I can't speak for the GCTA method, but the five main findings discussed in the review have all been known within the field for years: this is a review, rather than a research article.
If these findings are surprising to you, it is because there is probably no greater gap between lay and expert opinion than on the subject of intelligence. The psychological study of intelligence has a poor reputation among the lay public primarily due to the perception that it might support unsavory political conclusions. Hence, psychometric research must be intrinsically flawed crackpottery. In truth, the correlations between IQ and various life outcomes exceed practically any other effect observed in social science. Further, we have as much reason as we ever could have in social science--from a variety of sources all pointing in the same direction--to suspect that the causal arrow points from intelligence to good outcomes.
I encourage you to look into the issue for yourself, but my synopsis is that the picture one gets from the literature is unrecognizably different from the picture one gets from non-specialist media.
"As economies develop, one language often comes to dominate a nation’s political and educational spheres. People are forced to adopt the dominant language or risked being left out in the cold – economically and politically."
Another way of putting that would be:
"People learn foreign languages so they can communicate with a greater number of people", which does not have quite the same potential for moral panic as the original.
The paper still appears to be embargoed, but the authors have not made much of a case for why linguistic diversity per se is important. Not nearly enough to support their moral claim that states should take efforts to encourage people to speak languages that they themselves have decided not to speak.
I don't understand how this constitutes an explanation:
"Why don't restauranteurs maximize their profits? They're leaving money on the table," said Alice.
"They don't maximize their profits because, if they did, they wouldn't be running a restaurant in the first place. The fact that so many of them end up destitute is proof of that," replied Bob.
That seems to me more like a reaffirmation than an explanation. Doesn't it still seem mysterious when you put it that way?
If the market for restaurants were far from competitive (due to say, a law sharply limiting the number of restaurants in a town) I could understand that sort of attitude. It seems to me, though, that even though there's a lot of product differentiation, there are still many restaurants per cuisine type in every major city and ultimately, a meal is a meal. We should be able to learn something by granting that the market is competitive. So that in the long run marginal revenue equals marginal cost, and firms that can't do that, exit.
Given that, why are so many restaurants run as labors of love according to principles that would make a freshman econ major wince? And does that explain why so many restaurants that are run that way are run into the ground? Doesn't this state of affairs (which is pretty much public knowledge to anyone who's ever had a friend who worked in a restaurant) imply the existence of a large stack of $20 bills on the sidewalk for a profit-maximizing restaurant to swoop in and pick up?
That question isn't rhetorical; I find restaurant economics genuinely confusing, to the point where I am willing to believe that the most parsimonious explanation involves legions of chef/owners irrationally blowing their credit ratings on a mid-life crisis. A mid-life crisis with waitstaff and sanitation permits.
Monogamy should decrease sibling-sibling genetic conflict, relative to polygamy, since you can expect to be more closely related to your siblings on average. Even in ideally monogamous species, though, there is still genetic conflict between siblings, and between parents and children. Even though kin selection can drive these relationships toward cooperation, there still exists an opportunity for conflict whenever a behavior would benefit you more than twice what it would cost your sibling. The tension is heightened for parent-offspring relationships, since the expected reproductive potential of the parent is even lower from the offspring's genes' point of view. In the cases where this doesn't hold, such as in _Hymenoptera_ where females share 3/4 of their variation with their sisters through a quirk of genetics, eusociality tends to evolve and you get as conflict-free a family as you could imagine. A hive. That's what the absence of parent-offspring conflict looks like.
Even during fetal development, in which both parties have a strong interest in the survival of the other, there is a range of conditions that would be acceptable (i.e. better than nothing) to both parties. You should still expect replicating gene machines in such a scenario to claw over the surplus: the mother seeking to distribute her resources
among all her offspring in a way that maximizes her fitness, and the fetus to maximize its own.
Monogamy should decrease sibling-sibling genetic conflict, relative to polygamy, since you can expect to be more closely realted to your siblings on average. Even in ideally monogamous species, though, there is still genetic conflict between siblings, and between parents and children. Even though kin selection can drive these relationships toward cooperation, there still exists an opportunity for conflict whenever a behavior would benefit you more than twice what it would cost your sibling. The tensioned is heightened for parent-offspring relationships, since the expected reproductive potential of the parent is even lower from the offspring's genes' point of view. In the cases where this doesn't hold, such as in _Hymenoptera_ where workers share 3/4 of their variation with their sisters through a quirk of genetics, eusociality tends to evolve and you get as conflict-free a family as you could imagine. A hive. That's what the absence of parent-offspring conflict looks like.
Even during fetal development, in which both parties have a strong interest in the survival of the other, there is a range of conditions that would be acceptable (i.e. better than nothing) to both parties. You should still expect replicating gene machines in such a scenario to claw over the surplus: the mother seeking to distribute her resources
among all her offspring in a way that maximizes her fitness, and the fetus to maximize its own.
Paleolithic culture is a genuinely mixed bag. Not as bad as almost everyone thinks, but worse than the rest think. I would put 1850 as my over-under for the year that neolithic culture provided an improvement in average quality of life. The problem with being a foraging people is that farming peoples can push you off the nicer land, as the article corroborates. Over millenia, foraging probably got to be a worse deal.
It is far from clear, though, that living as a hunter gatherer isn't fun. Reports from the 18th and 19th centuries mention the scandal that when white farmers were captured by indigenous tribes, they hardly ever wanted to go back. Foraging beat farming in terms of qalys, it seemed.
Studies of the ǃKung San, who were recently hunter-gatherers living in a rather marginal environment, showed that they could get by doing far less work than farmers. The work they did do was strenuous. For example, they practiced persistence hunting. However, on average they had a lot more leisure time. Being a hunter-gatherer was probably an even sweeter deal before farmers and ranchers gobbled up all the prime real estate.
Interestingly enough, the recent history of the !Kung shows that settling down and joining the rest of civilization does not always benefit the fairer sex. !Kung society was much less sexist before contact than it is now, as the surrounding peoples they are now in contact with are not exactly the most egalitarian. Most archaeologists consider egalitarian social structure to be typical of hunter-gatherer societies, with rigid hierarchical structure being an innovation resulting from settlement. Consider the concept of being "rich" for example. In a nomadic pastoral culture, wealth might be owning a big herd. In a sedentary culture, wealth might take the form of housing or accumulated items. A hunter-gatherer does not own animals and has to carry everything he/she owns around. A hunter-gather's abilities are his/her wealth.
There are plenty of "civilized" places on Earth today where being poor is basically hell. There's ceaseless toil, no power or freedom, pollution, violence, poor nutrition, and no real access to the wonders of modern medicine that most of us are aghast at the thought of doing without. I'd far rather be among today's last few hunter-gatherer tribes than an immigrant worker in UAE or Qatar.
This basically tells us that land ownership and control is the critical ingredient against egalitarianism. The structure of the society is built around preserving land ownership; suddenly because family membership and inheritance grants you access to land it becomes a point of contention, and control is imposed on women to maintain that boundary.
I remember reading that and reeling, shocked that anyone could write and sign their name to that. Whenever I am pessimistic about my chances in science, I remember that that guy has a job at Harvard.
The Markov property does not require dependence on the previous state-- it requires that the distribution of the next state given the history of the chain be the distribution of the next state given the current state. The lottery trivially satisfies this property since tomorrow's winner doesn't depend on today's winner at all.
This is correct. Sadly, the first paragraph of the article contains some glaring errors.
"For Markov chains to be effective the current state has to be dependent on the previous state in some way;"
This is trivially untrue. A sequence of independently and identically distributed (iid) random variables is a Markov chain. An iid sequence is clearly effective at many things (e.g. Monte Carlo integration).
"Not every process has the Markov Property, such as the Lottery, this weeks winning numbers have no dependence to the previous weeks winning numbers." As lambdaphage pointed out, the Lottery does have the Markov property.
I'm interested in the above article and the above two comments, however, I don't understand the Lottery example. Can you clarify how it does have the Markov property?
I'm not seeing how the distribution of possible winning numbers relates at all to the current state. I'm trying to phrase this in the language of the above two comments. Help me out if I've got it all wrong. =)
The Markov property is that you can model the system as being dependent on the immediately previous state + noise.
The lottery ignores the previous state and is defined purely by the noise, so it is a (trivial) markov process.
More complex systems depend on the entire history (e.g. to model a poker player you have to consider all of their actions up to the current). Newtonian systems are markov, if you know the state of the system you can run it forward in time deterministically. Even if your knowledge of the state of the Newtonian system is not fully known, you can still run the distribution of states forward in time precisely.
current_state = previous_state + process_noise
typically expressed in matrix math but the idea is as simple as that.
If these findings are surprising to you, it is because there is probably no greater gap between lay and expert opinion than on the subject of intelligence. The psychological study of intelligence has a poor reputation among the lay public primarily due to the perception that it might support unsavory political conclusions. Hence, psychometric research must be intrinsically flawed crackpottery. In truth, the correlations between IQ and various life outcomes exceed practically any other effect observed in social science. Further, we have as much reason as we ever could have in social science--from a variety of sources all pointing in the same direction--to suspect that the causal arrow points from intelligence to good outcomes.
I encourage you to look into the issue for yourself, but my synopsis is that the picture one gets from the literature is unrecognizably different from the picture one gets from non-specialist media.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_Science_on_Intellige...