cSoze
cSoze on Hacker News
Towards the end of the video he also calls up 1900s America as the period of time that best exemplifies capitalism, not surprisingly an era marked by extreme inequality.
This thread is not about the incarceration rate. At least my initial comment (the one you responded to) was not specifically about that. The point was that Milton Friedman threw out two metrics to measure the success of capitalism in the United States compared to socialist countries. The United States is now worse in both those metrics than democratic socialist countries. Therefore, by MILTON's metrics, the economic / social systems that those countries use are better than ours.
At 13:42 Milton Friendman questions whether "socialism failed because it's good qualities were perverted by evil men" and goes on to claim that the both socialism and capitalism have failed or succeeded by each system being true to its own values. By that same argument, capitalism has failed by being true to its own values regardless of what the precise reason for the current high incarceration rates are.
His argument and his positions are horribly simplistic. Neither capitalist nor socialist structures can meet all of the needs of a society.
At about 8 minutes he starts talking about looking at the outcomes of the different systems. Specifically he brings up incarceration rates and inequality. It's interesting how poorly the United States currently stacks up on those measures compared to democratic socialist countries.
Kai Ryssdal is horrible. Fluff piece after fluff piece and he prefaces all stories containing data with an extremely patronizing "dumb this down for you" speech.
Are you seriously implying that IQ tests are a clean measure of a biological trait? Heritability for IQ ranges from ~40-60% That's pitiful.
Or... you know, you've actually got a PhD in sociology and have read the research. This is armchair-pundit-bullshit akin to climate change denial. Everyone knows better than the researchers who've actually done the work and are immersed in the field.
How about we accept the consensus of the scientists? Rather than calling it dogma because it doesn't agree with YOUR world view.
He's an engineer for Google (with a purported PhD from Harvard - likely to only be a MS) that wrote a 10 page article critiquing his company - specifically - for ignoring the science when making decisions about company culture. From someone with his credentials making these claims I expect 15+ peer reviewed sources with at least 1 review article from each field that studies the topic (sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology, biology).
Someone with his credentials should not expect to be spoon fed justifications for company hiring practices. If he had opened discussion on the validity of specific findings and which experiments contain the most valuable information for predicting benefits of policy changes, I don't think there would have been this outcry.
But if he wants to discuss the science he first needs to make it clear that he's read it.
There is significant scientific evidence that most of the differences in employment observed between women and men and minorities and white men can be explained by socialization.
When conditions are set that reduce or control for these social factors (including implicit bias) the differences in performance that James Demore attributes to "biological" factors disappear.
How is this not related to the bulk of his claims?
If only he was "exploring the question in what appears to be a very scientific manner based on the latest academic research into these questions". The FIRST warning sign to anyone reading his manifesto should have been how woefully undercited it was. He revealed that he really doesn't understand, much less has read, the science.
http://www.epi.org/publication/womens-work-and-the-gender-pa...
I mean.
(1) would absolutely not be continued, obviously.
(2) would be continued to completion.
In science one is maximally conservative with positive results. Negative results can be accepted rather quickly but positive results need to be maximally investigated. False positives are unacceptable, false negatives are often less damaging.
I'd question how scenario #1 made it through animal trials preceding experiments in humans.
So their old MBPs have 32 GB? Have they just been unable to get anything done these past 40 years? The tech just isn't quite there yet. Next year.
It seems to me that the false dichotomy here is equating (fit or problem solver) and (gregarious or reserved). Gregarious/reserved are opposites by definition.
"If you've believed the Or model of introversion and extroversion your whole life and resist the And model, try this challenge: try believing the And model for a week or a month."
I believed in the And model until I was ~23, it made me exhausted from all the pressure to be more extraverted. I've believed a soft Or model for 5 years now and I'm a hell of a lot happier having accepted my introverted lean.
The antagonistic pleiotropy theory actually advocates exactly that inverse correlation, more investment into young years for increased reproductive fitness at the expense of worse later years.
Further, I suspect that number of kids or even just a binary having kids or not would have a direct effect on BMI in old age. More kids > less time to excercise > compounded over many years. There's also a known correlation between educational attainment and number of children in the literature which is generally hypothesized to be causal.
I have concerns about the validity exactly because of the expected tiny effects. Polygenic traits with extremely high heritability (height being the prime example) top out at 10% of variance explained even when considering all alleles. That just highlights the need for better phenotypes and multi generational typing. I think it's Botstein who I've heard advocates for more time points over more replication when given the choice.
Considering that natural selection is generally considered to not operate on post-reproductive phenotype (prime case is antagonistic pleiotropy literature) I consider any conclusion based on these measures pretty suspect. Worse, specific heritability for these traits in this cohort, as far as I can tell, wasn't even estimated. Given that the supplemental says the mean in the literature is 40%, it could very well be sub 20%.
I suspect that selecting only known high effect QTLs would actually not impact your power all that much as it limits the number of tests performed. If you can't see selection at high effect alleles I'm not sure you'll be able to detect them in aggregate either, especially with very noisy phenotype data.
At the end of the day natural selection is a change in allele frequency driven by differences in phenotype. Sure, this maybe was an easy analysis to do given that the data was available, but I don't really see the value.
Still doesn't make much sense to use a secondary trait like educational attainment (58% heritability at highest) over a primary one like IQ (>80% heritability).
Most of these phenotypes strike me as pretty questionable. Maybe I missed something, but how well does BMI measured at age 45-50 correlate with BMI at reproductive age?
Wouldn't a far simpler approach be to measure allelic frequency at regions near GWAS QTLs in multiple generations?
No, I'm not proposing that at all, however, we certainly discourage people from having children at a young age. Military leadership could fairly easily adjust its recruitment practices, it relies far less on physical aptitude nowadays. Regardless, I don't really think this tangent is relevant to the discussion of college education.
You can shift mean college attendance age in a myriad of ways. Off the top of my head, bring public universities back under federal funding, reduce the for profit motives. Then start preferentially admitting students with a year or more of work experience as well as the current academic standards.
>But they're mature enough to kill for and be killed for the national military (sometimes against their will), contribute to governmental policy decisions, and have children?
I don't think they are mature enough for that, no. We weren't arguing that part (at least not yet). 21 would be a much more reasonable age for that, but 25 would probably be best. There's a reason that you can't rent a car below 21 and that you have to make a significant extra payment below 25.
We're arguing exactly the design that you seem to be espousing. Taking into account cost, immaturity due to biological constraints at age 18-22 and rampant party culture, college is a particularily bad place to "find yourself". Young adults should be exposed to a wide diversity in age and demographics, not locked into a small area with a largely homogeneous group of individuals to "grow up". All of this was touched upon in the article. In my opinion, the American "college experience" is in dire need of reconsideration.
I don't really agree with the proposition that a university degree has anything to do with or should have anything to do with critical thinking skills. A university degree simply implies intimacy with the existing knowledge in a field. This notion that because information is available you don't need to expend effort learning it and you will be just as effective is counter productive as well.