ckuehne

What exactly do you think "makes no sense"? That two groups could evolve different traits over time? If so, how would you explain differences in skin color between West Africans and Northern Europeans? Or differences in lactose tolerance between different ethnic groups [1]?

[1] http://www.foodreactions.org/intolerance/lactose/prevalence....

"This is perhaps more easily understood when you know that the Jewish culture places enormous focus on educating the next generation and on critical thinking"

Or maybe it is even better understood in terms of genetic differences: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence.

None of the results in this article warrants the conclusion in the title.

The fact that "children from affluent families were starting to speak after implant surgery, those from low-income families lagged behind." can simply be explained by genetics. I.e., affluent parents tend to have affluent children, even if those children are raised by other parents [1, 2].

All the cited study does is measure how much the vocabulary of the _caregivers_ increased due to linguistic feedback methods.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture [2] E.g., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21425893

"In medieval Europe, an oath of fealty (German: Lehnseid) was a fundamental element of the feudal system in the Holy Roman Empire. It was sworn between two people, the obliged person (vassal) and a person of rank (liege lord)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fealty

Not that I am aware of. But it is safe to assume that no one doubts the effectiveness of emergency care or most basic procedures in general. However, everything beyond that is likely on average not helpful and might be even harmful.

The overall result, namely, that at the margin medicine has net-negative effects (i.e., after a certain point more medicine equals worse health) has been replicated many times. See for example this meta-study from 2008 about what happens when health workers go on strike [1]:

"[..] mortality either stayed the same or decreased during, and in some cases, after the strike. [No study] found that mortality increased during the weeks of the strikes compared to other time periods."

The authors speculate about the reasons: "The paradoxical finding that physician strikes are associated with reduced mortality may be explained by several factors. Most importantly, elective surgeries are curtailed during strikes. Further, hospitals often re-assign scarce staff and emergency care was available during all of the strikes."

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18849101

EDIT: clarity

"Flights are much safer due to the amount of research done in air-travel safety, in general, and also after every accident."

Yes, of course. But why? Why is the amount of safety research so much higher after a plane crashes compared to when a patient dies? Why are simple checklists common practice for pilotes but not for doctors even though they could save many lives [1].

As for car travel. It seems to be inherently more dangerous for the reasons you mention. But lets introduce a principal-agent problem [2] for car driving. Assume that for example taxi drivers would steer the vehicle from a save place say as a drone. Would you want to drive with such a taxi?

[1] Gigerenzer: Risk Savvy - How to make good decisions. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem

I think you are confused what skin in the game means. Pilotes and startup founders are among the professions with most skin in the game. If they crash their plane/company they die/go brankrupt (or at least lose time and money) with it. That pilotes die in case of a plane crash is probably the main reason why air travel is so safe.

On the other hand doctors have, compared to their patients, no skin in the game. If the patients health gets worse or the patient dies the doctor stays unharmed. This is partially the reason for overtreatment in medicine (the other one being the asymmetry between the rewards for positive/negative effects of treatment vs. no-treatment.)

Arguing over sentences with the qualifier 'not mere' seems pointless [1]. Lets just say instead that I addressed the "hidden" implication of the statement. The quote continues: "The limits within which the preservation and self-expansion of the value of capital resting on the expropriation and pauperisation of the great mass of producers ...". Maybe this makes it more clear what he was going to say.

[1] Since 'not mere' does not exclude anything the means of production could be means for everything. But technically your point about the non-implication is correct.

Since the standard of living for the 'society of producers' has risen by a good measure since the time 'someone' said that, I guess 'someone' has been proven wrong by a good measure.

Is there a way to read up on the things taught in the workshop in particular on the more applied/practical material?

"It would be great if someone who is a researcher in this field could give us some more recent results and data."

There you go: Reef winners and losers in a warmer world: http://www-public.jcu.edu.au/news/JCU_099903

Thinking about it, it comes down to the level of analysis you choose. If you assume constant space per integer, then it is indeed solvable with O(1) additional space. For example, this is usually assumed when analyzing sorting algorithms and I guess this is also what the author had in mind.

I very much doubt that the OP can solve either problem 1 or problem 2 with constant space. Hint: even storing an additional integer N requires \Omega(log(N)) space.

Edit: For the down voter: I searched around and found a discussion of the puzzle [1]. Please go ahead and read it.

[1] http://books.google.de/books?id=415loiMd_c0C&lpg=PP1&...

An opinion by Nassim Taleb on the subject (posted on his facebook page):

"I have been told by conference organizers and other rationalistic, empirically challenged fellows that one needs to be clear, deliver a crisp message, maybe even dance on the stage to get the attention of the crowd. Or speak with the fake articulations of T.V. announcers. Charlatans try sending authors to “speech school”. None of that. I find it better to whisper, not shout. Better to slightly unaudible, less clear. Acquire a strange accent. One should make the audience work to listen, and switch to intellectual overdrive. (In spite of these rules of thumb by the conference industry, there is no evidence that demand for a speaker is linked to the TV-announcer quality of his lecturing). And the most powerful, at a large gathering, tends to be the one with enough self-control to avoid raising his voice to be noticed, and make others listen to him."

"there are already names for people who do that."

Honest question: What name is that? (English is not my first language.)

And since I cannot quite interpret the tone of your comment I have to ask bluntly: Do you find it okay what the Samwers do?

Tichy is right. Devaluation - if at all - works only in the short run [1].

http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2012/01/should-greece-deva...

I am well aware of the point they were trying to make. Or, more precisely, the point Kahneman et al. were trying to make. What I am concerned about is that they, that is, the editors / writers of Vanity Fair, do not understand their mistake. This is somewhat likely given the error they made described by the grandparent comment.

Overall, I find it rather ironic to find such gross errors in an article that sets out to educate the reader about "human error".

Not only do they seem to lack basic probability skills. They also cannot cite the original material correctly. Kahneman and Tversky tested something else completely. Namely, that people tend to ignore base rates when making probability estimates. From Kahneman's book:

"In one experimental condition, subjects were told that the group from which the descriptions had been drawn consisted of 70 engineers and 30 lawyers. In another condition subjects were told that the group consisted of 30 engineers and 70 lawyerss. [..] In sharp violation of Bayes' rule, the subjects in the two conditions produced essentially the same probability judgements."

There is also a blatant error in the OP article: Answer No. 2 (Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.) is by no means "logically impossible".

EDIT: wording

What he (probably) means is that the following query returns the same result as your query:

    select
        sp.Name,
        sum(s.Amount) as TotalSales
    from
        Sales s
        RIGHT join SalesPerson sp on
            sp.SalesPersonKey = s.SalesPersonKey
    group by
        sp.Name
    order by
        TotalSales desc

EDIT: Formatting.

Are you sure? You need an income of over 300k Euro to reach 42% taxes in Germany. Not saying, that you are not making that much. But sometimes people get confused between marginal and average tax rate.

Your point being?

Interesting experiment. But the 10,000 hours rule is a myth [1]. The variance in deliberate practice needed is huge: some top performers need 3,000 hours while others need 24,000 hours. Some never get to the top no matter how much they practice. Success is probably due to many different factors. Just focusing on the deliberate practice is neither necessary nor sufficient.

[1] http://www.sportsscientists.com/2011/08/talent-training-and-...

What does MVP mean?

We are talking statistics here. When you see a hypothesis like "past performance does not correlate with future performance" you look around for evidence for or against it. All the examples I cited clearly speak against this hypothesis. Insofar, the fact that people use past behavior as a predictor for future behavior clearly speaks against the hypothesis.

I could go on with examples. Why is it for example, that people want to get to know each other better before they hop into some kind of mutual arrangement or contract? Could it be, because we all try to predict future behavior from past behavior?

Of course we could all be wrong - in general or in certain circumstances. Maybe a pedophile will never molest a child again in the future. Or maybe the girl you dated who was very obnoxious will change for the better. Yet, this is unlikely (remember: this is still a statistical argument). So the burden of proof is with the guy who came up with this hypothesis.

EDIT: Regarding the "the fact that Google does it doesn't proof anything" argument. Would you say that Google should just throw a coin to decide which applicant to take or simply take the first k applicants (say, in alphabetical order) and Google would not be worse off than they are with the current interview process?

I think he is right. Past and future performance don't correlate. That is why employers do usually not look a resumes or references. Or why, say, Google and Microsoft don't ask tricky questions in interviews. Or why admission to graduate programs is never determined by your past grades and achievements. Wait, what?

Or maybe not: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/07/a-galaxy-on-earth.html. Who knows.

The hypothesis of this paper rings true (based on my experience).

The OP cites three sources at the bottom of the page.

http://mindhacks.com/2009/02/12/leadership-can-be-based-on-q...

http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/07/how-newcomers-can-influence...

http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1...

EDIT: cleaned links

"suppose a prospective client or employer saw your face on an advertisement for some banned substance"

But this is not what Google does, or am I missing something? AFAIK, what they actually do is more akin to shopping basket analysis supermarket chains do. So my question remains: How exactly does it harm you? Has Google ever linked you in a publicly identifiable way to some product? Moreover, if you feel bothered by the way they handle things, why don't you just stop using them?