differ only slightly from the previous frame, and be worth much less than the thousand words a single picture is worth. This is why videos can compressed at much higher ratios than still images with minimal perceivable loss of quality.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so.
I'm puzzled that anyone is puzzled by this. Living is awesome, and 80 years isn't nearly enough, especially when the last 60 are spent in slow decay.
SerialStateLineXer
3mo ago
There's still a debate on which plant it was but I'm not surprised the Romans used it to extinction if it was real.
It's kind of surprising. Generally plants that are useful to humans flourish due to intentional cultivation. It's not like wheat went extinct. Though the Wikipedia article does mention some speculation that it may not have been amenable to cultivation for some reason.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
The BBZ wasn't quite as enthusiastic about my plan to devote the NHS's entire budget to improving the health outcomes of trans women of color as I expected them to be. They were concerned about the effect on other marginalised communities.
I flew too close to the sun.
To that end it is no surprise he dislikes the HBD creed, given it is inherently divisive to the multiracial America.
I would argue that HBD, properly understood, is the least divisive explanation for racial achievement gaps. There are a few competing mainstream explanations:
- Racism, either systemic or individual. It's all white people's fault.
- Cultural deficiencies. Low-achieving minority groups have no one to blame but themselves.
- Socioeconomic privilege and lack thereof is the main determinant of individual achievement. It's all rich people's fault (or, per the "Dream Hoarders" narrative, the upper middle class is in on it, too).
HBD allows for the possibility that it's nobody's fault. White people aren't keeping black people down. Rich people aren't keeping poor people down (and neither are Jews). And black people don't just need to try harder (obviously this would help any individual on the margin, but it's not the main reason for group disparities).
Some of the more insightful leftists actually understand this, and hate HBD precisely because it offers an alternative to their libelous villain-and-victim narratives. Over the past week or so, I've seen several people "accuse" HBD advocates of being defenders of the "status quo," as if rejecting the idea that society is a conspiracy by whites/rich people/Jews to screw over everyone else were indisputable evidence of bad faith.
HBD also gives us a clear path to a biological fix to a problem that has stubbornly resisted all sociological approaches to remediation. We need to invest much more into understanding the genetics of human intelligence and developing technology for polygenic gene therapy. HBD is a red pill, not a black pill, and it offers a way forward out of this madness.
Edit: Wacky but also kind of serious idea to tide us over until STEMlords save the day: Offer low-SES women free access to semen from high-IQ men, explaining to them that this will give their children a much better chance at succeeding in life and greatly reduce the odds that they'll end up in prison.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Yes, there are obvious problems with the profit-and-loss system: first, it counts preferences only to the extent that they are backed by dollars
This is a feature, not a bug. This is what money is for. Imagine that we have a semi-capitalist system, where you're paid based on the marginal product of your labor and investments, but everybody's preferences are weighted equally when it comes to production and distribution of goods and services. Under such a system, money would be worth about as much as Reddit karma, and there would be no reason to work.
The weighting of preferences according to how much money you have and are willing to spend is not a drawback of capitalism—it's the main reason capitalism works better than socialism.
This is actually the second excavation to turn up no actual corpses. I don't think there's any basis for doubt that a lot of children died at the residential schools, partly due to the fact that children dying was a common occurrence back then, and partly due to the fact that they were kept in crowded housing that promoted the spread of infectious disease. Poor nutrition and extra susceptibility to European diseases may or may not have been factors.
However, it's clear now that the false positive rate of these GPR investigations is very high (0 for 48, by my count), and representing these hits as the discovery of definite or probable corpses was grossly irresponsible.
I don't remember to what extent the media actively encouraged this misinterpretation, or at least failed to discourage it in their reporting, but a lot of people were under the impression that these GPR surveys provided proof of hundreds of deaths above and beyond those which had already been documented, and/or cover-ups of actual murders.
My name is a snarky reference to the bizarre fixation of the left on the imaginary crime of crossing state lines during coverage of the Rittenhouse case, and has nothing to do with Nazis.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
Do you normally celebrate your birthday on February 28th, or March 1st?
SerialStateLineXer
5mo ago
On an intellectual level, most people on the left (in the broad sense) have bought into a harm-based model of morality. Since most people have very little need for intellectual consistency, what this means in practice is that they rationalize all of their moral intuitions by convincing themselves that the things they don't like are harmful. Hence "words are violence."
Bestiality grosses most people out. But in order to give themselves license to support banning it, they have to convince themselves that it's inherently harmful to animals. Non-vegetarians have to convince themselves that it's more harmful to animals than killing and eating them.
Fun, counterintuitive fact: Degree requirements actually favor black applicants, because in the US, black people are educational overachievers.
That is, for any given test score level, black Americans have, on average, higher educational attainment than non-Hispanic white Americans. If you look here, in 2021, 26% of black and 45% of NHW Americans age 25-29 had at least a bachelor's degree.
If we look here, we see that the 74th percentile for black SAT takers is between 1000 and 1100, let's say 1050. This is an upper bound for the average SAT score of black four-year graduates; it's likely a bit lower due to the imperfect correlation between test scores and educational attainment. The 55th percentile for whites is around 1150, half a standard deviation higher. If we do a similar exercise for masters or higher, again we find roughly a half-sigma difference.
I don't think this is primarily attributable to affirmative action, since most four-year universities do not have competitive admissions. Probably the fact that black students tend to have wealthier and more educated parents than white students with the same test scores plays a role. Athletics may be a factor as well.
Anyway, since black people tend to be more credentialed than white people (and Hispanics) with the same cognitive and academic skills, degree requirements actually give them an edge. I expect that the DEI industry will quickly lose interest in skills-first hiring when they realize that the main beneficiaries are white and Hispanic men.
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