I think most people agree with most of these; what they don’t agree with is the various ways in which they’re used to advance or justify repugnant normative claims (shaming people for being overweight, blindly asserting the market’s efficiency in all cases, insinuating that social racial assignments are a good predictor of intelligence, &c.)
The formulation of them is also interesting, for example CICO is true, but the composition of food matters so much because the CI affects the CO they are not completely independent, there is much more to the story.
Or that since most people are at least somewhat better off overall, that justifies the gap between the richest and the poorest in the world. "You were starving 30 years ago, now you're merely hungry and miserable while you can watch me eat fois gras" is not an argument that will appeal to anyone who isn't also enjoying the god life and trying to justify that.
I'm always amused by how much people value wealth differences above absolute measures of poverty. I am more a fan of, let's increase wealth inequality even more if it means we can raise the bottom. In America very few people die of starvation, but Americans complain bitterly about the fact that others have it so much better than the people at the bottom. I have been in many truly poor places where people would give anything to trade their miserable starvation at the door lives for that inequality that poor Americans have to endure.
There are intangible costs to high relative inequality (whatever the absolute level of wealth). They don't matter as much as not starving. But I can see why people are concerned about it.
In economically more equal societies, people tend to treat each other as equals in other ways. For example, I'm fairly convinced that the wealth inequality in America is why Americans to treat their low-paid service workers so poorly, compared to most other very wealthy countries. They're beneath them in the implicit class hierarchy created by the unequal wealth distribution.
Similarly, if the yearly salary of a police officer, judge, or tax auditor, is simple pocket change to the wealthy, then they're all for sale.
This is how we're wired as a species, and frankly more than just a species. We don't just look at what we have and what we want, we look at what other people have and ask ourselves why they got it and we didn't. At a basic level it's an instinct that exists in lower primates, and in us as well.
The difference with us is that we can learn and understand the reasons why one person gets a "grape" and the other a "cucumber"... and those answers are often not just unsatisfying, but infuriating.
It exists even in dogs. It's well studied and not new even.
And it's entirely rational, not merely universal or understandable.
Chris Rock has a joke about the same sort of argument that some white people try to make about black people having it objectively and absolutely so much better now. True. They do. So would you trade places? Even a Walmart greeter wouldn't trade places with me in a million years "and I'm rich!"
If "objectively better off than yesterday" is all that anyone "rational" should care about, then I'll take over your valueless extra 400k (you can keep 100). After all, your dad had to get black lung in the coal mine and die at 47, all you gotta do is play around on a computer in an air conditioned clean office. You have it objectively 1000x better. You (the parent comment not you) should be fine with this. After all, it does not matter at all what I do with that 400k, or what I did or didn't do to get it, or what you did or didn't to to only get 100.
Your reasons for the housing crisis are valid, but not a complete telling of the story. AirBNB for example is an issue, short-term rentals in general are, and the tendency of developers to build luxury accommodations which are purchased and left vacant is a problem. I'm not one of those people who thinks that it shouldn't be possible to use real estate as an investment, but the degree to which we do that while people can't find homes is also a problem.
And at the same time we need to acknowledge that NIMBY arguments aren't totally without merit, they're just cynical. If you believe that only half measures will be taken and ultimately neglected, that the full range of investment required to make a lot of low-cost housing work will not appear... then you're just potentially living next to a project.
Likewise with zoning laws, some are stupid, but some are there because they're the best compromise solution to proven problems. If we want housing to be both a place for people to live and a potential investment then there needs to be a degree of stability in the housing market, and zoning helps with that.
Reminds me of a “founder” who interviewed me and told me he had done a photo-documentary on the “Flyover states”.
Just because you’ve been somewhere doesn’t mean you’ve got a real understanding of anything that’s going on there. I’m very skeptical that someone wearing a visit to a place with poor people as some kind of badge of authority on the topics surrounding them actually has any clue.
The people I’ve talked to who had “miserable, starvation at the door lives” elsewhere who now live with low incomes in the us have mixed feelings about it… nothing as clear cut as what you’re implying
For #2, the idea that the evidence is overwhelming is just made up. The idea that the “experts” agree with him is laughable. That’s not what the majority of cognitive scientists believe at this point except in a few niches that are largely ignored by actual members of the field. So he just cherry-picked his “experts”.
This is the problem with “rationalists”.. . They don’t actually use their brains, they defer to “authority”, arguing that anyone that doesn’t listen to authorities is arrogant, but then they pick who they deem to be authorities to match their pre-existing opinions.
The evidence is overwhelming that intelligence is at least partly heritable. It's uncontroversial among experts to say that it's likely around 50% heritable. It's perhaps a little overstated to say it's "largely" heritable and that the evidence for this is overwhelming.
Being charitable here perhaps the author was just saying that the evidence is overwhelming that intelligence is heritable (to some degree), and that it's their opinion that it's "largely" heritable (assuming they mean 50%+). If by "largely" they just meant somewhere in the region of 50%, then I think this is a fairly accurate statement.
The author shares my view on this. If I had to guess intelligence is likely to be somewhere around to 60-80% heritable in the West. However, in countries where malnutrition, disease and lack of basic education are factors these are likely more important than genetics.
> This is the problem with “rationalists”.. . They don’t actually use their brains, they defer to “authority”, arguing that anyone that doesn’t listen to authorities is arrogant, but then they pick who they deem to be authorities to match their pre-existing opinions.
Ad hominem. Also your criticising rationalists for both blindly overweighting the opinions of experts and also not listening to the opinions of experts. If they're selecting expert opinions based on their own opinions then, if not their own brains, where did these opinions come from?
Whether or not you wear earrings is highly heritable. The number of fingers on your hands is not. People like the author use the word "heritable" in a way that strongly suggests they mean "IQ is genetically determined", but heritability statistics are just a way to ask that question, not answer it.
Also: that's not how the ad hominem fallacy works. It's not a religious law against criticizing groups of people; it's a logical flaw in a particular argument --- the commenter you're replying to didn't make that particular argument (in fact: they made the opposite kind of argument), and so you can't invoke it like a magic spell.
I don't know how the author used the word "heritable", however if we expand the scope beyond genetics – eg, a child of an academic parent might inherit that parent's cultural attitudes towards education via their upbringing – then it would be even more uncontroversial to say that IQ is "largely" heritable.
I personally assumed the author meant the variance of IQ within a population is "largely" a product of genetics. Assuming they they believe this genetic factor is around 50% then this would not be a controversial position to hold among intelligence researchers.
Yes: that's what I took the author to mean too. And that's not an argument heritability statistics can make. My point is that the author has confused "heritability" with "genetic determination".
> I don't know how the author used the word "heritable"...
If the author doesn't really know what heritability means, then maybe they're not in a position to be communicating to the world about what the "overwhelming evidence" shows, or even having an opinion on the matter at all.
#1, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Elman ... Jeffery Elman. I wonder what his stance on the matter is. Let's see if there's a quick way to determine what his thought on heritability are.
It's call "Rethinking Innateness," questioning the over-attribution to genetics of gene x environment interactions.
It took me all of 2 minutes to look that up. The author of this article clearly just completely made up what they said. They had no basis or intellectual discipline in arriving at their opinion.
I had never heard of Jeffery Elman (though I'm familiar with some of his work on RNN's apparently). I had the same thoughts about gene x environment interactions that he apparently describes in his book. I arrived there through a combination of reading papers about the impact of genetics on psychological and cognitive function as well as using critical thinking... as I bet most who have studied cognitive science would.
If I were going to publish a blog post, let alone a book, I would at least do the bare minimum 2 minute google search to see if I'm completely making stuff up before I make claims, implied or explicit, about the consensus of a whole field.
It's not an ad hominem at all. I attacked their thought process, not their person. And the point is that they encourage other people not to use their critical thinking and brains, and just defer to others who they happen to agree with.
> Being charitable here
And why would I do that? They're not being charitable to the opposing opinion.
If they were rational, they would have attempted a full catalogue of both sides of the matter, taking the actual of actual opposition, rather than making up straw men.
> The evidence is overwhelming that intelligence is at least partly heritable
This is an argument against nobody and nothing. I don't think there's a single scientist in the world who said intelligence is 0% heritable. This is a very far cry from the stance that it's mostly heritable. Which would imply greater than 50%.
So even being charitable the author's factual stance is very weak, yet they're drawing strong conclusions from it.
If it's 50% heritable that means less than 50% genetic... which implies that at least 50% of intelligence is based in environment. This is not at all evidence of the author's point. It's evidence against it.
I don’t have a particular take on the last point, but I _do_ have a strong take on the chart. If you think that the relationship of ordinary people’s life outcomes is linear to GDP, I have a bridge or two to sell you.
Cosign on those, especially the second one, which is a deep dive into why it might be hard not to come up with a "g-factor" even if you deliberately made up bullshit tests (which is not what people did).
Ned Block also has an excellent, deep, and very accessible piece --- more targeted to a lay audience than Cosma Shalizi's pieces, which are very much "about" statistics --- on what it is "heritability" means (tl;dr: it does not mean what most comments on HN seem to think it means):
I don't think most people necessarily disagree with this:
(1) The people who think that the market can be beat don't think most people can do it. They think most people can't but that they're special and can.
Think most people agree with (2) and (4) as well. They just don't like the implications re: society and God that come with it. To the extent they get rejected it's to preserve the viability of the notions they hold.
They admit (5) is something most people agree with.
(3) and (6) they whittle down their extreme position to what most people agree with
(7) is the closest to delivering what the title claims. But ultimately "better" is subjective and while I largely agree with the point it's not exactly an objective truth.
>Think most people agree with (2) and (4) as well. They just don't like the implications re: society and God that come with it. To the extent they get rejected it's to preserve the viability of the notions they hold.
This also operates the other way, and links to your statement in #1. Most people want to believe in the idea of pre-determined concepts because it makes them feel special when they aren't living a lesser pre-determined fate.
There is zero evidence leaning to either side. It's much like the concept of god, where the only proof people can establish is that the concept exists therefore it justifies. This is a comforting thought to hold instead of sitting in the unknown.
If by "learn" you mean "native mastery" then I suppose you are saying only kids reach that level, so they are "faster" simply because they are the only ones to finish.
The article considers "learn" to mean roughly "fluency", short of native mastery, and adults tend to reach fluency faster, then plateau.
So depending on nuance, you and the article are both right in some sense.
Maybe I am not smart enough for this, but can someone define "General Intelligence" for me?
"Practically speaking, the best way to become smarter is to learn a lot of stuff and cultivate a lot of skills. Since knowledge and skills are more specific than general intelligence, that may be less than we desire, but it still matters a lot."
Would "learning a lot of stuff and cultivating a lot of skills" not boost your general intelligence?
> Maybe I am not smart enough for this, but can someone define "General Intelligence" for me?
I think about this a lot and frankly don't have a good answer, but my current definition is something like "the speed and the depth at which someone can synthesize and comprehend new ideas."
It's by no means perfect, but when I observe people around me that just "seem smart" to me, the above statement is generally true.
The thing that gets me about the author's statements is the assertion that things things are 100% true.
If you said that these things are generally true, but have exceptions to these rules, then I would be more likely to agree. But I detest the kind of absolute-ist, black-and -white thinking represented here.
For instance, while physics is really good at making practical predictions about the physical reality of things we can observe, it mostly fails to describe why things behave as they do. It keeps trying to describe the underlying reality of the universe, but it's likely that the true nature of it is so much stranger than we can imagine right now.
Or that calories in vs calories out is the only possible cause of obesity. I agree that for probably 99.9% of people this is true, but to say that it's impossible that hormonal imbalance or other biological causes are not possible is just plain stupid. I know that lots of people think they are exceptions who probably aren't, but some of them actually do have more complex issues at play.
While your statement is probably correct, I've not known anyone who talks about CICO as anything other than "diet and exercise". This is why the absolute statement is a problem, it narrows they way most people think about these things. It becomes a substitute for nuanced explanations.
Even with huge confounding factors, tracking and controlling ci, correlates almost directly to co after such adjustments. Arguments that cico isnt absolute are technically correct but pedantic and unhelpful. None of this addresses the problems of willpower and differince in stimulus humans experince, nor the psychology of overeating as a coping mechanism, both of which seem to underpin the epidemic rather than math.
Can someone comment on #5? I'm a total layman, so this may just be my ignorance, but isn't it refuting a strawman? It seems to be claiming that reducing intake of the same substance reduces weight gain, but I've never heard anyone claim otherwise. Rather, the questions seems to concern whether (a) calories from different foods are equivalent for weight gain/loss purposes, and (b) whether different people eating the same amount of the same food would absorb the same calories. For example, I can imagine it being the case that if I cut my intake by 10%, I will gain 10% less weight, but another person would gain only 2% less weight. It might even depend on how much we are currently consuming, meaning some people could have a much harder time than others. He doesn't seem to even address these at all, let alone refute them?
I agree with their take. I have lost a significant amount of weight and the mechanics was certainly calories in < calories out. What makes it difficult for obese people is that you need a sustained caloric deficit for a long period and your body makes it really difficult to do that.
I was successful using a high fat low carb (keto) diet only because the calories I ate from fat helped activate my satiety feelings better than other diets and that helped me control my caloric intake for 2 years. Other diets I had tried failed to trigger that satiety level and made them unsustainable.
But is anyone claiming otherwise? I’m not sure there is anyone on the face of the planet that will claim that a person will continue to be fat in perpetuity if they stop eating
I think the controversy around the opinion is twofold. Some people don’t believe that it’s difficult to lose weight because “all you need need to do is eat less” without realizing or understanding how hard it is. With the direct opposite controversial opinion being that some people believe that it’s much more than just CICO because of how hard it is to eat less to lose weight with long periods of little to no weight loss despite a caloric deficit.
I heard how easy it was for decades and generally it was from people who have never had a weight issue in their life. Frankly, they are clueless idiots. I also know from my own journey that your body definitely will fuck with you in some extraordinary ways that over the short term can make you suspicious that there is more to it than a calorie deficit. I went for 3 months with a definite calculable calorie deficit and lost nearly nothing. My body just decided to retain some fluid for a time and that threw off the scale. I powered through the frustration with the lack of progress and dropped double digits in a week and then weight loss gradually fell appropriately after whatever biological/metabolic box got ticked.
I've seen the argument being made that some people's bodies are highly resistant to attempts at weight loss.
Something along the lines of that if they try to go on a diet the body will fight the attempt to use stored fat so hard that they'll end up with low blood sugar and faint.
I don't recall the exact argument being made but I think that's the overall gist -- not that it's possible to somehow violate thermodynamics, but that for some people it may be near impossible in practice while remaining healthy/functional for weird internal biochemistry reasons.
“Efficient market hypothesis” is probably one of the most misleadingly named concept: this result has nothing do to with market “efficiency” (by any common meanings of this word). If market prices were purely random, then nobody could ever “beat the market” either, but a market that give purely random valuation to assets is the least efficient market possible: it means that price is just completely useless as an indicator of anything.
Other than this, this is just a collection of bad takes based on flawed understanding of topics (inheritable ≠ innate, GDP ≠ well being, etc.)
Some of those are definitely in the realm of "if you agree, it's often wiser not to say so".
People weren't amused at all when James Watson said that intelligence is heritable, and that like basically all other heritable attributes there is a difference between the average of different "races". [1]
Yep, that was the only "controversial" opinion in this piece. Oh, intelligence is heritable due to genetics? Certain genetic groups have more incidence of Sickle Cell Anemia? Let's put those together...
The problem is that once you say that something has a strong genetic component, two different genetic groups having the exact same distribution of that attribute would be really surprising.
But while we are fine with different genetic groups having different incidences for hair color, nose shapes or skin pigmentation, and are slowly coming to grips with different genetic groups having different incidences of various illnesses, and sometimes different reactions to them, the idea that different genetic groups could have statistically significant intelligence differences feels wrong.
It feels wrong, yes. But it's something that needs to be answered one way or another. One issue is that even conducting research into the question is anathema, so all we're going to do is argue about it based on a handful of pre-2000 studies with questionable methodologies.
The reason it's important to know, regardless of what the answer is, is that policy should be informed by reality. If we find that general intelligence is 80% genetic, or 40% genetic, or 0% genetic, this would have starkly different impacts on how we choose to educate our children, how we choose to recognize and/or compensate success, etc.
It is actively studied. There's a reason you're only ever seeing the questionable studies on message boards. What's being pursued in these conversations isn't science; it's something else.
> 4. The world around us is explained entirely by physics.
It is not the case that there is a model scaling from the sub-atomic to the universal level that offers complete predictive capability.
He says:
>The remaining controversies of physics, from string theory to supersymmetry, are primarily theoretical issues only relevant at extremely high energies.
Fair enough, but using the word "entirely" in the section heading is inappropriate.
None of these arguments are interesting. Some of them are done to death, like "efficient markets". Others are settled, like the VARK "learning style" model. I'm pretty sure "most people" don't have an opinion one way or the other about how much of the world the standard model explains. The effect of the whole piece is of engagement bait.
This is part of the genre of straw man clickbait. It works because people are so trapped in their filter bubbles they have no idea what the opposite side actually thinks anymore. "Republicans think housecats are aliens - here's why I disagree," no they don't.
> But pretty much every economic indicator is positive. Even the indicators that pessimistic pundits like to complain about are largely from areas where wages have been stagnant, or inequality has been rising rather than genuine decline.
I am going to take issue with this one; because as standards rise, the more unachievable they can become.
Example: 100 years ago, it wasn’t nearly as hard to buy a house. Sure, they might have had leaky roofs or lacked electricity or lacked indoor plumbing, but that was pretty normal. Your wife wasn’t going to lose her mind if you told her the outhouse was the only option.
Now here we are. Sure, our homes are way better - and more unaffordable for everyone. Just saying it’s better than it was - so stop being so pessimistic ignores how comparatively out of reach life feels.
It would be like if the only computer you could buy in 2027 was $8000, and had the equivalent of a RTX 7090 in it. “Stop whining - it’s so much better than they used to be” is not my complaint.
> because as standards rise, the more unachievable they can become
Why should "standards" be relevant in the measurement of long-term economic indicators? Doesn't the very stack that standards have risen prove the core point that life has gotten better?
To use the GP's example: if the median standard home has electricity, a minimum insulation R-value, a minimum grade of roof, minimum square footage, bathroom plumbing, land setbacks, etc, governments tend to align their habitability inspection requirements with those standards.
Let's say hypothetically that County X establishes the 2023 habitability requirements, and these requirements by market necessity cost a minimum of $120k for the dwelling and $120k for the land.
Let's say you're a single guy on minimum wage who is absolutely fine not having electricity, is ok with dealing with the occasional roof leak, and has no problem using a composting toilet. You want to buy a home, and you can absolutely afford it, but County X is preventing you from doing so because the standards have been set by people making more than minimum wage.
It means life has gotten better for those that can keep up and afford it. It also means life sucks more, and is far more hopeless and depressing, for people who can’t.
I really hate this "markets are efficient" bullshit. The markets are too slow because they don't incorporate the true cost of stuff. The environment is going to shit and by the time the markets have incorporated that cost, it is too late.
Markets are efficient in the sense that you can't personally make money by trading stocks, not in the sense that the economy is optimal for society as a whole. Pollution is the classic example of a negative externality that harms society by offloading part of the cost of individual behavior to others. But you can't personally make money by exploiting the societal inefficiency of pollution. (In game theory terms, not every Nash equilibrium is a Pareto optimum.)
> The environment is going to shit and by the time the markets have incorporated that cost, it is too late.
I'm not sure that measuring externalities like that are what markets are for.
In the context of this post, for example, the author seems to be casting a pretty narrow net here, and talking about whether market prices are accurate measures of what other people are willing to pay for a thing.
To speak of markets as serving society poorly by not incorporating environmental impacts is to speak of other than what he is talking about when he says "markets are rational".
There would seem to be a gap in the market for indices of climate-linked prices, then people could discover trends, and perhaps trade on their perceptions of mis-pricing.
I feel like most people agree with these opinions. I personally happen to disagree with at least 3 and 4. I either agree or am agnostic and/or ambivalent about the others.
Frankly, I'm shocked you made it to page 1 of HN with your second point. Be prepared for the armies of trolls who are going to harass you over that one, never mind the repeated finding that the r² between lifetime odds of being in a car accident and IQ (as a proxy for g) exceeds 0.8, along with other strong statistical correlation between IQ and lifespan, lifetime income, being nominated for a nobel prize, winning a nobel prize, and that's still just scratching the surface.
In fact, if you add up all correlations, adjusted for strength, existing research suggests there is no other single data point (age, race, gender, sex, religion, country of birth, parent(s) SES, parent(s) educational attainment, disability, BMI, standardized test scores, etc) that predicts as much, as powerfully as IQ (again, as a proxy for g) does.
I am not taking a position for or against these findings, and it's fair to note that all of these findings occur within the broader paradigm of the replication crisis, affecting even the most prolific studies oft cited for some of the most widespread beliefs held by the scientific community, which more or less weakens the "signal to noise ratio" of the scientific community's consensus, so take those studies I've mentioned with as much a grain of salt as any other.
For anyone downvoting this comment, could I please ask why, or at least whether for ideological reasons (i.e. you disagree with the ideas I am discussing) or form (i.e. tone is wrong, appears disingenuous, etc). I respect your right to do so, but I intentionally attempted to maintain an inoffensive, neutral, unbiased stance here. As a non-neurotypical person, common perception can be difficult for me to absorb without explicit feedback, so any feedback is appreciated.
Studies suggest that your IQ can be used to make strong predictions about your lifetime odds of getting into a car accident, but that doesn't flow backwards - you cannot use someone's occurrence or nonoccurrence of being in a car accident to make a reasonably strong prediction about their intelligence, because their intelligence isn't the only thing affecting their lifetime likelihood of being in a car accident.
