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That was the most insightful thing I've seen in this thread, thank you. There was a slashdot topic a while back, and I asked Samantha Wright about neurochemistry affects the brain, and she replied with this link, which isn't chemistry at all but a fascinating treatise on human cultures (and in fact answered my question). We are all products of our environments. The linked article notes that westerners are weird, and the weirdest of the westerners is Americans from testing different peoples.

Mod this up! Great link, just read the whole thing: Americans are weird.

That was the most insightful thing I've seen in this thread, thank you. There was a slashdot topic a while back, and I asked Samantha Wright about neurochemistry affects the brain, and she replied with this link, which isn't chemistry at all but a fascinating treatise on human cultures (and in fact answered my question). We are all products of our environments. The linked article notes that westerners are weird, and the weirdest of the westerners is Americans from testing different peoples.

Citation needed. Please show me a study where someone who becomes curious about something becomes more intelligent.

Given that we're talking about development from an extremely early age, that would be illegal, but I will do my best to explain this.

Conventional thinking right now is that intelligence is primarily genetic, and while it can be influenced by environment, it is largely fixed from birth.

This is the primary reason given for the class bias seen in IQ testing. That is not, at all, conventional thinking. Read this and this. If intelligence were genetic to the extent you suggest, the children of immigrants would be incapable of integrating at the most fundamental cultural level.

Curiousity is a personality trait. Intelligence is an ability. You can be curious and stupid, or disinterested yet intelligent. One has no bearing on the other.

If you are curious about how something works, you will be more likely to figure out how it works. Once you understand how things work, you can use that understanding to interpret more situations. This includes abstract concepts. Pattern matching, abstract reasoning, and creativity all depend on the fruits of a mind knowledgeable in such things. The brain cannot function in a vacuum (as learned from Genie, along with observations of animals in factory farms), and it cannot derive new ideas from absolute nothingness, only recombine what it has experienced (this is a central hypothesis of computational creativity).

The genetic element you're identifying is a person's potential to be intelligent. That potential is meaningless until some force motivates the person to learn to use it, whether that's curiosity, school, or parenting, because we are not born with an understanding of any axioms that we can derive new concepts or thinking strategies from. These last two don't cause self-sustaining intellectual growth, leaving curiosity as the only reliable driving force for a person's development of their intelligence.

And obviously stupidy non-sensical correlations are up. Wow.. talk about ridiculous. Libs want to ban guns because they are so dangerous.. the number of guns going up is actually a direct correlation according to DoJ and dozens of studies showing that the number 1 thing that causes a criminal to NOT commit a crime is the potential presence of a gun. Same reason that Crime is up in all but two small townships in the UK,.. and that the groundswell there is to re-legalize guns.. Number one argument?.. so that people can defend themselves. But that's okay... disregard the facts (as most libs do) and inject your semi-witty banter.

Ohh the humanity! Look at all that Crime in the UK!

Yes, instead of my witty banter lets rely on your unimpeachable data consisting of a cherry picked example that doesn't even seem to be right, unnamed "studies", and reports by a non-scientific government agency (I'll trust their stats, but not their analysis).

Here's the one quick bit of info I found that suggests that there's isn't much correlation either way. Which isn't surprising, in most cases I'd expect guns to be dwarfed by socio-economic factors when it comes to crime, and it's hard to remove confounders from the data. Still, there's a piece of actual data for the null hypothesis.

This study fails on two counts: Americans are statistical outliers; the conclusion is fallacious due to poor understanding of causality.

For those for whom this is TL;DR -- Americans are the worst possible population to base any form of human study on (let alone a flawed study) - ref Solomon Asch's conclusion. The short summary @ neuroecology ; the longer discussion @ pacific standard.

Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”

But try this little thought experiment: take some random Anyville, USA. How much have they travelled, how diverse is their population? How do populations move? How many are going to marry from the same town, as did their parents and grandparents, and how many are going to have children and grandchildren doing the same? And even if the population started out with diversity, you can lather, rinse, repeat the marriage/procreation suds and end up with a genetically similar pool of people - the town itself holds massively similar people on average.

Those of us who are more footloose and have moved around further are still statistical anomalies, insomuch as we often hail from outside of these wells of similarity. That is not to say that since we're so different, we cannot make friends with those whose families are long time residents, nor does it exclude the idea of having a multicultural community of extremely different people, DNA-wise.

But at its core, the fault of this study is basic: a textbook example of correlation-causation fallacy.

Our regular-speed rail is subsidized, but the closest thing we have to high speed rail, Amtrak's Acela Express, made a profit of about $41 per passenger in 2008.

The experience in other countries is the same. High speed rail subsidizes slower intercity lines.

Only Taiwan continued to lose money on HSR after their line became operational. But since then they refinanced the debt and the line is now making a profit.

Another option is to use the DND (do not disturb) feature which I believe overrides the national alerts and prevents a 2am wakeup call when you can't help.

My phone was on DND. Didn't help. Still sounded like my house was on fire.

Disabling an important warning system that could save children seems kind of... selfish.

Oh, come on, based on your UID I would have thought you'd be better than that tired line... BUT THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!

If you look into it at *all*, AMBER alerts have been even less useful, with more false positives, than TSA airport screening. "Crime control theater", indeed.

The issue - as usual - isn't that the problem - strangers kidnapping and murdering children - isn't horrible, it's that it's in fact extremely rare and the "solution" spends an absurd amount of time, money, and attention on it instead of the other 99.9% of the actual crimes against children. And the implementation was so bad it managed to piss off people instead of encourage them to help.

Not only that, but the entire system itself is so inherently flawed it amounts to little more than “crime-control theater.”

It's difficult to determine. It might curb some criminal behaviour, for example dumb and inexperienced criminals would be less likely to survive. However, it seems likely that criminal behaviour would adapt to the new circumstances. For example, the criminals might shift to taking their victims by surprise more often, and shooting them more often to prevent their victims from using the weapons they are presumed to be carrying. It's quite possible that if more people were carrying concealed weapons that more people would be injured during the commission of crimes with no real impact on the underlying crime rate. It's also possible that crime rates for "crimes of passion" (where the comitter isn't thinking straight), would go up since the means to cause serious damage and/or death are always at hand.

Overall, I actually doubt that gun ownership rates and concealed carry rates have any significant impact on crime rates. I think the largest impacts come from culture, heavy metal contamination (especially lead) rates and policing strategies.

With the growing problem of gang violence in major U.S. cities...

This is a friendly reminder that violent crime in the U.S. has dropped every year for the past ten years, and in fact we're at the end of a fairly sustained 20-year drop in crime.

1. Narrow study group.
2. Highly questionable conclusions.
3. Suspected publication bias.

All in all -1 Overrated story.

Psychology is hard. Even if you are interpreting your subjects' behaviour correctly (a very big "if"), the idea that they are representative of "humans" in general is probably wrong.I think this article was mentioned on Slashdot a while back - http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/

"...The potential implications of the unexpected results were quickly apparent to Henrich. He knew that a vast amount of scholarly literature in the social sciences—particularly in economics and psychology—relied on the ultimatum game and similar experiments. At the heart of most of that research was the implicit assumption that the results revealed evolved psychological traits common to all humans, never mind that the test subjects were nearly always from the industrialized West. Henrich realized that if the Machiguenga results stood up, and if similar differences could be measured across other populations, this assumption of universality would have to be challenged.

Henrich had thought he would be adding a small branch to an established tree of knowledge. It turned out he was sawing at the very trunk. He began to wonder: What other certainties about “human nature” in social science research would need to be reconsidered when tested across diverse populations?..."

How we set aside our morals and learned to love the bomb

I suspect the reason most nerds are bad at social etiquette simply because they don't see the point and don't care. It's a waste of time and/or something beneath their intellectual pursuits. If you are on the verge of a breakthrough in a new black hole theory, or revolutionary AI algorithm, everything else might seem unimportant by comparison.

If they started caring, picking up proper social etiquette is really not that hard. You don't need a school a class or an instructional manual... Just mirror whatever other "smooth" and "cool" people are doing. (The hard part is to hold an engaging social conversation talking about nothing, but that's a story for another day.)

So the key is to convince the nerd of the importance of social etiquette. Ironically, those who do go to this school probably don't really need it, and those who really need it haven't realized what they are missing... but sooner or later, they will do.

The deal is, if you only intend to deal with your peers, lacking social etiquette is fine. However, that also limits your interactions - if you ever intend to communicate your ideas to others who you consider "lesser" (less educated, the general public, whatever), then not conforming to what they expect discounts you as an "expert" in their eyes.

After all, just like everyone on /. thinks people should learn more about the computer that they use because they're smarter than the general population. Of course, the general population easily says the reverse - if these computer geeks are so intelligent that they should tell us what to do and know, why aren't they smart enough to look, act and play the part?

As much as everyone loves to say to not judge a book by its cover, it's what happens. Dress sharply, and people will listen. Dress like a slob, and people will think your thoughts and ideas are the same and refuse to listen.

And if you have to ever deal with customers (travelling, say) - even if they're engineers themselves - it doesn't hurt to be extra polite and show you do know your way around a dinner (especially with bosses and managers present).

It's why a properly fitted suit is often the ideal garment - it's one of the easier get-ups to instantly add credibility in the eyes of others.

Hell, look at scams out there. You'll find the perpetrator in confidence moves always dresses up because people typically let their guard down. If a slob approached you trying to sell you some hot investment, you'd turn them away. If a sharply dressed person did it, a lot of people drop their guard and listen. Same goes for pick-pockets.

An interesting study also shows that "clothes make the man" - how the simple act of wearing say, a lab coat can increase attentiveness and carefulness of anyone who wears them.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103112000200 (paywall)

http://www.psmag.com/science/the-brain-focusing-power-of-the-lab-coat-40108/

Research published late last year suggested psychological differences at the city level too.

Some of the differences they've found actually are interesting, though. Like this familiar illusion, which has tricked many Westerners, but Bushmen from the kalahari see them as obviously equal length. (Let's hope they didn't use those images for comparison in the actual tests, as this guy pointed out, the lines actually are different length!)

I've often thought that someone with a good set of scientific principles could go into the fields of sociology and do a lot of easy work and get famous.

Research published late last year suggested psychological differences at the city level too.

Some of the differences they've found actually are interesting, though. Like this familiar illusion, which has tricked many Westerners, but Bushmen from the kalahari see them as obviously equal length. (Let's hope they didn't use those images for comparison in the actual tests, as this guy pointed out, the lines actually are different length!)

I've often thought that someone with a good set of scientific principles could go into the fields of sociology and do a lot of easy work and get famous.

Yes, believe it or not, fingerprints are far more reliable than DNA.

Not true, thanks to a little thing called confirmation bias

Combine the explosion of cyberwarfare with the advances in organic "inkjet printing" compound creation (e.g. http://www.psmag.com/health/making-medical-miracles-with-inkjet-printers-26770/ ), and you get: Internet Virus Causes Home Printers to Generate Plague / Ebola / Marshmallow Fluff.
-- clearly I consider all 3 to be of equal horror --

...because there is no way criminal elements could abuse this technology...

I think we've just eliminated fingerprints as a viable identification method.

Contrary to popular opinion, fingerprints never were a viable method, thanks to confirmation bias.

Proof here

I imagine having a spaceport wouldn't be all that different from having an airport, though an airport sees constant use and a spaceport would therefore seem to be less of a disturbance.

Throughout the world a lot of airports have wildlife preserves- especially wetlands- near them; that's the case for both of the airports closest to me. The airport and its noise make it less likely that people will drain/bulldoze the wetlands for housing developments. Bacteria in wetlandscan make short work of deicing chemicals used by the airport, which would otherwise build up to toxic levels. Bird strikes don't increase as much as you might think. There's some mutual benefits here.