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...
(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...
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.
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 ...
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)?
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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...
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.