force_reboot

I disagree, the law does provide these exceptions but I (and presumably the author) don't find these exceptions to be comprehensive enough to render the unqualified statement of the author "out of context".

How is a person supposed to prove that their views are "fair and accurate" or a "fair comment" and a "genuine belief"? These are highly subjective, and none of them helped Andrew Bolt, a reporter who was sued under these laws.

Note that you won't even grant that the author is quoting the law in good faith. How is a person supposed to show that their "racist" views are held in good faith?

I don't really see support for that in the article, but most of the details are in the individual studies. The study does say

Kanazawa notes that intelligence correlates positively with evolutionarily novel activities, but the correlation with ancient activities is zero or even negative. That is also evident in Table 25.1 , which mostly lists novel school- or job-related forms of success that have the expected positive correlation with intelligence, but one of the most ancient forms of success, number of children, has a negative correlation (−0.11).

I would guess that you are reading "social success" as "social skills" while in the article's terminology they mean by "social success" things like career success, education level etc.

As for mathematics, it's true that this is a very special case, and people select into mathematics based on both ability and personality. All I can say for certain is that I can identify a distinct group of people who are both intelligent and have autism spectrum traits, and they seem to occur more often than if these traits were uncorrelated.

In my experience, intelligence is correlated with bad dress sense, lack of hygiene, awkward personalities and poor motor skills. I know a lot of professional mathematicians, and they all would have been bullied for these things things (like I was) if they went to my high school, though many of them went to private high schools.

Before anyone downvotes me because presuming the existence of a group of people that is more intelligent than others is elitist or arrogant, I would point out that it is no more so that presuming the existence of a group of people with less social skills or motor skills.

I'm sure most people would not deny this mechanism exists. The distinction is whether one focuses on this mechanism (correct Bayesian inference) or the various biases and feedback loops described in the article. Personally I believe that progressives miss the forest for the trees: there is a huge gap between White and Black crime that encompasses almost every kind of crime[0]. While I am against any policy that exacerbates this gap, or otherwise discriminates against Black people, I feel that there is a huge effort by the progressive movement to promote an understanding of these subtleties, while at the same time actively repressing general knowledge of the basic facts about race and crime. For example, progressives like to point out that for drug charges this gap could be explained by uneven enforcement (though I don't know if this claim is accurate - the evidence is somewhat indirect) but fail to mention that for most other crimes this claim is not tenable.

And fyi, a very basic fact[1] in the field of criminology is that being black is predictive[2] of crime even after controlling for income and education. I'm not criticizing you for not knowing this since this fact is considered "racist" when expressed by non-experts, and experts only refer to it among themselves, in order to avoid the fact being misinterpreted.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...

[1] It's not entirely uncontested, but it certainly represents the majority belief in most social science disciplines. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S....

[2] "predictive" is a term of art, meaning that it has a positive coefficient when used on the right hand side of a regression where "crime" is on the left hand side, along with other right hand side variables which depend on the context.

you've just expressed a great counterpoint to https://xkcd.com/1357/.

Furthermore, it's not just a matter of ISPs. Because of its refusal to censor various kinds of content, sites like 8chan have been refused service from various sites that process donations.

Isn't the concept of an "information bubble" already inherently relativistic? sevenless was simply pointing out the relativism cuts both ways.

As someone with a PhD in economics, and a believer in the what the mainstream econ departments teach, I still found this article very reasonable. I hope no one will take this article to be saying that orthodox economics is fundamentally flawed because at no point is that argued. Instead they argue that behavioral biases exist and are well enough understood that we can in some cases craft policy based on them, instead of the standard economic assumptions.

My favorite points were

- Unpack ‘animal spirits’. These arise in the minds of economic actors. We can unpack the biases behind them and do something about them – an indeed BIT is currently working on such a project.

The debate on "animal spirits"[0] is ongoing, but the potential payoff from understanding them is huge. They deserve more research using more modern ideas and methods.

- Promote rainy-day saving. Recent work suggests that the behavioural and economic effects of having even small amounts of saving are even larger than previously thought.

There are two contradictory arguments often made in regard to poverty and rational behavior: (A) poor people are completely constrained by their poverty and unable to make the "right" decision to save and (B) poor people are unable to make rational decisions because poverty affects their decision making ability. I am mostly in the (B) camp and as such, I think that helping poor people to behave more rationally is a great idea. However it does require honestly stating that poor people do make bad decisions, even if anyone else in that situation would have done the same.

The weakest point IMO was

- Trial light-touch ways to improve estimates by key economic actors. Encourage the use of estimation frames.

This is based on a claim that is much more general, and therefore requires more evidence. I would like to see a lot more studies on improving estimation accuracy in general, before I accepted that there is some general formula to make people's estimates more accurate.

[0] A term of trade for Keynes' original, but discarded by the mainstream, idea that markets were moved by irrational exuberance/pessimism by society as a whole. The main advocate of this theory today is Robert Schiller.

I have a PhD in economics, and your claims about monopolies and competition aren't accurate.

Economic theory doesn't state that monopolies always arise, at least not under the circumstances you are describing. If you can buy your competitors, or make a legally binding contract to compete, the yes, monopolies are inevitable. And as you say, inelastic demand does make monopolies more likely, though your intuition that medical goods have inelastic demand may be wrong, e.g. see the RAND health care study where they randomly assign people insurance types, and find the high deductible group consume less healthcare even in emergency situations.

In the general situation, no theory guarantees that monopolies arise in the absence of regulation (apart from the above to cases which aren't the regulation you're discussing).

Rational actors will spend up to their expected monopoly profits to create a Nash Equilibrium where new entrants into a market will be unprofitable.

In economics, anything that relies solely on Nash Equilibrium is doubtful. In most situations, Nash Equilbria are not unique, and therefore it's hard to say what will actually happen. If the Nash Equilibrium is unique, usually some stronger equilibrium concept applies like dominant strategy equilibrium.

In your case it would be more accurate to say that committing to drive out potential competitors can be a Nash Equilibrium for some parameters.

On what basis do you say that meta-analysis is not credible? From my stats background, (but without any direct experience in meta-analysis) I would say that they could be problematic because the N is very small and so have a lot less to work with, and more temptation to use fancy statistical techniques with hidden assumptions. On the other hand, what do you do when you have 50 studies of varying quality, no one of which is has such a compelling methodology as to eclipse the others? In that case it seems like meta-analysis is the least bad option.

One thing that is glossed over slightly in these discussions is the distinction between collections of sound-meaning compound characters where the rebus is the same but the words aren't cognate, and where the words are cognate.

I've read in some places that the scribes attempted to use the same rebus for cognate words but I everything I could find online was a re-hashing of wikipedia (or wherever the wikipedia article is sourced from) which states "However, the phonetic component is not always as meaningless as this example would suggest. Rebuses were sometimes chosen that were compatible semantically as well as phonetically."

I'm not sure how important this really is or how many characters that share a common rebus are cognate. But to my aesthetic senses I much prefer characters to contain etymological information than just the pronunciation when the character was first written.

Yes, that is an equivalent phrase, but much less commonly used than 加油 and "gi' det gas".

I mean in English it isn't used as a generic encouragement, while in Mandarin and Danish it is.

Almost certainly. One fascinating aspect of language is that many metaphors that are baked into language appear in many languages. E.g. In English we can form the future tense with modal verbs, "I will..." and "I am going to..." and in Chinese there are similar modal verbs "我要..." and "我去...". In both languages the idea of intention, or motion, are used as a metaphor in forming the future tense. Or 加油, an expression of encouragement similar to "put your foot on it" which has no equivalent in English, but does in Danish, "giv det gas".

Proponents of diversity engage in non-Bayesian updating whereby if a non-diverse company/city/person does well, they update their prior that the system is rigged, but if a diverse company/city/person does well update their prior that diversity has economic benefits.

The problem with the Situationists is that they have no political program. They refuse to describe how they would like the world to be, instead coming up with convoluted explanations for why doing so is unnecessary and counterproductive. The assertion is basically that capitalism is so terrible that once we get rid of it, things will obviously be much better.

Apologists have tried to fill in the gaps with a utopian vision [1] where we maintain the a similar standard of living but without wasting energy on conspicuous consumption. I agree that developing a culture that avoids conspicuous consumption would probably mean we could get by with less work. However there would still be enough work leftover to either require capitalism, or socialist style forced labor, both of which situationists explicitly reject.

[1] see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Widmer

I'm not sure about that. I'm not saying this boy's parents pushed him into this path, but by virtue of their own education (mother has a PhD, not sure about the father) they would have provided him with many opportunities for intellectual growth that other kids lacked. So I would assume Jeremy is very smart but not as exceptional as his achievements would imply.

Being smart can be isolating, either from not being able to relate to people or act normal, or people assuming you are arrogant, or developing actual arrogance, but in the scheme if things this is just one of many issues that affect people, and not necessarily that serious. The super-smart shy people I know are not too different from the average intelligence shy people I know.

While I don't know if this is the right path for the kid, or if he really is a genius (from the article he seems very smart) your comment comes across as mean spirited.

Do you not believe in the existence of genius, or that people vary in intelligence? If not, why do you doubt his intelligence? Terrence Tao is an example of a child prodigy who became a famous mathematician, although I would say winning gold in the International Mathematics Olympiad is a more objective standard than admission to Cornell.

I think that a "biological basis" means something different to you than to me. How exactly do these studies show that depression is different from being unhappy? Did they study the brains of merely unhappy people and find no such biological differences? Again, in my understanding psychiatrists and researchers make no attempt to differentiate between depression and unhappiness because they have no reason to make this distinction.

I'm going to assume that your argument is that if depression is caused by biological factors then it must be treated differently from unhappiness that is caused by life events. But in that case you will have to explain how this is consistent with the fact that "...depressive episodes are strongly correlated with adverse events..."[0]. This fact seems more consistent with either reverse causation (depression causes biological changes) or that depression can have multiple causes, and can occur in the absence of a biological cause.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_depressive_disorder#Psyc...

I don't have time to read every book out there, so when I look for answers to questions like this I look for sources that are authoritative, that is, sources that summarize the majority opinion in a field. The book you recommend doesn't seem to be that, and so I'm not convinced that it's worth reading. Are there particular studies in the book that specifically address whether depression is qualitatively different from unhappiness? Does the book cite mainstream opinions by psychiatrists and if so, what opinions does it cite?

There seems to be a huge gap between what psychiatrists believe and how psychiatric knowledge is presented to the general public.

For example, I'm not aware of any scientific evidence that depression is qualitatively different from being unhappy, or that depression can't be caused by events that would make a typical person unhappy, or cured by the opposite. And I'm fairly certain that very little such evidence exists, because this is not the concern of psychiatrists, they just want to treat the person, not define categories per se. But I believe that psychiatrists allow the public to form this flawed understanding because they think it will lead people to treat people with depression with more sympathy and treat depression like a real problem. To me the more honest approach would be to simply say that unhappiness is a real problem and any approach or treatment that works should be considered.

Maybe I'm just a third level contrarian, but I don't think one can reject mainstream advice on, for example, saturated fat simply because the USDA changed their mind on cholesterol.

Mainstream medical sources have never claimed to have strong evidence on the link between dietary cholesterol and heart disease, mortality etc. However since the link between serum cholesterol and these things is so string, it seemed prudent to advise limiting dietary cholesterol. However no, with more negative studies, this advice no longer makes sense. But at no point was limiting dietary cholesterol claimed to be as high of a priority as limiting saturated and trans fats.

That said, apart from saturated fats, total calories and protein (for people looking to build muscle) I don't think the rest of the label is useful for most people.

when I say "positive statement" I mean in the positive/normative sense.

It's natural for compassionate people to prefer to characterize addition as a disease, because it gives a powerful argument for treating people with addiction compassionately. But this is deriving an "is" from an "ought".

In fact its very common in this kind of discussion to see an argument like "If you believe <positive statement> then you must support <morally abhorrent policy>". But mostly the morally abhorrent policy doesn't actually follow from the positive statement, and if the person making this argument were forced to accept the positive statement, they would not in fact support the policy. In this debate

  <positive statement> = addiction is not a disease

  <morally abhorrent policy> = people with addiction don't deserve any sympathy or help

There is a glaring contradiction between the two mainstream narratives, one of which goes that we need working class jobs because not everyone is capable of middle class jobs, the other of which says there aren't enough people to fill working class jobs so we need immigration.

There two narratives exist in almost every Western nation.

There seems to be very non-Bayesian updating that goes on around this issue.

When White people do well at something, people update their prior that White people experience White privilege that makes it easier for them to achieve these things.

When non-White people achieve something, or White people do poorly, people update their prior that diversity is important to achieving good results.

Most of my information on China comes from my father who was born in China, and was very well studied in Chinese history, although he left when he was young because of the famines during the Great Leap Forward. The part of history that he emphasized to me, was that in spite of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution killing tens of millions of people, communism was still much better than what came before. There was constant famine before communism.

I'm not so well versed in Chinese history myself, but I believe this narrative. One thing that confirms this is a graph of China's population. It shoots up after 1950, and you can't really identify either of these major catastrophes by looking at a population graph. The obvious explanation is the population shot up because people had enough to eat, notwithstanding these two discrete events.

Would Chiang Kai-shek have done better? The Guomindang certainly wanted to institute land reforms that would have benefited peasants (the vast majority of Chinese) without the central control of communism. On the other hand, it's not clear that the Guomindang would have had the power to actually implement these policies.

Do you think there are circumstances where it's ok to shame fat women? E.g. if they had incorrect beliefs that lead to bad diets?

As a native English speaker, born in England, I always enjoyed Shakespeare in the original language because I could understand many the nuances and plays on words, and because I could see the continuity between the language of Shakespeare and the language we speak today. This is probably not possible for everyone (I speak a few languages fluently, an this broader experience probably helps) and of course I need to read the footnotes, but the language of Shakespeare is not a foreign language to me.

Of course if it was spoken out loud in the original pronunciation I would probably understand very little of it.

A good portion of mainstream American and European liberals would consider Jewish culture to be a real thing that deserves preserving, even while they claim that saying the same thing about any other culture or identity is racist

When it comes to outsourcing or moving manufacturing overseas, there is no difference between robots and foreigners. Some economists who study international trade like to emphasize this point, that there is no fundamental difference between trade and technology.

On the other hand, immigrants interact with the country they migrate to in a whole bunch of ways. E.g. someone who earns below minimum wage is very unlikely to pay taxes that account for their increased burden on the government. This issue is often ignored by pro-immigration economists who only consider some narrowly defined set of govt services like welfare. Furthermore (and I acknowledge that here I am going against mainstream economic opinion) economists often justify immigration using ponzi-scheme like logic [1]: even if the immigrant is a net economic negative, they are younger and therefore are a net positive while they are working, and presumably even more immigration in the future will pay for this generation's retirement.

[1] Technically this is referred to as "overlapping generation" models. While these models are not all ponzi-like, a lot of the popular models assume that the net production of humankind for all time has infinite present value, so we can borrow a (finite) amount from the infinite future and make everyone better off.