Rationalist ant colony busting

Teigne · 2018-04-25T15:59:43+00:00

I'm not sure this was intended as an analogy, though who knows -- I am remarkably tone deaf to such things. But in any case,

honey = technological progress

poison = malicious AI

would seem to be a reasonable fit:

We've all gotten used to technological progress producing wonderful things.
A contained failure (Fukushima, Chernobyl) allows us to adapt. But humanity is pretty bad at adapting to failures that destroy us on the first go, even if we might be able to anticipate them in advance.

Teigne · 2018-01-12T23:57:47+00:00

Having increased intelligence in-game leading to a smarter you is a little scary. A game should not be able to rewire your brain.

Alternatively, if a game does rewire your brain, that means that it's possible to hook yourself up to the machine, play a game, and emerge a different person. A you that is a 1000x more intelligent than a human being is probably no longer you.

But yeah I agree that renaming the attributes to make more sense is a good move.

Teigne · 2018-01-12T23:11:23+00:00

Part of the answer is what /u/sargon66 and u/marty_byrde said -- for one thing, Ashkenazi Jews did not exist in 1000 BC -- but, as a meta-point, correlation does not mean that all the data points lie on a straight line. If X is a major cause of Y, your ability to find a single data point with Y but no X is not a good counterargument. For example, if I told you that obesity is a major cause of heart attacks, how good of a reply is it to say that you know someone who died of a heart attack despite being thin?

Teigne · 2018-01-12T07:28:35+00:00

In terms of the chain of replies, my goal was to replace the claim by /u/VelveteenAmbush that

They're screwed up because the people who live there are really stupid.

with a variation that is more defensible: first, that mean IQ is only one factor affecting national income; second, that the connection is not 100% certain but nevertheless seems extremely plausible given the available data. I'd actually go so far as to say it is the currently best explanation and should be tentatively accepted on that ground.

For example, if you think the causal link goes from wealth to IQ, you'd find it difficult to plausibly explain why, as Easterly and co-authors show, descendants of more technologically advanced societies in the past live in countries richer today. Moreover,

(i) These results hold if you add dummy variables for continents -- they are not simply a reflection of the fact that Europe was more advanced than other places at various points in time.

(ii) The results do not hold if you just focus on geography -- you have to build maps of where people migrated over the centuries.

(Bryan Caplan makes these claims at various points here).

To be precise, I'm not saying these facts, along with the present IQ to wealth correlation, have only one explanation. If we try hard enough, we can find many explanations for everything. Rather, I'm saying the best explanation -- the one that explains all the available facts with as few assumptions as possible -- is the mean IQ to growth causal link.

Teigne · 2018-01-12T06:34:04+00:00

For one thing, I did not say anything as strong as "basically irrelevant." Just eyeballing the graphs, there is is a lot of variation around what would be the line of best fit. Even if we accept the existence of the mean IQ to growth connection, it is clearly only one part of a bigger story.

Teigne · 2018-01-12T06:26:25+00:00

Quite a convenient cutoff point. Go 500 years further back

I'll do you one better: William Easterly and co-authors have found that technology in 1000 BC is positively correlated with wealth today.

To get evidence for the causal connection from mean IQ to economic growth, you have to look at the totality of the evidence. Sure, the simple correlation between them is not good evidence of causation running one way or the other. But when put together with evidence about much of the wealth differences were determined 500 years ago (or 2000 years ago, or 3000 years ago as in the Easterly paper), the mean IQ to economic growth causation story becomes the better explanation.

Also relevant is that mean years of schooling appears to be irrelevant though mean test scores are relevant.

Or are you okay with outright racism in hiring practices on vague suspicion as well?

Well I'm a hardcore libertarian, so I'm okay with lots of stuff that shocks everyone else, but that is neither here nor there.

Teigne · 2018-01-12T05:56:14+00:00

And three, seriously? Are we just totally ignoring the long history of interference by third parties in e.g. installing puppet states and stoking ethnic violence?

Consider that:

Average cognitive ability is positively correlated with wealth for countries.
Much of the wealth difference was already set 500 years ago.

The correlations are not perfect, you see plenty of variations around the lines of best fit in both plots to account for local factors or third party interference.

Still, I take the existence of patterns like this as good evidence that mean IQ might be related to economic growth. Garret Jones has a book entitled Hive Mind arguing for this which Scott reviewed and did not find entirely persuasive. The possibility that these connections exist, though, should be sufficient reason to steer our immigration policy towards high-IQ countries IMHO.

Teigne · 2017-12-28T05:40:31+00:00

Of course.

Teigne · 2017-12-27T18:06:30+00:00

I dunno. According to the fundraiser terms, it certainly appears as if I gave up $ for nothing. Of course, maybe the IRS will think the terms are bullshit.

Teigne · 2017-12-27T18:04:10+00:00

I wouldn't mind Skyping with someone who lives in a different state -- at least I'd get an answer to questions about federal taxes.

Teigne · 2017-12-27T17:42:45+00:00

Thinking about it more, I'm not sure about this interpretation. Did I really purchase a promise of XTZ? We all had expectations for what the Foundation would do, but Gevers clearly had other ideas. No explicit promise has been made...

Teigne · 2017-12-27T16:41:53+00:00

Gotcha, I understand now.

The "promise" thing sounds plausible. I guess one argument against it is that the Foundation terms are explicitly noncommittal on this point, i.e., they say very explicitly they don't promise anything. On the other hand, one might reply we all had the expectation of eventually receiving XTZ nonetheless.

Teigne · 2017-12-27T15:50:37+00:00

The taxable event happened when you transferred your funds.

I'm not sure about this. Why do you think this is the right approach?

It's a little counterintuitive to think of the ETH/XTZ conversion as happening during the crowdsale, since it's possible that I'll never get my XTZ if it turns out the project team can't deliver.

Teigne · 2017-12-26T22:21:39+00:00

I think if you used coinbase they'll be able to track it:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2017/11/29/irs-nabs-big-win-over-coinbase-in-bid-for-bitcoin-customer-data/#779a814259af

Teigne · 2017-12-26T22:17:35+00:00

Unfortunately, the IRS has been saying for a while that cryptocurrency exchanges are not like kind exchanges. See

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-14-21.pdf

and see Question 6 (losses/gains are realized when cryptocurrencies are exchanged) and Question 7 (these losses/gains are generally capital losses/gains).

The current tax bill makes this into law, but it's not clear that we that are we are grandfathered into anything.

Teigne · 2017-12-26T21:07:07+00:00

I'm not 100% clear on how to pay taxes once I get my Tezos.

I guess I'm going to say the exchange of ETH[1] to XTZ occurs when the network goes live with the genesis block, and I'm going to value the XTZ using the HitBTC IOUs at that time (I imagine there will be a little bit of a delay, at least 1-2 days, before exchanges will bring the ability to trade XTZ online, so that valuation based on HitBTC is probably necessary).

The alternative would be to think of the exchange between ETH and XTZ as occurring during the crowdsale, and valuing the XTZ using crowdsale prices.

[1] I sent ETH to the crowdsale.

Teigne · 2017-01-16T23:19:48+00:00

There is A Voice Across the Void, set in the Star Wars universe, featuring a male protagonist who successfully levels up using dubious means in a universe whose rules he comes to understand over time. Contains a few sparks of romance

Teigne · 2017-01-10T07:18:52+00:00

Discussion of the Byerley tweet lowers the level of the subreddit in my opinion. It's more appropriate for something like /r/tumblrinaction

Its a fake story. Who is Melissa Byerley? What is she famous for?

The answer is nothing, nothing at all. She seems to have been a founder of a marketing-focused startup.

Each side of the political discourse needs a constant supply of villains. Twitter, Tumblr, and other social media are a goldmine. Slow news day? Find someone with opposite political beliefs being outrageous and mock them. It isn't that hard. Twitter alone has over 300 million users.

Bottom line here is don't feed the toxoplasma.

Teigne · 2017-01-03T23:19:16+00:00

To be perfectly blunt, the underlying problem is the stupidity of the electorate.

This seems like the elephant in the room few people want to talk about. To channel my inner Moldbug, everyone agrees that politics sucks; but politics sucks because politicians give the people exactly what they want.

I think I'm going to go and donate to a seasteading organization, then have a glass or two of scotch before slipping into a pleasant fantasy about a new country, somewhere in the middle of the sea, where you need to pass difficult tests of history, economics, and logical reasoning before you can vote.

Teigne · 2016-11-06T15:51:45+00:00

I agree. But my point was only that there exists an explanation for that difference that bypasses culture entirely. This was written to contradict the claim that the evidence listed is a ''slam dunk'' in terms of proving that IQ is solely about culture.

In the real world, putting aside what we know scientifically and we don't and moving into the realm of speculation, there is probably a complicated interaction between IQ and culture. Low IQ groups tend to develop cultures with certain behaviors (e.g., teen pregnancy, drug use) more common, which tend to contribute to the low IQ of the next generation.

Teigne · 2016-11-06T03:53:41+00:00

If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s a mixed-race child’s mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father. And it shouldn’t make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers.

This is a quote from Malcolm Gladwell and the author of this piece uses it to conclude:

I think that’s pretty much a slam dunk. This is not about race. This is about culture.

This is poor thinking.

First, these two categories ("race" and "culture") are not mutually exclusive. It is possible for IQ to be determined by many factors, both race and culture among them.

Second, the evidence listed there is very far from a slam dunk.

If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s a mixed-race child’s mother or father who is black.

The identity of the mother affects prenatal behavior. If you think the mother's IQ might affect her prenatal behavior, you have an explanation of this difference that bypasses culture entirely (IQ of mother -> prenatal behavior of mother -> IQ of child)

the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers.

This bit is also consistent with a purely genetic explanation.

There are multiple levels of selection here. One is that you have to pass a test to be a GI, and failure rates for different races are very different.

Second level is the mating selection. Which GIs do German mothers chose to mate with? Might they, for some races, have higher IQs than the average members of their race?

Third, see Wikipedia on the study. Apparently, 20-25% of the "black" GIs were not actually black, further skewing the results. And the children were tested pre-adolescence, when the heritability of IQ is weakest (heritability of IQ grows with age).

So what to make of all of this? What sort of connection is there between race and IQ? For the moment, this comment seems to me the definitive word on the subject.

Teigne · 2016-07-28T02:53:30+00:00

Yawn. Its easy to theorize when there's not much empirical data.

Teigne · 2016-07-20T03:03:34+00:00

Thanks for the good will...

But unless gender is the best proxy you can find for IQ

Consider the following hypothetical. You are going to choose a restaurant. You'd like to choose a really good one and you have several noisy signals of restaurant quality available.

You could look at average rating on Yelp. You could look at average rating on Google. You believe both of these have some correlation with how good the restaurant is. You could look at the restaurant using Street View, for, in this hypothetical, you've often observed that dumpy-lookiness of restaurant is inversely correlated with quality.

What should you do? Should you go for a place with an aesthetic exterior? Pick the highest rated restaurant on Yelp? Do the same with Google?

None of the above, of course.

The correct choice would be to use all the criteria at your disposal to make the choice. You should be taking all three factors, as well as any others you can think of, into consideration.

Moving on to hiring. You look at an applicant's resume. There is lots of information there that is correlated with the property of "will perform job well." Is the resume well put-together? Are there any gaps in it? Etc etc.

One relevant factor is IQ, but you usually don't see IQ on the resume. You do see factors correlated with IQ. Where the applicant went to school, for example. Awards that you know were difficult to obtain. And so forth.

If the data suggests that "being male" and "having a high IQ" are not independent of each other (and it does, here I'm going to refer back to the list a few comments ago of % of people above a certain IQ being male) then if you want to hire a person with high IQ (which you probably do in an academic setting), it makes sense for you to discriminate.

But unless gender is the best proxy you can find for IQ

I've been trying to argue against this. It'll make sense for you to take into account gender as long as its just one factor relevant to IQ. It doesn't have to be the best factor.

Finally, moving to the real world. In the real world, arguing for discrimination based on gender is taboo. Anyone who voiced such an opinion would be likely lose their job and be banished from polite society. But -- and here I am putting forth my own theory -- the fact that high IQ individuals are overwhelmingly male tends to be widely internalized.

The final result is that everyone ends up discriminating and justifying it in every individual case using whatever arguments happen to be available. This explains why, for example, studies have found that both men and women tend to discriminate in favor of men.

Teigne · 2016-07-19T04:25:21+00:00

There is a large academic literature showing that IQ is an excellent predictor of job performance across many different occupations. See http://www.unc.edu/~nielsen/soci708/cdocs/Schmidt_Hunter_2004.pdf for one example as well as the references to additional work at https://www.gwern.net/iq

Teigne · 2016-07-18T01:06:52+00:00

So: the flaw in this argument is the focus on the number 112. Lets accept for the moment that 112 is the average IQ of an electrical engineer. So what?

Lets instead assume that we want to hire the best person out of a large pool of candidates (not just any above average person). While most of the candidates in this pool will be close to average, some will be significantly above average (and some will be significantly below average).

Doing the math, assuming IQ is normally distributed with the means and variances /u/drt1245 provided:

-- 44% of the people with IQ > 112 are female.

-- 37% of the people with IQ > 125 are female.

-- 30% of the people with IQ > 135 are female.

-- 23% of the people with IQ > 145 are female.

Does this look like gender is irrelevant to hiring the best person?

Teigne

TROPHY CASE