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Harold and George Destroy the World

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Re: Harold and George Destroy the World

#301

Post by TimorousBestie »

rayiner wrote: post #259
dgsii wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t mean to suggest that an IQ test doesn’t have any value, only that they don’t account for many subtleties across (sub)cultural boundaries and are too heavily considered in determining one’s intellect, and often worth, by society. You’re using Motte-and-Bailey tactics to conflate IQ test results with vaccines denialism, on the basis that they are both “for the greater good”, which conveniently paints my point i…

> You’re using Motte-and-Bailey tactics to conflate IQ test results with vaccines denialism No, I’m pointing out that in both cases people attack the science because the implications of the science are in tension with their ideological priors. The fact that top-down coercion is an effective response to pandemics is inconvenient for libertarian-conservatives. Likewise, the fact that people differ in their intellectual…

> Likewise, the fact that people differ in their intellectual capabilities from birth is inconvenient for liberal egalitarians.

It is? Egalitarianism is usually considered to be the position that all humans have equal moral worth, not the position that all humans have equivalent physical and mental capacities. Not even actually existing Communists believed the latter, as far as I’m aware.

But just to double check:

> Egalitarian doctrines are generally characterized by the idea that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or moral status. As such, all people should be accorded equal rights and treatment under the law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarianism

Nor does the existence of special laws or practices concerning low (or high, for that matter) IQ people pose any great obstacle to egalitarianism, assuming the laws or practices in question do not infringe upon moral personhood.

Rawls is a typical egalitarian philosopher and he takes care to account for these natural variations in the human condition during both the classic _A Theory of Justice_ and the modern “restatement” in _Justice as Fairness_.

Re: Harold and George Destroy the World

#302

Post by lisdexan »

randallsquared wrote: post #68
ranyume wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting thought-provoking movies still exist. They're just far away from regular people's comfort zone. I'll recommend you three post 2015 movies that will get you thinking: Wandering (2022) Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) Monster (2023) But I'd concede that maybe making movies nowadays is harder because things are turning more and more expensive and there's too much pressure for producing profitable mov…

EEAaO is a fun slop movie, but a thinker it is not.

Yeah yeah, it isn't arthouse but, is it a less of a thinker than Pulp Fiction? I have the suspicion that GP would find IMDb Top movies agreeable and they aren't all deeply introspective films, which isn't a bad thing.

I think it's just survivorship bias, we don't remember the pre-2000 schlock because it's schlock. The two real "things used to be better before" situations IMO are:

- The loss of DVD revenue killed mid-budget productions, in the US the options are mostly indie darling or outrageous budget blockbuster.

- Big productions look flatter than before due to VFX crew exploitation. The VFX must be reworked 100 times with minimal time because planning is for suckers. No complex lighting for you and only crunch for the non-unionized Korean.

Re: Harold and George Destroy the World

#303

Post by xyzzyz »

hirvi74 wrote: post #292
xyzzyz wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, what exactly do you mean by "is representative of general intelligence"? This is a very abstract statement. What does this mean in scientific, empirical terms? What kind of facts we would observe in the world where this is true? What empirical observations we'd make in the world where it's false?

> Sorry, what exactly do you mean by "is representative of general intelligence"? This is a very abstract statement. No need to apologize. Perhaps my g is too low to describe my thoughts properly. > "is representative of general intelligence"? This factor that is derived from the positive correlations, g, is called general intelligence. So, g is nominally general intelligence, but is g actually what the name implies?…

One can take n number of positively correlated but independent things, and there will always be a some factor that can be derived from it.

I hope you understand that your vague question cannot be seen as equivalent to this rather more concrete statement. That’s why I asked for clarification, and your patronizing comments were really not called for.

In any case, Shalizi is very wrong, probably because he is entirely unfamiliar with the literature. He is wrong on multiple accounts.

First, yes, any number positively correlated measurements will yield a common factor. However, when talking about g, this is not an artifact of how we constructed IQ tests. Shalizi says:

What psychologists sometimes call the “positive manifold” condition is enough, in and of itself, to guarantee that there will appear to be a general factor. Since intelligence tests are made to correlate with each other, it follows trivially that there must appear to be a general factor of intelligence.

But this is just not true. Tests are not made to correlated with each other. Any time anyone attempts to construct a test of general mental ability, we always find the same g factor, even if they explicitly attempt to make a battery that tries to measure distinct, uncorrelated mental aptitudes. Observe how Shalizi fails to provide a single example of a test that does not exhibit the positive manifold with other tests.

Second, unlike Shalizi, we know that g is the predictive component of the IQ tests. IQ predicts real world outcomes very well, but what is really interesting is that the predictive power of individual subtests of an IQ test is practically perfectly correlated with g-loadings of the subtest. This would be very surprising if g was just a statistical artifact.

Shalizi says

So far as I can tell, however, nobody has presented a case for g apart from thoroughly invalid arguments from factor analysis; that is, the myth.

But this is just baffling if you have any familiarity with the literature.

Whether g be true or false -- the result wouldn't look any different. The methodology being used cannot determine what is true nor false, and that is the crux of this entire problem.

That’s just not true. For example, if g was a statistical artifact, one of the hundreds of intelligence tests devised would have not exhibited the positive manifold with all the others. It would not be correlated with heritability. It would not be correlated with phenotype features like reaction time. The world where g is a statistical artifact looks much different than our world.

Re: Harold and George Destroy the World

#304

Post by xyzzyz »

tptacek wrote: post #291
xyzzyz wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no debate on construct validity of IQ among the experts in the field. The consensus position is that IQ tests measure something real, that the tests enjoy extremely high measurement invariance (which implies construct validity), and that the results have extremely high predictive validity (relative to literally anything else in the entire field of psychology). The current debate is more along the lines, wheth…

Wait, this comment starts out with an assertion about one scientific question (the construct validity of a quantitative psychological metric) and ends with a statement about the range of a totally different question, and it's one studied by different fields than the former question.

Yes, I could have left off the last comment. I added it to illustrate where the debate currently lies. I am not sure what your point is.

Re: Harold and George Destroy the World

#305

Post by tptacek »

xyzzyz wrote: post #304
tptacek wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, this comment starts out with an assertion about one scientific question (the construct validity of a quantitative psychological metric) and ends with a statement about the range of a totally different question, and it's one studied by different fields than the former question.

Yes, I could have left off the last comment. I added it to illustrate where the debate currently lies. I am not sure what your point is.

That the logic of your comment doesn't even hang together? Which debate? You've managed to cite two of them.

Re: Harold and George Destroy the World

#306

Post by xyzzyz »

hirvi74 wrote: post #287
rayiner wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I will not dispute that this ethereal 'g-factor' can infer minor to moderate predictions in some domains of people's lives at a population level The U.S. military won’t hire people below an 83 IQ to peel potatoes, because experience shows that such people can’t effectively be trained. So it’s more than just “minor” predictions.

One, you are conflating IQ and g, which are not the same thing. IQ is a proxy for the measurement of g, but it does not measure g directly. Two, the military does not administer protected IQ exams, but rather, the ASVAB which correlates with IQ. Three, our entire global society does not revolve around who can do what for the military. Four, what can someone with an IQ of 84 do that one with an IQ of 83 cannot? Five,…

And why do you think Congress has passed this law? What prompted them to micromanage the military in this manner? I encourage you to research this topic, “McNamara’s folly” will serve as a good starting keyword. Spoiler: it has everything to do with unsuitability of low IQ enlisted.

FWIW, ASVAB is an IQ test. Any intelligence researcher will tell you so, because it exhibits the usual positive manifold, you find the usual g factor in it, and it shows high correlation with other IQ test. The military doesn’t usually call it as such for political reasons, but will happily admit in private that ASVAB and WAIS measure the same thing: https://web.archive.org/web/20200425230037/https://www.rand....

Re: Harold and George Destroy the World

#307

Post by [deleted] »

xyzzyz wrote: post #265
snowwrestler wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genetic heritability, which is a subset of heritability, does not generally mean what people think it means, though. To the extent IQ can be attributed genetically to parents, it does not imply a "compounding" effect where smart people continuously have smarter kids and dumb people have dumber kids. This can understood by analogy to other personal traits like eyesight, height, weight, hair color, etc. which vary with…

Yes, but since the heritability is high, the average IQ of the children will be close to the average IQ of the parents, despite the fact that it will tend to regress towards the mean.

[deleted]

Re: Harold and George Destroy the World

#308

Post by snowwrestler »

xyzzyz wrote: post #265
snowwrestler wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genetic heritability, which is a subset of heritability, does not generally mean what people think it means, though. To the extent IQ can be attributed genetically to parents, it does not imply a "compounding" effect where smart people continuously have smarter kids and dumb people have dumber kids. This can understood by analogy to other personal traits like eyesight, height, weight, hair color, etc. which vary with…

Yes, but since the heritability is high, the average IQ of the children will be close to the average IQ of the parents, despite the fact that it will tend to regress towards the mean.

That’s not how genetics works. It’s not a simple averaging scheme.

Re: Harold and George Destroy the World

#309

Post by mmooss »

nradov wrote: post #255
dbspin wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They may have dropped from the level of death during the war itself. A transnational conflict that involved every continent on earth. But I'd be shocked if the numbers dead from war in the post war period did not exceed the median number of civilian victims of war pre-WW1 or in the post war period. The World Wars normalised the idea of total war, of death squads and killing fields and mechanised genocide. Those have…

Alas we're seeing a reversion to historical norms. The "civilized" world was a temporary and localized phenomenon. The usual pattern in conflicts between societies was always genocide: kill all the men, take the women and children as slaves, smash the cultural artifacts, and steal anything of value. Probably thousands of societies have been utterly erased that way. Hopefully we can arrest the gradual worldwide regres…

People love repeating this stuff, a form of navel-gazing: 'Norms' is used by bad people to support their obviously bad ideas - 'I know this sucks, but it's inevitable!'.

Instead of complaining, do what prior generations did and stand up and build something.

Re: Harold and George Destroy the World

#310

Post by dudefeliciano »

randallsquared wrote: post #66

The "silver dollar" change isn't -- it's the dime. The design was in the works before the current administration [1], and is only intended to be for the 250th anniversary [2]. The Dept of Defense was only created in the late 1940s. Before that the US had the Dept of War, the Dept of the Navy, and other organizations. The point of calling it "defense" was not because "everyone has the right to defense", but because th…

> If you're going to call people stupid or immature for making certain decisions, maybe take a couple minutes to find out who made the decisions, and/or what the history of those and similar changes has been.

“We won the first world war, we won the second world war, we won everything before that and in between,” Trump said at the signing. “And then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to the Department of Defense.”

Seems like a stupid and immature reason enough to me.

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