gwern comments on July 2016 Media Thread - Less Wrong

2 Post author: ArisKatsaris 01 July 2016 06:52AM

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Comment author: gwern 02 July 2016 08:11:35PM 4 points [-]

Everything is heritable:

Politics/religion:

  • "Wealth, Health, and Child Development: Evidence from Administrative Data on Swedish Lottery Players", Cesarini et al 2016
  • "Okhrana: The Paris Operations of the Russian Imperial Police" (The back and forth secret war of the Okhrana with the myriads of Russian revolutionaries across Europe, documented by the complete archives of the Paris Okhrana office smuggled to America after the Russian Revolution. When you see how easily and thoroughly the Okhrana had infiltrated the Russian revolutionaries, you start to see why the Communist leadership would be extraordinarily paranoid about spies - but also that the revolutionaries were, well before the Revolution, generally highly nasty folks; many of the mentioned revolutionaries would be summarily executed by their comrades.)
  • "The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus's Wife", King's response (The Gospel of Jesus's Wife is probably a modern forgery. But it gets weirder. And kinkier. Forgeries like this always raise troubling issues about religious scriptures: if this forgery had been kept in private collections for another century before becoming known, in all likelihood, most of the damning evidence would either have disappeared or become inaccessible, and all that would be left is a few worries over the appearance. Most scriptures have even more vexed provenances than does the Gospel of Jesus's Wife, with blackouts of centuries not uncommon, and known destruction of variants (eg the well-known destruction of all variants of the Koran). Of course, you might think, who would dare counterfeit the Word of God Himself? Yet, humans are strange and inscrutable and can talk themselves into anything - why did Fritz do it? Probably even he doesn't really know. Who knows how many Fritzes there have been throughout history...)
  • "My Four Months as a Prison Guard"

AI:

Statistics/meta-science:

  • "Generalized Network Psychometrics: Combining Network and Latent Variable Models", Epskamp et al 2016
  • "Statistically Controlling for Confounding Constructs Is Harder than You Think", Westfall & Yarkoni 2016 (This is part of why results in sociology/epidemiology/psychology are so unreliable: not only do they usually not control for genetics at all, they don't even control for the things they think they control for. You have not controlled for SES by throwing in a discretized income variable measured in one year plus a discretized college degree variable. Variables which correlate with or predict some outcome such as poverty, may be doing no more than correcting some measurement error (frequently, due to the heavy genetic loading of most outcomes, correcting the omission of genetic information). This is why within-family designs are desirable even without worries about genetics: they hold constant shared-environment factors so you don't need to measure or model them.)
  • "Linear Programming: How Does It Work?"
Comment author: gwern 02 July 2016 08:11:41PM 3 points [-]

Psychology/biology:

  • "Ann Roe's scientists: original published papers" (One of the very few data sets, excluding TIP/SMPY, of extremely intelligent people. I am still reading through them but one impression I get is that the education system in America when most of them were growing up around 1910-1920 was grossly inadequate and unchallenging; many of them seem to only drift into their field when they happen to run into a challenging course in college. Quite a few mention incredibly little access to books and severe poverty (although interestingly, they all come from what are clearly middle/upper-class descent families, even if in some cases they are so poor as to be unable to afford shoes). Smart kids are so much better off these days with Internet access to anything at all they want to read. As I've noted in reading biographies of American scientists, the academic environment pre- and post-WWII is strikingly different than the pressure-cooker race to the bottom we are familiar with now. Relative underperformance in grades compared to females is also a running theme. With the chemists and physicists, home chemistry kits seem to have been nigh universal - which is something that sure doesn't happen these days!)
  • "Gifted Today But Not Tomorrow? Longitudinal Changes in Ability and Achievement in Elementary School", Lohman & Korb 2006 (Challenges in gifted education in elementary or earlier: IQ scores are unstable and so regression to the mean implies that few children in G&T programs will grow up to be gifted.)
  • "Is Education Associated With Improvements in General Cognitive Ability, or in Specific Skills?", Ritchie et al 2015
  • "Understanding the Improvement in Disability Free Life Expectancy In the U.S. Elderly Population", Chernew et al 2016 (Adult disability-free life expectancy continues to increase, due in large part to eye surgery improvements; vision is probably, like falling, the proximate cause of a lot of health issues.)
  • "Nicotine Contents in Some Commonly Used Toothpastes and Toothpowders: A Present Scenario", Agrawal & Ray 2012 (/not sure if harmful or helpful)
  • vision:

    • Orthostatic hypotension: when you stand up and feel like you are about to faint & your vision becomes totally obscured by silver mist
    • Visual snow: when you see the world slightly fuzzy and noisily, like very gentle translucent static on a TV screen
    • Closed-eye hallucination with phospenes: when you close your eyes and see a colored background with blobs and lights, especially in a pitch-black room or at night

Technology:

Economics:

Philosophy:

Fiction:

Comment author: TheAltar 14 July 2016 03:42:07PM *  0 points [-]

I have visual snow from trying out a medication. I can confirm that it sucks and is annoying. It's not debilitating though and is mostly just inconvenient.

Then again, it may be slightly harming my ability to focus while reading books. Still checking that out.