blackbrokkoli

The section Unlike height, no one knows what IQ is actually measuring, buried deep in the article, is really all that's needed. "Height" is a well-behaved non-changing property that is meaningful, "IQ" is none of these things. Some fun facts:

- The variation between IQ tests done by the same individual is significantly higher than almost any reasonable cross-group variation (men vs. woman, country A vs. country B, doctors vs. craftsmen, ...)

- The original IQ-test had to use a mathematical trick to cut off "growth of intelligence" at exactly 16 years old, which totally incidentally was the age where mandatory schooling ended for the relevant population.

- The famous "Termites" study which attempted to use IQ to predict the future upper crust of society by testing a large number of children failed to predict any Nobel price winners, but excluded two future Nobel winners (they were too dumb)

- IQ is totally unchangeable and static — nonetheless, you are forbidden from studying or practicing for IQ tests.

So to me, it's not particularly surprising that genetics disappoint in predicting IQ — given that they also fail at predicting other nonsensical and ever-chaning values such as whether I liked today's dinner..

Who ever measured the "correlation" between intelligence and IQ and how?

...given that intelligence is not only abstract, but also not defined consistently?

Being good at something, executing something well, beating a challenge is extremely satisfying.

Nobody said this is some kind of hack for dollars and bling.

Literally the point of Ericsson. The "D" in "DP" is not just there for decoration.

Examples like driving or touch typing are among the most-mentioned examples in the literature for skills where people just go to "good enough" and then plateau, because they don't deliberately aim for improvement.

I mean, do you know what the biggest record jump in 100m running was?

...Usain Bolt beating his own record.

I used to think that genetics must surely play a bigger and bigger role the more a skill is built around pure body function (management < speed typing < wrestling < running), but looking at stuff like this, it doesn't seem so simple.

Trying to innovate digital language learning by building actual learning games, not just gamified apps.

Currently experimenting with a game build around the old classroom method of Total Physical Response — you can see a very early prototype here: https://kolja-sam.itch.io/the-tpr-game-gala

Finally, we curbed the ability of the most fucked subclass of workers to edge their way towards a livable wage by mildly abusing existing systems of trust. Instead, we can now reduce them to a number and use massive data analyses to squeeze the last penny from every gig worker (or of course just straight up steal, like in the OP).

And they say software isn't a force of good! /s

Pretty neat!

Some unsorted Feedback:

- some recommendations where to start apart from "knowledge" would probably help. "Choose any word" kind of prompts are cool, but also overwhelming

- the contrast for "Node Information" is really low (Firefox, Laptop)

- I know this is a free tool and all, but some "selling" could help. What do I gain from your tool? Which pain point does it attack, how does this make me better faster stronger? Where to integrate this in, say, an academic workflow?

Thanks for sharing :)

Interesting! Didn't expect that. Also useful statistic with the 30%, makes sense I guess.

Getting off-topic at this point I guess, but I think national bans can go both ways (and everything in between). I suppose (alcohol) Prohibition and the War on Drugs in the US are prominent examples, but I don't think such bans are doomed to fail necessarily — especially if they are tied with genuine cultural or religious beliefs, geographic isolation, pragmatic unavailability or the thing being banned being simple "not in fashion",,

I think that may be a moot point if you move from an individual level to a societal level.

Like, the positive effects that their success in baseball has on the Dominican Republic would likely also be there if they would commit that hard to basketball, or chess (and maybe that would come with less knee injuries). Yet, it's still correct to say that baseball is hugely beneficial to the DomRep.

My larger point being that we have to disentangle "what should you do on your evenings" and "what is a good cultural approach to this issue"

Do you have support for that claim? Large, large parts of the Islamic world are not westernized at all — I would be very surprised if rural Yemeni housewives or Socotran shepherds ever drink, or for that matter 99% of people in pre-tourist-visa Saudi.

Hard agree on their being a myriad of confounding factors from genetics over climate and family relationships to diet, though...

The other being the myriad of influencing factors you can never really isolate.

Say you do the setup from the quote, then one group would also be in a special situation where researchers told them to do this thing, and they would tell their friends, or maybe they would keep it secret, or maybe it would make them a bit weird, or maybe it would pave the way for more addictions, or make them more conscious of it, and they would have another item on their usual shopping list, and they may meet their spouse in a bar, and so on — all of which influences outcome.

Also the curse of paradigm.

Making tools libre as a matter of course and mailing people checks for bug finds just rings different than today's dominant paradigm of landing pages, conversion rates, social media tie-ins and for-profit non-profits...

Yeah I don't understand how this can be a patent.

For example Skinner's Learning Machine as well as any automatic implementation of Pimsleur's method, both described in the SIXTIES, would fall under this (according to my reading, I'm not a patent lawyer, hamdulillah).

Absurd.

That's a cool take, thank you!

I think it's something that I already knew in my heart, but I think by putting it like this you killed some shipping anxiety and perfectionism tendency in me. Thanks :)

Don't even have to look that far. Scriptio Continua, writing without spaces, was all the rage in Greek and Latin, and the idea of using all those fancy separators like spaces and full stops only caught on in Europe from 800-1400. [0]

[0] Wiki Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua

Hi, late to the party, but cool project. Very intrigued by the kind of learning that AI is starting to enable. Any chance of supporting Arabic anytime soon? :D

Two minor pieces of feedback: Your landing page could use a favicon (makes it look more, idk, polished?) and, rather unrelated, your personal website linked on HN throws a 404.

Anyways, godspeed with the project, will maybe write more here once I downloaded the app :)

Genuinely curious, how would you scrutinize a categorization tool that includes both causes and effects in its key?

I'm only tangentially following the whole autism/Asperger's/ADD/ADHD development, and I'm growing more and more convinced that all these categories are mostly arbitrary constructs grown out of random history and academia politics. Happy to be proved wrong here, though.

Wouldn't go that far. Rural exodus is pretty universal in the West, even in countries that have all these under control.

However as someone who lived in the area I want to point out that the offer is neither a scam nor a meme.

There are people buying these houses (not in droves), and a few communities achieved repopulation. The 1€ offers are an expression of a larger sentiment of the local gov having genuine interest in you moving there, and a promise that they won't drown you in needless bureaucracy or otherwise push you out. And, if you interested in such a renovation project, it's a genuinely great offer ofc.

Agreed on your points on quality of living though, that is indeed the crux.

Man I don't love these unspecified, context-free takes on "building software". The author lists a lot of tech stack, but no scope, no context, no size estimates about the software he's built.

Now we have a thread where the gal writing FORTRAN for legacy nuclear plants is telling the guy doing IT for a mom and pop how he's approaching tests all wrong. Meanwhile, the third person working in an expanding startup who has "ninja" in his job description understands neither and looks down on both.

Not very productive.

Hey, in case you are still interested, here is a little explanation on the algorithm: https://koljapluemer.com/2023/09/23/arabic-numbers-sr.html

Noted, thanks!

As another German living in SWAMA, I'd say this sounds correct.

Additional fun fact, the locals here don't actually seem to be aware that they read numbers the other way 'round. I pointed this out to two Egyptians now, both of whom told me that they never noticed. What can I say, I guess it's all habit and intuition...

Yeah, expressing that you are talking about the, eh, Arabic numbers in Arabic in a generally understandable way is pretty hard haha

I don't think Arabic numbers are necessarily the hardest of all, but coming from English, they are certainly tougher than, say, Spanish: The numerals are different, and so is the script in the long-form. It's "one-twenty" instead of "twenty-one" so to speak. And counting to 10 already requires quite a few of the really hard, uniquely Arabic sounds, like the 'ain. So yeah, not trivial :D

You can certainly learn them without this project, but you definitely have to seriously practice in some way..

Thank you for sharing your experience!

I'm sort of using it as a from-scratch-learning tool myself (and I made sort of the same experience as you, after a while the first numbers start to stick) - although I definitely agree that it is very much a "getting thrown into the pool" approach to teaching.

In my head, I call the usage of Latin script for Arabic words "transliteration", which I believe is the general term for expressing a word in another script system. Not sure if there is a specific one for Arabic/Latin..

Good idea, thanks!

It's a pretty lazy version of intra-session Spaced Repetition, vaguely based on Pimsleur's original definition, with some extras to avoid boredom/frustration.

Give me a day or so for a writeup then I come back to you :)

Yes, you are right, and that should probably be clarified.

Thanks! That's a good idea, I'm putting it on the list.