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Urbit is now in open developer beta

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Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"But not IQ? What's the exception?" I don't think intelligence, outside of unusual situations, is a physical characteristic. So I'm not sure how to answer your question.

If you have any reasoning or research to back up your view, I would genuinely like to see it. For sure, we don't understand everything about the brain, but we certainly have found correlations between physical characteristics of the brain and IQ. BTW, try to convince a dog breeder that temperament is 100% nurture and 0% nature. I would like to hear that person's answer.

Yes, there are correlations between genetics and IQ.

There are undoubtedly hereditary factors which will effect nurture, which will subsequently effect IQ. That is not synonymous with IQ being hereditary.

For example, there are hereditary factors which will effect career choices: temperament, physical strength, race, gender, height, and so on. Thus, career choices will correlate with genetics. That doesn't mean that career is a hereditary trait. This is an important distinction.

Likewise, twins being adopted and raised by other families does not correct for nurture. People are still treated differently depending on their genetics: temperament, physical strength, race, gender, height, facial structure, etc. As a result, seeing a correlation between intelligence in separated twins is not enough to prove a genetic cause.

Asking me to see researching backing up my view is asking me to support the null hypothesis. That's not how science works.

Wikipedia: "In inferential statistics, the term 'null hypothesis' usually refers to a general statement or default position that there is no relationship between two measured phenomena, or no association among groups. [...] The null hypothesis is generally assumed to be true until evidence indicates otherwise."

Until IQ Heritability researchers can prove that twin studies aren't just measuring nurture as a result of genetics, the burden remains on them.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#162
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discounting Yarvin feeling superior, or others perceiving that, I am in favor of the 'start from scratch' here. Worst-case scenario it fails, and only drags a few bleeding edgers with it. If it succeeds, we have a whole new way to proceed without necessarily abandoning the old. Just at the hardware level, we are forever, it seems, stuck in the von Neumann architecture with some recent hops to vector processing on GPU…

>After having read a little Wittgenstein and the late Umberto Eco's works on semiotics Do you have any suggestions on good starting points? I found Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to be a rough introduction to Wittgenstein. I'm also curious what Eco you'd recommend; I've only read his novels and essays.

I've only read two of Eco's fictional works: The Name of the Rose, and Foucault's Pendulum. I loved them both, but then I picked up The Island of the Day Before, and didn't finish it. I have also read his essays.

The book I was referring to was Theory of Semiotics by Eco. I picked it up in 1982 or 83, after having read The Name of the Rose, and I honestly didn't know what Semiotics meant until I spent 20 minutes reading it in the bookstore (no Googling then!).

I had read Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus around the same time, 1983 or so. I read most of it, some pages multiple times, but I didn't finish it. I only grasped enough to know I wasn't going to change my major to Linguistics. I was hopping off of references in the bookstores the way I now follow links down rabbit holes.

I should revisit these works now that I have some more years on me!

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about torsion dystonia? Increased IQ can be observed before the onset of the disease, even when matched to comparable members of the same population. What evidence would falsify your position?

A few things on torsio dystonia. One, Torsion Dystonia could just as easily be effecting something else which effects IQ. Two, the studies on Torsion Dystonia decided to only study people who were not showing symptoms. This means they were selecting around heredity , since those who show symptoms and those who don't were not divided on gene expression -- there is only one allele in play as far as we know. Three, the…

Point 3 is weak without a quote of the variance or other such notions of spread.
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