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I agree with your post overall. Especially wrt to intelligence I think that it's composed of thousands of microtasks some of which are specific enough, likely coming complete with dedicated brain functions, to be helped or hurt by genetics. If we knew what they were, we could develop compensatory strategies for each distribution of abilities / deficits.

That is one of the (many) reasons I always argue for fearlessly understanding the full measure of reality as opposed to practicing a new form of Lysenkoism called "we're all equivalent and interchangeable, so the problem lies elsewhere...".

In a sense, all pro-social behavior is a kind of learned compensation which counters an innate desire to just club that other fellow over the head. Compensating for a "lack" in your genes is the stuff civilization is founded on.

That said, this is just wrong:

> If we demonstrate some ethnicity can run faster, they'll start getting picked more to be professional athletes.

You aren't picked to excel; you're born to it and other peple observe that fact. If people were picked to excel then just anyone could be in the NBA. We have all run the 100 yd dash. We've all had opportunities to distinguish oureslves there. Not many of us did. Even fewer did and failed to notice this in themselves.

You can't socially engineer raw talent but you can impose conditions which overwhelm it. That is always a tragedy.

This is exactly it. I looked at doing something like this, ok, I looked at doing this and decided early to forgo CSS because it's so very very complicated.

Truthfully, if my skillset had better matched the task I might have been lured into giving it a go. On another project I considered using CSS as a styling technology and got down to really understand it in detail. I then realized how good my 1,000 yard vision really is.

I can't speak to the forces which inevitably lead to decay but essentially, for some reason every technology tries to eat the world.

CSS is trying to eat the world and HTML5 is trying to eat the world and of course Javascript is famously trying to eat the world.

All these technologies (and here's the part where I see my post begin to fade to gray) are on their way to experiencing technology's version of societal collapse.

I use that analogy because it's so so apropo.

They are overwrought, overly complex systems yielding only marginally better results and being maintained at huge cost in terms of attention, brain power and collateral damage by everyone. The benefits accrue to a smaller and smaller number of people (FANG et. al) who do not have society's best interest at heart at all and are very far from the founding principals which inspired the original vision.

A simple scriptless HTML 1.0 browser minus the blink tag would deliver at least to me nearly 100% of the benefit I get from the web which can be characterized as "seeing what is happening, seeing what other people think, learning new stuff and downloading stuff".

I would love to start a (reactionary) movement away from the current web composed of a privacy-preserving HTML 1.0 browser capable of HTTPS and people dedicated to creating pages and resources for it. I don't know of any such "movement" .

If anyone is aware of anything like this do share.

I may have replied to the wrong person here. My mistake for which I apologize.

It makes sense to have watchers to watch the watchers because their respective job descriptions are different. One's task is to watch for "bad actors" and the other's job it to watch for bias within rendered judgments. Those are two different tasks requiring two different microskill sets and bodies of experience. Exemplars at each task may also represent two different personality types.

That's true. There is more intra-group variation because within any group you have geniuses and you have morons, which is the widest spread you can have either intra-group or inter-group.

>>Race is a socially constructed category.

This is Mao telling me I'm reactionary. It's Freud telling me I am going after his theories because I am projecting and have an Oedipal Complex.

You missed the point I was making. When 23andMe tells me I'm Jewish and I share 99% of my profile with fellow Jews whether or not "race is a social construct" used by some people for nefarious ends, the facts remain where they are.

Some ethnicities suffer from certain diseases at a rate far exceeding other ethnicities. That's genetic. That's the action of, in some cases a defect on a single gene. If you want to say those people are not a race, then fine, I'm not inclined to argue with you.

The point is that the possibility that shared genetic profiles are responsible for abilities and disabilities- which is something in the neighborhood of what bad racists are leveraging for effect, is not completely impossible.

I appreciate the anti-racist ethos. All humans are equal in my eyes merely for the fact of being human, full stop, no exceptions. It is still possible that genes control abilities and deficits and that shared genes result in shared outcomes. That is still a reasonable hypothesis and in the cse of outright maladies, more than a hypothesis.

If you want to have good outcomes, including societal outcomes, you need to know what is causing the outcomes you have. You cannot dictate causality; it needs to be discovered. Dictating causality looks like this:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/trofim-lysenko

https://theconversation.com/the-tragic-story-of-soviet-genet...

OK I am not a racist. Let me just affirm that. Here is my question- what if the tenets of racism - that race is tied in some fundamental way to a profile of abilities and deficits- is right? It's a possible world. Ethnically Jewish people could just be born with more verbal ability than whites. That is not impossible.

My point is this. By demanding a world in which some things cannot even be spoken of (except by critics) you're amputating our ability to know reality.

If people with your opinion in the 1800s had achieved the type of dominion over others you now seek, there would not be womens right and there would not be gay rights and there would not be equal rights.

The built-in assumption of your post is- we have reached a point of final knowledge about the physical universe and what is and is not possible in it. All further inquiries are a sort of crime.

This is exactly the attitude the old Soviet Union took towards evolution and Mao took towards, well everything really. It's the grand totalitarian error at its core, irrespective of what claims it makes for itself.

The chief wealth generating event that most home owners experience is when the deed is yours. Then you aren't paying the bank "rent" any longer and only have to worry about property taxes and maintainence. Then you have the start of intergenerational wealth and or a hard asset you can sell for example, old people selling homes and buying a smaller they're better able to manage.

Nt saying the article is not contradictory, maybe it is, just pointing out that "wealth" is a flexible concept.

>> leveraged bets on asset prices at taxpayer expense

But doesn't the tax code distinguish between a house which houses its owner and one which doesn't? I don't think investment homes are treated tax-wise the same as normal homes. I am not aware of tax advantages being extended to investments just because those investments are houses, but maybe I am wrong?

If you have been watching California's experiments with homelessness, especially San Fran. you may have learned that homeless people prefer being homeless even when given free accomodations and when i say accomodations I mean nice hotel rooms of their own.

This is because homelessness is a side-effect of mental illness and drug addiction. The later is not all drug addiction, ( I used to live next to an "invisible" heroin addict which we only learned about when he OD'd) it's a certain type of disorganized-thinking and lifestyle which some addicts manifest.

The cost of housing doesn't cause homelessness; it causes roommates and the conflicts and violence and chaos that imposes on people's lives which is significant if under-studied.

The number of people who buy homes to live in them greatly exceeds the number of people who buy homes as investments. That seems obvious to me. The only way most housing could be investment property is if investment vehicles each had so many houses, literally tens or hundreds of thousands, that their total ownership exceeded that of ordinary people .

As it turns out, this is not the case:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/187576/housing-units-occ...

It's not like the price of sleeping somewhere is going to go down if we assign home ownership to people whose goal is to raise the cost of housing for personal gain.

California found out how little this is tolerated when they tried to turn everyone's house into the government's piggy bank by continually raising property taxes. Their voters, ina rare show of almost total unity, capped property taxes to 1%.

It can only be, then, that not only will we not own housing, but its cost, supply, distribution and asignment to individuals will tightly controlled by the government.

At this point in this exercise either you understand that this is an attempt to get you to accept the implementation of totalitarianism or you're under the age of 15.

Population is going down in the developed world. The housing supply is not. If you can't afford housing where you live, then it can only be because more people are demanding housing where you live, having left where they were previously living.

The solution to the "problem of home ownership" is to stop making areas undesirable places to live. Portland springs to mind but there's San Fran. NYC, L.A. but it's not just the Big Blue cities in the US and elsewhere, it's nations run by totalitarians everywhere.

The solution is to export prosperity around the world. Then we can all enjoy the benefits of the developed world's population crash which translates into cheaper housing, amongst other things, both good and bad.

Since The Economist is looking everywhere for the West's biggest mistake, today's their lucky day, I happen to have it right here.

The West should have demanded of China and every other non-democratic regime in the world, as a condition of receiving manufacturing and industries and the privilege of importing their products duty-free, that they liberalize their political systems in ways which are hard to reverse.

This had the power to transform regions from Mexico and Central America to China.

We could have created a schedule of increasingly substantive requirements composed of democratic institutions, free speech and political assembly, (truly) free markets and anti-corruption metrics which had to be met in order to benefit from trade with the West. But we didn't.

We didn't because a small group of industry beneficiaries made small and large fortunes by outsourcing the West's industrialization. They leveraged the lack of environmental and labor standards endured by the world's poor, living under corrupt and totalitarian regimes, to lower the cost of goods sold then sell back into the first world at first world prices.

That's what the elite have been doing since Clinton gave China MFN status and even before.

Now no one in the West can afford the most basic thing every mammal requires- a place of their own. A home. A burrow. A nest. A place to which they can retreat, which they can control and experience sheer animal comfort and safety. Now even that has to go to satiate the boundless greed of our elites.

The only thing left for them to come after is reproduction. We should probably also start thinking about turning our mates over to them, since they can provide for them better than we can.

RTFA. (written by no-one, literally, no byline). TLDR: the elites want you to own nothing and like it.

Anyone who doesn't see in this and COVID passports and only electronic money the clear beginning of an elite-driven fascism is beyond help at this point.

The article is confusing. It appears they're leveraging implicit information in the spectrum of the light reflected from objects to settle on the object's identity.

Then they're encoding that information using the light spectrum again - but not the same wavelengths or information as they used to detect them in the first place.

So you have two things being run together. One is the identification of objects and the other is the encoding of information about those objects so that a single pixel detector is all that is needed to read what has been encoded.

Leverging the light coming off objects and processing it using diffusion filters to "learn" or "reason" about what the object is is a sort of side channel attack on the problem of object identification wrt to current approaches.

Encoding thngs into a light so only a single pixel is needed to carry information is an encoding trick.

If I misunderstood anything- entirely possible- feel free to correct.

Japan and Korea have a homogeneous population with a self-conscious national identity which is a source of pride to each individual. That's the difference you're seeing.