If I accept that technical difficulty and infeasibility is no defense, then I want that standard applied to lawyers as well.
Overly litigious firms causing rising legal costs across industries? I don't care if it's hard to solve, the onus for fixing it is on the firms, they figure it out or face penalties. Perhaps in the interests of helping the disenfranchised we could institute something like what real estate has, where banks are required to sell a quota of mortgages in certain areas regardless of the financial viability. Lawyers could be forced to seek out clients they would ordinarily never entertain due to the risk of loss. If would stink for them, but what do I care? That's their problem.
This is kind of an interesting cultural difference between Europe/America and China. While we talk about universal rights, they talk about universal duties, and this only sometimes converges on the same values.
For example:
Both the West and China believe that old people deserve care in their old age. The West would justify this by saying that the elderly have fundamental human rights, which would be neglected without care. Chinese would justify this by saying that the young have a duty of care to the old.
Both the West and China (at least superficially) believe that rulers should treat their subjects with respect. In the West, this is because each subject has human rights. In China, this is because the ruler has a duty to treat their subjects respectfully.
So I would not make the mistake of thinking that the Chinese are somehow amoral because they do not subscribe to the doctrine of human rights. It must honestly seem to them like a Western concept that clashes with their view of morality (or at least it would if I were in their shoes). But the Chinese government must have a set of duties to their people. I would love to read a document where they outline those, I'm sure it must exist somewhere.
There is haggling to be done on the specific words though; I'm going to dispute that care of the elderly is tied to the Western conception of rights. The Western concept, particularly in places like France and the Anglosphere, is tied freedom of action and from interference that came about when the monarchies were de-toothed. A good classic benchmark of what rights look like, the US Bill of Rights, only guaranteed a level of protection from government and law enforcement as opposed to saying that people deserved some standard of comfort or whatever.
Care of the elderly is a recognition of the fundamental importance of individual dignity and the value of character. This is an inherent quality of individuality, as opposed to a right which is somewhat granted by an external entity [^]. Claiming people have a 'right' to someone else taking a positive action on their behalf isn't a universal Western value, or if it is it is reasonably modern. The idea is old, but historically it probably had a different name (likely tied in with religious community, for example).
[^] You can be denied your rights, but you can't be denied the fact that you are in individual with dignity and importance.
> ...the US Bill of Rights, only guaranteed a level of protection from government and law enforcement as opposed to saying that people deserved some standard of comfort or whatever.
A right implies a duty on others. A duty implies a right of the person you have to the duty to.
The duty formulation is good because it makes clear the cost of the right - it's like avoiding the passive voice in writing (compare 'everyone has the right to food' with 'those with food have a duty to feed those without' - the first is meaningless without the second). The rights formulation emphasizes that the reason for the duty resides in the person to whom the duty is owed, not the person who must perform the duty, and even if the performer changes, the duty will remain.
Elsewhere in the thread, the point is made that the prevalence of right formulations in western society mainly came about as western society went through successive limitings of the power of monarch and government, and the rights of the people against all governments present and into the future were enumerated. I don't know if this is true, but it seems plausible. It also provides a possible explanation for why authoritarian regimes might prefer a duty based view, and would certainly try to avoid accepting a philosophy that limited their power over their people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven. The idea hasn't changed much in two thousand years: the ruler that rules well is the ruler that deserves to govern. If the ruler rules badly enough, they'll be overthrown.
The "Duty" vs "Right" thing is ancient. You can see the earliest form of this "duties" concept underpinning the all the abrahamic religions, even in all salvation-oriented religions. You have a duty ultimately to the "godhead", from which all other duties derive.
The concept of universal rights was the refinement of this and only fully emerged during the enlightenment era in Europe. But it was there in a less explicit, more rudimentary form in classical Greece, too.
It's a choice, really. What kind of world do you want to live in? A world where we recognize basic human rights as x-y-z (from which we can determine what duties we have toward each other, for sure) Or a world that we left behind for very good reasons.
For example a Buddhist might argue that the fundamental concept is realizing that there is no difference between the concept of you, and myself, that we are all one thing, and from this determine that one should not inflict suffering on other sentient beings.
True. I do like aspects of the "duties > rights" mindset, though - it becomes clear that the person with a duty is responsible for the whole job, and not just the parts that line up with specific rights.
For example, in the U.S. there's a culture that if a government is not infringing on the rights of its citizens, it has done enough. For example, the secretary of state that runs my DMV does a good job of respecting the human rights of the disabled, and a good job of respecting the human rights of their employees, but I don't get the feeling they feel compelled to provide good service.
If they had a duty to be the best administrator of a DMV around, they would need to be focused on accessibility, their employees, and the level of service provided to their customers. An administrator who did not focus on providing great service could be chastised for that in a way I don't see happening (in my state, at least).
Duties precede rights. In the African savannah of 50,000 years ago, our obligations to each other saved us from extinction. As hunter gatherers in tiny bands of ten people, we had to do everything as one. There was only “we”, no “I”, unless you were the leader. You either went with the group or died.
I really, really wish people took bad methodology criticisms more seriously. I have a degree in the social sciences, and if there is one thing that completely defines the field right now it is that you can't use their findings for absolutely anything.
A good portion of studies don't replicate, including fundamental ones (in particular see the failed replication here [1] on one on Rand et al, a study on the effects of priming). Priming is a huge topic in social psychology.
He understands statistics. I'm not sure his opponents properly understand that when you complain about methodology, the implications are not just "add a section in the paper acknowledging the potential for error", it's "your whole study might be fatally flawed in a way that invalidates all your conclusions".
There is a big body of literature on priming. Each study is generally done to get a p-value < 0.05. In a sense, there are a bunch of replications of the effect itself. That points to priming as an effect large enough to matter.
There is another viewpoint, where priming is not an effect large enough to matter. (This is the viewpoint I hold.) The arguments for this viewpoint are that the original study does not replicate - the 2018 replication attempt I linked used a ~300% larger sample size (1014/343), but achieved a p-value of 0.366 and had an effect size 80% smaller than the original. A second argument is that priming is not used in industry, though the effect would be useful in fields like advertising or military psyops. A third argument is that there is a widespread suspicion in the field that psychology researchers are p-hacking to get spurious results.
A whole subfield exists on an effect that showed an 80% reduction in effect size with a 300% larger sample size and a 4000% increase in p-value on a direct replication. And my focus on this study ignores the fact that the group of replications turned up 9 failures in 21 replications pulled exclusively from studies picked from Nature and Science.
If psychology can botch the literature on priming this badly, what else have they botched?
Two experiments getting a large variance in p-value for the same hypothesis says that (a least) one is either done wrong or an extreme statistical outlier in the space of potential tests of the hypothesis, but it doesn't tell you which is wrong. And the effect of sample size is already reflected in p-value, it doesn't tell you which of two studies with apparently inconsistent p-values is more likely to be the error or extreme outlier. To do that you either need specific evidence of error or more studies which provide at least probabilistic evidence of which study is an outlier.
How does that justify making factually wrong claims like "There is no correlation IQ/Income above 45K"?
Is that claim true somehow? It certainly looks wrong, looking at the scatter plot (even setting aside whether a linear regression is appropriate). Are scatter plots 'bad methodology' somehow?
(BTW the comparison of IQ to priming is ridiculous. IQ is the most replicated and reliable measure in all of psychometrics.)
> IQ is the most replicated and reliable measure in all of psychometrics
This is not a high barrier to pass. Psychometrics is a field notorious for employing biased and non-existing constructs.
Just because it is well studied, doesn’t make it real. N-rays were at one point one of the most studied rays in physics. It didn’t make measurements using n-rays more reliable. If everyone is repeating the same mistake, it doesn’t erase the mistake.
You know the history of IQ and how countless studies in the past are biased in horrendous ways. It might be well replicated and "reliable", it is still wrong.
If it's not such a high barrier to pass then maybe you can make your arguments without appealing to the most easily knocked down nonsense (social priming).
If you want to argue that IQ is "wrong" you need to explain https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8162884 and every other result that has been published relating to it, not just make vague insinuations that IQ is just like social priming (it's not).
Again (this has been stated several times in this thread). Intelligence tests are useful to detect and diagnose mental disabilities. What we (and Taleb) are questioning is the usefulness of above average IQs.
I don’t know why you are all of a sudden talking about social priming (I’ve never seen it pop up before in this thread), especially since priming is a concept from physio-psychology and computation psychology (that has apparently been borrowed by social psychologists) not psychometrics. I’m not even sure what you mean by social priming (I did a quick browse on wikipedia without success) so you have to inform me.
If you are saying that my claim—that psychometrics is a field filled with pseudoscience—is unsubstantiated, you are right. I did (implicitly) claim that, and I didn’t provide any substantial evidence for my claim. I probably should have, but that is out of the scope of this thread, so I’ll just leave it unsubstantiated. Call me lazy, and you would be correct.
---
Edit: To clarify. Priming did come up in a grandparent’s comment. Priming (as my layman understanding goes) is believed to be a neurological effect that increases the efficiency of a search response for similar stimuli presented at short intervals. That is finding a particular pattern gets easier with subsequent trials. Priming effects have been demonstrated in numerous studies in the past two decades. However (as is usually the case in many scientific fields) a hype has arisen around the concept and many scientist are claiming that priming can explain several unrelated psychological constructs. Many of these studies have poor methodology and have never been replicated. Perhaps my parent comment was talking about one of these studies when they mentioned “social priming”.
Low level chronic lead exposure doesn't cause a "mental disability". What it does is cause permanent brain damage which subtracts a few IQ points, harming individuals with above average IQ scores just as it harms those with average and below average IQs.
Yes, social priming studies are what cljs-js-eval was referring to originally when they mentioned "priming". Priming itself is generally solid science (eg. the Stroop effect).
Another observation: as with any slushy area of science, peoples' willingness to apply skepticism and what they are willing to question tends to be determined by their politics and other biases.
Liberals are happy to question IQ and especially race/IQ work while conservatives are happy to question stuff like those gender blinded recruitment studies or those academic trolling studies that try to link conservative opinions with mental illness.
The reality is that all of it is very questionable because the entire field is riddled with shaky methodology and down right bad science. From what I've seen of the replication issues the whole field is worse than nutritional science, and that's bad.
The degree to which a scientific field is politically weaponized is usually inversely proportional to its "hardness." You don't see the same thing in math or physics. Liberals and conservatives oddly never disagree on the value of Pi or the formula for the Carnot efficiency of a heat engine. The closest things to hard science that you find massive political disagreements on are climate change and evolution, and I've noticed that more serious conservative thinkers are coming around on those topics because the evidence is overwhelming.
> The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat. Despite its name, the main result claimed by the bill is a method to square the circle, rather than to establish a certain value for the mathematical constant π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The bill, written by the crank Edward J. Goodwin, does imply various incorrect values of π, such as 3.2.[1] The bill never became law [...]
One of his repeated criticisms of analysis like this is using regression to fit datasets that don't necessarily follow a straight trend line.
His larger point with respect to IQ is that it only predicts substandard IQs. Measures like the variance are largely influenced by the effects of IQs below the average, not above the average.
A second point which I don't see addressed is that IQ measures share features with testing. If how you test in school affects future income, and testing well in school predicts testing well on IQ, then more robust analysis is needed. A sample space of people in a wide band of IQ ranges who all got about the same grades in school would be a true test of the predictive value of IQ on income.
There's an ongoing replication crisis in psychology that suggests that most of the findings in the field are fatally flawed [1][2][3].
In light of this, it's not really fair to say that tech cannot be inherently complex because psychology is more complex, and they somehow manage. The psychologists have, empirically, not managed very well.
Yeah, psychologists have managed worse than techies, because psychology have a more complex object to explore. They even cannot find a good methodology for 150+ years.
There is an alternative explanation: psychologists are less intelligent than techies, but I do not believe in that. There are a lot of tech people in psychology research.
There's also no output to psychology, so there's nothing to validate you. Especially because it doesn't matter if you get psychology wrong - who cares if you don't know how your mind works? It doesn't care, it's going to keep thinking.
But also, a psychology degree isn't used for becoming a "psychologist", right? That's either an academic or a kind of talk therapist. I think the people I know with that degree work in HR.
Yeah - I've seen and worked with (very talented!) people like Brad, and I feel for them. They're good at working with this presentational stuff, but it's never been necessary to learn that when they're creating an <input> they're secretly creating an HTMLInputElement. And then one day, they're expected to learn this framework that fits so nicely with the frontend because they try to emulate that hierarchy of objects on the frontend and deal with them in code.
It would be weird to go from a DSL and realize that to move forward you have to get good at general programming. I'm not sure that I would handle that transition very well.
You should check out CLJS's reagent. It mixes the best of both worlds, everything is a plain CLJS object without special syntax, but it's also obviously HTML/CSS:
> That looks really ugly IMHO, compared to JSX which is more HTML-like.
The point of this is not of asthetics, (IMO it’s not that ugly :-)) but more that it just consists of common data structures that is easy to manipulate. If you’re a React person, think of directly writing JSON instead of using indirect React.createElement calls.
Writing components in JSON would be impractical; (actually it might not be - I think I’ve seen blogposts using React without JSX) but writing components in cljs data structures are practical and less tooling is needed!
edit Oh I see. You don't need the extra {} to jump into JS mode. And, CLJS requires : to denote keys. I think as long as my editor colors the syntax appropriately I'm okay with either.
The difference is that in the cljs version you are writing clojure at all times using clojure data structures and types (vector, map, keyword, string) which lets you manipulate and generate things easily, and, you don't have to jump between "jsx" mode and "JS" mode.
This is a major reason why I've left JS behind for CLJS. Reagent code is really just data. It acts like data, you can treat it like data. Sure, it's all well and good to say "code is data and data is code," but in reality doesn't usually work that way quiet so simply. But it does work that way in Lisp.
Compare to alternatives like Om, where the code looks like, well, code. Except in reality it's just Lisp sequences instead of Lisp vectors, so you still get all the same abilities to treat code like data. I don't think I'll ever willingly go back to JS. Maybe Purescript once of these days, but never JS.
Additionally, re-frame is absolutely wonderful and I cannot believe I waited as long as I did to switch to CLJS considering how much I prefer re-frame (and reagent) it over Redux (and React). Writing JS for immutability feels like such a chore now (Immer helps), since that part already just works in Clojure.
Also the CLJS you see is using the vectors and hashmaps of the language, meaning much more direct manipulation the same way you'd program any other datastructure.
The :display is a keyword, which works like keywords in Ruby or Erlang; it's a special, never-garbage-collected string for when you use the same string over and over. Though I'm not sure whether the implementation is the same when compiling to Javascript instead of the JVM.
Overly litigious firms causing rising legal costs across industries? I don't care if it's hard to solve, the onus for fixing it is on the firms, they figure it out or face penalties. Perhaps in the interests of helping the disenfranchised we could institute something like what real estate has, where banks are required to sell a quota of mortgages in certain areas regardless of the financial viability. Lawyers could be forced to seek out clients they would ordinarily never entertain due to the risk of loss. If would stink for them, but what do I care? That's their problem.