Groupthink is as powerful as ever. Why is that? I'll tell you. It's because the world is run by extraverts.

The problem with extraverts... is a lack of imagination.

pretty much everything that is organized is organized by extraverts, which in turn is their justification for ruling the world.

This seems to be largely an article about how we Greens are so much better than those Blues rather than offering much that is useful.

There are two obvious effects (guns are more deadly than other weapons, but guns are also a deterrent) and it is not clear which is stronger. It's one of those issues where natural experiments or instrumental variables are our best bet for gaining knowledge, and of course anyone with a stat background will know the troubles with those techniques.

That said, there are studies using those techniques and they are better than a cursory glance at gun laws and homicide rates by country (or by state). And, to my understanding, the results of those studies are resoundly mixed. Some of these are quite controversial, but we're talking about tricky statistical techniques surrounding an emotional political issue, so controversy will abound even if the results are sound.

My takeaway is that this is not an issue worth getting very passionate about one way or the other. Your knowledge should drive your emotions, and if you don't know what effect is strongest, then you should save your emotional energy for more clear-cut or important causes.

If anyone knows of any very elegant studies, please correct me. Obviously I haven't read the whole literature.

there are real examples of gender bias in biology publications

Like what? Just curious.

And people (for whom the inferential distance is too great) love to hate on it.

I don't think that's all that's going on here. A lot of Women's Studies has other ideas and claims which are much more questionable, and the good points (such as the substantial differences in women's experience v. men) can get easily lost in the noise.

It's probably not a good idea to laugh at people until you've at least heard their arguments.

I think Wikipedia's Trivialism page already contains a comprehensive list of its supporting arguments.

Is this from real data?

I would think that the behavior of parents has a massive impact on the way the children grow up (but indeed, not the material stuff that so many parents fuss so much over), considering how strong of a correlation there is between the parents' belief systems and behaviors and their children's.

I'm not much compared to even a small survey, but from my small sample I've noticed a possible strong correlation between the way parents respond to questions / handle "problematic" behavior / do anything to "educate" their children and the intelligence, rational behavior and open-mindedness of the children later in life.

The most salient example (but not the most statistically significant) is that everyone I talked to about this who were on the higher end of the intelligence scale had clear memory of their parents responding "I don't know, let's find out" to their curiosity when they were a child, while everyone else I talked to had no such memory.

I think looking into actual pedagogical research results and how to best behave towards children would probably be very high expected utility / value of information if maximizing your child's chances of not being stupid is something you care about.

At the very least, a parent can affect the environmental factors that the book mentioned in the parent post mentions (I haven't read the book, only the abstract) by carefully selecting a good initial environment with these things in mind in the first place.

Obviously also worth looking into is alternative forms of education. Public schools are far from optimal both for social and intellectual development.

If any of this is of interest, I can try to help with some research on it.

Neat! I'll put less confidence in such surveys now. HOWEVER! Many of the questions in such surveys are plain-ol' 50/50, and I have no idea how they could be very biased.

As an example, here is a scan from Carpini and Keeter's What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters. You'll notice that, in table 2.7, only 42% of Americans knew that Soviets suffered more deaths than Americans during World War 2. Seems like a coin flip to me, unless they asked, "Who had the most deaths during World War 2?" and ignored all answers besides US and USSR. I still think Americans are pretty durn ignorant of most political and historical matters. (Myself included, for many of the questions. I have no idea who my state's congressmen are (and I don't really care.))

But then, I've never been one to compare this to modern cultural knowledge. I see that as irrelevant. Asking about fresh memory vs. deep memory doesn't tell you about political knowledge per se. Responses should be compared against questions of similar difficulty.

Disjunctivism: In normal cases, when a person is perceiving something, the object of their perception is a mind-independent object. The character of the person's phenomenal experience is explained by the properties of the object (for instance, a person perceiving an apple has an experience of redness because the object of their perception -- the apple -- is red). However, when a person is hallucinating or experiencing an illusion, the object of their perception is some sort of mind-dependent entity (perhaps sense-data; see below). So hallucination and veridical perception are substantially different kinds of mental processes.

Representationalism: Perceptual experience is representational. It represents our immediate environment as being a certain way. Since representations can be both accurate and inaccurate, we can understand both veridical perception and hallucination as the same kind of process. The difference is merely in the success of the representation. To be perceiving is to be representing one's immediate environment in certain ways (visually, aurally, etc.), and perception is accurate to the extent that this representation corresponds to reality.

Sense-datum theory: The objects of our perception are not mind-independent entities, they are mind-dependent objects called sense-data. These are objects like "a red spot at such-and-such position in my visual field". We infer the existence of mind-independent objects from patterns in the sense-data we perceive.

Qualia theory: [I don't think I fully understand the claims of qualia theory. I have tried to describe the kinds of things qualia theorists say, but if it appears confused that's because I am confused.] The phenomenal character of our perceptual experience (the particular way our experience feels) is non-representational. We don't infer information about the external world from the particular feel of our conscious experience; rather, our conscious experience is simply what it feels like (from the inside) to be obtaining sensory information about our environment. One way to put is that my conscious experience doesn't tell me that the apple I'm perceiving is red. My conscious experience is just an effect of the particular way in which I am obtaining information about the apple; I am perceiving the apple red-ly.

I voted "Lean toward: externalism", but the I get the feeling that even asking the question shows that you're barking up the wrong tree.