Expert Opinions I Agree with (That Most People Don’t)
scotthyoung.com
scotthyoung.com
In economically more equal societies, people tend to treat each other as equals in other ways. For example, I'm fairly convinced that the wealth inequality in America is why Americans to treat their low-paid service workers so poorly, compared to most other very wealthy countries. They're beneath them in the implicit class hierarchy created by the unequal wealth distribution.
Similarly, if the yearly salary of a police officer, judge, or tax auditor, is simple pocket change to the wealthy, then they're all for sale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg
The difference with us is that we can learn and understand the reasons why one person gets a "grape" and the other a "cucumber"... and those answers are often not just unsatisfying, but infuriating.
And it's entirely rational, not merely universal or understandable.
Chris Rock has a joke about the same sort of argument that some white people try to make about black people having it objectively and absolutely so much better now. True. They do. So would you trade places? Even a Walmart greeter wouldn't trade places with me in a million years "and I'm rich!"
If "objectively better off than yesterday" is all that anyone "rational" should care about, then I'll take over your valueless extra 400k (you can keep 100). After all, your dad had to get black lung in the coal mine and die at 47, all you gotta do is play around on a computer in an air conditioned clean office. You have it objectively 1000x better. You (the parent comment not you) should be fine with this. After all, it does not matter at all what I do with that 400k, or what I did or didn't do to get it, or what you did or didn't to to only get 100.
That's what "I'm always amused by".
Hell we are in an active housing crisis because of inequality.
Sure you won't starve but the idea that the wealthiest country in the world can't house everyone isn't something that should be ignored.
There’s plenty examples of nations with way worse inequality but abundant housing options.
And at the same time we need to acknowledge that NIMBY arguments aren't totally without merit, they're just cynical. If you believe that only half measures will be taken and ultimately neglected, that the full range of investment required to make a lot of low-cost housing work will not appear... then you're just potentially living next to a project.
Likewise with zoning laws, some are stupid, but some are there because they're the best compromise solution to proven problems. If we want housing to be both a place for people to live and a potential investment then there needs to be a degree of stability in the housing market, and zoning helps with that.
Not saying it is an easy problem just that it could be solved more directly.
Honestly our federated nature and in fighting make a real solution super difficult.
If you tackle your homeless problem others will ship you their homeless since bus tickets are cheaper than solutions.
Just because you’ve been somewhere doesn’t mean you’ve got a real understanding of anything that’s going on there. I’m very skeptical that someone wearing a visit to a place with poor people as some kind of badge of authority on the topics surrounding them actually has any clue.
The people I’ve talked to who had “miserable, starvation at the door lives” elsewhere who now live with low incomes in the us have mixed feelings about it… nothing as clear cut as what you’re implying
This is the problem with “rationalists”.. . They don’t actually use their brains, they defer to “authority”, arguing that anyone that doesn’t listen to authorities is arrogant, but then they pick who they deem to be authorities to match their pre-existing opinions.
Being charitable here perhaps the author was just saying that the evidence is overwhelming that intelligence is heritable (to some degree), and that it's their opinion that it's "largely" heritable (assuming they mean 50%+). If by "largely" they just meant somewhere in the region of 50%, then I think this is a fairly accurate statement.
The author shares my view on this. If I had to guess intelligence is likely to be somewhere around to 60-80% heritable in the West. However, in countries where malnutrition, disease and lack of basic education are factors these are likely more important than genetics.
> This is the problem with “rationalists”.. . They don’t actually use their brains, they defer to “authority”, arguing that anyone that doesn’t listen to authorities is arrogant, but then they pick who they deem to be authorities to match their pre-existing opinions.
Ad hominem. Also your criticising rationalists for both blindly overweighting the opinions of experts and also not listening to the opinions of experts. If they're selecting expert opinions based on their own opinions then, if not their own brains, where did these opinions come from?
Also: that's not how the ad hominem fallacy works. It's not a religious law against criticizing groups of people; it's a logical flaw in a particular argument --- the commenter you're replying to didn't make that particular argument (in fact: they made the opposite kind of argument), and so you can't invoke it like a magic spell.
I personally assumed the author meant the variance of IQ within a population is "largely" a product of genetics. Assuming they they believe this genetic factor is around 50% then this would not be a controversial position to hold among intelligence researchers.
If the author doesn't really know what heritability means, then maybe they're not in a position to be communicating to the world about what the "overwhelming evidence" shows, or even having an opinion on the matter at all.
Look at this list of the most cited cognitive scientists in the journal "cognitive science"... https://exaly.com/rankings/author/journal-2/19263/
#1, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Elman ... Jeffery Elman. I wonder what his stance on the matter is. Let's see if there's a quick way to determine what his thought on heritability are.
Turns out right on his wikipedia page he wrote a book about what he thinks about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rethinking_Innateness
It's call "Rethinking Innateness," questioning the over-attribution to genetics of gene x environment interactions.
It took me all of 2 minutes to look that up. The author of this article clearly just completely made up what they said. They had no basis or intellectual discipline in arriving at their opinion.
I had never heard of Jeffery Elman (though I'm familiar with some of his work on RNN's apparently). I had the same thoughts about gene x environment interactions that he apparently describes in his book. I arrived there through a combination of reading papers about the impact of genetics on psychological and cognitive function as well as using critical thinking... as I bet most who have studied cognitive science would.
If I were going to publish a blog post, let alone a book, I would at least do the bare minimum 2 minute google search to see if I'm completely making stuff up before I make claims, implied or explicit, about the consensus of a whole field.
It's not an ad hominem at all. I attacked their thought process, not their person. And the point is that they encourage other people not to use their critical thinking and brains, and just defer to others who they happen to agree with.
> Being charitable here
And why would I do that? They're not being charitable to the opposing opinion. If they were rational, they would have attempted a full catalogue of both sides of the matter, taking the actual of actual opposition, rather than making up straw men.
> The evidence is overwhelming that intelligence is at least partly heritable
This is an argument against nobody and nothing. I don't think there's a single scientist in the world who said intelligence is 0% heritable. This is a very far cry from the stance that it's mostly heritable. Which would imply greater than 50%.
So even being charitable the author's factual stance is very weak, yet they're drawing strong conclusions from it.
If it's 50% heritable that means less than 50% genetic... which implies that at least 50% of intelligence is based in environment. This is not at all evidence of the author's point. It's evidence against it.
http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html
http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html
On efficient markets, I'd recommend:
https://economics.northwestern.edu/docs/events/nemmers/2004/...
Ned Block also has an excellent, deep, and very accessible piece --- more targeted to a lay audience than Cosma Shalizi's pieces, which are very much "about" statistics --- on what it is "heritability" means (tl;dr: it does not mean what most comments on HN seem to think it means):
(1) The people who think that the market can be beat don't think most people can do it. They think most people can't but that they're special and can.
Think most people agree with (2) and (4) as well. They just don't like the implications re: society and God that come with it. To the extent they get rejected it's to preserve the viability of the notions they hold.
They admit (5) is something most people agree with.
(3) and (6) they whittle down their extreme position to what most people agree with
(7) is the closest to delivering what the title claims. But ultimately "better" is subjective and while I largely agree with the point it's not exactly an objective truth.
This also operates the other way, and links to your statement in #1. Most people want to believe in the idea of pre-determined concepts because it makes them feel special when they aren't living a lesser pre-determined fate.
There is zero evidence leaning to either side. It's much like the concept of god, where the only proof people can establish is that the concept exists therefore it justifies. This is a comforting thought to hold instead of sitting in the unknown.
> adults simply plateau at a non-native level of ability, given continued practice.
If adults plateau and kids don't, kids do learn languages faster.
The article considers "learn" to mean roughly "fluency", short of native mastery, and adults tend to reach fluency faster, then plateau.
So depending on nuance, you and the article are both right in some sense.
> True, knowing the Standard Model doesn’t help us predict most of the big things we care about
Quite the caveat! The big things may be supervenient on physics, but explained by it, no
Maybe I am not smart enough for this, but can someone define "General Intelligence" for me?
"Practically speaking, the best way to become smarter is to learn a lot of stuff and cultivate a lot of skills. Since knowledge and skills are more specific than general intelligence, that may be less than we desire, but it still matters a lot."
Would "learning a lot of stuff and cultivating a lot of skills" not boost your general intelligence?
I think about this a lot and frankly don't have a good answer, but my current definition is something like "the speed and the depth at which someone can synthesize and comprehend new ideas."
It's by no means perfect, but when I observe people around me that just "seem smart" to me, the above statement is generally true.
If you said that these things are generally true, but have exceptions to these rules, then I would be more likely to agree. But I detest the kind of absolute-ist, black-and -white thinking represented here.
For instance, while physics is really good at making practical predictions about the physical reality of things we can observe, it mostly fails to describe why things behave as they do. It keeps trying to describe the underlying reality of the universe, but it's likely that the true nature of it is so much stranger than we can imagine right now.
Or that calories in vs calories out is the only possible cause of obesity. I agree that for probably 99.9% of people this is true, but to say that it's impossible that hormonal imbalance or other biological causes are not possible is just plain stupid. I know that lots of people think they are exceptions who probably aren't, but some of them actually do have more complex issues at play.
But, things like hormonal imbalances and biological causes would effect the "calories out" portion of the formula, no?
I was successful using a high fat low carb (keto) diet only because the calories I ate from fat helped activate my satiety feelings better than other diets and that helped me control my caloric intake for 2 years. Other diets I had tried failed to trigger that satiety level and made them unsustainable.
I heard how easy it was for decades and generally it was from people who have never had a weight issue in their life. Frankly, they are clueless idiots. I also know from my own journey that your body definitely will fuck with you in some extraordinary ways that over the short term can make you suspicious that there is more to it than a calorie deficit. I went for 3 months with a definite calculable calorie deficit and lost nearly nothing. My body just decided to retain some fluid for a time and that threw off the scale. I powered through the frustration with the lack of progress and dropped double digits in a week and then weight loss gradually fell appropriately after whatever biological/metabolic box got ticked.
Something along the lines of that if they try to go on a diet the body will fight the attempt to use stored fat so hard that they'll end up with low blood sugar and faint.
I don't recall the exact argument being made but I think that's the overall gist -- not that it's possible to somehow violate thermodynamics, but that for some people it may be near impossible in practice while remaining healthy/functional for weird internal biochemistry reasons.
Other than this, this is just a collection of bad takes based on flawed understanding of topics (inheritable ≠ innate, GDP ≠ well being, etc.)
People weren't amused at all when James Watson said that intelligence is heritable, and that like basically all other heritable attributes there is a difference between the average of different "races". [1]
But while we are fine with different genetic groups having different incidences for hair color, nose shapes or skin pigmentation, and are slowly coming to grips with different genetic groups having different incidences of various illnesses, and sometimes different reactions to them, the idea that different genetic groups could have statistically significant intelligence differences feels wrong.
The reason it's important to know, regardless of what the answer is, is that policy should be informed by reality. If we find that general intelligence is 80% genetic, or 40% genetic, or 0% genetic, this would have starkly different impacts on how we choose to educate our children, how we choose to recognize and/or compensate success, etc.
For most people differences among different groups stop at the brain ;)
It is not the case that there is a model scaling from the sub-atomic to the universal level that offers complete predictive capability.
He says:
>The remaining controversies of physics, from string theory to supersymmetry, are primarily theoretical issues only relevant at extremely high energies.
Fair enough, but using the word "entirely" in the section heading is inappropriate.
I am going to take issue with this one; because as standards rise, the more unachievable they can become.
Example: 100 years ago, it wasn’t nearly as hard to buy a house. Sure, they might have had leaky roofs or lacked electricity or lacked indoor plumbing, but that was pretty normal. Your wife wasn’t going to lose her mind if you told her the outhouse was the only option.
Now here we are. Sure, our homes are way better - and more unaffordable for everyone. Just saying it’s better than it was - so stop being so pessimistic ignores how comparatively out of reach life feels.
It would be like if the only computer you could buy in 2027 was $8000, and had the equivalent of a RTX 7090 in it. “Stop whining - it’s so much better than they used to be” is not my complaint.
Why should "standards" be relevant in the measurement of long-term economic indicators? Doesn't the very stack that standards have risen prove the core point that life has gotten better?
To use the GP's example: if the median standard home has electricity, a minimum insulation R-value, a minimum grade of roof, minimum square footage, bathroom plumbing, land setbacks, etc, governments tend to align their habitability inspection requirements with those standards.
Let's say hypothetically that County X establishes the 2023 habitability requirements, and these requirements by market necessity cost a minimum of $120k for the dwelling and $120k for the land.
Let's say you're a single guy on minimum wage who is absolutely fine not having electricity, is ok with dealing with the occasional roof leak, and has no problem using a composting toilet. You want to buy a home, and you can absolutely afford it, but County X is preventing you from doing so because the standards have been set by people making more than minimum wage.
Extreme example: LA.
There are still places you can buy $50K or $100K homes in the US, which has a lot of land. But you’d pay 10X more in a desirable metro area.
I'm not sure that measuring externalities like that are what markets are for.
In the context of this post, for example, the author seems to be casting a pretty narrow net here, and talking about whether market prices are accurate measures of what other people are willing to pay for a thing.
To speak of markets as serving society poorly by not incorporating environmental impacts is to speak of other than what he is talking about when he says "markets are rational".
The less liquidity, the more inefficiency there is...the environment being an extreme example...
See my detailed comment here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37172299
Can I sell you my apartment in Miami? Would you park your Ferrari in the basement?
In fact, if you add up all correlations, adjusted for strength, existing research suggests there is no other single data point (age, race, gender, sex, religion, country of birth, parent(s) SES, parent(s) educational attainment, disability, BMI, standardized test scores, etc) that predicts as much, as powerfully as IQ (again, as a proxy for g) does.
I am not taking a position for or against these findings, and it's fair to note that all of these findings occur within the broader paradigm of the replication crisis, affecting even the most prolific studies oft cited for some of the most widespread beliefs held by the scientific community, which more or less weakens the "signal to noise ratio" of the scientific community's consensus, so take those studies I've mentioned with as much a grain of salt as any other.
For anyone downvoting this comment, could I please ask why, or at least whether for ideological reasons (i.e. you disagree with the ideas I am discussing) or form (i.e. tone is wrong, appears disingenuous, etc). I respect your right to do so, but I intentionally attempted to maintain an inoffensive, neutral, unbiased stance here. As a non-neurotypical person, common perception can be difficult for me to absorb without explicit feedback, so any feedback is appreciated.