Andre_Wanglin

Taking note of the context within which an acronym or abbreviation is used is part of being an informed reader. In this case, one does not even have to go to the link to get a clue as the URL is right here on HN.

Everyone I know (and know of) espouses obvious claptrap from time to time. If that is the sieve with which you denote undesirables to remove from your personal sphere, your circle either has a radius of 1 or you delude yourself about your detection abilities.

Do think that Republicans are irrational? Are Democrats rational? What about Libertarians or Greens? Irrational or no?

Most people would welcome a government that is merely indifferent to them.

And self-replicating robots at that! They will just require food, water, and shelter as inputs.

How do you (unconsciously) select for attributes that do not exist? It was not until several generations that the first physiological changes began to be observed and those were in hormone levels, not morphology. In fact, the physiological, anatomical, and morphological changes were entirely unanticipated. The testing & categorization methodology is described in the article:

The tests for tameness took the following form, which was still in use as of 2009. "When a pup is one month old, an experimenter offers it food from his hand while trying to stroke and handle the pup. The pups are tested twice, once in a cage and once while moving freely with other pups in an enclosure, where they can choose to make contact either with the human experimenter or with another pup. The test is repeated monthly until the pups are six or seven months old." At the age of seven or eight months, the pups are given a tameness score and placed in one of three groups. The least domesticated are in Class III; those that allow humans to pet and handle them, but that do not respond to contact with friendliness, are in Class II; the ones that are friendly with humans are in Class I.[5] After only six generations, Belyayev and his team had to add a higher category, Class IE, the "domesticated elite", which "are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs. They start displaying this kind of behavior before they are one month old."

What is a racist? Is this a fixed idea or does it change year to year and depend on the context? Shouldn't we be careful about writing off people based on fluctuating social mores? What about fascists, Marxists, communists, and anarchists? And, say, Trump supporters? Do they deserve basic human respect? Is there any reason not to dehumanize these groups too? Or others who fail our moral tests?

I dispute that avoiding obesity requires either exercise or high-quality nutrition. It is simply a matter of maintaining a caloric balance at a healthy weight. This can be effectively controlled entirely on the intake side. (See the nutritionist who lost weight and improved his bloodwork on a gas station junk food diet. [0]) Other countries with varied labor and economic conditions (presumably among them are some you would not label medieval) are experiencing the same obesity pandemic. There is nothing unique about the US in this regard other than it has been leading the trend.

[0]: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/

Ideas are expressed by people. Does every person deserve serious consideration?

Ideology is a relatively new (taking the long view of human history) mechanism for demarcating tribal affiliation that is a uniquely powerful tool for sowing discord and disunity among people who otherwise have every reason to owe allegiance to and be socially bound to one another.

Dmitri Belyayev's decades-long study on silver foxes produced animals that began to distinguish markedly different morphological features (bushy tails, floppy ears, spotted coats) and physiology (lower adrenaline and stress hormone levels, smaller skulls, longer breeding seasons, larger litter sizes) by selecting strictly for tameness, which they defined simply as aggression toward humans.[0] Belyayev was forced to live in Siberia to carry out this work as Mendelian geneticists and biologists were officially condemned (denounced as "fascist" and many were executed) by the Soviet state as it supported Lysenkoism, a Lamarckian psuedo-scientific theory that minimized the role of genes on behavior, which allied well with Soviet and Marxist ideology.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Belyayev_(zoologist)#Be...

What does someone who has spent his academic career with a tailored education program that provides extra time to complete tasks and take tests do upon entering the workforce? Will employers go the extra mile to cater to his needs? Will the market do likewise for his business or product? If I could have taken as long as I wanted on the SAT, I probably would have been able to get a perfect score. But then I wouldn't have been taking the same test as everyone else, would I?

Obesity is a sign of improved living conditions that is also a sign of declining living conditions. The former conditions are largely out of the individual's control while the latter conditions are largely in his control. That is, being able to be obese is dictated by the economic vitality of one's country whereas being obese is dictated by one's actions.

Why do you characterize normal parental investment as privilege? Is it to exculpate parents who neglect their children? Again, as the students in The Promise School not only enjoyed these "privileges" but also twice as much schooling, what would happen if all students received twice as much schooling? Does it stand to reason that the claimed success in closing the achievement gap would persist? In terms of resource allocation, why should some populations be excluded from receiving this additional benefit?

I have never heard anyone express any prejudice toward "Asians" regarding a lack of intelligence. In fact, the usual stereotype is precisely the opposite.

"Society" is just another tribe, one that may wish to eradicate your culture. In a multicultural society, whose tribe is deemed "problematic" and whose is "normal?"

Please substantiate your claim that poor white students receive these benefits, to include "twice as much" schooling.

Yes, poor white students contribute to the black-white achievement gap despite being poor. That is precisely why I brought up that population.

Please dispute a single fact.

In fact, your comment is a lie as my first "contribution" was a simple one-line assertion based on information I happened to be aware of.[0] It was only after being prodded for substantiation that I bothered to type a whopping 3+ paragraphs of facts relating to the matter under discussion.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16728884

Your alternatives are bounded by a lack of imagination.

I am to understand that white students, in aggregate, receive twice as much schooling as black students? And thus the black-white achievement gap?

How is spending twice as long at school correcting a deficiency? Are you sure you understand what a deficiency is? If spending twice as long at school can improve the results of the poor black students in this study, why shouldn't it do the same for white students? If it does, what happens to the achievement gap? How is this not a reasonable question? And do you really think being provided free medical care, dental care, mental health care, etc. is not qualitatively different than receiving the same from the fruit of the parents' labor?

Perhaps, if humans are mostly fungible commodities that respond uniformly to inputs. And RIP if you dare suggest the inverse: subsidizing the reproduction of high achievers.

There is an even greater need to empirically prove the "obvious" and "self-evident" as those are the very things no one sufficiently questions.

You do realize that addressing the achievement gap is the point of both the school and the article, correct? It then makes sense to question if the gap might re-emerge if similar methods were applied to all students, does it not? I have no problem saying precisely what I mean to say.

I wish the opposite. Education should be entirely apolitical and atomized to give those with the most skin in the game the most control. Traditionally, this has been the American way and I do not find a more politicized approach has gained us anything other than divisiveness and contention. The more local the matter, the less the Rs and Ds matter and the more the actual names and people they represent do.

Literacy is a low threshold. This study is talking about eliminating achievement gaps between populations. Their method is intense intervention in every facet of the students' lives. So who receives these services? Is it "fair" to only provide them to certain populations, those deemed most in need? If these methods are successful, why should any student be deprived of them? And if all students receive them, what then becomes of the achievement gap? Does it re-establish itself?

And what if both of those are caused by self-indulgence? Ballooning waistlines reducing lifespans while concomitantly causing healthcare shortages (because of high demand due to obesity-related chronic conditions) is definitely "getting worse" but it's an odd and self-inflicted sort of worse.

>So the obvious story here is the actual decrease in US life expectancy, a situation broadly reflecting declining living conditions in the US.

True, however complicated by the obesity pandemic. Some informed estimates posit that by 2030 the majority of Americans will not be merely overweight but outright obese. [0] That alone is surely sufficient to retard and revert the US life expectancy.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22608371

The kids were in school twice as long, received free dental, medical, and mental health services as well as free meals and transportation for their parents. That is quite a bit more than high-quality schooling. And does the touted "closing" of the black-white achievement gap persist if white students receive the same treatment?

Why do you think the "education system" isn't working as intended?