Americans can only report their health derivative (dx/dt) :)
A lot of the most unhealthy groups in the US are also poor and somewhat outside te reach of casual academic sampling.
I assumed that at first too. It turns out even removing the poor or minorities from the sample doesn't fix this gap.
I guess the study used the modifier "wealthy" along with developed to explain their choice of reference class. I looked at the list and it didn't seem obviously cherry picked. What countries would you add?
The guts of the study lists one (of many) possible causes:
"getting health care depends more on the market and on each person’s financial resources in the U.S. than elsewhere".
Insurance companies should point out to their detractors that they provide a valuable service by making healthcare so inaccessible that Americans no longer have any idea how they're doing. And that given this absence of knowledge, Americans assume they're doing great.
Young Americans believe they have the best health in the world...
Of course, it turns out they're actually last among developed nations in real health outcomes.
The U.S. ranks #1 among 17 affluent, western countries in the percentage of people aged 5 to 34 who rate their health as good. Unfortunately, when doctors look at people’s actual health, at indicators such as obesity, diabetes, and simply the chance that someone will die before his or her next birthday, the U.S. ranks last: young Americans are #17 out of 17 in real health.
I received a letter telling me on no uncertain terms that if [US Customs] found another shipment of modafinil addressed to me, they would prosecute me as a drug smuggler.
You mean something like this? That's not really as meaningful as it seems. There is always some legal risk associated with doing anything since there are so many US laws that no one has even managed to count them, but a pretty serious search through legal database turns up no records of people being prosecuted for modafinil importation, ever. So that letter is 100% posturing by US Customs.
You should probably conclude from this that you're more likely to be prosecuted for illegally downloading music or jay walking.
And it's obviously everyones' personal choice to decide what level of legal risk they are comfortable with. But a rational person who wanted modafinil should be willing to order it from an online pharmacy at least as often as they're willing to pirate music or jaywalk without fear of prosecution. Otherwise their preferences for assuming legal risk are inconsistent.
Yeah, don't be discouraged. LW is just like that sometimes. If you link to something with little or no commentary, it really needs to be directly about rationality itself or be using lots of LW-style rationality in the piece. This was a bit too mainstream to be appreciated widely here (even in discussion).
Glad to see you're posting though! You still in ATL and learning about FAI? I made a post you might like. :)
Just to clarify, I recommend the book "Probability and Computing" but the course I'm recommending is normally called something along the lines of "Combinatorics and Discrete Probability" at most universities. So the online course isn't as far off base as it may have looked. However, I agree there are better choices that cover more exactly what I want. So I've updated it with a more on-point Harvard Extension course.
The MIT and CMU courses both cover combinatorics and discrete probability. They are probably the right thing to take or very close to it if you're at those particular schools.
Thanks again for the feedback Klao.
Fixed. Thanks.
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Yep, you're right. I've never used the Open Threads so I didn't know that. Thanks.