Hedge fk-ed | Human Capital Enjoyer | There is no conservation of misery!

Joined July 2020
This, by @arctotherium42, is the best writing on the mass internet censorship of the 2010s I have ever seen. It is long but a must read. Thanks to @PirateWires for bringing it to my awareness. arctotherium.substack.com/p/…
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Replying to @charlesmurray
My experience of teaching is that when students are doing poorly, it's extremely difficult to tell whether (i) they have low IQ; (ii) they are missing prerequisites and would be great if they had them; (iii) they are spending all their energy on something else, like their startup idea. The second really stands out in the theory classes of the first year of the Econ PhD, where there's an insane range of performance, but a lot is explained by which students took 3 classes in real analysis and which ones came in not knowing that had anything to do with economics.
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For clarity, the reason the Black-White gap in D.C. (highlighted) is so extreme is that its Black students are a bit below average and the White students are the highest-performing Whites in the entire U.S. D.C. is also a 'state' where Whites strongly outperform Asians.
Washington DC has some of the largest cognitive inequality of any region. For academic achievement measured by Math and ELA scores, there is little overlap between groups.
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Here's some power-related qualification of this thread's conclusions🧵 Firstly, for well-funded and run, preregistered, independently-analyzed educational interventions that are funded because they're likely to work, the median effect was found to be very small, at d = 0.06.
This is the SEED school, a 100% Black public boarding school in DC. These disadvantaged students here enjoy a rigorous study schedule and a spending per student of 63000$ per year, comparable to some of the best schools in the country. So, how and what do they do? Thread🧵
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In 2022, Wainschtein et al. showed rare variants might explain the missing heritability of BMI and height. Less well-known, in the same year Jang et al. found the same to be true for smoking behaviors—no significant missing heritability for a behavioral phenotype!
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Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) is widely recognized as one of greatest mathematicians of all time, and the greatest of the 18th century. Other than the quality of his work, one thing that stands out is the sheer *quantity*. I will tell a few interesting facts, because it really is quite astounding. One of the funniest facts: at the time of his death, he had built up such a backlog of mathematical works that after he died, he published 228 papers (source: W. Dunham). He lost his sight in one eye in 1738. And later in his life, his other eye suffered too. By 1771, he was almost entirely blind. What is remarkable is that his productivity seems to not have suffered. In 1775, he produced a paper each week. In that sense, he is the Beethoven of mathematics. Beethoven produced music while deaf, Euler produced mathematics while blind. In total, he produced more than 25 books and treatises and 850 papers. From 1725 to 1783, his publications averaged 800 pages a year. Some have even estimated that Euler alone was responsible for more than a quarter of all mathematics in the 18th century. In 1908, a project was undertaken to combine his collected works, the "Opera Omnia Leonhard Euler". It took more than 100 years to complete, and it was made online in 2022. The result: 81 encyclopedia-sized volumes totaling over 30,000 pages. Finally, as far as I can tell, Euler has more mathematical concepts named after him than any other mathematician ("Euler formula", "Euler line", etc). Gauss is probably the second. If you go to MathWorld and search for "Euler", it gives more hits than even "Gauss".
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Does exercise improve cognition? Several randomized controlled trials seem to suggest the answer is "Yes!" But using active controls and correcting for baseline differences, the effect shrinks. After also accounting for publication bias, it becomes negligible.
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Turns out we do have have race-specific maps where the scaling is done within races. First up: Whites.
We've seen state-level IQs, but what about American IQs at the county level?
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Quite a bit of heterogeneity in the NLSY79 IQ/income correlations when looking at different groups and measures of income. E.g., among men, the correlation seems to rise with age & when income is log-transformed. Among women we basically see the exact opposite.
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Interesting new method to estimate rare variant heritability (RARity). It seems aggregating the variants can underestimate the RV h2 by up to 79%! "Using unaggregated variants, 27 traits had h2RV > 5%, with height having the highest h2RV at 21.9% (95% CI: 19.0-24.8%)." Pathan et al. Nat Comm nature.com/articles/s41467-0…
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RT @cremieuxrecueil: Many studies of the psychological consequences of scarcity have been published and they've received tons of citations…
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idk who needs to hear this but misery isnt intrinsically deep and happiness isnt intrinsically shallow
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Preview II: The Flynn effect in the Woodcock-Johnson tests is reduced when accounting for bias with a decent method, and generally reduced to a greater degree with an even better method.
Preview: I was able to replicate a certain result from the 2005 meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research very closely.
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Replying to @Noahpinion
I think this is missing what I'm saying. The Holocaust very likely caused PTSD. You can see this through the elevated rates of PTSD in select and nonselect samples of Holocaust survivors: xitter.cf/cremieuxrecueil/… For their kids, you get a completely ambiguous result: xitter.cf/cremieuxrecueil/… You can also see that subjective reports of trauma experiences have validity but objective ones do not in the absence of a subjective report: xitter.cf/cremieuxrecueil/… People are differentially susceptible to PTSD, being affected by trauma, etc., but this doesn't make for a strong intergenerational case, precisely because of that differential susceptibility in the exposed generation. An intergenerational association could be evidence for intergenerational trauma, but even using low-quality, existing PRS, it's also consistent with near-total genetic confounding.
Replying to @cremieuxrecueil
The labels on the first chart were backwards. I apologize for any confusion.
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Let's be clear: @sama is a force of nature and he will win. This setback is very temporary.
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There are a million studies which have had men and women rate each other, yet all we ever see is the OKC meme. This is how it usually looks in a speed-dating setting. Women are consistently rated higher, but men's distributions are much more similar. (Karbowski et al., 2016)
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You can take away everything from people—their land, their material possessions, their social networks, their religious worship, all of it—but you can't take away their minds, and they only need to have kids to pass those on. Source: cepr.org/voxeu/columns/enemi…
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Human geneticist: the predictor only explains 2% of the variance, it's worthless. Cattle geneticist: the predictor explains 2% of the variance. We're. Going. To. Be. Rich.
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By looking at the UK biobank researchers found that people with a greater number of damaged gene variants are more likely to be childless, with the effect much stronger in men than in women.
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empiricism is the key to progress rationalism is the key to sounding smart
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