All of ForensicOceanography's Comments + Replies

Although impressive, it is worth to notice that Cicero only played blitz games (in which each turn lasts 5 minutes, and players are not usually very invested). 

An AI beating 90% of players in blitz chess is less of an achievement than an AI beating 90% of players in 40 min chess; and I expect the same to be true for Diplomacy. Also, backstabbing and elaborate schemes are considerably rarer in blitz.

 I would be very curious to see Cicero compete in a Diplomacy game with longer turns.

Corretto, non faremo noche loca fino all'alba :D

Thank you! I had never thought that Aristarchus might have intentionally seeked a lower bound for the relative size of Sun and Moon. This does indeed make a lot of sense.

The shape is perceptibly different from a Gaussian (at least in the distributions that I found googling "empirical distribution of IQ" and similar keywords). This is not surprising, because almost nothing in Nature is an ideal Gaussian.

1alexgieg
Not really. Currently IQ distribution is defined as a Gaussian, so if tests are made correctly and the proper transformation is applied the shape of the curve, for a large enough population, will literally be a Gaussian "by definition". Check this answer on Stack Exchange for details and references: * Wood, Why are IQ test results normally distributed?, URL (version: 2019-12-23) Now, evidently, for smaller sub-samples of the population the shape will vary.
1Jay
Enjoy.  Keep in mind that it was written 25 years ago.  The findings still hold up, but the paper's forward-looking statements ("this might get better") didn't pan out.

Now, suppose everyone began gaming the "athletic ability" test so that the table of maximum speeds B in light of scores didn't correlate anymore, what would happen? Well, psychologists would analyze the new trend. They'd look at current full time professional short range runners, the scores they obtained in their "athletic ability" test when they took it a few years before, and develop a new table with updated maximum speeds B for "athletic score" abilities, so that both numbers began correlating again.

Here you are supposing that everyone does the same amo... (read more)

1alexgieg
AFAIK, most don't prepare at all since there isn't much at stake. Very few companies hire based on high IQ, when they do it's usually because the problems the employee will have to deal with are highly mathematical and/or logical in nature and a person with a low (real) IQ would do really poorly in that, and in any case they still require candidates to have specific skills, which are more determinant than the IQ. And when such companies do take IQ in consideration, they usually do so not by requiring an official score, but by making candidates go through aptitude tests and puzzles, then checking how they scored in those. Very few go for a fully certified score, and when they do, they have requirements such that they may well also require a full personality evaluation, meaning a full Big 5 assessment. On the flip side, there are jobs that have a maximum IQ score requirement, and don't hire people above that, the reasoning being that anyone with an IQ higher than that would get utterly bored at that job and leave it on the first opportunity, thus wasting the company's time and training investment. So they provide a test and if you get too good a score on it you're let go. Hence, if one were to try gaming the score, one would either end up in a job with such extreme mathematical and logical thinking requirements they would end up constantly mentally exhausted and leave, unable to cope with spending so much mental energy (and this is measurable, brain scans of high IQ individuals show their brains do very energy expenditure when dealing with complex tasks that, for average IQ individuals, cause their brains to flare up in a storm of long, constant, intense activity). Or, on the other extreme, would put them in a job with such low requirements for their abilities that it'd make them feel miserable until they in fact jumped ship for something more stimulating. Now, one important thing to keep in mind is that IQ scores aren't absolute values, they're relative values ba

(A) and (B) make different predictions. If (B) is true, people with high IQ will not be particularly good at a new task when they try it for the first time - but then they would improve by application. If (A) is true, people with high IQ will be immediately good at new cognitive tasks (or, at least, much better than people with low IQ).

Thank you for your answer!

If you practice for IQ tests, you're going to become better at detecting the specific kinds of patterns used in IQ tests, but then your IQ score will correlate less with your general pattern-recognition ability, and in turn with those other traits, so at some point your score will stop reflecting your general intelligence. [...]

Are you sure of this? Maybe the sort of people who are motivated to get an high score in a IQ test are the same sort of people who are motivated to get good grades in the college, who work harder to advance... (read more)

1alexgieg
Yes. It measures an intrinsic ability, not a learned skill. I'll make an analogy: Suppose there was an "athletic ability" measurement score calibrated so that it can gauge, via a set of physical tests, the athletic potential of individuals. It's devised so that a population with no specific training can take it, and the result correlates with, for example, how fast a person will be able to run if they dedicate themselves to short range training full time. This limit, notice, is genetic. Your genes determine the structure and interconnection of your skeleton, muscles, nerves etc. and how well they all respond to diet, training regimen, stimulants, and other external factors. Hence, every person will have a range of running speed that goes from their speed when running without any specific training, let's call this speed A, all the way up to their maximum genetically determined potential, let's call this speed B. The "athletic ability" scoring then, taking into account several factors tested, including your current, untrained running speed, will give you a number that, when you look at a table constructed after test with thousands of other individuals, show that your maximum speed, if you dedicate yourself completely to developing your running potential, will be B. Now, suppose an individual, for some reason, trains day and night at short range running before taking the "athletic ability" test. Maybe they're a teen with parents who insist they excel at the test due to, let's say, the potential to get tuition fee reductions in college. Or maybe they have a parent who's an running champion and they want to impress them, be up to their standards, or whatever. They thus decide to look at how the test is applied, does everything to nail it, and so, when the day comes, they take the test -- in which, among other things, they run at their current speed P --, and as a result obtain a much higher score than they would have gotten otherwise. According this score, when they
3Richard_Kennaway
A and B are only different if "motivation" is not an innate factor. But what else would it be? Is it even an actual thing, or just a name for a phenomenon, masquerading as an explanation of the phenomenon?
2tailcalled
This is essentially proposing a correlation between intelligence and conscientiousness. But from my reading they appear to be mostly uncorrelated.

I agree that different peoples have different learning curve. 

I wonder if perhaps a more appropriate test of "general intelligence" (+ motivation/grit) would be assessing how much you are able to improve in a task, given 1 month to practice.

Probably it is hard to make this work, because you could cheat in the first test doing it terribly on purpose.

1Ericf
Maybe if you have to pass a certain level to start, and then you have a bunch of different kinds of things to learn, but each person gets to specialize in what they do/like best so the test covers both breadth and depth of learning. It would probably take a few years, but the administrator could provide some sort of general certificate of intelligence+grit that potential employers and spouses could check without having to administer the test themselves?

Thank you for your answer, however, the question is not if it is worthy, or useful to practice for IQ test; the question is if it can be done (and, secondarily, how many people do it). 

Usually, the ranking of abilities for a task are well correlated with the amount of practice. There is the rare child prodigy who beats the chess grandmaster, but usually all the people who can beat a chess grandmaster have practiced a lot of chess.

Is IQ special in this respect? Is the majority of people who is extremely good at IQ tests just "naturally" extremely good ... (read more)

4Jay
Short answer: it's not preparation.  Sure, if you study the answer key of a test, you'll get a better score on that test.  However, there's no known method (including practice) that increases the cognitive ability (Spearman's g factor) that IQ tests measure.  Some IQ tests have no behavioral component at all; they just scan your brain and calculate your IQ.   For a solid primer on IQ, I recommend Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns.  It's a consensus report of a task force of the American Psychological Association, so it's as credible as anything. Personally, I took an IQ test for toddlers when I was about 3 (my neighbor was a psych grad student who wanted to practice giving the test and my mom wanted a short break from having a toddler). I got a 168 (the limit), surprising my neighbor quite a bit.  I had done about as much test prep as the typical toddler (none, unless Sesame Street counts).  I haven't taken an IQ test since then, but my life experience since then indicates that the test was qualitatively accurate. Some people are naturally good at IQ tests and some people are naturally bad at them, and there's not much a person can do to change their scores (aside from brain damage, of course).  The people who are good at IQ tests have an advantage in any situation where absorbing, remembering, manipulating, and applying information is useful, which is a lot of situations.  The people who aren't have a disadvantage in those situations, and (with our current technology) we have no way to help them.

Maybe I am in the minority, but I think that I in my teenage years I would definetely have studied for an IQ test if I had had to take one. 

Let us say that only 1% of people are like me, and the other 99% does not care. With your premises, that 1% would get a very high IQ. This is still a lot of people; is it possible that they are the majority of the people with high IQ? Or do you think that most of the people with IQ > 130 are "natural" (in the sense that scored high without solved made similar exercises before)?

2Teerth Aloke
While I would tilt towards the 'natural' option, this question is worthy of some research.

Interesting, can you direct me to some scientific papers which prove conclusions (1) and (3)?

(I already believe (2))

1Phil Scadden
Just stick "heritability of intelligence" in scholar.google.com. I have only had experience of intelligence tests on 4-6 six year olds. Quite a few dimensions to the test - but nothing that would have been practiced at home. A very limited sample, but the resultant ranking fitted my pre-determinations in terms of general problem solving abilities.
1Ericf
Sadly, I can only share the synthesized results of years of reading - I don't keep track of where my ideas come from (though I do try to avoid known-bad sources) #1 is seen with SAT scores - taking the test a second time / taking a prep course improves the median student's score by ~10 percentage points. I (and others) attribute this to improvements in the "IQ test taking ability" portion of the SAT, not the "have memorized vocabulary and rules of math" portion. #3 is clearly seen in results from twin studies, adoption studies, and just looking at the world (ie we see a wider range in "ability to do things we would predict high IQ people to be better at" among people with similar childhoods than we do among people with dis-similar childhoods in extended families.

Thank you for your reply! The differences in economic developement are undoubtedly a part of the story; it is hard to isolate the "material culture" from the rest of the culture. I never said it has to be direct cultural transmission (expecially in the case of Poland, which was resettled by colonists from all the other areas of Poland. Barely one sixth of the population of Western Poland in 1950 was made of Germans who inhabited in the same place in 1939; is it enough to have direct cultural transmission? Maybe, but the quick resettlement itself may have b... (read more)

The immediate cause for the fact that "lead pollution in 200 AD was lower than lead pollution in 1 AD" is that "the extraction from Rio Tinto mines in 200 AD was lower than the extraction from Rio Tinto mines in 1 AD". Now, according to Diodorus Siculus (Bibliotheca historica, V, xxxvi-xxxvi), the Carthaginians used mechanical and hydraulic technology for exploiting the Rio Tinto mines (they probably also employed chemical acids). According to Bromehead, this impressive technology was initially expanded by the Roman conquerors; but eventually the Romans sw... (read more)

Yes, the lead pollution was measured with arctic ice; this is the original paper. The authors belive that the peak in the eraly Imperial era was mainly caused by the Rio Tinto ore mines (so yes, it is pollution from all Europe, but mainly from Spain).

I agree with your main point that the first century BCE and the first century CE were a peak of economic developement of the ancient world (as shown by the graphs); I think that this is not in contradiction with what I am saying. In the first century BCE, many of the Roman provinces were of recent conquests, w... (read more)

1HDMI Cable
I don't necessarily agree with your depiction of the Romans as being "parasitic". Just because they did not produce food, does not mean that they were not valued. The Romans were interested in math, its just that most of them weren't located in Italia. Just look at the various mathematicians who lived in Alexandria, Athens, or Constantinople, and invented the fields of trigonometry (among others). Rome had almost completely absorbed Greek culture and academics, to the point where many prominent Romans often read and wrote in Greek. Unless you were Cato the Censor, you almost certainly learned Greek math, its just that if you wanted to practice it full time, you would live in the east (and spoke Greek). Especially after the 4th century, when the focus of the Empire shifted to the East anyways. Also, the Romans heavily benefited the economy of the Greeks. An interconnected empire meant that Greek goods (such as amphorae, pottery, or other luxury items) could be traded anywhere in the empire, with only the nominal port taxes placed on it by the Empire. Also Rome wasn't militarily occupying the East either, since the entirety of it was governed by the Senate (except Syria, Mesopotamia, and Armenia).

Thank you for the article! In my opinion, one of the main issues is that it does not seem to explain how the Eastern part of the Empire survived.

Rome was never economically self-sufficient. The city of Rome was a sink that absorbed food and products from the provinces, and produced nothing. The millions of inhabitants of Italy could survive only thanks to the subjugated provinces of the Empire.

Other areas of the Empire, notably Egypt and Gaul, were self-sufficient. In particular, Egypt was the main exporter of manufactured good (Roman travelers to Alexandr... (read more)

5LukeOnline
Thanks for the long reply!  You're describing a lot of local contrasts. The city of Rome vs the provinces. The Western Rome Empire vs the Eastern half. Charlemagne vs the Umayyads. While certainly interesting and worthy of discussion, the trends I try to perceive and explain happen on more of a global level.  Look at the shipwrecks and lead pollution graph or the social development graph from the first article. I'm pretty sure the lead pollution was measured from ice cores in Greenland. It's pollution from all of Europe (and perhaps even more distant), not just pollution in the vicinity of the city of Rome. It was barely existant in 600BC, peaks enormously in the first century AD, and it's at ~10% of its former peak in 600AD.  The social development graph follows the most advanced civilization in either the western or eastern half of Afro-Eurasia. If one culture declines and is taken over by another, it switches. Look at this example of Western maximum settlement sizes: 100 CE: Rome, 1,000,000; 9.36 points  200 CE: Rome, 1,000,000; 9.36 points  300 CE: Rome, 800,000; 7.49 points  400 CE: Rome, 800,000; 7.49 points  500 CE: Constantinople, 450,000; 4.23 points  600 CE: Constantinople, 150,000; 1.41 points  700 CE: Constantinople, 125,000; 1.17 points  800 CE: Baghdad, 175,000; 1.64 points  900 CE: Cordoba, 175,000; 1.64 points  1000 CE: Cordoba, 200,000; 1.87 points  1100 CE: Constantinople, 250,000; 2.34 points  1200 CE: Baghdad, Cairo, Constantinople, 250,000; 2.34 points  1300 CE: Cairo, 400,000; 3.75 points  1400 CE: Cairo, 125,000; 1.17 points  1500 CE: Cairo, 400,000; 3.75 points  1600 CE: Constantinople, 400,000; 3.75 points  1700 CE: London and Constantinople, 600,000; 5.62 points  1800 CE: London, 900,000; 8.43 points  1900 CE: London, 6,600,000; 61.8 points  2000 CE: New York, 16,700,000; 156.37 points As you suggest, in 800 AD, the author is looking at the Umayyads and not Charlemagne. While they quantatively exceed Europe in that time period, they do

This is anecdotal, but if you look at technological progress from 200BCE (the Punic Wars) and 200AD, you find that not much has happened, except the expansion of trade networks.

While this may be true, it overlooks the fact that many technologies that were developed in the precedent period (for example, the lighthouse, the cog and the gear wheel) were lost during the Roman age, not to be recovered until the Renaissance - or later. 

Heron describes many artifacts that require tiny metal lives to be built, copying from previous Hellenistic sources, but at... (read more)

The fact that the Enterprise has survived for a long time may be due to the fact that captain Kirk overrules Spock in the areas where he is not competent (for example, when he estimates the probability of escaping from a black hole), while he is good enough in other aspects of his job.

The fact that Captain Kirk decides to ovverrule Spock's 99,999999 % predictions is strong evidence that he does not trust them.

Yes, it is the relevant quantity in the limit of infinite number of uses of the channel. If you can use it just one time, it does not tell you much.

Actually the mutual information has some well-defined operational meaning. For example, the maximum rate at which we can transmit a signal through a noisy channel is given by the mutual information between the input and the output of the channel. So it depends on which task you are interested in.

9Donald Hobson
A "channel" that hashes the input has perfect mutual info, but is still fairly useless to transmit messages. The point about mutual info is its the maximum, given unlimited compute. It serves as an upper bound that isn't always achievable in practice. If you restrict to channels that just add noise, then yeh, mutual info is the stuff.

Imagine a water wheel. The direction the river flows in controls the direction that the wheel turns. The amount of water in the wheel doesn't change.

In this case you do not say "the wheel rotates in the direction of water increase", but "the wheel rotates in the direction of water flow".

I can see how you could argue that "the consciousness perceives past and future according to the direction of time in which it radiated heath". But, if you mean that heath flow (or some other entropic-related phenomenon) is the explaination for our time perception (just lik... (read more)

I agree - but, if understood correctly the OP, he is averaging over a time scale much larger than the time required to reach the equilibrium.

It is interesting to think that dogs may have been selected for hundreds of generation for their ability to influence the emotions of humans.

While of course it could, current measurements suggest that it is not.

The human brain radiates waste heat. It is not a closed system.

Sure, but are you saying that the human brain perceives the whole universe (including the heat it dissipated around) when deciding what to label as "past" or "future"? The entropy of the human body is approximately constant (as long as you are alive).

How do you make space for new memories? By forgetting old ones? Info can't be destroyed. Your brain is taking in energy dense low entropy food and air, and radiating out the old memory as a pattern of waste heat. Maybe you were born with a big load

... (read more)
2Donald Hobson
Imagine a water wheel. The direction the river flows in controls the direction that the wheel turns. The amount of water in the wheel doesn't change. Just because the total entropy doesn't change over time, doesn't mean the system is time symmetric. An electric circuit has a direction to it, even though the number of electrons in any position doesn't change (except a bit in capacitors) So the forward direction of time is the direction in which your brain is creating thermodynamic entropy. Run a brain forward, and it breaks up sugars to process information, and expels waste heat. Run it backwards and waste heat comes in and through huge fluke, jostles the atoms in just the right way to make sugars.  Entropic rules are more subtle than just tracking the total amount of entropy. You can track the total amount of entropy, and get meaningful restrictions on what is allowed to happen. But you can also get meaningful restrictions on which bits are allowed to be in which places. Restrictions that can also be understood in terms of state spaces. Restrictions that stop you finding out about quantum random events that will happen in the future. The physical entropy and the von Neuman information theory entropy are intricately interrelated.  This is technically true of the universe as a whole. Suppose you take a quantum hard drive filled with 0's, and fill it with bits in an equal superposition of 0 and 1 by applying a Hadamard gate. You can take those bits and apply the gate again to get the 0's back. Entropy has not yet increased. Now print those bits. The universe branches into 2^bit count quantum branches. The entropy of the whole structure hasn't increased, but the entropy of a typical individual branch is higher than that of the whole structure. In principle, all of these branches could be recombined, in practice the printer has radiated waste heat that speeds away at light speed, and there probably aren't aliens rushing in from all directions carrying every last pho

No. As I said in this comment, this can not be true, otherwise in the evening you would be able to mak prophecies about the following morning.

Your brain can not measure the entropy of the universe - and its own entropy is not monotone with time.

The energy constrains the moments, but not the positions. If there is infinite space, the phase space is also infinite, even at constant energy.

Take two balls which start both at x=0, one with velocity v(0) = 1 and the other with velocity v(0) = -1, in an infinite line. They will continue to go away forever, no recurrence.

1Marco Discendenti
Good point but gravity could be enough to keep the available positions in a bounded set

The entropy of the brain is approximately constant. A bit higher when you have the flu, a bit lower in the morning (when your body temperature is smaller). If we perceived past and future according to the direction in which the entropy of our brain increases, I would remember the next day when going to bed.

2Donald Hobson
The human brain radiates waste heat. It is not a closed system. Lets think about a row of billiard balls on a large table. A larger ball is rolled over them, scattering several. Looking at where the billiard balls end up, we can deduce where the big ball went, but only if we assume the billiard balls started in a straight line. Imagine a large grid of tiny switches, every time they are pressed, they flip. If the grid starts off all 0, you can write on it. If it starts off random, you can't. In all cases you have 2 systems, X and Y. Lets say that X starts in a state of nonzero entropy, and Y starts at all 0's. X and Y can interact through a controlled not, sending a copy of X into Y. (Other interactions can send just limited partial info from X to Y) Then X can evolve somewhat, and maybe interact with some other systems, but a copy remains in Y. A recording of the past. You can't make a recording of the past without some bits that start out all 0's. You can't record the future without bits that end up all 0's. (Under naieve forward causality) How do you make space for new memories? By forgetting old ones? Info can't be destroyed. Your brain is taking in energy dense low entropy food and air, and radiating out the old memory as a pattern of waste heat. Maybe you were born with a big load of empty space that you slowly fill up. A big load of low entropy blank space can only be constructed from the negentropy source of food+air+cold.

Depending on how you define it, arguably there are observation of entropy decreases as small scales (if you are willing to define the "entropy" for a system made of two atoms, for example). 

At macroscopic scale (10^23 molecules), it is as unlikely as a miracle.

If you work under the hypothesis that information is preserved, then the total entropy of the universe does not increase nor decrease.

In the equilibrium, small increases and small decreases should be equally likely, with an unimaginably low probability of high decreases (which becomes 0 if the universe is infinite).

1Brendan Long
Yes, but our universe is not in equilibrium or anywhere near equilibrium. We're in a very low entropy state right now and the state which is in equilibrium is extremely high entropy.

First, a little technical precisation: Poincaré's recurrence theorem applies to classical systems whose phase space is finite. So, if you believe that the universe is finite, then you have recurrence; otherwise no recurrence.

I think that your conclusion is correct under the hypothesis that the universe exists from an infinite time, and that our current situation of low entropy is the result of a random fluctuation. 

The symmetry is broken by the initial condition. If at t=0 the entropy is very low, then it is almost sure that it will rise. The expert c... (read more)

1Marco Discendenti
In order to apply Poincarè recurrence it is the set of available points of the phase space that must be "compact" and this is likely the case if we assume that the total energy of the universe is finite.

They are not things you would like to spend more time on, when you're rich enough not to work.

People who work for a living aren't kept from alcoholism because they don't have time to drink, or can't afford even cheap alcohol.

This is sure; but someone could be kept from alcoholism because he knows he must be sober to live. This comment suggests that some very rich people who lacks this motivation do effectively become drink-addicted.

3DanArmak
After thinking this over, this effect may be due to hangovers. I don't drink myself, so I don't really know this firsthand, but in stories there's always someone saying "I shouldn't drink more tonight, I have work / school tomorrow." Or even more prosaically, "I shouldn't drink more tonight, I need to drive home (and I'm not a rich person who always takes a cab or has a chauffeur)".

The final paragraph of this comment seems relevant: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class#comment-1350041

2DanArmak
Depression and alcoholism are the opposite of "things you spend more time on, when you're rich enough not to work". People who work for a living aren't kept from alcoholism because they don't have time to drink, or can't afford even cheap alcohol. (In fact, sufferers of alcoholism, like other drug addictions, notoriously spend too much time and money on their addictions even when they can't afford to do so and keep working.) There's a kind of spectrum between "I really want to do X but I must spend time working; if I worked less I would X more", and "I'm going to do X even though it harms my ability to work and is not sustainable, because it's just that valuable/attractive in the short term." A very simple model would say the only difference is in the short-term subjective value of X. But more complex models tend to cash this out as different things: biological vs. psychological causes of addiction; seeking highs, vs. avoiding lows; upstream vs. downstream of conscious behavior.

My position is that everyone is already sick and intoxicated at work and we don't notice or care most of the time. 

I do not think this is true. I think that it is important that we clarify this point before continuing.

0Stuart Anderson
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I'm willing to bet your town's average wages are terrible in comparison to what you get doing nothing.

No, it is not that the wages are low, it is that they can not be fired (both for legal and for cultural reasons). So they do not risk to lose their wage by not working.

To clarify your position, are you saying that if more people were sick/intoxicated then the quality of their work would deteriorate, but this does not really matter because there is sufficient slack in the system and nothing really bad would happen? 

1Stuart Anderson
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Coincidences are improbable, but improbable thing happens. Given any two events A and B, each one with probability 0.01/day, we expect that in about one day in 10000 both will happen. Seems pretty low, but what happens if there are several events A, B, C, ...., Z, each one with probability 0.01?

If we consider 25 distinct improbable events, there are 25X24/2 = 300 pair of events, and each of those pair has a probability of 10^(-4) of happening in a day. Therefore, in about 3% of days (that is, one a month) you will observe a coincidence, which is not anymor... (read more)

I agree, and I would extend the advice to all the expressions which are short, fashionable, and somewhat opaque.

In Politics and the English Language, Orwell offered further arguments for avoiding ready-made phrases.

Basically, the fact that the sea rises not only in the directions of the Sun and of the Moon, but also in the opposite directions.

If you think that the Sun and the Moon attract just the sea, but that the Earth does not move, then you would expect the water to bulge only towards them, and not also in the opposite direction.

If you instead think that the whole Earth is falling towards the Moon and the Sun, you have to subtract the motion of the center of the Earth, and you will correctly predict to see the water rise in both directions. The center of the Eart... (read more)

Business (and life) favours completion over perfection. You might have a feel for whether you are underperforming at work but the question is whether others can see that (and especially whether they can quantify it). 

So you are saying that you can still pretend to do a good work if many people do a work just a bat as yours. This is different from saying that your work is decent. 

In the town I grew up in, it is common for people to do not work at all (not because they are sick, but because they do not care). They "can" do it in the sense that they... (read more)

1Stuart Anderson
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I am not really into the studies, but I know that in 1950/1960 virtually everyone smoked (also, if you read books from that period, is it taken as given that everyone smokes), while now it is quite uncommon for a young person in Italy to smoke.

I think that also in the USA tobacco consumption rate is plummeting, so why are you saying that it does not work?

It may be misleading to conflate all "addictions" together. I can see how this can not work with heroine, but addiction to candies is a different thing.

Maybe I am making confusion between two claims: 

      A) If it happens that you are sick one day, you can still (with pain) carry out an acceptable amount of work for that day.

      B) You can work in a decent way, in the long run, while being sick most of the time.

Are you saying that (B) is true, or just (A)? I fully concede (A) - I also did it. But (A) does not imply (B). I work as a PhD student (which in Europe is a job: you do not have to attend lessons, but you have to do research), and I am sure that (B) is false for me.

Maybe there are jobs for which (A) implies (B), but my intuition is that they are not the majority. 

1Stuart Anderson
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Probably some of them do (at least in the popular imagination); I do not know if this can be checked.

Maybe it is possible estimate drug consumption in a geographical area by enviromental data, for example the amount of cocaine retrieved in the water, and attempt to infer a correlation with income. But I do not know if there is sufficient data available.

Surely not everyone would be like Ogodei Khan.

I think that Caplan is referring to a scenario in which the UBI is high enough to cause a significant reduction of the employment rate.

1000 $ per month would not achieve this effect.

By the way, here in Italy the state has recently enacted a law to give 780 € per month to unemployed people. The party which proposed this law has been mostly voted by southern Italy, whose ruling classes correctly predicted that it would have had the effect of increasing undeclared work.

While I agree that the state can not prevent you from becoming obese or drunk (mush less sure about, say, heroine), I think it is legitimate to apply economic incentives to decrease the expected number of people engaging in a given activity. 

Many states apply taxes on tobacco and sugar, and there are advertising and sale restrictions on cigarettes and alcohol.

1Stuart Anderson
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I definitely can not work when I am sick. Can I ask what kind of job are you overseeing?

1Stuart Anderson
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This look like a technical statement of the Anna Karenina principle, 

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

But then the problem becomes finding the right M which maximises your utility function.The optimal solution might be very unintuitive and it may require a long description to be understood.  M will not be (in general) a smooth set. 

As a slightly unrelated question, I would be very interested to hear if you think that the quality of the work you watch over is somehow affected by the workers being addicted, and how much.

1Stuart Anderson
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If the Earth was stationary in an inertial reference frame, no. 

If you want to compute tidal forces in the reference frame of the Earth (i.e., extract the quadrupole term from a painful integral), you have to include an apparent force which accounts for the fact that the Earth is really rotating.

1Brendan Long
I'm not math-y enough to understand what this means. What would an ancient Greek scientist see in the tides that they couldn't attribute to effects of the moon or sun (keeping in mind that they don't know the masses of either of those objects)?

 If people aren't causing problems, and aren't asking for addiction intervention, then why shouldn't their agency and privacy be respected?

i agree on this principle: making people work to avoid them falling in vice seems definitely an exceedingly patronizing position for the State. However, I can think to two possible answers to your question:

    - many addicted people are not really happy with their addiction, and do not ask for help for pride or because they are costantly believing that are quitting (like the stereotypical smoker that deci... (read more)

2Stuart Anderson
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