dionidium

> Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%, with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%. IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

Sorry, I deleted that part right after posting it, because I thought it was a little bit uncharitable. But I stand by the general sentiment, and I would just say that in our system of law and government, we have decided to solve this problem in one direction, which is to say that you are innocent until proven guilty. Taking an innocent person’s children away from them is an outrageous harm, and nobody should be subjected to it on the basis that extreme caution may save some other kids someday.

People should not feel guilty about saying plainly, no, you cannot take my children out of their home, just because an abundance of caution might help you prevent some real cases of abuse elsewhere.

> Some among the medical staff and social workers involved in the case thought that Jenn reacted strangely to the discovery of her children’s injuries. She didn’t show emotion or seem bothered. Her affect was “flat,” according to the D.S.S. report. The hospital’s abuse specialist concluded that the baby girl’s fractures were “diagnostic of physical abuse” and that the bruises were “inflicted.” D.S.S. concluded the boy’s injuries were also the result of abuse. A factor in this determination was that Robbie and Jenn did not have “a plausible explanation” for the injuries. “We had no idea,” Robbie told me later.

What’s perverse is that the state can take your kids away without a trial and on the basis of evidence this flimsy, and the expectation is that you are guilty unless you can provide an explanation they’re happy with. To add insult to this obvious injury, you will be held to account for your affect when dealing with the state apparatus charged with taking your children away and subjected to weird psychologizing by people without any particular psychological expertise (as if there is a correct way to respond to these questions in the first place). A tired and overworked social worker who just came from collecting six kids from a drug den can operationalize a gut feeling that your responses were “flat” and you’ll go to bed that night not knowing where your children are or when (if ever) you’ll get them back.

The idea that this only ever happens to bad people who deserve it is naïve in the extreme, and the annals of CPS are full of cases of outrageous mishandling and overreach.

These are medians.

No. This is obviously adjusted for inflation.

https://twitter.com/johanknorberg/status/1780892502070898828

> A common view among Gen Z or younger Millennials I know is that not only will you have a lower quality of life than your parents (and your kids probably will too), you'll have a lower quality of life even to elder Millennials (who happened to enter the housing market 5 years earlier than you).

This meme has reached the level of conventional wisdom, so any response feels a bit like trying to empty the Atlantic Ocean with a thimble, but the evidence that Gen Z and Millennials are in any way materially worse off than their parents is very weak.

They are, in fact, doing quite well:

https://twitter.com/johanknorberg/status/1780638119156408480

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/04/16/g...

And that's before we account for the truly massive and unprecedented wealth transfer that's about to happen when the Boomers really start dying in big numbers.

When it's all said and done Millennials are going to be the richest generation of all time and still talking about how uniquely bad they have it, which I guess is the most Millennial thing imaginable.

Yes, my (limited) understanding of the literature is that this is exactly what they do. You don’t see the same single-fatherhood effects when looking at the children of widows, for example.

It actually seems like it's the behaviors of other poor people, which those in poverty cannot escape, that "fucks people up." It's not privation. It's proximity to violence and abuse (both of which are highly correlated with -- note: not demonstrated to be caused by -- poverty).

It also begs the question of nature vs. nurture. If researchers won't take this seriously, then nobody should take their findings seriously. It's almost impossible to untangle, "single-fatherhood leads to bad outcomes because kids need a father figure in the house" from, "single-fatherhood leads to worse outcomes because the type of person who would abandon their children is likely more impulsive and less conscientious than average and those traits are heritable."

I always think of this from Aaron Swartz:

> But let’s say you can narrow it down to one good one, and you can find the time to read it. You plunk down an absurd $30 (of which, I’m told, less than $3 goes to the author) for a bulky hardcover and you quickly discover that the author doesn’t have all that much to say. But a book is a big thing, and they had to fill it all up, so the author padded it. There are several common techniques.

> One is to repeat your point over and over, each time slightly differently. This is surprisingly popular. Writing a book on how code is law, an idea so simple it can fit in the book’s title? Just give example after example after example.

> Another is to just fill the book with unnecessary detail. Arguing that the Bush administration is incompetent? Fill your book up with citation after citation. (Readers must love being hit over the head with evidence for a claim they’re already willing to believe.)

> I have nothing against completeness, accuracy, or preciseness, but if you really want a broad audience to hear what you have to say, you’ve got to be short. Put the details, for the ten people who care about them, on your website. Then take the three pages you have left, and put them on your website too.

Source: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001229

> As someone who lives in an area with plenty of high-density residential buildings

And yet you live there, which means, presumably, that it's your best option relative to the alternatives. People should be allowed to choose living arrangements that meet their most critical needs, even if they also find reasons to complain about aspects of those arrangements that are self-evidently less important to them.

This is wrong in an important way (that's quite relevant to message boards like this one, about which you'll often hear that arguing about controversial subjects is pointless because nobody ever changes their mind). Basically, nobody ever individually changes their mind in the moment, so it appears as though debates are ineffectual. But that's only because people change their minds slowly, in private, in response to thousands of inputs.

And it might not even be the person you're talking to who eventually changes their mind. It might just be a reader, a thousand of whom exist for every one person visibly contributing.

You can't see the mind changing, but it's wrong to conclude that therefore it never happens.

"Paycheck to paycheck" is not an official term or (to be frank) even a meaningful one. The fact is that Americans are extraordinarily wealthy and by no reasonable measure are "most" of them "low income."

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

This is sort of true, but confused, because it's land that has value, not housing, and the value of land increases when it's upzoned. [0]

[0] It's of course not increased when government unilaterally constructs low-income housing without reference to market conditions, which is why it's important to assure homeowners that this is not what upzoning entails.

It’s a pretty typical YIMBY prescription. I’m just careful to emphasize the market-rate nature of it, since some YIMBYs are sensitive to attacks from the left and quick to assure people that they also support public housing, etc.

My view is that it’s pretty silly to talk about other solutions so long as it’s literally illegal to build housing. We should just try making it legal for a couple decades and then see where we are. This is not a problem that demands creative approaches.

I'd dramatically increase by-right permitting while at the same time assuring people that whatever gets created will be market-rate. The government shouldn't be in the social engineering business, one way or the other. In my perfect world there'd be a Supreme Court case overturning Euclid such that it's impossible for government to block most new housing, but also impossible for them to demand affordable housing subsidies, etc.

We've been under-building for decades. Let's give not doing that a shot and then we can talk about other approaches if that fails.

I'm as capitalist as they come, but I don't see how it's tenable that we created a system in which if you were in a good position to buy in 2020, then you got a huge windfall, but if you weren't, then you're probably locked out of the housing market for at least a decade -- especially since this outcome is largely the result of government intervention.

I guess the obvious counter is that sticker prices would be even higher today, anyway, if not for higher interest rates, so it all comes out in the wash.

It’s not 2015 anymore and I’m not going to have a conversation with you about whether cancel culture is real or if maybe actually everybody complaining about it just simply deserved it. If you want to have that debate, then you’re going to need either a time machine or another interlocutor.

Why don’t you just say explicitly what you’re trying to imply and save everybody the bother of guessing.

> You're in a country with no worker protection for that to be scary?

Almost all employment in the United States is "at-will" and you can be fired for practically any reason and with no notice.

> And if you are, do you boss really care?

The answer to this is, "who knows?" I don't want to spend an afternoon defending my tweets to HR, either way. There's a chilling effect. If even moderate opinions are risky, then I'm probably just going to disengage.

David Shor was fired for pointing out (with data) that riots are electorally counterproductive, for example.

> I can't understand people saying it's better now.

Those things are all bad, but they're fairly easy to ignore. I much prefer random sexbot spam to the hysterical culture that was ascendant on Twitter in, say, 2018. I think how much one misses that era probably just comes down to one's politics. For me, it was miserable.

I have a pretty thick skin and I enjoy the fray, so let's stipulate that there have always been assholes and jerks saying offensive and insulting things, but the word I'd use to characterize the progressive milieu of 2018 was menacing.

"Wow, interesting unconventional opinion on #metoo you've got there. Sure would be a shame if I found you on LinkedIn and sent it to your boss. Wonder what she'd think of it."

I couldn't be happier that those kinds of interactions have become less frequent.

I find X to be far more enjoyable than at any time in the past, but I suspect that's because we have different politics. Peak unusability on Twitter for me was, say, 2016-2021, a period during which people who disagreed with me on there literally emailed my boss to try to cause trouble for me, a period in which I was routinely piled-on and called the most offensive and ridiculous names by massive accounts for relatively banal and benign moderate opinions.

That's all mostly gone now and many of the most insufferable users (from my point of view) have moved elsewhere.

People who happen to have accepted the dominant Twitter culture of that period don't see any of this in the same way a fish doesn't know what water is.

The President pardoning a turkey is an expression of meat-eating culture, not vegetarianism -- we eat turkeys; that's why the symbolism works -- and meat-eating is indeed the dominant culture.

This is why I don't worry too much about AI. It can write the code better and faster than I do? Wow, you just freed up 5% of my day.

I can carry one of those in each arm or maybe three total bags, if I balance it right. With the plastic ones I can get just about the whole trunk-load wrapped around my wrists and up the stairs in one go.

That's great! I'm sure there exist thousands of high-conscientiousness hard-workers just like you who are taking the time they spent commuting and pouring it back into work. Forums like Hacker News are filled with this kind of person, a defining characteristic of whom is an inability to recognize just how atypical they are in this respect (amongst other ways).

It's a countervailing force. You can tell because when people are challenged to say explicitly how they think it's made them more productive they say stuff like, "I can get the laundry done in the afternoon" or "it's easier to pick my kids up from daycare early" or "I can sleep in because I don't have a commute."

It's wild that this has become unchallenged conventional wisdom. There's basically no evidence for it:

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1690894492688437248

Young people own homes at higher rates than they did in the 90s:

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1690951544240484352