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Rich, Black, Flunking

eastbayexpress.com

151–154 of 154 posts

Re: Rich, Black, Flunking

#151
post #56
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially if you're doing things like operating on people:-/ No restoring from backups, or rolling back to the latest working version if you fuck up.

That's the exact reason they push interns beyond breaking point. My friend regularly made silly, dangerous mistakes when tired - every time he did a serious dressing down ensued. Because he was an intern a qualified doctor always double checked him so none of the mistakes were enacted. But he learned his limits and how far it was safe to go. People put their lives in the hands of doctors; they are under pressure, ove…

I agree that knowing your limit it part of medical school training, but it's also about practicing how to work effectively and safely when you pass that limit. Many doctors will eventually have to perform very long surgeries often over 12 hours of intense concentration with no breaks. Overworking medical students for long shift helps to prepare them for the occasions when they have to perform and have no one to pass the patient off to and no one to closely monitor their work.

Re: Rich, Black, Flunking

#152
post #131
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These books come out every so often. 5 years ago "emotional intelligence" sold copy. IQ has a heritability coefficient of between .5 and .8. The rest seems to be non-shared environment. IQ is a very good predictor of academic success and future income (.7 to .8 correlation). There's a hell of a lot of research out there that has shown this again and again. I'd like to see Stanovich's definition of "critical reasoning…

> two uncorrelated variables can't both have a correlation coefficient of .8. Can you prove this? I think that the greatest possible correlation is sqrt(1/2) (around .7), but I have no idea how to prove it. (Formally, the conjecture is as follows: if X,Y, and Z are random variables, and k is a real constant, with: corr(X,Y) = 0 corr(X,Z) > k corr(Y,Z) > k then k It is indeed possible for corr(X,Z)=corr(Y,Z)=sqrt(1/2)…

Thanks for doing the math. I appreciate the pursuit of curiosity here on HN. There is a different issue here to be curious about, and that is exactly what a calculation of broad heritability definitely predicts. It predicts a lot less than what many readers unfamiliar with genetics might guess. It happens that some of the leading authors on human behavioral genetics just wrote an article about what heritability does and does not mean

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://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/cdir/2009/00000018...

(one online abstract)

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122587149/abstrac...

(the main link to the article)

Alas, a peek behind the pay wall that was available the other day when I posted this article here on HN

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=838534

is now dead. But I have the full text of the article at hand, as I am currently attending a weekly journal club with some of the authors, and one key paragraph from the article must be read by anyone who draws conclusions from heritablity figures:

"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)."

This simply reemphasizes a point that is familiar to anyone who has studied genetics carefully, namely that the pre-Mendelian concept of heritability says nothing about malleability, the degree to which a trait can be influenced by environmental variables.

Angoff, W. H. (1988). The nature-nurture debate, aptitudes, and group differences. American Psychologist, 43, 713-720.

Mange, A. & Mange, E. J. (1990). Genetics: Human Aspects.

Kaufman, Alan S. (1990). Assessing Adolescent and Adult Intelligence.

So the statement above that heritability somehow constrains the expression of IQ or of consequences of IQ such as occupational success is actually conceptually incorrect. But I appreciate you going to the effort of doing the math.

Another thought is that relating one correlation coefficient to another with linear algebra probably depends too heavily on applying linear tools to a not fully linear model. Increases of income are plainly linear and are on a ratio scale. (There is a zero point for income, and each dollar increase in income has the same magnitude anywhere along the scale.) But IQ test standard scores are at best ordinal scales, so it is already an abuse of mathematics to treat them as a linear variable, or to treat a figure derived from them as a linear variable.

Re: Rich, Black, Flunking

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3+3=6, 30/5=6. Sorry for the snark, but what's your proposed interpretation? That it's all socioeconomic?

Yes, the parent post evokes some ridiculous reverence for ".55 is very close to .56". At least compare ratio of average income per race to ratio of GPA, not some bizarre ratio of "% > threshold". I could probably find an income threshold so that the ratios are exactly equal.

Whoever downvoted this is wrong. There's always a threshold so "fraction less than threshold" is x for any 0<=x<=1.

Re: Rich, Black, Flunking

#154
post #56
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially if you're doing things like operating on people:-/ No restoring from backups, or rolling back to the latest working version if you fuck up.

That's the exact reason they push interns beyond breaking point. My friend regularly made silly, dangerous mistakes when tired - every time he did a serious dressing down ensued. Because he was an intern a qualified doctor always double checked him so none of the mistakes were enacted. But he learned his limits and how far it was safe to go. People put their lives in the hands of doctors; they are under pressure, ove…

FWIW, I've read that the reason for pushing interns beyond their physical limits is simply money, not teaching or building character. It's cheaper to work them ridiculous hours than to hire enough people to do the job well.

Working sleep-deprived for long periods of time doesn't really teach you anything after the first couple weeks. It just lowers your efficiency and increases your error rate. In software development, that causes you to waste time. In medicine, that causes, er, iatrogenic death, or something like that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libby_Zion_law#Libby_Zion.27s_d...

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