411–420 of 479 posts
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Goodhart's law strikes again. As soon as IQ becomes a measurable thing, populations that measure it will act in ways that increase it. Shocking, I know.
It's interesting how closely tied "goodness" and "intelligence" are. To make a mistake is to be a bad person. To be stupid is to be bad. I can call you weak. I can even call you ugly, cowardly or a flibbertigibbet. But if I call you stupid look out! Like our whole worth as humans is summed in our ability to talk smart and solve riddles like a trained animal. Which seems pretty stupid.
If you're making material mistakes that hurt the social group you're in, especially things that cost extra work for someone else to undo and redo correctly, then you could be identified as someone ripe for removal from the group. Ostracization means assigning taboo or outsider status to that person, either as a way to get them to shape up and earn back the trust they lost or to remove them entirely with little remorse.
Is it possible to measure amount of lead in water somehow at home?
The easiest method is "at home" strip tests that react to various concentrations. eg: (in Australia)
https://www.alloratestkits.com.au/shop/lead-water-test-kit/
Available from a number of companies | countries | international order.
From there it's a matter of chemistry and what kind of equipment you might have or be able to access via a local school or friend from the test tube crowd.
Or bottling a small sample of your water and sending it to a local | state lab for testing.
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I remember reading somewhere that lead exposure might correlate with poverty. Is this accounted for?
It does correlate, and it is accounted for. We have evidence to believe the causal arrow points lead=>poverty. This is because the natural experiments of phasing out leaded gasoline in different countries at effectively randomized times produce subsequent decreases in lead poisoning (and downstream crime). This is as close to a controlled "give one population lead poisoning" experiment as you can ethically run.
This is well known e.g. (1) and seems like it would be a large effect.
I'm not saying that this invalidates the studies on lead, I'm sure that the researchers know how to do it far better than I do, and have spend a lot more time on accounting for it; just that poverty drives increased pollution exposure, as a general rule.
1) https://www.london.gov.uk/%20New%20report%20shows%20shocking...
This feels like a good time to bring up the lead-crime hypothesis (flaws and all). For those who don't know, there's a strong (if faulty) correlation between lead levels in preschool children and crime rates: https://www.vox.com/2016/1/14/17991876/crime-drop-murder-lea... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis Regardless of what you think about the hypothesis, the growth and crunch in lead levels…
Late Soviet writers such as Strugatsky brothers would often bring out the topic of barbarism and brutality which is characteristic of Human race and had to be fought at all times... ...which is, as far as we know now, not innate but looks like symptoms of chronic lead poisoning.
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Or people just haven't tried hard enough to find a politically correct explaination. I think slavery itself could be one cause of it. Restricting the freedom to pick a partner of one group compared with other nearby groups seems likely to have an effect.
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I've never heard of copper-lined PEX, can you tell me more?
I still have a length of it in storage but I don't know the brand by heart. It was pretty expensive stuff and it needed weird fittings, which were also expensive, the inner liner was blue, that much I do recall. In the end I mostly regretted going for plastic, I'd probably use regular copper pipe and crimp fittings again, less hassle and I'm just more familiar with it.
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I probably dodged this ceramic problem because I drink from borosilicate glass beakers. (Yes, I buy new, unused labware for cooking/drinking use.)
Are those not too fragile for daily use? A pint glass is so much thicker in comparison than a beaker.
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This is a common predicament. A piece of information that, if it was made public, would be immensely useful in countless ways for the management of our society, But it might also be exploited by bad people. So it is made private. And the icing on the cake. We say "it's private because privacy is intrinsically good and a basic human right ". Not, "It's private because we fear bad people".
> "It's private because we fear bad people" I wonder if the thought process even goes that far. Oftentimes, the motive seems more like self-conscious social pressures, e.g., fear of embarrassment.
A chronic ubiquitous anxiety "rationalized" as a fear of everybody for everybody.
Try posting the question on social media sometime. The answers are interesting.
How did they prove the causality of various conditions to the study?
Deviations from a normal distribution?