Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My new favorite book of all time

gatesnotes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 421 posts

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#221

Post by lawtguy »

sisu wrote: post #130

"The global average IQ score is rising by about 3 IQ points every decade." Is this statement correct? I was under impression that while the per-country averages are mostly rising, the global average is going down. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2730791/Are-S... http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/IQ/1950-2050/

The statement about rising IQ is the Flynn Effect[1]. The fact that IQ has risen over the past 80 years or so is well accepted. Exactly why this is happening is open to debate.

The fourmilab link you mentioned seem to be based on the book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations"[2]. They explicitly normalized all IQ data to have Briton as 100. The author then assumes that IQ hasn't changed any in the past 50 years. The author mentions the Flynn effect and then ignores it. Once you do that, you really can't say anything about how IQ is changing over time. Instead he basically ends up measuring the relative growth rates of countries.

The Daily Mail link has a whole bunch of things, the graph they have of lowering world IQ looks pretty much like the one in the fourmilab article, so I suspect it's based on the same data.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#222

Post by CamperBob2 »

martin1975 wrote: post #93
topleveldomain wrote: post #17

" War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations." I would argue that something else that happened in 1945 has been a much bigge…

Nothing has had as large an impact on the maintenance of relative peace, at least between large/nuclear nations, as the atomic bomb. It's the MAD principle - mutually assured destruction. I think our discovery of nukes is actually pretty cool.

No question about it. Nukes accomplish something that no other deterrent can: they make world leaders personally afraid to go to war with each other.

Those who advocate nuclear disarmament are basically advocating a return to increasingly-bloody world wars every few years.

Of course, it's also true that the leaders who are afraid to confront each other directly are more likely to resort to proxy wars that cause massive pain and suffering in their own right. But that's a different problem that will have to be solved by different means.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#223

Post by dexterdog »

thisisit wrote: post #5

Strange. Ublock is blocking the whole blog content. TL;dr - Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now

I've had the same experience whenever I go to his page. It seems odd that a guy that needs no money from his website would have one that doesn't display on everything. There are few sites where my blockers block all of the content. This is one of them.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#224

Post by randcraw »

rjkennedy98 wrote: post #92

This article/video explains why so many people have completely lost faith in our technocratic elite. The idea that "You’re 37 times less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than you were at the turn of the century" makes a large difference in the happiness of people is ridiculous. Why are people pessimistic about the future? Maybe its because the rates of addiction (including to smart phones and other screens)…

I suspect pessimism toward the future is rising because more people are not finding life to be satisfyingly meaningful.

I think many people have been moving away from traditional sources of personal meaning (religion, civic duty, nuclear family, etc), but we haven't been replacing these age old 'guiding principles' with anything that's equally compelling. Instead we seem to be focusing our lives ever more around unshared point sources of life experience like social media and entertainment streams, which are largely passive and unshareable. This passivity increases separation and pushes us away from awareness and involvement in the needs of other people who are important to us, much less inhibits us in serving those needs.

That seems like the perfect recipe for loneliness.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#225

Post by WalterBright »

topleveldomain wrote: post #17

" War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations." I would argue that something else that happened in 1945 has been a much bigge…

Another factor making war less likely is the mass media. Remember how the Vietnam War was "the first television war"? Actually seeing what happens in war turns peoples' stomachs, and the propaganda of war's "glories" is revealed for what it is.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#226

Post by randcraw »

Froyoh wrote: post #84

What's the book? Can't load the page on mobile.

Based on the URL of the OP, I think it's Steven Pinker's new book shipping on February 27: "Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress"

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073TJBYTB/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#227

Post by danieltillett »

simonh wrote: post #175
hinkley wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also had the horror of chemical weapons in WWI. It was becoming more and more clear that there were things men could do that men should never do, even in war. Otherwise you could just crop-dust your downwind neighbors and be moved in before anyone could even report an attack. I still don't understand why we're allowed to stockpile nerve gas given the past 100 years of warfare and treaties.

Actualy the reason the Germans didnt use nerve gas in WW2 was because they mistakenly assumed Britain and Russia also already had them. Hitler was otherwise pretty keen on them.

Hitler was an experienced soldier and had been gassed a few times in the Great War. He ruled out using gas.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#228

Post by danieltillett »

topleveldomain wrote: post #17

" War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations." I would argue that something else that happened in 1945 has been a much bigge…

War became illegal when those that declare war could not avoid being killed in war.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#229

Post by kps »

dllthomas wrote: post #193
claytoneast wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are disregarding the degradation of the human attention span that modern media has brought to our minds. If you really think there is no difference in capacity between the minds of that time and now, just google "technology and attention span" and spend some time with the results. If you can manage to hold your attention long enough to read through them :) I know hardly anyone anymore who can sit on a cou…

Dickens was serialized - there was only so long you could spend reading new Dickens before you ran out of it. (I haven't been able to find the typical length of a portion, though.) On the other hand, plenty of people will spend a weekend on the new Harry Potter.

32 pages. " rel="nofollow">http://dickens.wpi.edu/history.html>

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#230

Post by kgabis »

jacquesm wrote: post #156
kgabis wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all Europeans, just Germans.

The Dresden firebombing is very well known outside of Germany. And if you've seen the 'before' and 'after' pictures of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden you won't be surprised that people consider them to be on the same scale.

Bombing of Dresden is well known, of course, but it doesn't compare to a single bomb that can level cities when it comes to deterring your enemy. I'm not trying to diminish the scale of destruction in Dresden, but there are many cities other than it that got destroyed in similar, "conventional" way (like Warsaw, Breslau or Tokyo), so I don't see why it should be treated in a special way.
Post reply on HN