tokenadult

https://www.madinamerica.com/

"

The link to the paper here is from Eric Turkheimer's faculty webpage at the University of Virginia, which I visit often to read his latest publications.

http://www.people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for...

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/12/13/robert-w...

I see the article kindly submitted here is the equivalent of an amateur blog post, just a note posted to one personal webpage that happens to be served up by the MIT server. This is a case when the Hacker News protocol for displaying a domain for the submitted article was misleading rather than helpful. The author is gainfully employed and highly educated in related disciplines,

http://math.mit.edu/~cohn/

but he hasn't worked for a long time in this aspect of number theory, so the note is just thinking out loud, nothing more.

https://history.princeton.edu/people/michael-j-barany

I'm troubled that a Princeton history student can write about a worldwide phenomenon with so little reference to non-Western cultures. (This is a pet issue of mine, as I am an American who lived in east Asia for years after studying Chinese and sinology.) I don't think he has looked at development economics and the history of popular attitudes toward economics enough to understand how important basic understanding of mathematics is. In other words, I disagree with the conclusion of his article, summed up in the last paragraph.

"Imagining math to be everywhere makes it all too easy to ignore the very real politics of who gets to be part of the mathematical elite that really count—for technology, security, and economics, for the last war and the next one. Instead, if we see that this kind of mathematics has historically been built by and for the very few, we are called to ask who gets to be part of that few and what are the responsibilities that come with their expertise. We have to recognize that elite mathematics today, while much more inclusive than it was one or five or fifty centuries ago, remains a discipline that vests special authority in those who, by virtue of gender, race, and class, are often already among our society’s most powerful. If math were really everywhere, it would already belong to everyone equally. But when it comes to accessing and supporting math, there is much work to be done. Math isn’t everywhere."

http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf

(I can well believe, however, that any current with a current one-party dictatorial government, something Taiwan had the first time I lived there and something China still has today, will lag in teaching history. Critical thinking about history is bad for dictators. Taiwan thoroughly revised the history textbooks after it had its peaceful transition to democracy.)

The submitted article suggests that this is not at all well known, and is an understudied issue. That's my impression too from years of doing research on education policy--most American teachers and school administrators have NO IDEA how much more young people could be learning in the school context, and indeed no idea how much learning the brighter kids do in the summer when they are away from school reading on their own.

May I take it that you mean "It's a pipe dream to believe that the public education system is going to adapt to be SOMETHING OTHER THAN a one-size-fits-all"?

As a parent (of four children, two now adults) and as a voter and taxpayer, I am of course interested in general improvements in the education systems of all countries, and especially in the country I now live in, the United States. I think it will be helpful for advocacy of thoughtful improvements in education policy to be aware of how much young people do and can learn, whether or not their schools set high standards. I think setting more ambitious standards will make school less boring and more meaningful for the plurality of young people in the United States, and quite possibly for the majority of young people here.

As a parent, I chose to homeschool my children early on. That seems (according to my oldest son's testimony, sent to me by email) to have been helpful for my oldest son's career as a hacker. My second son may pursue a programming career too, although he has plenty of other interests. I'm still interested in discussions of education policy, the issue that drew me to Hacker News, here because I can still adjust the educational plan for my two younger children some more, and because this matters for all of us, childless or not. But so far I have found it expedient, in a high-income school district with high parental educational levels, to homeschool my children for their elementary education. They then go to the friendly local high school (which has improved its academic standards recently by dint of competition from Minnesota's public school open-enrollment policy) and take lots of AP classes and do lots of academic extracurricular activities with friends who have open-enrolled from the territory of other school districts. It isn't perfect, but it's a trade-off that works well enough for us.

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/201...

On my part, having lived in another country (Taiwan), I have long suspected that most United States pupils could handle more challenging school lessons, if only those were on offer in United States schools. For example, in almost every other country in the world, it is routine for pupils to begin foreign language study while still in elementary school, and in many countries (including Taiwan and Singapore, a generation ago) the majority of school pupils are attending school with a language of instruction that is not the same as the language they speak at home with their parents. Yet most United States high school graduates are resolutely monolingual English speakers, unless they grew up with another home language besides English. International comparisons suggest that there is still plenty of room at the top for achievable higher standards for United States students, and that students would enjoy school better if their lessons were more challenging.

"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?

"No, he doesn't."

他會說普通話嗎？

他不會。

in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write

"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?

"No, he doesn't."

佢識唔識講廣東話？

佢唔識。

in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. If you can see the Chinese characters at all as this is displayed on your screen, you should easily be able to see that many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...

"But back to the question: What does heritability mean? Almost everyone who has ever thought about heritability has reached a commonsense intuition about it: One way or another, heritability has to be some kind of index of how genetic a trait is. That intuition explains why so many thousands of heritability coefficients have been calculated over the years. . . .

"Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isn't an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size. An effect size of the R2 family is a standardized estimate of the proportion of the variance in one variable that is reduced when another variable is held constant statistically. In this case it is an estimate of how much the variance of a trait would be reduced if everyone were genetically identical. With a moment's thought you can see that the answer to the question of how much variance would be reduced if everyone was genetically identical depends crucially on how genetically different everyone was in the first place."

Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...

"Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)."

Deary, I. J., Penke, L., & Johnson, W. (2010). The neuroscience of human intelligence differences. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(3), 201-211.

http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neur...

"At this point, it seems unlikely that single genetic loci have major effects on normal-range intelligence. For example, a modestly sized genome-wide study of the general intelligence factor derived from ten separate test scores in the cAnTAB cognitive test battery did not find any important genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms or copy number variants, and did not replicate genetic variants that had previously been associated with cognitive ability[note 48]."

Johnson, W. (2010). Understanding the Genetics of Intelligence: Can Height Help? Can Corn Oil?. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(3), 177-182

http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/...

"Together, however, the developmental natures of GCA [general cognitive ability] and height, the likely influences of gene-environment correlations and interactions on their developmental processes, and the potential for genetic background and environmental circumstances to release previously unexpressed genetic variation suggest that very different combinations of genes may produce identical IQs or heights or levels of any other psychological trait. And the same genes may produce very different IQs and heights against different genetic backgrounds and in different environmental circumstances. This would be especially the case if height and GCA and other psychological traits are only single facets of multifaceted traits actually under more systematic genetic regulation, such as overall body size and balance between processing capacity and stimulus reactivity. Genetic influences on individual differences in psychological characteristics are real and important but are unlikely to be straightforward and deterministic."

Johnson, W., Penke, L., & Spinath, F. M. (2011). Understanding Heritability: What it is and What it is Not. European Journal of Personality, 25(4), 287-294. DOI: 10.1002/per.835

http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Johnson_Penke_Spinath_2011_-_He...

"Our target article was intended to provide background knowledge to psychologists and other social scientists on the subject of heritability. This statistic, in many ways so basic, is both extremely powerful in revealing the presence of genetic influence and very weak in providing much information beyond this. Many forms of measurement error, statistical artefact, violation of underlying assumptions, gene–environment interplay, epigenetic mechanisms and no doubt processes we have not yet even identified can contribute to the magnitudes of heritability estimates. If psychologists and other social scientists want to understand genetic involvement in behavioural traits, we believe that it is going to be necessary to distinguish among these possibilities to at least some degree. Heritability estimates alone are not going to help us do this."

Turkheimer, E. (2011). Genetics and human agency (Commentary on Dar-Nimrod & Heine, 2011). Psychological Bulletin, 137, 825-828. DOI: 10.1037/a0024306

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...

"That heritability depends on the population in which it is measured is one of the most frequently repeated caveats in the social sciences, but it is nevertheless often forgotten in the breach. (For example, it is nearly meaningless for Dar-Nimrod and Heine to note that 'heritability [of intelligence is] typically estimated to range from .50 to .85' [p. 805]. The heritability of intelligence isn’t anything, and even placing it in a range is misleading. Making a numerical point estimate of the heritability of intelligence is akin to saying, 'Social psychologists usually estimate the F ratio for the fundamental attribution error to be between 2.0 and 4.0.') The observation that genotypic variation accounts for 90% of the variation in height in the modern world depends on the variability of genotype and environment relevant to height. Among cloned animals with widely varying diets, body size is perfectly environmental with heritability of 0; in genetically variable animals raised in identical environments heritability is 1.0. This is no mere statistical fine point: it means that the entire project of assessing how essentially genetic traits are in terms of measured heritability coefficients is a fool’s errand."

Chabris, C. F., Hebert, B. M., Benjamin, D. J., Beauchamp, J., Cesarini, D., van der Loos, M., ... & Laibson, D. (2012). Most reported genetic associations with general intelligence are probably false positives. Psychological science, 23(11), 1314-1323. DOI: 10.1177/0956797611435528

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498585/

http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9938142/Most_Repo...

"At the time most of the results we attempted to replicate were obtained, candidate-gene studies of complex traits were commonplace in medical genetics research. Such studies are now rarely published in leading journals. Our results add IQ to the list of phenotypes that must be approached with great caution when considering published molecular genetic associations. In our view, excitement over the value of behavioral and molecular genetic studies in the social sciences should be tempered—as it has been in the medical sciences—by an appreciation that, for complex phenotypes, individual common genetic variants of the sort assayed by SNP microarrays are likely to have very small effects. Associations of candidate genes with psychological traits and other traits studied in the social sciences should be viewed as tentative until they have been replicated in multiple large samples. Doing otherwise may hamper scientific progress by proliferating potentially false results, which may then influence the research agendas of scientists who do not appreciate that the associations they take as a starting point for their efforts may not be real. And the dissemination of false results to the public risks creating an incorrect perception about the state of knowledge in the field, especially the existence of genes described as being 'for' traits on the basis of unintentionally inflated estimates of effect size and statistical significance."

[1] https://www.amazon.com/How-Improve-Your-Mind-Unlock-ebook/dp...

"In the US there has been a 25% decline in death rate in the last two decades. 'More than half of that decline is driven by cancer prevention activities," says Brawley.

"This points to the fact that some of the cancers that would previously have killed people had been prevented. Almost a third of death from cancer in the US has been attributed to cigarette smoking, for example. This makes tobacco "the single most preventable cause of death in the world", according to Cancer Research UK."

Never starting a smoking habit, or quitting a smoking habit if you have already started, is a great way to prevent a lot cancer risk. Being moderate (not excessive) in alcohol use helps a lot too.

http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention

After the independence of the United States, United States law on defenses against libel claims developed some more, so that press reporting about public officials (especially) and even "public figures" (people who are already well known in public activities) can be protected even if reporters make false statements by mishap. For public officials, since my early childhood, the standard has been that "actual malice" (which doesn't exactly mean malice, but complete disregard for attempts to check the factual statements) has to be shown for a journalist to be liable for libel. In some other countries (notably Singapore), libel law can be used to suppress dissent. United States courts have not wanted libel law to work that way.

The practices of tabloid journalists, of course, are despicable, and they are examples of abusing legal precedents originally meant to protect more factual and more fair journalism.

http://www.medialaw.org/topics-page/defamation-faqs

https://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-end-poverty/

Simply put, it is possible to affirm the scientific observation that ALL human behavioral characteristics are more similar among close relatives than they are between two randomly selected individuals from the whole human population--that's just agreeing with the facts, and that's ALL that "human behavioral characteristics are heritable" means. Second, it is possible to affirm the scientific observation that EVERY human behavioral characteristic tends to show variance even between identical (monozygotic) twins--which means that some variance in human behavioral characteristics must be influenced by factors other than the human genome. Following the facts leads to both of those conclusions.

But Eric Turkheimer is not an advocate of policies that would be characterized as "eugenic" policies (he is very aware of the history of that subject) and neither am I. It's possible to study and understand nature without falling into the naturalistic fallacy that assumes that human society must mirror all aspects of "nature." We have the opportunity to use human intellectual capabilities and observation of reality to make the human community enjoy something other than strictly "natural" conditions, and often should.

Thanks for asking. I invite all readers looking to read the entire (not too long) article I linked to in my first comment here.

A correlational study like this can't show us the path of causation, if any. Any behavior geneticist worth his salt would immediately ask, "Do the boys earn more as grown men because they had the home environment filled with books, or perhaps they gained genes from their parents that prompt both collecting books and pursuing more lucrative occupations?" And the answer to that question, of course, is both,[1] but anyway the genes will matter.

[1] http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/three_laws.pdf

To make the point I am bringing up here, I would rewrite the second sentence of the helpful article kindly submitted here to read, "As the individuals who provided the main genetic contribution to modern humans began to spread out of Africa roughly 50,000 years ago, they encountered other hominin clades that looked remarkably like them — the Neanderthals and Denisovans, two groups of archaic humans that shared an ancestor with us roughly 600,000 years earlier."

[1] http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3D...

http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-26/trump-and-...

so perhaps danger of a neo-Nazi movement is lessening while we stay wary and stick to ideals.

By the way, Bershinky's very latest column directly discusses Godwin's Law, the main topic of this thread, and is titled "Comparisons to Hitler Can Be Useful. Discuss."

http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-27/comparison...

What does forgetting mean here? Is it like forgettable? Google failed me.

This refers to the grandparent comment's quotation of Mike Godwin from his essay kindly submitted here to open the thread, which in full context was, "The internet has been shaping an increasingly international culture and collective memory — with the Holocaust, just as with other countless human atrocities, we have a moral obligation to 'never forget'. My view, which I've held for many decades now, is that glib and frivolous invocations of Hitler, or Nazis, or the Holocaust, are a kind of forgetting."

I read this as Mike Godwin saying that the crimes against humanity that were perpetrated by the Nazis must never be forgotten, so that we guard against the same crimes happening again. But if we just mention Nazis every time we disagree with someone on the Internet, without thinking deeply about whether or not what we are disagreeing with really has anything to do with what the Nazis actually did, then we are nonetheless forgetting the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis. Does that sound like a fair reading of the essay to you?

The way I would sum up Godwin's argument here is that it may be that some current events resemble events of the Nazi era in important ways. As we discuss policy issues online, we have to take care to check our facts and the logic of our own arguments, and if we think something going on today is like the activities of the Nazi Party, then first of all we should review the history and make sure we are correct in our thinking on that point.

By the way, I actually did learn a LOT about the Nazi Party from a thoughtful comment here on Hacker News back in about August 2014, when a reader here mentioned the book series about the Third Reich by British historian Richard Evans, which is well worth a read.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Coming-Third-Reich-Destroyed-Democr...

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/05/everybody-be-cool-a-n...

but I see that this story with the alarmist headline got more traction on the main page of HN. That's unfortunate for understanding the underlying issues.