tokenadult

"What is a p-value?

"Informally, a p-value is the probability under a specified statistical model that a statistical summary of the data (for example, the sample mean difference between two compared groups) would be equal to or more extreme than its observed value.

"Principles

"1. P-values can indicate how incompatible the data are with a specified statistical model.

"2. P-values do not measure the probability that the studied hypothesis is true, or the probability that the data were produced by random chance alone.

"3. Scientific conclusions and business or policy decisions should not be based only on whether a p-value passes a specific threshold.

"4. Proper inference requires full reporting and transparency.

"5. A p-value, or statistical significance, does not measure the size of an effect or the importance of a result.

"6. By itself, a p-value does not provide a good measure of evidence regarding a model or hypothesis."

[1] "The ASA's statement on p-values: context, process, and purpose"

http://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00031305.2016....

Similarly, imputation of "race" by genome testing depends crucially on assuming that the average genome is informative, but for any trait of interest, a person who by both genome testing and known historical ancestry is categorized in some "race" category might have any degree of variance from "average" in the trait found in the whole human genome. It will be exciting to follow up on larger and larger data sets on these issues as human genomics projects continue.

That's an amazingly ignorant comment. First of all, the better evidence is behind the idea that currently observed high human IQ, when the "g" factor is factored into consideration, consists mostly just of luckily lacking deficiencies in function that other human individuals have. In other words, the centuries-long factor-analytic approach mostly suggests that high-IQ individuals luckily lack "general stupidity," but still are subject to hard limits on human cognition (Mackintosh, IQ and Human Intelligence second edition 2011, pages 155-156).

And the hard limits on human cognition are intractable, and actually illustrated by the article kindly submitted here. Psychologist Keith R. Stanovich points out in his book What Intelligence Tests Miss that even very high-IQ individuals (studied in studies of members of high-IQ societies) are still subject to most human cognitive biases, and they can be MORE subject to delusional beliefs than members of the general public because they can make up elaborate rationalizations for anything they choose to believe, including a belief in superintelligence.

I doubt the statements in this article also because there is a long line of research that goes back to before when the article author was born on selective breeding of mice and rats for high intelligence in their behavioral context. (One kind of test of intelligence given to rats and mice is running through mazes to find food.) Since before the author was born, there have been purebred strains of "maze-bright" and "maze-dull" rats that have been tested by psychologists. Now that there are gene technology methods in animal research, there are transgenic mice with knocked-out genes and added genes, and the author significantly fails to mention any experimentation in animal models that shows that his speculation is likely to become true.

The Wikipedia article on IQ classification adequately cites references to demonstrate that the IQ scale is strictly ordinal, so indeed a notion of "IQ 1000" is meaningless.

If you'd like to read a more thoughful article on genetic influences on human IQ, by a researcher who has been closer to the research for longer and who has published in better journals than the author whose essay was kindly submitted here, see Wendy Johnson's article "Understanding the Genetics of Intelligence: Can Height Help? Can Corn Oil?"[1] which has an excellent review of decades of research on genetics and on human intelligence.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Understanding+the+Genet...

He then goes on to investigate the plausibility of that claim in great detail and rejects it. You can follow the rest of the article as an example of how to read a medical study thoughtfully. (The author is a medical researcher who writes blog posts to educate the public on what medical research shows and what it doesn't show.) The conclusion is, "The bottom line is that cell phone usage as measured by a study like the Technion study is almost certainly a confounder, a surrogate for some other factor that is known to be related to infertility that the study doesn’t control for."

AFTER EDIT: To clarify this point a bit, the world of espionage practice distinguishes "operatives" (nationals-employees of the foreign government, who first of all need a visa status even to be in the host country) from "agents" (nationals of the host country, who often have employment status in some sensitive position in the host country's government or armed forces). Yes, the United States and absolutely every country is harsh in its treatment of its own citizens who act as espionage agents directed by the intelligence operatives of foreign countries. Quite a few of the prisoners in the federal SuperMax prison in Colorado are people like John Walker or Robert Hanssen who were paid by the United States taxpayers to handle secret information with discretion and who were pledged by their terms of employment to not have contacts with foreign intelligence operatives at those operatives' direction. Men like that do hard prison time in any country where their activities are discovered. But the foreign operative usually just ends up expelled from the host country, unless there was something illegal in itself about the foreign operative's presence in the host country.

There is a whole website about why Esperanto never caught on as a world language (focused mostly on its linguistic features) by a writer who has considerably more acquaintance with formal linguistics and with a variety of world languages than the inventor of Esperanto ever had.[2]

[1] original article:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/12/03/english-a...

HN discussion thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702080

[2] "Learn Not to Speak Esperanto" by Justin Rye

http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/

Human nutrition studies are notoriously difficult because it is very hard to measure exactly what a study subject eats, especially a nutrient like salt that occurs as a hidden ingredient in wildly varying doses in many foods. So correct measurement of the initial study data is hard to get right in studies about salt. But if scientists are still not in consensus about what to look at as endpoints to tell if salt is helpful or harmful in different doses, it will be a long time before we can individualize the research or do anything else suggested in the comments already posted in this thread.

A crucial skill for a professional interpreter or a casual language-learner is "lexicalization," figuring out what the correct match is between what is possibly a phrase in one language but only a single morpheme that is part of a larger word in another language. But the huge advantage automated translation solutions have is shared learning and long-lasting memory. If the lexicalization is built into a database, for example a database kept by Apple, Google, IBM, or some other multinational provider of translation services, that learned information can be deployed in products over and over and over again. In the end, that's all that it takes for automated translation and interpretation to do better at equal cost (or as well at less cost) compared to human language-learning or human language services. I got out of interpreting for a living years ago, because I finally came around to the understanding of how little I could compete with the worldwide efforts made with new technology to tackle language problems. I still think learning natural modern human languages is a very intellectually enriching activity, and all my children do that, but we expect to live in a world a decade from now with very good real-time interpreting and translation systems for a wide variety of language pairings.

More generally, in the very excellent book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century,[1] author and researcher Steven Pinker makes the point that the hardest thing for any writer to do is to avoid the "curse of knowledge," assuming that readers know what you know as they read your writing. It's HARD to write about something you know well without skipping lots of steps in reasoning and details of the topic that are unknown to most of your readers. This is one of the best reasons for any writer to submit manuscripts to an editor (or a set of friends, as Paul Graham does) before publishing.

And, yes, if you think what I wrote above is unclear, as I fear it is, please let me know what's confusing about what I wrote. I'd be glad to hear your suggestions of how to make my main point more clear. I'm trying to say that anyone who writes anything has to put extra effort into making his point clear.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00INIYG74/

[1] http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

[2] http://www.cep.ucsb.edu/primer.html

[3] http://www.larspenke.eu/en/publications.html

The Hacker News participant who kindly shared the article that opens this thread is a user whose user name I recognize from the many good articles he submits for discussion here. That said, permit me to not entirely agree with the opinion expressed by the Canadian teacher profiled in the article that "our most brilliant children are among our most vulnerable." That is actually not what the research shows. I agree with the several comments posted before this comment that say that age-segregated, lockstep curriculum school[4] is a particularly toxic environment for gifted learners, and not a good environment for any learner. But I learned, after majoring in Chinese language in university and living in east Asia after graduation, that there are varying cultural perspectives on how a smart person fits into human society. Growing up in the United States, in junior high I read a story by Philip K. Dick, which I have tried to find again but have not yet found in his collected writings, in which he expressed the opinion that the higher one's IQ is above the population median, the fewer true friends one can have, an opinion expressed in a top comment in this thread. I fully agreed with that opinion when I was a child, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as I isolated myself from "average" people in my school and neighborhood environment. But when I lived in east Asia, I learned that Confucius said, 三人行，必有我師焉 ("wherever three persons are walking, my teacher is surely among them"). The east Asian Confucian philosophers were very clear than human beings vary in how smart they are, but they also deeply believed that any human being can learn from any other human being. The job of a smart person is to use brainpower to understand other people and make society better. As soon as I adopted those east Asian perspectives, I found it much easier to make friends. Now I proactively tell my four children and the gifted young people I teach in my supplemental mathematics program that they can find rapport with anyone, if they are willing to listen. And I spread this same message internationally among parent email lists and social media groups for parents of gifted children.

To sum up, the article makes strong claims that high IQ is strongly associate with social maladjustment and psychological disturbance. That is not an invariant property of high IQ, and I know many exceptions. All research on the topic confirms that many high-IQ people do fine in social interaction with other human beings, and some who do not start out that way can learn better social adjustment. School has a lot of toxic features for most learners,[5] but gifted children need not fear being social misfits for life.

[1] http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/

[2] http://cty.jhu.edu/set/

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Termans-Kids-Groundbreaking-Study-Gift...

https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?artic...

[4] http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html

[5] http://www.johnholtgws.com/

http://learninfreedom.org/system.html

For bilingualism as such, I'll mention that my list of languages learned as second languages (I'm a native speaker of General American English who grew up in the United States) is on my Hacker News user profile. My wife (from Taiwan) and I were quite consistent about bringing up our oldest son (born in the United States, brought up partly in Taiwan) as a bilingual native speaker of Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin) and English. Some of my younger children are less completely bilingual, but all are comfortable with the project of studying other modern languages. Taiwan's history since World War II is quite interesting, because after the Republic of China Nationalist Party of China (KMT) regime regained control of Taiwan at the end of the war, the school policy was that school lessons all had to be taught in Mandarin. But the local people in Taiwan mostly spoke Taiwanese (my wife's native language) or Hakka, cognate but not mutually intelligible Sinitic languages. So the whole postwar generation went to school, from first grade on, entirely in a foreign language. My wife grew up speaking Taiwanese at home and Mandarin at school (pupils were fined if they spoke the wrong language at school) and she now habitually speaks to her older siblings in Mandarin, even though her whole family in that generation are native speakers of Taiwanese. Some of our nieces in Taiwan, essentially all from Taiwanese or half-Taiwanese families, are more proficient in Mandarin than in Taiwanese. The KMT regime succeeded in switching the majority language in Taiwan (also through control of radio broadcasting and movie production in the days of the former dictatorship) and the school pupils learned a lot even when Taiwan was dirt poor despite going to school in a foreign language. And the level of knowledge of English over there is pretty high too--my wife began study of English as a compulsory school lesson at the beginning of junior high, and I think English is now a primary school subject. So bilingualism is perfectly doable, if a country puts its mind to bilingualism. Even language change is possible in just two generations.

"I can’t wholeheartedly recommend the book. Overall, it gives the impression that we know much more than we do. The studies described are very preliminary and far from ready for prime time; we know that preliminary studies are often overturned by larger, better-designed studies. I found some things in the book disturbing. I don’t condone her use of the term “Western medicine;” there is only one medicine. I was appalled that after a C-section she had a VBAC at home, giving birth to her second baby underwater with the assistance of a non-NHS midwife who she believed was less likely to transfer her to a hospital if something went wrong. In my opinion, that showed very poor judgment. She misrepresents the safety of home births. She even trots out the old “death by medicine” canard. She claims that statins may only benefit 1 in 50 patients (true, but misleadingly alarmist when taken out of context as statins do save lives).

"Conclusion: Marchant has interesting ideas, but a bad title"

[1] David Gorski, 11 January 2016, "Is 'harnessing the power of placebo' worthwhile to treat anything?"

https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/is-harnessing-the-power...

[2] Harriet Hall, 26 January 2016, "Cure Is About Caring, Not Curing: Placebos, Alternative Medicine, and Patient Comfort"

https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/cure-is-about-caring-no...

Let's think quantitatively to see if there is really a net trend here. In the most recently reported year, there were approximately 680,000 new United States citizens through naturalization.[1] So barely more than 1,000 United States citizens renouncing citizenship is swamped by several hundred thousand new citizens each year. I am an American citizen who has spent two three-year stays working and living abroad during my adult life. I've read about this taxation issue for decades, and filed United States tax forms from my place of foreign residence, but I've never seen a good reason to renounce my United States citizenship, nor has anyone else in my family.

The most common complaint about United States policies around citizenship that I see here on Hacker News is the complaint that it should be much easier to come to the United States to work on an employment-based visa. (It's more difficult than many participants on Hacker News desire, but settling in the United States with an employment-based visa is sufficiently easy that I know people just in my own social circle here in the Midwest who have settled here from Britain, the Netherlands, Norway, Japan, Taiwan, China, India, Pakistan, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Ecuador, Argentina, Korea, and a variety of other countries. Many people would like even more employment-based visas to be available, but they are already available by the tens of thousands.

[1] https://www.uscis.gov/archive/archive-news/naturalization-fa...

[1] https://www.khanacademy.org/sat

There are two age bands for SAT test-takers. The great majority of test-takers are of senior high school age, mostly eleventh graders or twelfth graders in their last two years of secondary school (so typically sixteen or seventeen years old as they take the test). They take the test at that age for one part of an application to college or university, as the article points out.

A younger age band for SAT test-takers are younger children taking the SAT for Talent Search[1] testing. All four of my children have participated in Talent Search testing (inherently, all with the previous version of the SAT, or even the version before that), all testing for the first time in sixth grade (just before their twelfth birthdays). Taking the SAT, or the competing brand of college entrance test the ACT, at such a young age is to identify young people who are ready for more challenging levels of study than usually served up by United States middle schools (lower secondary schools). My children have taken various online courses or supplementary locally arranged group courses at late elementary or middle school age, and have taken quite advanced courses at senior high age. My oldest son, now a hacker for a startup, got into the world of supplementary mathematics courses, discussed in another article submitted to Hacker News recently,[2] and found that experience very helpful for his career development.

I agree with the statement that the SAT is

bizarrely simple compared to the college entry exams at my country

and that would be true compared to the university entrance examinations used in a lot of countries that Hacker News readers come from. On the other hand, the SAT or ACT are only one element, and not the most important element, of college admission in the United States, and it's easy in general in the United States to enter higher education after secondary education--the majority of high school graduates do.

My children all score well on the SAT (and the ACT) when they take it at young ages for Talent Search. The key to the standardized tests used for college entrance in the United States is reading ability. Kids don't read for fun in their youth like they did in my generation. I am amazed (and my children are amazed) at how little reading contemporary children do. My stock advice on getting ready for standardized tests is "read, read, read, and read." My two older sons call the ACT, particularly, the "American Reading Test." Anyone who can read well can ace that test.

A few years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language. So what I tell my children about test prep, and this advice has served them very well, is read whatever you find fun to read, and keep on trying out new kinds of reading matter. Read widely. Read the cereal box while eating breakfast. Read a newspaper or magazine. Read books on any subject imaginable. Put down the video game and read. Get away from the computer (in our family, this sounds like "Do as I say and not as I do") and read. Read, read, read, and read. Then there is nothing to worry about in any United States college entrance test.

[1] http://cty.jhu.edu/talent/testing/about/sat.html

https://tip.duke.edu/node/44

http://www.ctd.northwestern.edu/program/numats

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/the-math...

Yes, I found it surprising when I first learned the fact (in the 1970s), because immigrants were pouring into all other parts of the United States in large numbers at the time. That includes places that were wholly undeveloped wilderness and also places that were battlegrounds outside the borders of the Confederacy.

It's even more surprising to me now, after years of reflection on my visits to Hong Kong in the 1980s, because the plain lesson of history is that welcoming immigrants is an excellent way to build up a destroyed economy and to provide more work both for the new arrivals and for the people who were already in the place that welcomes immigrants. There wasn't "work" (preexisting jobs) in the places where my ancestors or the majority of immigrants settled either, but there became work to do as the new settlers arrived.

An interesting fact about immigration to the United States is how much more some regions (broadly, the north after the Civil War) than other regions (broadly, the territory of the former Confederacy after the Civil War) were favored by immigrants during the peak period of United States immigration (the end of the 1800s). All of my ancestors arrived before peak immigration--in particular, all before the founding of the immigration station at Ellis Island in New York harbor--but immigrants throughout the post-Civil-War era strongly preferred settling anywhere but in the former Confederate states.

[1] https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/foreignborn/#decade=1950&c...

"Religious Opposition to Polio Vaccination," Emerg Infect Dis. 2009 Jun; 15(6): 978. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2727330/

is quite helpful. Significantly, it was published two years before Osama Bin Laden's compound was discovered and he died.

"Research suggests that only 5 to 10% of cancers run in families. Some factors, like age, are outside our control, and some we just don’t know about yet.

"The really good news is that up to 45% of cancer in Alberta is caused by factors we can control.

"So while it’s not possible to completely prevent getting cancer, there are many proven things we can do to greatly reduce our risk. This is what cancer prevention is all about."

As I look at the site's advice, I see

Eat Healthy (I should still do a bit more to reduce calories while increasing dietary fiber from vegetables and whole grains, but I'm mostly on that already)

Prevent HPV Infections (I've got this covered)

Get Screened (some screening programs are useless, actually, but I participate in the screening programs with proven benefit)

Limit UV Rays (easy to do in Minnesota in the winter)

Live Tobacco-Free (I have always done that)

Be Active (I exercise moderately every day)

Maintain a Healthy Weight (I can improve on this a little)

Drink Less Alcohol (I go weeks at a time without drinking at all, and have never been drunk)

and control other risk factors, which I do.

You could do all of this too.

[1] http://albertapreventscancer.ca/

But of course here we don't even have a randomized controlled trial, but only a very poorly conducted observational study in an obscure journal that is implausible on scientific grounds. If there is any association here, likely it results from some coincidental lifestyle association between cell phone use (wherever the cell phones are put) and sperm quality. (P.S. I'm a father of four children, but three of those four were born before I became a regular cell phone user. I'm not worried about this issue for my personal life, at my current age.)

[1] https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/about-science-based-med...

[1] http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/