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Part of the reason, I think, is that the modern talent extraction system didn't exist then. Think of standardized testing and the education industrial complex as a kind of strip mining operation.

Many of the most capable people are identified before they're adults and then relocated to certain specific institutions, locations, and careers. The result is that the places and subcultures they leave behind fail to thrive in a thousand small ways, the cumulative effects of which are obvious.

In 1900, lots of the people who today are 10x programmers in SF were farmers and small business owners in small towns or rural areas. When you look back at some of the things they figured out and built, you see a level of talent that most of their modern successors lack.

Empirically, yes. Very few people who attempt to lose a substantial amount of weight via diet and exercise are able to lose the weight and keep it off over the long term. The latter part is the problem for most people.

No, they'll still want to come here en masse even if we don't do those things to them.

The increasing legal constraints offset the declining technological constraints. Given modern communications and transportation technology, open borders would have very different practical effects today than a century or two ago. The number of people who would come in would be hugely greater than in the past.

Agreed. When GPT-3 first became available to everyone, I assumed that, for example, huge numbers of kids in school would immediately start using it to write essays for English and History class. But I was surprised to find, even after it was available for a year, that virtually no students or teachers I asked about it had even heard of it.

Supposedly ChatGPT is based on "GPT-3.5". When GPT-3 came out in 2020, it wasn't really good at rhyming words. It could do okay-but-not-great blank verse. There are some examples of 2020-era GPT-3 poetry here:

https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#miscellaneous-poetry

ChatGPT is way better at poetry than the original GPT-3.

Why does this article capitalize the word "Black" but not "white"?

Restrictive lending standards for minorities is redlining, which is racism. Permissive lending standards for minorities is predatory lending, which is also racism.

You could try using Midjourney: https://discord.com/invite/midjourney

It's probably more accurate to describe this as a new way of pouring concrete than as "3D-printing a house" in full. It's using concrete shot out from a printer head where concrete block or poured concrete might have been used. But most of the materials in the house are the traditional kind and will be installed in the traditional way.

It's possible to download Google Earth's 3D model, at the resolution in your link, for any area where they show 3D buildings/landscape. It's not something they facilitate and definitely requires something of a hack, but it does work. Then you can get the model into Blender, SketchUp, etc. and start editing it to add or remove buildings and so on.

Would be interested to know whether that's technically legal. I mean, they put it out there on their website, right?

Define "in your control". Research finds over and over again that genetics plays a major role in BMI and that upbringing plays little or no role.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2012.0002...

One way to think about it is that certain behaviors are more controllable in the short term than in the long term. An extreme example would be breathing, which, like eating behavior, the brain subconsciously regulates by default. You can override the default and intake substantially more or less oxygen for a while. In the end, though, you will revert to to subconscious regulation and your blood oxygen level will revert to the level where your brain wants it to be.

Eating behavior seems to work in a similar way, although the timeline is much longer and the cues are more subtle.

If these family-level environmental inputs had substantial effects on adult IQ, we'd see it in the behavioral genetics research. But we don't. The adult IQs of adopted children have very little correlation with those of the adoptive parents who raised them or those of their adopted, non-biological siblings.

Agreed, this is a more precise way of stating it, albeit using traits that are more difficult to measure at scale.

>Different school districts offer vastly different levels of education, depending mainly on wealth

The data show that causation mostly flows in the opposite direction. The main determinant of whether a school is "good" is the average academic ability of the students who attend the school. And that, statistically speaking, is largely a function of race and income.

Policy interventions based on the idea that school quality determines student performance have consistently failed to show significant results. These interventions include local and regional busing. Putting lower-achieving students in close physical proximity to higher-achieving students doesn't make much of a long-term difference.

Tether's market cap has declined about $9 billion in the past several weeks, going from ~$83B to ~$74B. If that continues, and its backing really isn't adequate, we will find out.

Their missiles seem to work.

Again, I'm just re-posting that comment. Would be nice if someone who could read the actual article confirmed that the comment is accurate.

First, this apparently covers one single set of twins. Tiny sample size.

Second, I can't access the actual paper, but a commenter at Marginal Revolution wrote the following:

"Everyone in the comments here arguing about the implications of this study for the heritability of intelligence (vs. other factors like parenting) seems to be missing an important piece of information buried in the study: the twin raised in the US suffered three concussions as an adult, including one in 2018 that resulted in "light sensitivity and concentration difficulty" and led her to feel like a "different person, with increased anger and anxiety." It is hardly surprising that someone who has suffered multiple major concussions would score lower on tests of cognitive ability than someone who has not."

I wonder how it would do with more technical engineering drawings, like shop drawings for machinists or blueprints for a building.

Embryo selection based on genome sequencing is already being done:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/welcome-polygenically-...

>the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth, which is indeed due to racist public policy as well as racist private actions. it may be intended not that way, but that's how it functions.

I'm not aware of data on SAT scores and family net worth, but there is plenty of data on SAT scores and family income. Controlling for income doesn't come close to accounting for racial gaps; the richest black kids barely do better than the poorest white kids.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ezekiel-Dixon-Roman/pub...

No, because the debt is owed to the government or to private lenders. Once the money is issued from the lender to the school for tuition, the school has no further exposure to any risk. Total scam.

It's not clear, although it seems reasonable to assume that the availability of cheap processed food is a major factor.

If changing one's environment were a straightforward thing, like changing what foods one keeps in one's cabinets, then the data on the effectiveness of weight loss interventions would not be so dismal. An effective change of environment is probably more like "moving from Alabama to Japan".

People get mad when they hear this, but:

A) Obesity is HIGHLY heritable. Tons of twin and adoption studies prove this. The correlation between the adult BMIs of adopted (non-related) siblings raised in the same household is virtually zero. This means that parenting practices have no long-term impact on body fatness. The correlation between the adult BMIs of biological siblings raised in different households is strong, though.*

B) Virtually all attempts to lose weight eventually fail. "Eat less and exercise more" essentially doesn't work as a long-term weight loss intervention, because very few people are able to comply with it over the long term. The one exception is gastric bypass surgery, which does reliably produce long-term weight loss. There are some new medications that show promise, but it's too soon to tell if they'll work permanently.

*People will inevitably say "how can obesity be heritable when it's increased so much over time? Americans used to be much thinner!" But the same is true of other highly heritable traits, like height. In some Asian countries, people are six inches taller than they were 100 years ago. Nevertheless, height is heritable. Heritability exists within a specific environmental context, and our environment is much more conducive to obesity than it was in the past.

Russia will be greatly hurt overall by all of these sanctions and corporate decisions. Still, it's striking how many of the American companies pulling their products from Russia sell things that weaken and enervate the people who consume them. I personally would probably be better off if I lost access to all Coca-Cola products. Likewise for Netflix, Instagram, etc. It doesn't say anything good for America that so many of its big companies fall into that category.

If enough of this happens, the world will become a giant shopping mall in which everyone is from everywhere and no one has anything in common. No common culture, history, identity, ancestry, anything. The distinctions between countries will become meaningless; an America filled with H1B workers will be the same as a Canada filled with their neighbors from back home. Sounds depressing. Personally, I'll settle for lower GDP.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency has a lot of good data:

https://www.fhfa.gov/DataTools/Downloads/Pages/House-Price-I...

The Five Digit Zip Codes developmental indices give good information about local-market performance across multiple cycles.

Anonymous people online might use this murder as an argument for limiting immigration. "As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse."

It’s not clear that condo units have higher long-term capex costs than single-family homes; arguably economies of scale make their capex lower as a percentage of home value. So the problem isn’t a problem of cost per se, it’s a collective action problem.

The issue is that the buyers of condo units don’t really pay much attention to the condo association’s reserve balance. A current owner who contributes $1 to the reserve fund won’t see a corresponding $1 increase in the value of their unit. The increase, if any, will likely be a small fraction of that.

So an owner who’s considering selling in the next few years - which is common, since the tenure of condo owners is lower than that of single-family homeowners - is rational to fight attempts to fund the reserve. They’re also rational to keep monthly condo fees as low as possible, since buyers do look at the fees. But that also makes preventative maintenance difficult.