I took a course on Freud in college, and what struck me at the time was that the framework of psychoanalysis seemed basically cruel, in that the analyst was free to say that either acceptance or rejection of their claims was evidence for them, and that it would be maddening to deal with that for any extended period of time.
The paper does more than that. It measures wet bulb temperatures at different stops with different combinations and varieties of trees and bus stops, provides decent evidence of variation among these combinations, and attempts to explain the variations. For example, the roles played by evaporation from leaves and shelter material weren't obvious to me before reading.
More generally, this method of interacting with the most simplified interpretation of science and then criticizing its simplicity isn't useful to the criticizer or the criticized.
+1 for Consumer Reports. They're not expensive either, something like $5 per month. If they keep you from buying a bad fridge, it pays for itself!
Their recentish coverage of lead in foods is a bit embarrassing though, since they used a California standard for dosage limits that even the EU would blush at.
I chalk that up as lame but kind of inevitable mild corruption that doesn't really go anywhere -- Hunter seems more like an embarrassing addict child that a caring parent has no choice but to put up with than somebody who can truly peddle influence over his father -- and feel that this administration is a vast difference in degree of corruption. Degrees matter!
Yeah, The Economist regularly writes these articles that spend half the time praising the intense competition in certain sectors of the economy and half the time bemoaning the influence of state-owned enterprises (or other CCP instruments) in others. It seems to vary a lot by specific industry.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Blindsight. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that it is a book about the place of human intelligence in a universe with other options, both biological and artificial.
I don't think there's a good discussion to be had about this article. The referenced paper is based on two data sources. One is a longitudinal study (great!) of "hundreds" of children in one region (not bad!) and only checks parenthood at the rather young age of 23-24 (uhhh). The other study is based on Mechanical Turk questions. In both the article and the fullest version of the paper I can find online [1], no further details are provided -- not the size of the effects, not the statistical power, nothing.
Yeah, checking at such a young age is a serious distortion of the data. The average age at first pregnancy is somewhere around 30. That means they are counting exclusively pregnancies that are untypically early. A more accurate summary of the results would be:
Bullies have more accidental children before reaching the age where the average couple will start to deliberately get pregnant.
No, a more accurate summary of the results would be: "we generated a tiny bit of data from which no conclusions can be drawn, but it's some extra data that other studies may be able to use in the future maybe".
I'm not sure what word to apply to facing three familial tragedies, any one of which might seem like more than a life's fair share of misfortune, with that kind of perseverance. Inspiring is too glib, inhuman is too alienating. Whatever kind of mettle that is, I hope to never have to prove it.
People are products of their environment. There are people with mettle/grit and then people who are more sensitive to perturbations of fate. The society they live in sets the base level of grittiness that you can expect any average person to be equipped with.
Dahl here is a very hardy man who approaches these issues in a very practical and logical way. But this was also in the post WW2 era where millions died, people lost their families and possessions, and had to start their life anew. It was a period of rebuilding after the devastation of war and hard times build hard people.
Today, all this feels like too much because we were all mostly born and brought up in wealth and prosperity. We have not seen any real hard times and there is no need for mettle.
