To help you see what some of the problems with Chetty’s work is, let’s walk through the top and bottom of his new rankings of 2,478 counties. When thinking about Big Data, I’ve long found it extremely useful to look at the highest and lowest examples in detail to see what kind of patterns leap out. It’s extremely easy these days to look up facts about outliers, so more people should do it. This doesn’t seem to be a common practice among academic data analysts, however, who evidently fear contamination by bias and stereotypes. But instead they wind up suffering from ignorance, which is worse.

Steve Sailer

To be great at anything creative, you must have both skill and taste. Painting, music, programming -- every art I've ever studied, or even heard of, has worked this way. You need the technical skill to create, and the eye that decides what's worth trying, and worth keeping.

You've made a good case that math, like music, requires taste for true greatness. And you've persuaded me that Scott Alexander has it. But you also seem to be saying that math doesn't have a skill component, in the sense I mean here, and I do not find that part of your argument persuasive.

May I ask what is the utility of Haskell? Or rather, in what field it has one? Functional programming as a shortcut is great, but Python has that covered. Even C# LINQ has that covered, for most pragmatic functional programming is about writing domain-specific query languages, as a lot of complicated programming can be reduced to input - massage the data - output. The rest often just library-juggling. As opposed to this pragmatically functional stuff, purely functional programming is largely about avoiding bugs of certain types, but in my experience 95% of bugs come from not of those types, but from misunderstanding requirements or requirements themselves being sloppy and chaotic. Pure functionality is largely about programming like a mathemathician, strictly formal and everything the result of reasoning instead of just cobbling things together by trial and error which tends to characterize most programming, but the kind of bugs this formalist attitude cuts down on is not really the kinds of bugs that actually annoy users. So I wonder what utility you found to Haskell.

This "let's defeat the villain and everything will be OK" mentality is what made me skeptical of many aspects of liberalism. Many liberal-leaning activists choose a controversial topic (religion, gay marriage, abortion, immigration, etc.) and proclaim that the old system is evil, without a rational explanation why, and more importantly, without a rational explanation how their proposal would be better in the long term. If I ask for an explanation, I'm often labeled as "the enemy".

It's interesting, as I think that if liberalism were slower, I would likely be a liberal. If the liberal views were rationally discussed, and if serious research was being made to study the effects of these novel ideas on society after many generations, or if we just slowly introduced a few minor reforms first, and then observed how it affects the next generation, I would be among the very strong supporters of these liberal ideas.

Why I'm conservative-leaning? Because I hold the belief that while the proposals of liberals might bring the advantage of some personal freedoms, 1. these would be relative, so people would not feel happier and 2. they could have long-lasting negative side-effects of the society as a whole.

Why wasn't I convinced by these ideas? Because they are used as ammunition, as things which "sound good". The weight is not on scientific rigor, but about how nice the idea sounds to potential voters.

A (maybe a little extreme) example: A school wants to introduce the rule that teachers are not allowed to correct student's essays with a red pen, because red is an aggressive color, it is abusive and it causes psychological trauma for the children. Or that they intentionally forbid children to call each other boys and girls, or even to forbid them the knowledge that any difference exists, just to erode the difference between genders, so that everyone should choose a gender later and not be "biased". These seem to be suggested because they "sound good" for a liberal activist, but as I grew up while my essays were corrected with a red pen, and all other people I know grew up that way, and countless generations grew up that way, and none of us seem to have any psychological trauma because of this, I would oppose any such "novel ideas", unless there was a serious study observing the long-lasting effects proving me wrong.

I know the evidence for some of my beliefs is mostly anecdotic, but even anecdotic evidence is better than no evidence at all.

But we don't have a precise understanding of what a "good name" is, for the same reason that we don't have a precise understanding of what a "good song" is: the goodness of a name is measured by its effect on its reader.

I'm not sure whether I buy that argument. It would be quite possible to go out and study naming in the real world and study problems that arise and what goes well.

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. -- Phil Karlton

Without focusing on the first problem, is there a path to get better at naming things?

Do you have experiences to share where you think you improved on the skill?

Exercises to recommend?

Books and articles to recommend?

If the point of this comment is that the US, or the west in general, does not have the power to invade these countries, given the political will, then I'd say this is factually wrong.

In general:

Religiosity is correlated with fertility, the most extreme example being 'quiverfull' people having 8 kids each, with Mormons in a close second.

Religiosity is about 50% genetically heritable, and also mimetically heritable, the extent depending upon the situation.

The secularisation of Europe might have gone as far as it can go, while if anything the US seems to be getting more religious. In the long run, won't genes win out?

Therefore, it seems likely that the world is going to keep on getting more religious. And I'm sure we are all aware that exponential growth curves can cause very rapid changes. Trying to put an exact time-frame is difficult, because of immigration, questions of how long communities can remain isolated from the rest of the country, positive feedback where immigrants vote for more immigration, negated feedback from backlashes, birthrates decreasing in a demographic transition, and so forth.

I did a calculation and decided that within around 100 years many secular countries would be run by religious fanatics, and then I read that the quiverfull movement has around a 20% retention rate. Of course, given exponential growth that doesn't buy all that more time.

The problem isn't that ISIS take over. They don't have the weapons, they don't have the numbers, they don't control any tank factories. The worry is that in 2100 or 2200, if for some reason the singularity hasn't happened, fundamentalist Muslims are a democratic majority in France and evangelicals are a majority in the US, and now there is a far more serious threat than that of ISIS, and the question of whether, with the technology of 2200, the US can disable France's nuclear weapons in a first strike is raised.

Obviously that is just one hypothetical. But as the average religiosity rises, and when both Islam and Christianity have a serious history of violence, it seems likely to end in disaster, if baseline humans are still the dominant force at that point in time.

This post (edit: fixed link) reminded me of this thread. 2.5 years later, I'm still not sure I understand your point or why it has a +5 score. How does what LW (which I guess I'm not part of) "wants"^W "wishes" relate to my concerns?

No. (It was not my bet in the first place, so...?)