challenger22

Interesting bit I learned a while back- boat operating costs run about 10% of capital expense, regardless of size of boat.

All arguments I have ever seen involving free will, from both sides, are very weak. It is a branch of philosophy that is particularly self-obsessed, and particularly unlikely to make any decent forward progress. The people who write books about free will are self-selected for a tendency to pontificate on a topic that has no foreseeable resolution.

What evidence do you have for this claim? The article just laid down a lot of evidence that contradicts what you say.

>In fact, the Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health estimates that city dwellers face a nearly 40 percent higher risk of depression, 20 percent higher chance of anxiety, and double the risk of schizophrenia than people living in rural areas.

>In their review, Meyer-Lindenberg and van den Bosch found that some potential threats had been examined more thoroughly than others. For some, including pollen, there wasn’t enough information yet to show a convincing link to depression. However, the team did find a number of studies suggesting that heavy metals like lead, pesticides, common chemicals like bisphenol A (BPA), and noise pollution may contribute to depression, although further research is still needed to confirm that this is the case.

The article gives me the distinct impression that the author is in denial of the stress associated with living in a crowded place. I doubt that it has to do much with fumes in the air- stress is a side effect of spending all day hustling, bustling, and competing. The popular opinion in the zeitgeist is that urban development is a good thing- so any bad effects are treatable. Adding green space may be a decent way to treat the symptoms of city living, but I think it will always be a stressful, mental illness-inducing lifestyle.

And to further complicate it, the smaller a risk, the worse we are at estimating it.

Investigations after the Challenger Disaster revealed that engineers at NASA thought the space shuttle had a 1/100 failure rate per mission, while managers thought the shuttle had a 1/10,000 failure rate.

The criticisms he makes against IQ are pretty easy to argue against. 1. So it looks like any correlation against IQ is strongest at IQ's < 100. This is a fine conclusion and shows an important result- as your IQ increases, your life outcomes are more dependent on other personality factors and choices. He knocks this as a "no correlation existing" for high IQ's, even when you can see the damn correlation on his scatterplots (even after he blacks out large portions of them).

2. For income vs. IQ, there will be high variance. This is obvious.

3. He intentionally omits R-values for many of his plots to hide their predictive power. Even smaller R-values, given a large sample size and good p-test, show the power of a correlation.