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"isolationism"

My personal theory as to why chess isn't that popular in the US - and why the US produces relatively few world-class players given its very large talent pool - is that chess at a high level involves a large number of draws. The last championship was entirely bloodless in the main games and had to go to tiebreaks (rapid + blitz games). At IM+ level more than half of games end with draws. And this goes contrary to the US mentality where everyone is either a 'winner' or a 'loser' and competition is seen as a highest ideal. A game where most of the time it is impossible to tell the better player must feel frustrating to amateurs. And indeed, many many many times some laymen will complain that there are 'too many draws' and 'the rules must be changed' so spectators see some blood.

Another common complaint related to draws is the number of 'grandmaster draws', or 'comfort draws', whereby two players, usually at a high level, agree to leave it at that after a low number of moves (Chess is one of the few games featuring 'draw by agreement', meaning both players may agree to a draw at any point in the game without justification). Almost every grandmaster is guilty of that, and players who do that often get derided by their coaches, the media and amateurs: how dare you, you are a disgrace to the sport, I didn't pay to watch this, etc. I daresay the complainers are either hypocritical or have never been involved in high-level long-form tournaments (7+ days of 4+ hour games each plus rapid/blitz side events etc.). Sometimes both players feel tired and don't want to play it out (usually due to having played it out 6+ hours the game before) and objecting to that is just unrealistic. Chess isn't a gladiatoral arena. Then there are the famous accusations of collusion from Fischer against his Soviet counterparts but Fischer has always been slightly mad his whole life so I wouldn't take anything he said seriously.

Lol every time a piece like this gets posted some 'experts' come out of the woodwork and go like 'but what if women actually liked having low-paying low-status jobs though? Something something population differences something genetics something evolution blah blah.' (Note that none of these people are in fact evolutionary biologists) It's like a broken record, despite the enormous literature accounting for sexist biases in hiring, promoting, rating performance, evaluating stereotypes, etc. At this point I'm left to wonder if any of these people are arguing in good faith.

I can't be the only one thinking that treating dating as some kind of MMORPG you have to grind through is somewhat, I don't know, creepy? And the comments aren't exactly reassuring. It's all about response rate, market value, percentiles, figures, and so on. Skimming through this thread you could think people are talking about the stock market and not actual human beings.

I'm sorry, how does history require fewer hours than chess? Are you a historian or chess player? What does history 'performance' even mean?!

"there is no denying that people have different thinking speeds" -> "IQ is a real, relevant and construct-valid metric"

What is the IQ needed to draw this implication?

Genetics happens to be my field and...yeah. IQ is just too far removed from an actual mechanistic explanation ("gene X does this which interacts which gene Y whose coding protein triggers a cascade onto receptor Z of the brain which...") and for a geneticist if you haven't got a mechanism you've got nothing. There are far more interesting, solid and construct-valid traits to study.

As for neurosci I'll admit it's second-hand knowledge from my social circle and colleagues, though it could be that I live in a bubble and neuroscientists are secretly terrorized to share their mindbreaking findings on the first component of a PCA.

>if nothing else, it measures your ability to take IQ tests, and IQ score has some correlation to “success” in western culture (note i’m not saying “intelligence” anywhere here).

This is circular, since many of the required tests to be "successful" are similar to IQ tests or "g-loaded" as people like to say. Even then, the correlation is weak beyond very low IQs.

I believe it was a twitter thread that he unrolled and mashed up into a medium post. On twitter he's often abrasive and kind of a dick as a character, and the tone carried into this post. He's doubled down about it because his rant seemed to have angered a lot of people among his demographic following, so if you follow him you'll probably find more explanation.

>this piece was meant for math PhDs

Lol it is absolutely not meant for math PhDs. I think anyone with a bachelor degree could follow the math (probably, I don't know much about the university system works in the US).

I'm pretty sure this (or at least sticking to kana) was attempted shortly after 1945 but was abandoned because of the sheer number of homophones.

I've always wondered why so many toilets in the US seem to have see-through holes: you can be seen below the knees, between the hinges and if you're tall enough, above your neck. I've been told that this anti-privacy design was on purpose and made to avoid people doing drugs or having sex in toilets. Is it true?

Nassim Taleb wrote a thorough rebuttal of IQ as a concept, if you can trudge through the math:

https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...

It's also worth noting that no one in the field of neuroscience (or genetics, for that matter) takes IQ seriously. It's solely an abstract toy for some psychologists to play with.

Your study is based in the States, which has a long history of segregating cultures and even language according to ethnic lines. On the other hand, I mean is that both Switzerland and Germany have a diversity of peoples, cultures and languages (e.g. Switzerland itself has 4 official languages and German has a myriad of dialects) and many citizens of these countries consider themselves pretty diverse in that regard though they are mostly white, but is that what people mean by "diversity" when they talk about "population heterogeneity"? Or is it just "diversity is when people have different skin tones and the more skin tones there are the more diverse it is"?

>Say a company introduces a policy that when men pass all the interviews, the company flips a coin and if heads they get an offer and no offer if it's tails. Women just get an offer after passing the interviews. Does this discriminate in favor of women? Absolutely. Does this make the women who got offers less qualified? Only if you consider luck to be a qualification.

This example is completely made up and does not appear on the memo. There is no reason to think Damore was thinking about examples like this when he was talking about "lowering the bar", nor is it clear what he meant by "reducing the false negative rate". "Reducing the false negative rate" in a way that doesn't involve "lowering the skill bar" is either an admission that Google hires its applicants in a completely nonsensical way past a certain interview stage and that doesn't transpire at all from the memo. It could be true, but there's no reason to think he thought this, at all.

>Yet again, in the second purported implication you're trying to claim that Damore wrote that female employees are less fit. This is not correct on two points. One, Damore wasn't writing about Google employees or women in tech. He was writing about all women, worldwide. And second, he didn't write that they are less fit to be in high stress roles. He claimed that these thoroughly studied differences in personality make the average woman less likely to want to be in those roles. Again, Damore wrote about preferences - the things that affect the choices that people make - not fitness.

I didn't claim "Damore wrote that female employees are less fit". I claimed he strongly implied that female employees were less likely to be fit. (Talk about putting words in other people's mouth.) Again, I don't see how that could not be the case given the previous two assertions. And again, that's not just my opinion, but the opinion of the National Labor Relations Board.

>Let me put this in simpler terms: The majority of both men and women don't go into tech. Say 99% of men go into fields other than tech, and 99.75% of women go into fields other than tech. Men and women are nearly identical, almost all of them don't go into tech. Saying that small minority that do is larger among men as compared to women due to innate preferences is an explanation as to why we have 99% vs. 99.75%. It is making no statement, whatsoever, about the capability of the 0.25% of women and 1.0% of men that do go into tech.

Thank you I took statistics 101 too and got that the first time, but it's not the reason his firing was justified. I admit that "innate differences" is the part that got the most people riled up (partly because of the underlying sexism, mostly for the bad science; notice how not a single evolutionary biologist - not psychologist - agreed with him) but it was mostly ignored in the decision of the NLRB.

>Saying "men are more likely to be a rapist" is not at all the same thing as saying "you're more likely to be a rapist" to individual men.

If you can't possibly imagine why saying "people with an innate quality you possess are more likely to be bad" could be offending, you probably need to hone up on your social skills. If someone explains over ten pages how people with innate quality X are more likely to be bad, with only a little disclaimer that the magical words "statistically" and "populations" make it all okay to say, and it doesn't raise any red flags, you definitely need to pause and ask yourself: "Is everyone collectively mad and only I am correct, or did I mess something up?" I mean it, sincerely.

What do you mean by homogeneity? Do you mean as opposed to heterogeneity such as what is found in the many different cultures, peoples and language across Swiss cantons or German landers, or is it really just "people looking different from one another"?

TL;DR: a very entry-level article about the field of popgen ("what is a genome?") and how the "breakthrough" is representing multiple sequence alignments as compact binary matrices. There's very little explanation or actual examples beyond that, so unless you're a complete layman the article probably won't satiate you.

Applying deep learning to genomic data is something of a fad these days - the bioinformatics world has caught up with the DL hype of the early 2010s and is trying to use DL on nearly anything that moves for easy papers.

The main issue with DL frameworks in the context of genomics is the format of input data. You pretty much want all your data to be a matrix of fixed size (if you want to use CNNs at least, and that's what everyone is interested in anyway), but that's just not how genomics data works. Sequences vary in length (I see the problems of nucleotide gaps, let alone short indels is left unanswered), alignments are not absolute (they are very much aligner dependent and secondary alignments are a thing), the alignments themselves may stem from different data sources (long reads cover more stretches of DNA but are less reliable than short ones), there is no mention of how ploidy is handled (especially in plants!) and somehow you're supposed to transform all of that into a neat 48x48 array to feed to Keras. Wait, thousands of them. Did I mention the human or plant genomes are often billions of basepairs long? Waiting for bwa to be done mapping on your cluster is the xkcd equivalent of "can't do work, compiling!"

So yeah, sorry to put a damper on this but I'm waiting for something within the reach of practical workability (and believe me the standards of bioinformaticians for workable stuff are low) before getting hyped.

Damore did not get fired for the debunked evopsych nonsense. He got fired by stating the following assumptions:

1) Google does "diversity programs" to increase their number of female employees

2) These programs involve "lowering the bar" to help female applicants get into the company

True, he does not explicitly state that:

3) Therefore, current female applicants are likely to be less competent at their job than current male ones

But I fail to see how this isn't an obvious implication from 1) and 2). This is akin to people "merely asking" about the origin of the IQ gap between blacks and whites and acting shocked when accused of racism.

Note that he also played the same game with the following reasoning:

1) Women have higher degrees of neuroticism, leading to anxiety in high-stress situations

2) High-level positions are often ripe with stress

Again, he does not explicitly state that:

3) Therefore, female employees are less likely to be fit for high-level positions

But the implication is still clear as day. Defending yourself behind "but that's not what I said" doesn't work: people are not stupid and can connect the dots, even if they aren't willing to take your reasoning apart in order to show you why they think you're acting in bad faith. The "but it's all statistical, I wasn't talking about female Googlers" isn't a valid defense either: if I were to argue that men are more likely to be rapists than women (statistically true) and therefore companies should abstain from hiring men (or at the very least, quarantine them to be safe and avoid "false negatives") in order to reduce workplace rape, men would rightfully feel insulted and write me off as crazy. "You're more likely to be a rapist" is a lesser insult than "You're a rapist" but it's still one, and hiding behind the adverb "statistically" doesn't change that.

Yes LGBT people should dispassionately discuss with homophobic and transphobic folks by rationally engaging them in the marketplace of ideas.

"You know, you think my sexuality is an abomination that should not exist and I will go to hell, but have you ever considered that - hear me out - this could not be the case? Do you have any data to back this up? Aren't you falling into an ad hominem fallacy?"

"Ah right, you have correctly pointed out a gaping hole in my otherwise excellent deductive reasoning. I hereby bow to your argument and am not homophobic anymore."

And once again, the power of rational debate shines through and through.

They are real but greatly exaggerated by people using the aforementioned rhetoric and completely surmountable. People who claim they aren't are either trying to push an agenda (usually on authoritarian, nationalistic, and/or warmongering grounds), or not very well-traveled or have very narrow social circles not involving foreigners at all.

Your 12th century stories are interesting and all but do not reflect the reality of the world we currently live in. If you live in a large city and have a medium-to-high salary, which is a reasonable assumption to make given HN's demographics, it is in fact easy to get acquainted to other cultures by traveling often (possibly living abroad), learning other languages and/or befriending (or dating) foreigners. Much easier than used to be a couple centuries ago, in any case. If you do, you will find that deep down beneath the veneer of culture humans are very much the same. I don't have data to back this up, this is only from my mere experience.

Pretending that cultural differences don't exist is harmful and condescending; acting as though they were insurmountable and irreconcilable is downright dangerous and leads to disaster.

Sometimes things are black and white though. The Chinese government is bad, and undermining it in any way, including through violence, is good. Nuance for its own sake is not a virtue [1].

[1] https://kieranhealy.org/publications/fuck-nuance/

This view is not controversial at all in HN where techno-libertarian crowds abound, and these are often adjacent to more authoritarian circles (see NRx/Moldbug et al.). It's also wrong. If it were true, modern democracies would not have built anything lasting more than 10-odd years since their inception. Multi-generational and even trans-national projects do exist, but perhaps they have been less publicized than other news and you haven't heard of them.

Lol, I'll assume the OP recently returned from one of the many European trance festivals (Mo:dem, maybe?) and discovered a new passion :-)

The comments are on point: the best thing about psytrance is the community, and the extremely friendly hippie vibe found in these festivals as well as, let's be honest, the extremely copious amount of free-flowing available drugs can make any one of them a live-changing experience.

I wonder how it compares to the American equivalent, which would be something like Burning Man? I guess?