Speaking of the richness of languages, TFA oversimplifies some important language tendencies too.
For example, Zipf's law (which is also linked in TFS) has little to do with "familiarity" or being "more likely to select a word or phrase that we're familiar with."
It basically is just an observation that the statistical ranking of word in most natural languages is inversely proportional to its frequency. From the Wiki article:
Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc. For example, in the Brown Corpus of American English text, the word "the" is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf's Law, the second-place word "of" accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), followed by "and" (28,852). Only 135 vocabulary items are needed to account for half the Brown Corpus.
Yes, I suppose one might get out of this that "we tend to choose words we're more familiar with," but Zipf's law is a MUCH more specific constraint on distribution of word frequencies. And it's more a statement about what word frequency distributions ARE rather than how we come to choose words or what we may be "familiar with," unless by "familiar with" you just mean "occurs more frequently."
Moreover, there is some research that has shown a distribution somewhat like Zipf's law will emerge even in texts generated with artificial random "languages" composed of random letters... which makes the claims about how we're making conscious or sub-conscious choices about "familiarity" even less likely.
Before I respond, let me be clear that I absolutely think copyright law is broken and needs significant reform -- at a minimum to make the time until something goes into public domain be only a few years (like it was in original 18th century statutes), not a century or more That said...
Sharing/copying should be encouraged as a social good. Sharing of knowledge is what made our civilization, and keeps it alive. Voluntarily allow a few elite control over what may be copied and who can copy, and you weaken civilization.
I always find these sorts of arguments hilarious. Because you know who funded the arts before copyright existed? Rich dudes.
How did one become an artist in the age before artists could make money off of publications and copying? Well, you had two choices:
(1) Be independently wealthy. A lot of art, music, literature, etc. used to be created by only those filthy rich who didn't have to work for a living. So, if you had nothing else to do and were bored, you could afford to make art.
(2) You're not rich? Well, if you want to be an artist, musician, writer, or skilled craftsman, you have to find yourself another rich dude to fund your work. In other words, you found yourself a patron, because otherwise, how are you going to support yourself?
If you actually want art that requires significant SKILL and TRAINING to learn a craft, those are your primary choices without some concept of intellectual property.
There are other ways for artists to earn a living.
Sure, you can say performing musicians have to tour rather than making money off of recordings, but what about the composers who actually write the songs? Lots of pop artists don't make their own songs -- they rely on expert songwriters to do that. How exactly does one make money off of those sorts of creations? One can't exactly become a "touring songwriter." (I mean, yeah, improvisation is fun and you can make up crappy songs on the spot for a paying audience I suppose, but there's little incentive then to spend time crafting an actual good song...)
So far, I've just been talking about pop music, but it gets harder if you want someone with real talent to devote months or even years to an extended project -- like a book, for example. And how about training? Mozart spent maybe 15 years learning the craft of composition before he began writing stuff of a "mature composer" with thorough training in how to write music. Who pays for those 15 years of training before one can even begin to compose?... and then one's compositions are just shared with no reward for the person who spent his life acquiring the skill to make them.
That's ultimately the problem with these arguments. A system without any sort of intellectual property makes it much more difficult for anyone to spend significant time on any given creative project, since no money can be made from that lost time... let alone taking any time to learn a skilled craft.
Art thus becomes only an amateur occupation, something your crappy band in a garage does improving stupid songs on a weekend, but no room for any possible types of refinement or skills. We expect doctors and engineers and scientists and programmers to spend years refining their skills so that they can produce a quality product. And when they do, they are rewarded for their work. But if you're a skilled artist who took years to learn a trade, too bad -- we still want you to make art, but we want you to donate it to us for free. Find some other way to make your money, thanks.
Unless, well, you're a rich dude and can spend the time acquiring random skills and putting time in creative tasks that won't make you any money. Or if you can find a rich dude to serve as your patron.
Yeah, once you're an established artist with a record, you might be able to get some crowd-funding or something today, but good luck to get that mon
Because it is a no-brainer that if you grab two random groups of individuals and measure ANY trait within them, you'd expect to find a difference in the mean. That is true no matter what the groups are, or what the trait is. Heck, if you grabbed 500 white people, took two samples of 50 out of that group, and compared just about any trait between the two groups of 50 you'd find differences. Hence the reason statisticians are interested in things like standard error.
Yes, all of this is true. And I think you've just proved my point. All sorts of "differences" can show up in random groups. The question is whether those differences are significant and meaningful (i.e., not caused by improper control groups or other confounding factors).
The variance among people of any given race in intelligence is larger than variance between races. So the question is whether those relatively minor variances seen between races are meaningful.
Black people and white people tend not to inter-marry. I'm not saying that it never happens - only that it doesn't happen NEARLY as often as intra-racial marriage. That makes it all the more likely for genetic drift to make some genes become more predominant in one population vs the other.
As I also said in my post, when you have appropriate control groups, most of that apparent disparity disappears. And even if it doesn't disappear completely, that doesn't mean that IQ is the sole measure of this monolithic entity called "intelligence" -- there could be many other things that lead to smart decisions and success in life other than that measured on an IQ test. (I'm not saying IQ doesn't measure something, but that doesn't mean it's the only thing....)
Would you expect the genes that govern skin color to be any different between the average african-american and somebody of european descent? Then why not other genes?
We could rephrase this question and say something like, "Would you expect the genes that govern where the heart is located inside the chest to be any different between the average african-american and somebody of european descent?" Answer -- probably not much. "Then why not other genes?"
The amount of COMMON genes between races is HUGE compared to minor differences. Those differences exist. But why would you automatically assume that any particular genes MUST be different when the vast majority of them are the same?
Look -- regardless of all of this, the reality is Watson didn't make a nuanced statement like this, "Oh, yeah, variance can reasonably happen between any group." He said nothing like that. He basically said he thought Africa was unlikely to improve its condition because black people are stupider.
That's not a nuanced statistical argument. That's stating something as a fact, and there just isn't enough evidence to support such a claim. The OP I was originally responding to was arguing that Watson's statements should be believed because he speaks the "truth."
So what I was responding to was an OP who was agreeing with a blatantly racist claim that is not supported by scientific evidence, not some nuanced "Oh, there might be some random variance" hypothesis....
For science to work you must be able to state an unpopular opinion and not get slaughtered for it.
Agreed. Has anyone discounted any of Watson's other scientific discoveries on the basis of this remark? I don't think so. And if not, science is still working as it should.
We're talking about a very smart guy that helped discover DNA.
I'm sensing a fallacious appeal to authority coming up....
If he says that there is a DNA element to intelligence (and everyone knows there is)
Yes, that's a true statement.
and that it varies by race (again, this is a no brainer)
If you're looking for the place where your post went from "misguided appeal to authority" to "racist rant," this is where it happens. Exactly why is it a "no brainer" that intelligence varies significantly by race?? I've personally met some very smart people of all sorts of races, and I've met idiots from all sorts of races too. I don't feel like I've accumulated enough data to say it's a "no brainer" that one race is smarter than another -- what dataset do you have access to where you feel like this is a "no brainer"?
Also, you referenced IQ earlier, and now you're talking about "intelligence" -- are you rejecting the idea that different races might have evolved different sorts of intelligence if you're presuming they've evolved differently enough to have different adaptations in this area (and maybe those localized adapations might not be measured as precisely as a test designed mostly by white people to test white people)? I'm just mentioning one of many problems with IQ as a proxy for "intelligence," even if there were obvious differences... which there aren't. When you control for demographics and other social aspects, a lot of racial differences narrow significantly.
then what is the big deal, he's speaking the truth.
The big deal is when he made these remarks, he was no longer just some smart young scientist. He was an 80-year-old dude with a history of making racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks with little basis. And, let's be honest here, even many great scientists aren't always going to be "at the top of their game" anymore at 80 years old.
So your appeal to authority here is problematic in a number of ways -- a guy was recognized for an achievement more than a half-century ago, he's old, he tends to say things that aren't true or well-thought-out in public, and yet you just assume he "speaks the truth"?
Why? THAT does not strike me as a very "scientific" attitude.
You are probably right about the confirmation bias. But one should be able to make that argument without hounding someone out of a profession. That is more-or-less what happened here.
No it's not. The guy has continued to revise his books and memoirs and other publications in recent years, which is more than you can say for most 86-year-olds. He has continued to publish new scientific ideas in recent years.
What actually happened is that he wrote a memoir about his life which was intended for a POPULAR audience, and in the early stages of gearing up for his book tour, he made the remarks everyone's been talking about. Most of his appearances on that book tour were then cancelled, because of reactions to a public figure who basically implied that the science on the genetics of race was settled (when it's really not -- there may be some studies that appear to agree with his claims, but there are about as many that show the opposite) and then made racist implications on the basis of this.
He was not at all "hounded out of a profession," unless you consider "being a public intellectual" a profession. Show me evidence that people have refused to publish his research or took away memberships in academic societies or whatever -- then you can say he was "hounded out of the profession." He wasn't. He did lose a high-profile administrative position, but he continued to advise and do research at that place. He just lost his audence to talk to the public, which he should, given that he has a long history of saying rather nasty things and claiming a scientific basis for them when there generally isn't.
This is a classic case of claims of "Science!" being used as a cover for political correctness. More like "Science! (so shut the hell up)".
Huh? Look, you want to be a "normal scientist" and go about your day, doing research, publishing papers, whatever -- that's great. And chances are if you make some crass or racist remark to some random friends, nothing's going to happen to you.
But if you want to be a world-famous scientist and live in the public eye, you are subject to public scrutiny -- which means when you say something that's not true AND offends people in the process, you might lose your public audience.
That has nothing to do with "science." It's just the reality of being a public figure. It would be one thing if this were a single off-hand comment from Watson. It was not. He has a history of saying things that are racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., and he's been doing it for decades. (He's also, frankly, a bit of a kook in his old age, but that's a separate issue.)
You want press? You get to accept what press you create for yourself....
The second is that we have this misbegotten notion that "balance" is that we must give both sides of a story equal billing. When one side is flagrantly wrong, it deserves to be dismissed and ignored.
I absolutely agree with you that there's no need to present ideas that are demonstrably false. But "liberalism" is not something that is easily proved "true" or "false." A group stating that they are promoting "liberalism" could mean many things, but a political ideology is NOT a synonym for "truth."
The third is on you to show how they omit facts. I know the extreme right wing of this country loves to manufacture "facts" or omit actual facts when it suits them, there's a whole TV network that excels in such shitflinging.
I know many "conservatives" who use misunderstandings (intentional or not) or outright lying to promote their ideas, but I also know "liberals" who have done the same. And there are people who have fundamental ideas about what they think good policies might be on both sides who try to stick to the truth.
In any case, getting stuck in one's own ideological bubble means that it can be difficult to see the truth -- not always because you're deliberately lying or because any of your ideological buddies are lying. Often the sides talk past each other -- so you always get your "talking points" and never really have to seriously consider rebuttals from the other side... or if they occur, you just laugh and dismiss them, and your group of ideological friends laughs along with you, because it's easier than confronting real philosophical fundamental inconsistencies that are present in any real-world political ideology.
Whether you're a fan of the Rush Limbaugh show or NPR or Fox News or DemocracyNow! or whatever, you get the slice of "news" that best represents what the producers/editors think is important.
"Balance" is an issue not so much about truth, but about making sure that opposing opinions are considered in cases where there are real, actual conflicts with no one "truth." And it's also about running a variety of stories that sometimes might bring up "inconvenient" problems with your pet ideology.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with a magazine or whatever saying, "We're going to slant toward liberalism." But "facts" can always be selected, even if they are all true. Magazines and newspapers have to figure out what stories to run, and they will select them in ways that will promote or emphasize their ideology. For people who don't ever step outside that "ideological bubble," though, they could end up with a pretty skewed perception of the world... even if every single sentence in the magazine is "verifiably true."
That's why "balance" -- in general -- is important. Even more important is diversity of opinions, diversity of experiences, and diversity of ideologies. If you don't have those things, you can still up distorting things to adhere to your chosen ideology... even unintentionally.
(P.S. In case anyone's making assumptions and gearing up for ad hominem, let me be clear that I would never identify myself as a "conservative" (whatever that means). I believe that the one-dimensional idea of a political spectrum that encompasses all possible ideas is fundamentally flawed and leads to distortions, groupthink, and doublethink -- because all possible issues have to be crammed into some space along the spectrum, despite many underlying inconsistencies that arise.)
So you can't have it out of a 1,000 degree oven, so you're going to put it into one that struggles to reach 500 and which heats your house in the process whether you like it or not?
My home oven easily tops out over 550 with normal bake cycle on. I have multiple thermometers I use to measure it, so yes, I know what temp it is. If I put the broiler on before throwing in the pizza, I can get it even hotter. (I'm not willing to break the lock and use the self-cleaning cycle as some do -- I value my home insurance.)
But the biggest difference is the steel. Sorry, but stones just don't cut it. I didn't realize this until I got one a year ago or so, but having baked pizzas for many years, I was positively shocked the first time I used a steel in terms of the difference it made. The heat transfer is just so much higher than a stone -- it easily cuts my baking time down by at least 30%. Between the increased heat transfer from the steel and the broiler above (with its excess radiant heat), I'm easily getting to a heat transfer rate comparable to a grill with a stone over 700F.
To be a proper hipster you're going to have to at least put it on a stone on your BBQ, which you can get well up into the sevens if it's any good.
I have no idea what "hipsters" have to do with anything. I've been baking pizza and bread long before "hipsters" became a common thing. I just like good food.
Anyhow, if I were to do it right, I'd build a brick pizza oven in my backyard. I don't have the time or energy for that now, and frankly I'm not that obsessed. I do have a friend who has one. Then you get to proper temp. I've used ceramic grills too, but that's a bit more work than I want to deal with every week.
In any case, I mostly make pizza in seasons when the heat for my house is actually useful, and if you are using a ceramic stone on your grill, you're probably not getting the maximum effect. Replace it with a steel plate, and you'll get much better heat transfer, probably enough to get close to a proper sub-90-second Neapolitan bake.
but of course google inbox 2034 will contain the term "actionize" instead.
Yes, but only for a year. Then it will be replaced, like all words in Google products, with some obscure icon on a button -- containing four seemingly random geometrical shapes and some weird lines between them -- "obviously" (according to Google's design team "experts") having the specific meaning of " actionize."
By this point, Google's support will also have replaced clear simple words with answers to their FAQ in only pictograms. Serious users simply give up and just click random buttons for five minutes every time they need an action ("actionization"?) beyond "read" and "send," hoping to hit the right icon by accident.
The official regulations state minimum oven temperatures as 430 degrees C for the oven floor and 485 degrees C for the oven dome, with a bake time of 60-90 seconds.
That's MINIMUM of ~800F for the oven floor and minimum 905F for the air temp, to qualify as authentic Neapolitan pizza. In practice, many ovens are higher than this. I was just stating an approximation.
You can get a large one topping pizza from Pizza Hut for $9.99. The only pizzas that are 1/4th the cost of that are the cardboard-crust, artificial cheese pizzas at Walmart.
As I replied to a previous post, I can easily make a large pizza with no toppings (other than cheese or sauce) for less than $3 with decent (not top-of-the-line, but better than your pizza joint is using) ingredients at home, and I do it every week.
Topping prices will vary a lot. But just a few months ago I had a dinner party with 7 adults, made 4 largeish pizzas with varied toppings (including some "fancy" things from artichokes to organic microgreens, along with fresh basil from the garden, pepperoni, gourmet olives, roasted peppers and tomatoes, and onions), and the overall cost of the ingredients was around $25. We fed 7 adults and had almost an entire pizza's worth leftover. And that was for "fancy" pizzas with "interesting" toppings.
I really get tired of hearing from people on Slashdot who seem to think they're somehow getting a "deal" by eating out at fast-food restaurant or buying a frozen dinner. You want to eat that stuff, fine. But it's just not true that it's cheaper, except for special deals. Most of the time, you'd save at least 50% by making it yourself compared to a pre-packaged frozen thing, and often 60-80% over getting it from a "cheap" fast-food place. How else do you think fast-food places pay for labor, facilities, AND make a profit for the owners? How else do the frozen dinner people make money? It's not all just volume. Their profits come by the fact that you're usually paying at least twice as much as you would by cooking it yourself.
In Naples, yeah, it was something like 3 to 5 Euro at many places. Pizza is VERY cheap there. Granted, those are for large-ish single serving pizzas, but yeah, they were less than $8.99. For that price in Naples, you'd get the fancy pizza with the expensive toppings... unless you went to some "upscale pizzeria" with a view and nice table serving, rather than the common hole-in-the-wall places that are world-renowned for their pizza.
What 8.99 will get you is Pizza Hut or something from Walmart. If you're gonna be that cheap, just go to Little Seizures and get the same crap for $5.
Uh, I make pizza at home all the time. I often buy top-quality flour in 50 lb. bags, where it comes to less than 50 cents/pound. (I usually share it with a friend, since I like to have a couple different kinds of flour on hand at any time, and 100 lbs. of flour would take me a couple years to get through.) With a pound of flour, I can make TWO large-ish pizzas. Cheese is the biggest expense, but the more expensive the cheese, usually the less you need. Maybe $4 for the cheese for the two pizzas, less if you find something decent on sale. You can buy better sauce in a jar/can, if you'd like, or make it yourself. In either case, you shouldn't be paying more than $1 or so for sauce for two pizzas.
Anyhow, at least once a week or so, I make two large pizzas for about $5.50 at home. That comes to $2.75/pizza, which admittedly is more then 1/4 of your $8.99 quoted price, but I was figuring closer to $10-12 for a large at Pizza Hut. (I haven't been there for a long time, and most decent pizzerias in the area charge at least that much for a large.)
And that's using mid-level ingredients, not the cheap stuff. I can definitely make a gluten-free crust with free range chicken and organic veggies for $8.99, though I hate gluten-free pizza crust.
If you allow me to buy the cheap pre-shredded bulk bag of cheap cheese, crappy bulk flour, and those jars of nasty sauce most people use, and I'll cut the costs down to less than $2 per pizza, easy. Pizza is one of the cheapest foods to make, particularly if you're light on the cheese and heavy on crust. Raise the oil content of the crust to make it richer (and more fattening) like many of the chain pizzerias do, and you have a calorie bomb that could feed a family of 4 for a few bucks at most.
Says someone who must never have eaten actual good pizza. Pizza Hut's pizza is really nothing like, say, the pizza I've eaten from a pizzeria in Naples where the pizzas are thin-crust, baked in an oven that's about 1000 degrees F for maybe a minute or so.
But hey, that's probably too high of a standard. Pizza Hut's pizza is nowhere near the top of my list of "decent" pizzerias in the U.S., either.
and if you have kids and they get to eat cheaply/free, all the better
That's nice and all, but I can also make my own crust in about 5 minutes, let is sit overnight in the fridge, take it out and toss it the next day, top it with whatever toppings I want -- with whatever quantities I want, choosing whatever quality toppings I want to buy -- and throw it into my oven on the hunk of pre-heated steel that best simulates a Neapolitan experience in a home oven.
And for investing maybe 15-20 minutes of my time (less than the time it would take me to drive to and from Pizza Hut), I get a pizza that's astoundingly better than Pizza Hut, for maybe 1/4 of the cost. Even if I have a kid or two who eats free, I still probably get it for less than 1/2 of the cost with higher quality ingredients, AND I get to choose exactly what ingredients I'm feeding my kid.
Sadly, in the UK they've been closing loads of Pizza Huts
Ah... you're from the UK. That explains a lot. "Hell is where the police are German, the lovers Swiss, the mechanics French, the chefs British, and it is all organized by the Italians."
In all seriousness, though, it's a really useful skill to learn to make pizza at home. It doesn't take a lot of time, it's cheap, and it can really taste a LOT better (than Pizza Hut, anyway).
(P.S. Sorry about the British joke -- there's a lot to say for English food. Fish-and-chips, Yorkshire pudding, and nothing like a good ole "fry-up" for breakfast. Mmmm... black pudding....)
But if researchers correct for these factors, and compare whites and blacks in similar socioeconomic circumstances, and look at black children adopted and raised by white families, there is still a variance correlated with race.
Some studies claim that. Other adoption studies have shown that black kids basically do the same as white kids when both are raised by white families. You can argue about which studies are better, but there's not a clear answer, unlike your (pardon the pun) "black-and-white" argument.
Blacks are more exposed to environmental pollutants, are more likely to have deficiencies in micro-nutrients, and are less likely to breastfeed, than whites in similar socioeconomic conditions.
Okay, let's talk about these in turn.
Why do black kids have higher levels of lead in their blood compared to white kids living in the same neighborhood?
Because even if they live in the same neighborhoods, blacks disproportionately end up in worse housing conditions. From that link, which compares randomly sampled groups of Whites and Blacks living in an urban environment in the same city: "Racial disparity in urban children's blood lead levels appears to be due to differences in housing conditions and environmental exposures. While [various factors] contribute to blood lead for both Black and White children, Black children, who in this study were largely impoverished and lived in pooly maintained rental housing, are also exposed to higher levels of lead-contaminated house dust and to painted surfaces and floor that are in poorer condition. Thus, housing condition and exposure to lead-contaminated house dust appear to be major contributors to the racial disparity in children's blood levels.
Next?
Why are poor black kids deficient in folic acid,
Well, we know that black moms are more likely to be deficient in folic acid. Part of it is dietary; from the link: "certain groups, including women of childbearing age and non-Hispanic black women, are at risk of insufficient folate intakes. Even when intake of folic acid from dietary supplements is included, 19% of female adolescents aged 14 to 18 years and 17% of women aged 19 to 30 years do not meet the EAR. Similarly, 23% of non-Hispanic black women have inadequate total intakes, compared with 13% of non-Hispanic white women."
So, diet is a big reason, and if black moms are deficient and feed a similar diet to their kids, well, you might guess that the kids could end up deficient. Other studies have noted that black women are less likely to have access to supplements or pre-natal vitamins that might provide adequate folic acid content.
iodine, and other critical micro-nutrients, when poor white kids are not?
Probably because blacks tend to consume a lot less dairy, which is often known to correlate with iodine deficiencies. From this study, "The NHANES and NCS UI [iodine level] data suggest that non-Hispanic black women have lower UI concentration than other women. Additionally, non-Hispanic black women had lower dairy consumption.... Non-Hispanic black women reporting rates of dairy consumption is consistent with recent data on U.S. population reports of lactose intolerance... among females, 50% were non-Hispanic black, 30% non-Hispanic white, and 20% Hispanic. Self-diagnosed lactose intolerance and consequent avoidance of dairy products may be on the contributing factors in the racial/ethnic differences we have shown in UI concentration."
There has been enough work on this to show decisively that one's racial heritage or gender has at most a tiny effect (if any) on intelligence, and one's upbringing has a far greater effect.
Nonsense. The scientific results show the exact opposite. People of African ethnicity score 15 to 18 points lower on IQ tests. Both Caucasians and blacks have improved over time (the Flynn effect) but the gap has remained.
Did you bother to read your cited article into the next section, where various hypotheses that explain part of the racial differences may come from differences in health, nutrition, socioeconomic environment, and test bias? Or continue further down your link, and read about how attempts to find actual genes related to intelligence have failed so far?
Twin studies have shown that home environment explains no more than a quarter of the variance, and most studies have found that it makes a negligible difference.
It's simply false to claim that "most studies have found it makes a negligible difference," as you might also find in various adoption studies, which have split (again, from one of your own links) in terms of their evidence about whether environmental factors can explain racial differences. Simply being raised by a white family, according to some studies, can raise IQ enough to account for almost the entire gap you identified. Other studies claim some differences remain.
But, more specifically, your particular citation of "twin studies" doesn't actually say what your post claims -- your citation says that home environment explains 25-35% of overall intelligence variance in the population at large. In other words, if you dropped a random kid (of whatever race) into a random household, on average the effect of the home environment might account for 25-35% of the reason why some kid has an IQ of 140 and another has an IQ of 80. That's a very different question from asking how much of the 15-point (or whatever) racial gap might be explained by household differences, since a 15-point difference in means between races is much smaller than the variance between the highest and lowest IQ people in general. It's certainly possible statistically for home environment to explain 25-35% of the IQ variance at large, but 100% of the gap between races -- I'm not saying it does, but you're quoting one statistic and applying it to another situation that doesn't make much sense.
(To use an analogy, this would be like doing a study to see whether reviewing one's notes helps in test performance, and noting that reviewing notes seems to explain 25-35% of the reason why some people score a A and others score D. But then I also note there appears to be a half-letter-grade gap in the mean scores of men vs. women on the test. I cannot just assume that reviewing notes accounts for only 25% of the gender differences without actually knowing something about how gender and studying correlates, particularly if I knew that one group skewed in a particular direction, like most tested black people skew toward certain types of home environments. To do so is a major statistical fallacy.)
And this doesn't even begin to get into the question of whether IQ is actually a good measure of general intelligence for all cultures, or whether specific IQ tests may be culture-laden in ways that don't adequately assess useful intelligence for different societies or different groups. MANY psychologists, other scientists, and even the psychometrics people who are involved with IQ test design have leveled a number of cri
Your problem is you are missing the idea of balance.
I wasn't aware I had a "problem." I was in fact discussing those who "have a problem" with drinking -- and therefore are out of balance.
I have no problem with the idea of "balance." The problem in this situation is that the researchers are talking about two different evolutionary adaptations, and they are claiming opposite factors are driving them, including ones that are out of balance.
The function of benefit vs loss over consumption is not linear but much more complex.
I absolutely agree this is possible. But the problem is that the authors of this study are not that nuanced in their explanation. They are not only claiming the origin for the desire to drink alcohol, but also the origin of drinking to EXCESS and alcoholism.
But the mechanism they proposed for an adaptation to process alcohol in humans requires an explanation that would select against such drinking to excess (i.e., primates can't defend their territory because they'd be too drunk). Don't you see the contradiction here?
On the one hand, we're "programmed to overconsume," but on the other hand, such overconsumption wouldn't allow us to evolve the study's special gene in the first place (according to the researchers' explanation).
I'm not saying these two separate things couldn't have evolved in something like this way, but the authors' explanations depend on contrasting selection pressures. Perhaps one trait evolved under one circumstance in one environment, and conditions changed a few millennia later, leading to the other development. Or perhaps there's an even more complex explanation.
The point is that TFA's description makes little sense as a SINGLE explanation for two different adaptations, despite the fact that TFA claims one thing if the first paragraph I quoted and then requires the opposite behavior in the next paragraph which begins "the [preceding] discovery might explain..."
Let's say the benefit of a buzz grows linerally, while the disadvantage grows exponetionally. You will be receiving a net benefit until you reach eqalibram. As there are point in a lineral function early on the exceed an exponential function.
I think you missed my whole point about "just-so" stories. I'm not saying what you're saying is false or that things couldn't have evolved that way. I'm saying that you made up a very nice story based on relatively little evidence -- just your speculation -- to explain a complex evolutionary phenomenon that could have all sorts of complex causes and explanations.
That's exactly the sort of thing that should be criticized. Just because "Well, I can make up a possible story that could explain something" doesn't mean it happened that way. You need, well, perhaps a little more evidence, not just "Let's say that...."
It's not the ones without,, but rather with the tolerance gene that would benefit from being drawn to the fermenting fruit.
Uh, yeah. That's obvious. I wasn't at all disagreeing with that. What I'm pointing out is that TFA is talking about two separate evolutionary developments. On the one hand, evolution explains a gene that avoids constant drunkenness to process alcohol. On the other hand evolution explains the psychological tendency toward constant drunkenness in the form of alcoholism by connecting such a thing to a pleasure center. Obviously those who are able to process alcohol will get the biggest evolutionary advantage from eating food with it (as you say), but how does that lead to alcoholism unless you begin to select for people who can't control their alcohol intake and drink to excess (which is the opposite trend)?
Anyone who has woken up next to someone they hooked up with while drunk can tell you that alcohol completely undermines selective breeding.
Funny -- TFA actually argues that "being a cheap date" was a disadvantage and selected against:
"If you were the ancestor without this new mutation in ADH4 [to metabolize alcohol], the ethanol would quickly build up in your blood and you'd get inebriated much faster," Carrigan says. "You'd be a cheap date." This easy inebriation, he says, would have been a disadvantage to the monkeys without the mutation, making them more easily get sickâ"or drunkâ"off fruit, enough so that they couldn't defend their territory and seek out food. Primates with the new mutation could get more food, his group hypothesizes, and the gene was selected for in the human and chimpanzee lineage.
But then the next paragraph makes a 180-degree turn and claims that alcoholism evolved to be associated with pleasure because, I guess, being drunk is fun (and, apparently, tasty). So, apparently "being a cheap date" is also something that is selected FOR in evolution, or alcoholism doesn't evolve, accroding to TFA:
Carrigan says the discovery might explain why human brains evolved to link pleasure pathways with alcohol consumptionâ"ethanol was associated with a key food source. "It's not a whole lot different from the addictions some people have towards food," he explains. "At the right dose, when you didn't have alcohol and candy at every corner, it was hard to get too much of this sort of stuff, so when you found it, you wanted to be programmed to overconsume."
Argh. Wasn't it just yesterday that I was complaining about evolutionary biologists making up random "just-so" stories that conveniently show how anything could evolve?
In TFA, wanting to get drunk is bad for natural selection, until it's good for natural selection... in the freakin' next paragraph. Really, guys?
Which is great until sometime between steps 6 and 7 the customer overspends on their credit card.
It's a great idea if you run a tight budget and have the discipline to do it.
I actually know multiple people now whose budgets have been saved by using credit cards. Yes, you heard me right.
Why? Because of financial tracking software. A credit card charge gets registered -- anywhere from instantly to a day later or so -- and it immediately shows an impact on your "running balance" of available money in your accounts.
Cash? When you spend that stuff, you need to keep track of it yourself. Once you withdraw cash from an account, it goes into a "black hole" in terms of financial software. Your financial software doesn't know whether you have $5 in your wallet or $500, unless you tell it. And when you spend $5 or $500, it doesn't know until you tell it.
So, for many people -- especially younger people -- credit card (or debit card) becomes the default, since you can actually track your balances automatically. I know someone who just got into this habit of withdrawing cash from the ATM whenever her wallet got empty. Those little lunches and coffees and scones and random little purchases can add up to many thousands of dollars per year, and cash is not easy to track, unless you choose to keep your own detailed record by hand (or input it manually).
This woman's husband was going nuts looking at the bank balances draining every month, so he asked for one simple thing -- put everything on a credit card, and get overall financial balance updates daily sent to her phone. Suddenly, she saw her numbers dropping every day, and the reality of what was happening set in. Granted, a similar thing could have been achieved by just using the financial software, since her cash withdrawal habits would register, but once the software was there and giving her updates, she'd be more interested in checking in occasionally and realizing the daily latte habit was costing hundreds of dollars per month, which her credit card told her.
Of course, the couple I'm talking about had enough money to go around so they were never in danger of starving, but when it came time to move out of the apartment and buy a home and have a couple kids, they needed to rein in the spending. A credit card which could track purchases and give immediate feedback in financial tracking software was what worked.
I know other people who say the same thing, and I follow that same principle now. Credit cards are magical devices that tabulate my purchases and give me hundreds of dollars in bonus money every year. Cash is this weird thing that I usually have some of in my wallet, but I use it so rarely that it's the "funny money." The credit card registers an immediate impact to my finances -- the cash could have sat in my wallet for weeks or months, so I basically see it as just stuff that could be spent whenever.
I'm not saying this method works best for everyone. But the idea that credit cards are "funny money" that buys stuff and you never see the bad part until you get the statement just isn't true anymore. Credit cards can now be the ultimate financial tracking tool, and the means to achieve financial discipline, while cash...
... It's a great idea if you run a tight budget and have the discipline to do it... [by tracking everything yourself]
Sure, cash prevents you from running your account balances below zero, but keeping your account balances above zero is only the first minimal step to financial health. You need to be monitoring what you do, trimming out things that are unnecessary or eating up excessive parts of your budget, making sure the balances in the right accounts are constantly going up, so you can do things like save for retirement, have an emergency fund, pay off other debts, etc. Credit cards can actually make that effort easier and more straightforward, rather than hinder it.
Just so you know, most of the people doing the work applying Game Theory to Sociology are just jacking off.
Yeah, unfortunately... as Master Yoda might say, "Tilting at windmills you are."
The larger context here isn't sociology, it's "evolution." Note that I put that in quotation marks for a reason -- there's a whole network of yahoos out there who spend time thinking up "just so" stories for their pet explanations of some evolved trait. They call it "evolutionary biology" or "evolutionary psychology" or "evolutionary sociology," but a lot of the practitioners do the same crap.
-------------------
Typical day at the office:
"Scientist" X sits at his desk, bored: "Oh, woe is I! I am an evolutionary biologist, but I have too little funding to do any real experiments in my lab. What shall I do?!"
"Scientist" Y, turning suddenly: "Lo, but we can 'do evolution research' without funding. Let us consider a question, like 'How did music evolve in humans and why?' That is a good question."
"Scientist" X: "Yes! Yes! Yes! That is a great question! And since other primates don't really have musical culture in the same way, our 'findings' don't even need to be based on cross-species trends! We can just make up a story, a 'thought experiment,' just like the great Einstein!"
"Scientist" Y: "Suppose one day a mother early hominid descended from her tree and went to gather food. Her infant baby hominid might be sad. Perhaps the mother would sing to let the infant know she was still there!"
"Scientist" X: "Indeed. How I can see them now, in my 'thought experiment'! 'Tis a fantastic tale. Tell it to me again, please!"
"Scientist" Y: "But shan't we publish it now? After all, our 'experiment' has proven the way music could have evolved!"
"Scientist" X: "By golly, you're right. I'm already typing it up. Let's make up a few more stories like that, and publish it as a book on the 'origins of music', and we'll call it 'evolutionary musicology'!"
"Scientist" Y: "Huzzah! Huzzah! We have 'done research'! Our book will sell!"
And, lo -- the book did sell, and others did join this movement. Thence to all the corners of the Earth went the good news of the true story of music's evolution....
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You think I'm joking. The book is out there. There are plenty of random made-up stories about stuff like this, that are supposedly to "explain" how things evolved. Even if the guys you're criticizing here are as bad as you say -- I haven't looked at their research in detail -- they got nothin' on a lot of stuff evolutionary biology people tend to do these days.
(P.S. This post should NOT in any way be construed as attacking the general theory of evolution, which I do not mean to criticize in any way. I'm just criticizing all the awful crap that has begun to accumulate around the field as lots of folks jump on the "Let's plan the 'how could that have evolved' game!" bandwagon.)
I think we should get rid of all sports in fact. Probably the arts, and likely music too. What does physical education really add to education any way? Home ec, for sure. Likely shop, those kids should go to vocational training for that.
Hmm... somewhat of a non sequitur, don't ya think? The parent was talking about a sport that is known to cause permanent brain damage in minors. I'm not sure if I agree with parent's approach to that issue, but it's a legitimate concern.
How exactly do ALL other sports, the arts, music, home ec, etc. cause serious and permanent injuries to teenagers? Unless you can answer that question, I think your analogy is invalid.
There are plenty of reasons to argue for all sorts of activities, including many varieties of sports with their various benefits for education, physical activity, teamwork, etc. Or are you claiming that somehow football is a unique endeavor whose absence will lead to the ruination of the human education? Seems unlikely.
Great plan. Really. I'd love to meet the products of that system, not sterile at all!
Well, it's 95% your plan, since the parent was only talking about football. So it's interesting that you're praising your own inventiveness (or hyperbole, I assume).
The Supreme Court is usually made up of hardcore authoritarians that modify the constitution with invisible ink in order to give the government more power.
[Citation needed]
If you look at the history of the U.S., you'll find that it's very rarely the Supreme Court (at least not until the past 50 years or so) as the branch of government who has tried to grab power most often. Ever hear of judicial review? SCOTUS actually came up with what was originally a somewhat controversial power of invalidating actions of Congress and the Executive in order to PRESERVE the Constitution and prevent accretion of federal power.
For the first 150 years or so of the U.S., that's generally what SCOTUS did. They invalidated overreaching statutes on many occasions to rein in federal power. It was only about the time that they were threatened to be overruled by a President (FDR) threatening to enlarge the Court (per his Constitutional prerogative) and pack it with his cronies that SCOTUS finally caved in and basically said, "Uh... yeah, I guess the federal government can do whatever it wants... please don't pack our court with your cronies, Mr. President!"
Even since then, you'd be hard pressed to find lots of places where it's SCOTUS who is modifying the meaning of Constitution -- they are generally letting the legislative and executive overreaches get by them. In other words, it's the OTHER BRANCHES generally who are "modifying the Constitution with invisible ink in order to give the government more power"; the Supreme Court has just stopped saying "no" to such things as often, a power which was never actually expressed in the original Constitution directly, by the way...
So how you're blaming the Supreme Court for not asserting a right (judicial review) which was unclear in the original Constitution to justify your Originalist position is beyond me. That's quite some logical fallacy hoops you're jumping through to blame one branch of the government, rather than the ones actually asserting AND exercising that power.
Actually, the first amendment comes after the copyright clause. Amendments change the constitution, so any ability of the government to restrict speech was overridden by the first amendment.
Wow. This must be one of the looniest arguments I've heard in a while.
Look, the Constitution was ratified and enacted in 1789. The first Congress began meeting on March 4, 1789. The Bill of Rights was debated and passed by Congress to be sent to the states for approval on September 25, 1789. The first Copyright Act (i.e., the very first time Congress decided to exercise its power to create a federal copyright system) was approved by Congress on May 25, 1790.
So, what you're telling me is that Congress approved a Bill of Rights in September, and then a few months later Congress (composed of THE SAME PEOPLE) voted to approve a copyright act that went against the very principles they had voted for in the Bill of Rights just a few months before?
WHY? Explain that. WHY? Why would Congress vote away power in proposed amendments and then assert it -- without comment -- just a few months later?
The only RATIONAL conclusion is that the people who actually voted to enact the First Amendment did NOT think they had invalidated the copyright clause of their brand-new Constitution.
Cursive exists because it's faster. This is why the letters are joined; it's not for looks. If it was about the latter, they would still be teaching Spencerian script in North America and similar systems elsewhere.
Umm, many places in the U.S. which still teach cursive teach variants (e.g., Palmer script) that still contain fundamentally Spencerian flourishes (e.g., with extra loops on capitals, etc.). These aren't just for looks -- they also aid in legibility, like making it easier to spot capitals in written script, etc. The ornate capitals in older letters and manuscripts often served the same purpose -- a reader could easily locate the beginnings of main sections, so they serve some function.
But for personal note-taking (which is all that cursive is useful for these days), these Spencerian/Palmer traits really seem about ornamentation -- and they've only started to die away in the past 2-3 decades in the U.S. with variants like D'Nealian.
Guess which is always faster if not handicapped by lack of practice???
Speed of writing is not the only relevant factor. Speed and ease of reading is another.
I'm well-versed in the art of cursive, including basic calligraphy. I've spent time with a number of different 19th-century writing manuals trying to master the old more ornate forms of writing.
So, I'm not stranger to cursive. I've practiced it a LOT.
And yet at some point during my undergraduate years, I switched to printing for my note-taking. I've never gone back. Why? Because while I can undoubtedly write faster with cursive because I don't pick up the pen, the distinctness in the letterforms of printing caused BY picking up the pen allow my writing to be more legible later (and more legible for other people).
I'm a very fast writer when I want to be, and I have no patience for legibility issues while trying to jot something down fast. But if I print it, I can guarantee it will be easier and faster to read later, simply because the letterforms are more distinct.
Thus, while I love the beauty of cursive and can do it with all the flourishes very slow or write very fast and sloppily, I take most of my quick notes with printing and have for quite a few years. It's the best balance of speed and legibility for me; others may have different opinions, but I don't think your statements have universal applicability about which is the best way to write fast.
You actually want to write REALLY fast? Learn shorthand. Standard cursive wasn't designed for super-fast writing -- it was designed for mildly ornate but rather quick writing that is LEGIBLE (e.g., why are all those little loops present on many of the capitals? to make it easier to spot capitals while reading, not because it's faster).
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of the richness of languages, TFA oversimplifies some important language tendencies too.
For example, Zipf's law (which is also linked in TFS) has little to do with "familiarity" or being "more likely to select a word or phrase that we're familiar with."
It basically is just an observation that the statistical ranking of word in most natural languages is inversely proportional to its frequency. From the Wiki article:
Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc. For example, in the Brown Corpus of American English text, the word "the" is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf's Law, the second-place word "of" accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), followed by "and" (28,852). Only 135 vocabulary items are needed to account for half the Brown Corpus.
Yes, I suppose one might get out of this that "we tend to choose words we're more familiar with," but Zipf's law is a MUCH more specific constraint on distribution of word frequencies. And it's more a statement about what word frequency distributions ARE rather than how we come to choose words or what we may be "familiar with," unless by "familiar with" you just mean "occurs more frequently."
Moreover, there is some research that has shown a distribution somewhat like Zipf's law will emerge even in texts generated with artificial random "languages" composed of random letters... which makes the claims about how we're making conscious or sub-conscious choices about "familiarity" even less likely.
Before I respond, let me be clear that I absolutely think copyright law is broken and needs significant reform -- at a minimum to make the time until something goes into public domain be only a few years (like it was in original 18th century statutes), not a century or more That said...
Sharing/copying should be encouraged as a social good. Sharing of knowledge is what made our civilization, and keeps it alive. Voluntarily allow a few elite control over what may be copied and who can copy, and you weaken civilization.
I always find these sorts of arguments hilarious. Because you know who funded the arts before copyright existed? Rich dudes.
How did one become an artist in the age before artists could make money off of publications and copying? Well, you had two choices:
(1) Be independently wealthy. A lot of art, music, literature, etc. used to be created by only those filthy rich who didn't have to work for a living. So, if you had nothing else to do and were bored, you could afford to make art.
(2) You're not rich? Well, if you want to be an artist, musician, writer, or skilled craftsman, you have to find yourself another rich dude to fund your work. In other words, you found yourself a patron, because otherwise, how are you going to support yourself?
If you actually want art that requires significant SKILL and TRAINING to learn a craft, those are your primary choices without some concept of intellectual property.
There are other ways for artists to earn a living.
Sure, you can say performing musicians have to tour rather than making money off of recordings, but what about the composers who actually write the songs? Lots of pop artists don't make their own songs -- they rely on expert songwriters to do that. How exactly does one make money off of those sorts of creations? One can't exactly become a "touring songwriter." (I mean, yeah, improvisation is fun and you can make up crappy songs on the spot for a paying audience I suppose, but there's little incentive then to spend time crafting an actual good song...)
So far, I've just been talking about pop music, but it gets harder if you want someone with real talent to devote months or even years to an extended project -- like a book, for example. And how about training? Mozart spent maybe 15 years learning the craft of composition before he began writing stuff of a "mature composer" with thorough training in how to write music. Who pays for those 15 years of training before one can even begin to compose?... and then one's compositions are just shared with no reward for the person who spent his life acquiring the skill to make them.
That's ultimately the problem with these arguments. A system without any sort of intellectual property makes it much more difficult for anyone to spend significant time on any given creative project, since no money can be made from that lost time... let alone taking any time to learn a skilled craft.
Art thus becomes only an amateur occupation, something your crappy band in a garage does improving stupid songs on a weekend, but no room for any possible types of refinement or skills. We expect doctors and engineers and scientists and programmers to spend years refining their skills so that they can produce a quality product. And when they do, they are rewarded for their work. But if you're a skilled artist who took years to learn a trade, too bad -- we still want you to make art, but we want you to donate it to us for free. Find some other way to make your money, thanks.
Unless, well, you're a rich dude and can spend the time acquiring random skills and putting time in creative tasks that won't make you any money. Or if you can find a rich dude to serve as your patron.
Yeah, once you're an established artist with a record, you might be able to get some crowd-funding or something today, but good luck to get that mon
Because it is a no-brainer that if you grab two random groups of individuals and measure ANY trait within them, you'd expect to find a difference in the mean. That is true no matter what the groups are, or what the trait is. Heck, if you grabbed 500 white people, took two samples of 50 out of that group, and compared just about any trait between the two groups of 50 you'd find differences. Hence the reason statisticians are interested in things like standard error.
Yes, all of this is true. And I think you've just proved my point. All sorts of "differences" can show up in random groups. The question is whether those differences are significant and meaningful (i.e., not caused by improper control groups or other confounding factors).
The variance among people of any given race in intelligence is larger than variance between races. So the question is whether those relatively minor variances seen between races are meaningful.
Black people and white people tend not to inter-marry. I'm not saying that it never happens - only that it doesn't happen NEARLY as often as intra-racial marriage. That makes it all the more likely for genetic drift to make some genes become more predominant in one population vs the other.
As I also said in my post, when you have appropriate control groups, most of that apparent disparity disappears. And even if it doesn't disappear completely, that doesn't mean that IQ is the sole measure of this monolithic entity called "intelligence" -- there could be many other things that lead to smart decisions and success in life other than that measured on an IQ test. (I'm not saying IQ doesn't measure something, but that doesn't mean it's the only thing....)
Would you expect the genes that govern skin color to be any different between the average african-american and somebody of european descent? Then why not other genes?
We could rephrase this question and say something like, "Would you expect the genes that govern where the heart is located inside the chest to be any different between the average african-american and somebody of european descent?" Answer -- probably not much. "Then why not other genes?"
The amount of COMMON genes between races is HUGE compared to minor differences. Those differences exist. But why would you automatically assume that any particular genes MUST be different when the vast majority of them are the same?
Look -- regardless of all of this, the reality is Watson didn't make a nuanced statement like this, "Oh, yeah, variance can reasonably happen between any group." He said nothing like that. He basically said he thought Africa was unlikely to improve its condition because black people are stupider.
That's not a nuanced statistical argument. That's stating something as a fact, and there just isn't enough evidence to support such a claim. The OP I was originally responding to was arguing that Watson's statements should be believed because he speaks the "truth."
So what I was responding to was an OP who was agreeing with a blatantly racist claim that is not supported by scientific evidence, not some nuanced "Oh, there might be some random variance" hypothesis....
For science to work you must be able to state an unpopular opinion and not get slaughtered for it.
Agreed. Has anyone discounted any of Watson's other scientific discoveries on the basis of this remark? I don't think so. And if not, science is still working as it should.
We're talking about a very smart guy that helped discover DNA.
I'm sensing a fallacious appeal to authority coming up....
If he says that there is a DNA element to intelligence (and everyone knows there is)
Yes, that's a true statement.
and that it varies by race (again, this is a no brainer)
If you're looking for the place where your post went from "misguided appeal to authority" to "racist rant," this is where it happens. Exactly why is it a "no brainer" that intelligence varies significantly by race?? I've personally met some very smart people of all sorts of races, and I've met idiots from all sorts of races too. I don't feel like I've accumulated enough data to say it's a "no brainer" that one race is smarter than another -- what dataset do you have access to where you feel like this is a "no brainer"?
Also, you referenced IQ earlier, and now you're talking about "intelligence" -- are you rejecting the idea that different races might have evolved different sorts of intelligence if you're presuming they've evolved differently enough to have different adaptations in this area (and maybe those localized adapations might not be measured as precisely as a test designed mostly by white people to test white people)? I'm just mentioning one of many problems with IQ as a proxy for "intelligence," even if there were obvious differences... which there aren't. When you control for demographics and other social aspects, a lot of racial differences narrow significantly.
then what is the big deal, he's speaking the truth.
The big deal is when he made these remarks, he was no longer just some smart young scientist. He was an 80-year-old dude with a history of making racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks with little basis. And, let's be honest here, even many great scientists aren't always going to be "at the top of their game" anymore at 80 years old.
So your appeal to authority here is problematic in a number of ways -- a guy was recognized for an achievement more than a half-century ago, he's old, he tends to say things that aren't true or well-thought-out in public, and yet you just assume he "speaks the truth"?
Why? THAT does not strike me as a very "scientific" attitude.
You are probably right about the confirmation bias. But one should be able to make that argument without hounding someone out of a profession. That is more-or-less what happened here.
No it's not. The guy has continued to revise his books and memoirs and other publications in recent years, which is more than you can say for most 86-year-olds. He has continued to publish new scientific ideas in recent years.
What actually happened is that he wrote a memoir about his life which was intended for a POPULAR audience, and in the early stages of gearing up for his book tour, he made the remarks everyone's been talking about. Most of his appearances on that book tour were then cancelled, because of reactions to a public figure who basically implied that the science on the genetics of race was settled (when it's really not -- there may be some studies that appear to agree with his claims, but there are about as many that show the opposite) and then made racist implications on the basis of this.
He was not at all "hounded out of a profession," unless you consider "being a public intellectual" a profession. Show me evidence that people have refused to publish his research or took away memberships in academic societies or whatever -- then you can say he was "hounded out of the profession." He wasn't. He did lose a high-profile administrative position, but he continued to advise and do research at that place. He just lost his audence to talk to the public, which he should, given that he has a long history of saying rather nasty things and claiming a scientific basis for them when there generally isn't.
This is a classic case of claims of "Science!" being used as a cover for political correctness. More like "Science! (so shut the hell up)".
Huh? Look, you want to be a "normal scientist" and go about your day, doing research, publishing papers, whatever -- that's great. And chances are if you make some crass or racist remark to some random friends, nothing's going to happen to you.
But if you want to be a world-famous scientist and live in the public eye, you are subject to public scrutiny -- which means when you say something that's not true AND offends people in the process, you might lose your public audience.
That has nothing to do with "science." It's just the reality of being a public figure. It would be one thing if this were a single off-hand comment from Watson. It was not. He has a history of saying things that are racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., and he's been doing it for decades. (He's also, frankly, a bit of a kook in his old age, but that's a separate issue.)
You want press? You get to accept what press you create for yourself....
The second is that we have this misbegotten notion that "balance" is that we must give both sides of a story equal billing. When one side is flagrantly wrong, it deserves to be dismissed and ignored.
I absolutely agree with you that there's no need to present ideas that are demonstrably false. But "liberalism" is not something that is easily proved "true" or "false." A group stating that they are promoting "liberalism" could mean many things, but a political ideology is NOT a synonym for "truth."
The third is on you to show how they omit facts. I know the extreme right wing of this country loves to manufacture "facts" or omit actual facts when it suits them, there's a whole TV network that excels in such shitflinging.
I know many "conservatives" who use misunderstandings (intentional or not) or outright lying to promote their ideas, but I also know "liberals" who have done the same. And there are people who have fundamental ideas about what they think good policies might be on both sides who try to stick to the truth.
In any case, getting stuck in one's own ideological bubble means that it can be difficult to see the truth -- not always because you're deliberately lying or because any of your ideological buddies are lying. Often the sides talk past each other -- so you always get your "talking points" and never really have to seriously consider rebuttals from the other side... or if they occur, you just laugh and dismiss them, and your group of ideological friends laughs along with you, because it's easier than confronting real philosophical fundamental inconsistencies that are present in any real-world political ideology.
Whether you're a fan of the Rush Limbaugh show or NPR or Fox News or DemocracyNow! or whatever, you get the slice of "news" that best represents what the producers/editors think is important.
"Balance" is an issue not so much about truth, but about making sure that opposing opinions are considered in cases where there are real, actual conflicts with no one "truth." And it's also about running a variety of stories that sometimes might bring up "inconvenient" problems with your pet ideology.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with a magazine or whatever saying, "We're going to slant toward liberalism." But "facts" can always be selected, even if they are all true. Magazines and newspapers have to figure out what stories to run, and they will select them in ways that will promote or emphasize their ideology. For people who don't ever step outside that "ideological bubble," though, they could end up with a pretty skewed perception of the world... even if every single sentence in the magazine is "verifiably true."
That's why "balance" -- in general -- is important. Even more important is diversity of opinions, diversity of experiences, and diversity of ideologies. If you don't have those things, you can still up distorting things to adhere to your chosen ideology... even unintentionally.
(P.S. In case anyone's making assumptions and gearing up for ad hominem, let me be clear that I would never identify myself as a "conservative" (whatever that means). I believe that the one-dimensional idea of a political spectrum that encompasses all possible ideas is fundamentally flawed and leads to distortions, groupthink, and doublethink -- because all possible issues have to be crammed into some space along the spectrum, despite many underlying inconsistencies that arise.)
Thanks for that. Awesome.
So you can't have it out of a 1,000 degree oven, so you're going to put it into one that struggles to reach 500 and which heats your house in the process whether you like it or not?
My home oven easily tops out over 550 with normal bake cycle on. I have multiple thermometers I use to measure it, so yes, I know what temp it is. If I put the broiler on before throwing in the pizza, I can get it even hotter. (I'm not willing to break the lock and use the self-cleaning cycle as some do -- I value my home insurance.)
But the biggest difference is the steel. Sorry, but stones just don't cut it. I didn't realize this until I got one a year ago or so, but having baked pizzas for many years, I was positively shocked the first time I used a steel in terms of the difference it made. The heat transfer is just so much higher than a stone -- it easily cuts my baking time down by at least 30%. Between the increased heat transfer from the steel and the broiler above (with its excess radiant heat), I'm easily getting to a heat transfer rate comparable to a grill with a stone over 700F.
To be a proper hipster you're going to have to at least put it on a stone on your BBQ, which you can get well up into the sevens if it's any good.
I have no idea what "hipsters" have to do with anything. I've been baking pizza and bread long before "hipsters" became a common thing. I just like good food.
Anyhow, if I were to do it right, I'd build a brick pizza oven in my backyard. I don't have the time or energy for that now, and frankly I'm not that obsessed. I do have a friend who has one. Then you get to proper temp. I've used ceramic grills too, but that's a bit more work than I want to deal with every week.
In any case, I mostly make pizza in seasons when the heat for my house is actually useful, and if you are using a ceramic stone on your grill, you're probably not getting the maximum effect. Replace it with a steel plate, and you'll get much better heat transfer, probably enough to get close to a proper sub-90-second Neapolitan bake.
but of course google inbox 2034 will contain the term "actionize" instead.
Yes, but only for a year. Then it will be replaced, like all words in Google products, with some obscure icon on a button -- containing four seemingly random geometrical shapes and some weird lines between them -- "obviously" (according to Google's design team "experts") having the specific meaning of " actionize."
By this point, Google's support will also have replaced clear simple words with answers to their FAQ in only pictograms. Serious users simply give up and just click random buttons for five minutes every time they need an action ("actionization"?) beyond "read" and "send," hoping to hit the right icon by accident.
If was Naples wouldn't that be degrees C?
The official regulations state minimum oven temperatures as 430 degrees C for the oven floor and 485 degrees C for the oven dome, with a bake time of 60-90 seconds.
That's MINIMUM of ~800F for the oven floor and minimum 905F for the air temp, to qualify as authentic Neapolitan pizza. In practice, many ovens are higher than this. I was just stating an approximation.
You can get a large one topping pizza from Pizza Hut for $9.99. The only pizzas that are 1/4th the cost of that are the cardboard-crust, artificial cheese pizzas at Walmart.
As I replied to a previous post, I can easily make a large pizza with no toppings (other than cheese or sauce) for less than $3 with decent (not top-of-the-line, but better than your pizza joint is using) ingredients at home, and I do it every week.
Topping prices will vary a lot. But just a few months ago I had a dinner party with 7 adults, made 4 largeish pizzas with varied toppings (including some "fancy" things from artichokes to organic microgreens, along with fresh basil from the garden, pepperoni, gourmet olives, roasted peppers and tomatoes, and onions), and the overall cost of the ingredients was around $25. We fed 7 adults and had almost an entire pizza's worth leftover. And that was for "fancy" pizzas with "interesting" toppings.
I really get tired of hearing from people on Slashdot who seem to think they're somehow getting a "deal" by eating out at fast-food restaurant or buying a frozen dinner. You want to eat that stuff, fine. But it's just not true that it's cheaper, except for special deals. Most of the time, you'd save at least 50% by making it yourself compared to a pre-packaged frozen thing, and often 60-80% over getting it from a "cheap" fast-food place. How else do you think fast-food places pay for labor, facilities, AND make a profit for the owners? How else do the frozen dinner people make money? It's not all just volume. Their profits come by the fact that you're usually paying at least twice as much as you would by cooking it yourself.
Your authentic Naples pizza was also not $8.99.
In Naples, yeah, it was something like 3 to 5 Euro at many places. Pizza is VERY cheap there. Granted, those are for large-ish single serving pizzas, but yeah, they were less than $8.99. For that price in Naples, you'd get the fancy pizza with the expensive toppings... unless you went to some "upscale pizzeria" with a view and nice table serving, rather than the common hole-in-the-wall places that are world-renowned for their pizza.
What 8.99 will get you is Pizza Hut or something from Walmart. If you're gonna be that cheap, just go to Little Seizures and get the same crap for $5.
Uh, I make pizza at home all the time. I often buy top-quality flour in 50 lb. bags, where it comes to less than 50 cents/pound. (I usually share it with a friend, since I like to have a couple different kinds of flour on hand at any time, and 100 lbs. of flour would take me a couple years to get through.) With a pound of flour, I can make TWO large-ish pizzas. Cheese is the biggest expense, but the more expensive the cheese, usually the less you need. Maybe $4 for the cheese for the two pizzas, less if you find something decent on sale. You can buy better sauce in a jar/can, if you'd like, or make it yourself. In either case, you shouldn't be paying more than $1 or so for sauce for two pizzas.
Anyhow, at least once a week or so, I make two large pizzas for about $5.50 at home. That comes to $2.75/pizza, which admittedly is more then 1/4 of your $8.99 quoted price, but I was figuring closer to $10-12 for a large at Pizza Hut. (I haven't been there for a long time, and most decent pizzerias in the area charge at least that much for a large.)
And that's using mid-level ingredients, not the cheap stuff. I can definitely make a gluten-free crust with free range chicken and organic veggies for $8.99, though I hate gluten-free pizza crust.
If you allow me to buy the cheap pre-shredded bulk bag of cheap cheese, crappy bulk flour, and those jars of nasty sauce most people use, and I'll cut the costs down to less than $2 per pizza, easy. Pizza is one of the cheapest foods to make, particularly if you're light on the cheese and heavy on crust. Raise the oil content of the crust to make it richer (and more fattening) like many of the chain pizzerias do, and you have a calorie bomb that could feed a family of 4 for a few bucks at most.
I don't mind pizza hut. Pizza is pizza,
Says someone who must never have eaten actual good pizza. Pizza Hut's pizza is really nothing like, say, the pizza I've eaten from a pizzeria in Naples where the pizzas are thin-crust, baked in an oven that's about 1000 degrees F for maybe a minute or so. But hey, that's probably too high of a standard. Pizza Hut's pizza is nowhere near the top of my list of "decent" pizzerias in the U.S., either.
and if you have kids and they get to eat cheaply/free, all the better
That's nice and all, but I can also make my own crust in about 5 minutes, let is sit overnight in the fridge, take it out and toss it the next day, top it with whatever toppings I want -- with whatever quantities I want, choosing whatever quality toppings I want to buy -- and throw it into my oven on the hunk of pre-heated steel that best simulates a Neapolitan experience in a home oven.
And for investing maybe 15-20 minutes of my time (less than the time it would take me to drive to and from Pizza Hut), I get a pizza that's astoundingly better than Pizza Hut, for maybe 1/4 of the cost. Even if I have a kid or two who eats free, I still probably get it for less than 1/2 of the cost with higher quality ingredients, AND I get to choose exactly what ingredients I'm feeding my kid.
Sadly, in the UK they've been closing loads of Pizza Huts
Ah... you're from the UK. That explains a lot. "Hell is where the police are German, the lovers Swiss, the mechanics French, the chefs British, and it is all organized by the Italians."
In all seriousness, though, it's a really useful skill to learn to make pizza at home. It doesn't take a lot of time, it's cheap, and it can really taste a LOT better (than Pizza Hut, anyway).
(P.S. Sorry about the British joke -- there's a lot to say for English food. Fish-and-chips, Yorkshire pudding, and nothing like a good ole "fry-up" for breakfast. Mmmm... black pudding....)
But if researchers correct for these factors, and compare whites and blacks in similar socioeconomic circumstances, and look at black children adopted and raised by white families, there is still a variance correlated with race.
Some studies claim that. Other adoption studies have shown that black kids basically do the same as white kids when both are raised by white families. You can argue about which studies are better, but there's not a clear answer, unlike your (pardon the pun) "black-and-white" argument.
Blacks are more exposed to environmental pollutants, are more likely to have deficiencies in micro-nutrients, and are less likely to breastfeed, than whites in similar socioeconomic conditions.
Okay, let's talk about these in turn.
Why do black kids have higher levels of lead in their blood compared to white kids living in the same neighborhood?
Because even if they live in the same neighborhoods, blacks disproportionately end up in worse housing conditions. From that link, which compares randomly sampled groups of Whites and Blacks living in an urban environment in the same city: "Racial disparity in urban children's blood lead levels appears to be due to differences in housing conditions and environmental exposures. While [various factors] contribute to blood lead for both Black and White children, Black children, who in this study were largely impoverished and lived in pooly maintained rental housing, are also exposed to higher levels of lead-contaminated house dust and to painted surfaces and floor that are in poorer condition. Thus, housing condition and exposure to lead-contaminated house dust appear to be major contributors to the racial disparity in children's blood levels.
Next?
Why are poor black kids deficient in folic acid,
Well, we know that black moms are more likely to be deficient in folic acid. Part of it is dietary; from the link: "certain groups, including women of childbearing age and non-Hispanic black women, are at risk of insufficient folate intakes. Even when intake of folic acid from dietary supplements is included, 19% of female adolescents aged 14 to 18 years and 17% of women aged 19 to 30 years do not meet the EAR. Similarly, 23% of non-Hispanic black women have inadequate total intakes, compared with 13% of non-Hispanic white women."
So, diet is a big reason, and if black moms are deficient and feed a similar diet to their kids, well, you might guess that the kids could end up deficient. Other studies have noted that black women are less likely to have access to supplements or pre-natal vitamins that might provide adequate folic acid content.
iodine, and other critical micro-nutrients, when poor white kids are not?
Probably because blacks tend to consume a lot less dairy, which is often known to correlate with iodine deficiencies. From this study, "The NHANES and NCS UI [iodine level] data suggest that non-Hispanic black women have lower UI concentration than other women. Additionally, non-Hispanic black women had lower dairy consumption.... Non-Hispanic black women reporting rates of dairy consumption is consistent with recent data on U.S. population reports of lactose intolerance... among females, 50% were non-Hispanic black, 30% non-Hispanic white, and 20% Hispanic. Self-diagnosed lactose intolerance and consequent avoidance of dairy products may be on the contributing factors in the racial/ethnic differences we have shown in UI concentration."
Tha
There has been enough work on this to show decisively that one's racial heritage or gender has at most a tiny effect (if any) on intelligence, and one's upbringing has a far greater effect.
Nonsense. The scientific results show the exact opposite. People of African ethnicity score 15 to 18 points lower on IQ tests. Both Caucasians and blacks have improved over time (the Flynn effect) but the gap has remained.
Did you bother to read your cited article into the next section, where various hypotheses that explain part of the racial differences may come from differences in health, nutrition, socioeconomic environment, and test bias? Or continue further down your link, and read about how attempts to find actual genes related to intelligence have failed so far?
Twin studies have shown that home environment explains no more than a quarter of the variance, and most studies have found that it makes a negligible difference.
It's simply false to claim that "most studies have found it makes a negligible difference," as you might also find in various adoption studies, which have split (again, from one of your own links) in terms of their evidence about whether environmental factors can explain racial differences. Simply being raised by a white family, according to some studies, can raise IQ enough to account for almost the entire gap you identified. Other studies claim some differences remain.
But, more specifically, your particular citation of "twin studies" doesn't actually say what your post claims -- your citation says that home environment explains 25-35% of overall intelligence variance in the population at large. In other words, if you dropped a random kid (of whatever race) into a random household, on average the effect of the home environment might account for 25-35% of the reason why some kid has an IQ of 140 and another has an IQ of 80. That's a very different question from asking how much of the 15-point (or whatever) racial gap might be explained by household differences, since a 15-point difference in means between races is much smaller than the variance between the highest and lowest IQ people in general. It's certainly possible statistically for home environment to explain 25-35% of the IQ variance at large, but 100% of the gap between races -- I'm not saying it does, but you're quoting one statistic and applying it to another situation that doesn't make much sense.
(To use an analogy, this would be like doing a study to see whether reviewing one's notes helps in test performance, and noting that reviewing notes seems to explain 25-35% of the reason why some people score a A and others score D. But then I also note there appears to be a half-letter-grade gap in the mean scores of men vs. women on the test. I cannot just assume that reviewing notes accounts for only 25% of the gender differences without actually knowing something about how gender and studying correlates, particularly if I knew that one group skewed in a particular direction, like most tested black people skew toward certain types of home environments. To do so is a major statistical fallacy.)
And this doesn't even begin to get into the question of whether IQ is actually a good measure of general intelligence for all cultures, or whether specific IQ tests may be culture-laden in ways that don't adequately assess useful intelligence for different societies or different groups. MANY psychologists, other scientists, and even the psychometrics people who are involved with IQ test design have leveled a number of cri
Your problem is you are missing the idea of balance.
I wasn't aware I had a "problem." I was in fact discussing those who "have a problem" with drinking -- and therefore are out of balance.
I have no problem with the idea of "balance." The problem in this situation is that the researchers are talking about two different evolutionary adaptations, and they are claiming opposite factors are driving them, including ones that are out of balance.
The function of benefit vs loss over consumption is not linear but much more complex.
I absolutely agree this is possible. But the problem is that the authors of this study are not that nuanced in their explanation. They are not only claiming the origin for the desire to drink alcohol, but also the origin of drinking to EXCESS and alcoholism.
But the mechanism they proposed for an adaptation to process alcohol in humans requires an explanation that would select against such drinking to excess (i.e., primates can't defend their territory because they'd be too drunk). Don't you see the contradiction here?
On the one hand, we're "programmed to overconsume," but on the other hand, such overconsumption wouldn't allow us to evolve the study's special gene in the first place (according to the researchers' explanation).
I'm not saying these two separate things couldn't have evolved in something like this way, but the authors' explanations depend on contrasting selection pressures. Perhaps one trait evolved under one circumstance in one environment, and conditions changed a few millennia later, leading to the other development. Or perhaps there's an even more complex explanation.
The point is that TFA's description makes little sense as a SINGLE explanation for two different adaptations, despite the fact that TFA claims one thing if the first paragraph I quoted and then requires the opposite behavior in the next paragraph which begins "the [preceding] discovery might explain..."
Let's say the benefit of a buzz grows linerally, while the disadvantage grows exponetionally. You will be receiving a net benefit until you reach eqalibram. As there are point in a lineral function early on the exceed an exponential function.
I think you missed my whole point about "just-so" stories. I'm not saying what you're saying is false or that things couldn't have evolved that way. I'm saying that you made up a very nice story based on relatively little evidence -- just your speculation -- to explain a complex evolutionary phenomenon that could have all sorts of complex causes and explanations.
That's exactly the sort of thing that should be criticized. Just because "Well, I can make up a possible story that could explain something" doesn't mean it happened that way. You need, well, perhaps a little more evidence, not just "Let's say that...."
It's not the ones without,, but rather with the tolerance gene that would benefit from being drawn to the fermenting fruit.
Uh, yeah. That's obvious. I wasn't at all disagreeing with that. What I'm pointing out is that TFA is talking about two separate evolutionary developments. On the one hand, evolution explains a gene that avoids constant drunkenness to process alcohol. On the other hand evolution explains the psychological tendency toward constant drunkenness in the form of alcoholism by connecting such a thing to a pleasure center. Obviously those who are able to process alcohol will get the biggest evolutionary advantage from eating food with it (as you say), but how does that lead to alcoholism unless you begin to select for people who can't control their alcohol intake and drink to excess (which is the opposite trend)?
Anyone who has woken up next to someone they hooked up with while drunk can tell you that alcohol completely undermines selective breeding.
Funny -- TFA actually argues that "being a cheap date" was a disadvantage and selected against:
"If you were the ancestor without this new mutation in ADH4 [to metabolize alcohol], the ethanol would quickly build up in your blood and you'd get inebriated much faster," Carrigan says. "You'd be a cheap date." This easy inebriation, he says, would have been a disadvantage to the monkeys without the mutation, making them more easily get sickâ"or drunkâ"off fruit, enough so that they couldn't defend their territory and seek out food. Primates with the new mutation could get more food, his group hypothesizes, and the gene was selected for in the human and chimpanzee lineage.
But then the next paragraph makes a 180-degree turn and claims that alcoholism evolved to be associated with pleasure because, I guess, being drunk is fun (and, apparently, tasty). So, apparently "being a cheap date" is also something that is selected FOR in evolution, or alcoholism doesn't evolve, accroding to TFA:
Carrigan says the discovery might explain why human brains evolved to link pleasure pathways with alcohol consumptionâ"ethanol was associated with a key food source. "It's not a whole lot different from the addictions some people have towards food," he explains. "At the right dose, when you didn't have alcohol and candy at every corner, it was hard to get too much of this sort of stuff, so when you found it, you wanted to be programmed to overconsume."
Argh. Wasn't it just yesterday that I was complaining about evolutionary biologists making up random "just-so" stories that conveniently show how anything could evolve?
In TFA, wanting to get drunk is bad for natural selection, until it's good for natural selection... in the freakin' next paragraph. Really, guys?
Which is great until sometime between steps 6 and 7 the customer overspends on their credit card.
It's a great idea if you run a tight budget and have the discipline to do it.
I actually know multiple people now whose budgets have been saved by using credit cards. Yes, you heard me right.
Why? Because of financial tracking software. A credit card charge gets registered -- anywhere from instantly to a day later or so -- and it immediately shows an impact on your "running balance" of available money in your accounts.
Cash? When you spend that stuff, you need to keep track of it yourself. Once you withdraw cash from an account, it goes into a "black hole" in terms of financial software. Your financial software doesn't know whether you have $5 in your wallet or $500, unless you tell it. And when you spend $5 or $500, it doesn't know until you tell it.
So, for many people -- especially younger people -- credit card (or debit card) becomes the default, since you can actually track your balances automatically. I know someone who just got into this habit of withdrawing cash from the ATM whenever her wallet got empty. Those little lunches and coffees and scones and random little purchases can add up to many thousands of dollars per year, and cash is not easy to track, unless you choose to keep your own detailed record by hand (or input it manually).
This woman's husband was going nuts looking at the bank balances draining every month, so he asked for one simple thing -- put everything on a credit card, and get overall financial balance updates daily sent to her phone. Suddenly, she saw her numbers dropping every day, and the reality of what was happening set in. Granted, a similar thing could have been achieved by just using the financial software, since her cash withdrawal habits would register, but once the software was there and giving her updates, she'd be more interested in checking in occasionally and realizing the daily latte habit was costing hundreds of dollars per month, which her credit card told her.
Of course, the couple I'm talking about had enough money to go around so they were never in danger of starving, but when it came time to move out of the apartment and buy a home and have a couple kids, they needed to rein in the spending. A credit card which could track purchases and give immediate feedback in financial tracking software was what worked.
I know other people who say the same thing, and I follow that same principle now. Credit cards are magical devices that tabulate my purchases and give me hundreds of dollars in bonus money every year. Cash is this weird thing that I usually have some of in my wallet, but I use it so rarely that it's the "funny money." The credit card registers an immediate impact to my finances -- the cash could have sat in my wallet for weeks or months, so I basically see it as just stuff that could be spent whenever.
I'm not saying this method works best for everyone. But the idea that credit cards are "funny money" that buys stuff and you never see the bad part until you get the statement just isn't true anymore. Credit cards can now be the ultimate financial tracking tool, and the means to achieve financial discipline, while cash...
Sure, cash prevents you from running your account balances below zero, but keeping your account balances above zero is only the first minimal step to financial health. You need to be monitoring what you do, trimming out things that are unnecessary or eating up excessive parts of your budget, making sure the balances in the right accounts are constantly going up, so you can do things like save for retirement, have an emergency fund, pay off other debts, etc. Credit cards can actually make that effort easier and more straightforward, rather than hinder it.
Just so you know, most of the people doing the work applying Game Theory to Sociology are just jacking off.
Yeah, unfortunately... as Master Yoda might say, "Tilting at windmills you are."
The larger context here isn't sociology, it's "evolution." Note that I put that in quotation marks for a reason -- there's a whole network of yahoos out there who spend time thinking up "just so" stories for their pet explanations of some evolved trait. They call it "evolutionary biology" or "evolutionary psychology" or "evolutionary sociology," but a lot of the practitioners do the same crap.
-------------------
Typical day at the office:
"Scientist" X sits at his desk, bored: "Oh, woe is I! I am an evolutionary biologist, but I have too little funding to do any real experiments in my lab. What shall I do?!"
"Scientist" Y, turning suddenly: "Lo, but we can 'do evolution research' without funding. Let us consider a question, like 'How did music evolve in humans and why?' That is a good question."
"Scientist" X: "Yes! Yes! Yes! That is a great question! And since other primates don't really have musical culture in the same way, our 'findings' don't even need to be based on cross-species trends! We can just make up a story, a 'thought experiment,' just like the great Einstein!"
"Scientist" Y: "Suppose one day a mother early hominid descended from her tree and went to gather food. Her infant baby hominid might be sad. Perhaps the mother would sing to let the infant know she was still there!"
"Scientist" X: "Indeed. How I can see them now, in my 'thought experiment'! 'Tis a fantastic tale. Tell it to me again, please!"
"Scientist" Y: "But shan't we publish it now? After all, our 'experiment' has proven the way music could have evolved!"
"Scientist" X: "By golly, you're right. I'm already typing it up. Let's make up a few more stories like that, and publish it as a book on the 'origins of music', and we'll call it 'evolutionary musicology'!"
"Scientist" Y: "Huzzah! Huzzah! We have 'done research'! Our book will sell!"
And, lo -- the book did sell, and others did join this movement. Thence to all the corners of the Earth went the good news of the true story of music's evolution....
-----------
You think I'm joking. The book is out there. There are plenty of random made-up stories about stuff like this, that are supposedly to "explain" how things evolved. Even if the guys you're criticizing here are as bad as you say -- I haven't looked at their research in detail -- they got nothin' on a lot of stuff evolutionary biology people tend to do these days.
(P.S. This post should NOT in any way be construed as attacking the general theory of evolution, which I do not mean to criticize in any way. I'm just criticizing all the awful crap that has begun to accumulate around the field as lots of folks jump on the "Let's plan the 'how could that have evolved' game!" bandwagon.)
I think we should get rid of all sports in fact. Probably the arts, and likely music too. What does physical education really add to education any way? Home ec, for sure. Likely shop, those kids should go to vocational training for that.
Hmm... somewhat of a non sequitur, don't ya think? The parent was talking about a sport that is known to cause permanent brain damage in minors. I'm not sure if I agree with parent's approach to that issue, but it's a legitimate concern.
How exactly do ALL other sports, the arts, music, home ec, etc. cause serious and permanent injuries to teenagers? Unless you can answer that question, I think your analogy is invalid.
There are plenty of reasons to argue for all sorts of activities, including many varieties of sports with their various benefits for education, physical activity, teamwork, etc. Or are you claiming that somehow football is a unique endeavor whose absence will lead to the ruination of the human education? Seems unlikely.
Great plan. Really. I'd love to meet the products of that system, not sterile at all!
Well, it's 95% your plan, since the parent was only talking about football. So it's interesting that you're praising your own inventiveness (or hyperbole, I assume).
The Supreme Court is usually made up of hardcore authoritarians that modify the constitution with invisible ink in order to give the government more power.
[Citation needed]
If you look at the history of the U.S., you'll find that it's very rarely the Supreme Court (at least not until the past 50 years or so) as the branch of government who has tried to grab power most often. Ever hear of judicial review? SCOTUS actually came up with what was originally a somewhat controversial power of invalidating actions of Congress and the Executive in order to PRESERVE the Constitution and prevent accretion of federal power.
For the first 150 years or so of the U.S., that's generally what SCOTUS did. They invalidated overreaching statutes on many occasions to rein in federal power. It was only about the time that they were threatened to be overruled by a President (FDR) threatening to enlarge the Court (per his Constitutional prerogative) and pack it with his cronies that SCOTUS finally caved in and basically said, "Uh... yeah, I guess the federal government can do whatever it wants... please don't pack our court with your cronies, Mr. President!"
Even since then, you'd be hard pressed to find lots of places where it's SCOTUS who is modifying the meaning of Constitution -- they are generally letting the legislative and executive overreaches get by them. In other words, it's the OTHER BRANCHES generally who are "modifying the Constitution with invisible ink in order to give the government more power"; the Supreme Court has just stopped saying "no" to such things as often, a power which was never actually expressed in the original Constitution directly, by the way...
So how you're blaming the Supreme Court for not asserting a right (judicial review) which was unclear in the original Constitution to justify your Originalist position is beyond me. That's quite some logical fallacy hoops you're jumping through to blame one branch of the government, rather than the ones actually asserting AND exercising that power.
Actually, the first amendment comes after the copyright clause. Amendments change the constitution, so any ability of the government to restrict speech was overridden by the first amendment.
Wow. This must be one of the looniest arguments I've heard in a while.
Look, the Constitution was ratified and enacted in 1789. The first Congress began meeting on March 4, 1789. The Bill of Rights was debated and passed by Congress to be sent to the states for approval on September 25, 1789. The first Copyright Act (i.e., the very first time Congress decided to exercise its power to create a federal copyright system) was approved by Congress on May 25, 1790.
So, what you're telling me is that Congress approved a Bill of Rights in September, and then a few months later Congress (composed of THE SAME PEOPLE) voted to approve a copyright act that went against the very principles they had voted for in the Bill of Rights just a few months before?
WHY? Explain that. WHY? Why would Congress vote away power in proposed amendments and then assert it -- without comment -- just a few months later?
The only RATIONAL conclusion is that the people who actually voted to enact the First Amendment did NOT think they had invalidated the copyright clause of their brand-new Constitution.
Cursive exists because it's faster. This is why the letters are joined; it's not for looks. If it was about the latter, they would still be teaching Spencerian script in North America and similar systems elsewhere.
Umm, many places in the U.S. which still teach cursive teach variants (e.g., Palmer script) that still contain fundamentally Spencerian flourishes (e.g., with extra loops on capitals, etc.). These aren't just for looks -- they also aid in legibility, like making it easier to spot capitals in written script, etc. The ornate capitals in older letters and manuscripts often served the same purpose -- a reader could easily locate the beginnings of main sections, so they serve some function.
But for personal note-taking (which is all that cursive is useful for these days), these Spencerian/Palmer traits really seem about ornamentation -- and they've only started to die away in the past 2-3 decades in the U.S. with variants like D'Nealian.
Guess which is always faster if not handicapped by lack of practice???
Speed of writing is not the only relevant factor. Speed and ease of reading is another.
I'm well-versed in the art of cursive, including basic calligraphy. I've spent time with a number of different 19th-century writing manuals trying to master the old more ornate forms of writing.
So, I'm not stranger to cursive. I've practiced it a LOT.
And yet at some point during my undergraduate years, I switched to printing for my note-taking. I've never gone back. Why? Because while I can undoubtedly write faster with cursive because I don't pick up the pen, the distinctness in the letterforms of printing caused BY picking up the pen allow my writing to be more legible later (and more legible for other people).
I'm a very fast writer when I want to be, and I have no patience for legibility issues while trying to jot something down fast. But if I print it, I can guarantee it will be easier and faster to read later, simply because the letterforms are more distinct.
Thus, while I love the beauty of cursive and can do it with all the flourishes very slow or write very fast and sloppily, I take most of my quick notes with printing and have for quite a few years. It's the best balance of speed and legibility for me; others may have different opinions, but I don't think your statements have universal applicability about which is the best way to write fast.
You actually want to write REALLY fast? Learn shorthand. Standard cursive wasn't designed for super-fast writing -- it was designed for mildly ornate but rather quick writing that is LEGIBLE (e.g., why are all those little loops present on many of the capitals? to make it easier to spot capitals while reading, not because it's faster).