I disagree, the law does provide these exceptions but I (and presumably the author) don't find these exceptions to be comprehensive enough to render the unqualified statement of the author "out of context".
How is a person supposed to prove that their views are "fair and accurate" or a "fair comment" and a "genuine belief"? These are highly subjective, and none of them helped Andrew Bolt, a reporter who was sued under these laws.
Note that you won't even grant that the author is quoting the law in good faith. How is a person supposed to show that their "racist" views are held in good faith?
In my experience, intelligence is correlated with bad dress sense, lack of hygiene, awkward personalities and poor motor skills. I know a lot of professional mathematicians, and they all would have been bullied for these things things (like I was) if they went to my high school, though many of them went to private high schools.
Before anyone downvotes me because presuming the existence of a group of people that is more intelligent than others is elitist or arrogant, I would point out that it is no more so that presuming the existence of a group of people with less social skills or motor skills.
This is not actually true. Intelligence correlates with social skills https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2015-strenze.pdf. It's just that math departments select for people who want a job where they have high degree of control over their environment and work on things they chose and want to spend lots of time on, and this makes it a good choice for high IQ people with autistic traits.
I don't really see support for that in the article, but most of the details are in the individual studies. The study does say
Kanazawa notes that intelligence correlates positively with evolutionarily novel activities, but the correlation with ancient activities is zero or even negative. That is also evident in Table 25.1 , which mostly lists novel school- or job-related forms of success that have the expected positive correlation with intelligence, but one of the most ancient forms of success, number of children, has a negative correlation (−0.11).
I would guess that you are reading "social success" as "social skills" while in the article's terminology they mean by "social success" things like career success, education level etc.
As for mathematics, it's true that this is a very special case, and people select into mathematics based on both ability and personality. All I can say for certain is that I can identify a distinct group of people who are both intelligent and have autism spectrum traits, and they seem to occur more often than if these traits were uncorrelated.
I'm sure most people would not deny this mechanism exists. The distinction is whether one focuses on this mechanism (correct Bayesian inference) or the various biases and feedback loops described in the article. Personally I believe that progressives miss the forest for the trees: there is a huge gap between White and Black crime that encompasses almost every kind of crime[0]. While I am against any policy that exacerbates this gap, or otherwise discriminates against Black people, I feel that there is a huge effort by the progressive movement to promote an understanding of these subtleties, while at the same time actively repressing general knowledge of the basic facts about race and crime. For example, progressives like to point out that for drug charges this gap could be explained by uneven enforcement (though I don't know if this claim is accurate - the evidence is somewhat indirect) but fail to mention that for most other crimes this claim is not tenable.
And fyi, a very basic fact[1] in the field of criminology is that being black is predictive[2] of crime even after controlling for income and education. I'm not criticizing you for not knowing this since this fact is considered "racist" when expressed by non-experts, and experts only refer to it among themselves, in order to avoid the fact being misinterpreted.
[2] "predictive" is a term of art, meaning that it has a positive coefficient when used on the right hand side of a regression where "crime" is on the left hand side, along with other right hand side variables which depend on the context.
I can't speak for the progressives that you have read from, but I can say that there is strong movement on the conservative front for criminal justice reform. Here's a good op-ed by Doug Deason:
His first anecdote gets at the issue to which I believe you misattribute to progressives, "actively repressing general knowledge of the basic facts about race and crime":
> I am a Republican businessman, and President Obama and I do not see eye to eye on most issues. But I agree with him on the inequities of the criminal justice system. I learned about it firsthand. Like many 17-year-olds, I did something stupid. It was 1979, and I threw a party at the home of neighbors while they were out of town. (Their son had given me a key.) The party got out of hand, ultimately getting the attention of the police. I was charged with felony burglary.
> My actions were wrong and irresponsible. They could also have ruined my life, affecting my ability to go to college or even get a job. But unlike many in my situation, I was able to fight the charge.
Perhaps the progressives you accuse of deliberately spreading ignorance, are indeed not focusing on the "basic facts". But they might argue that that focus is flawed in the first place. If blacks were disproportionately targeted and punished for low-level offenses, then that leads to a disproportionate number of people who have criminal records. Even if you ignore the material impact of incarceration, there's the issue of how criminal record can be a negative factor in job searches and overall participation and trust in society.
The basic fact that a greater proportion of blacks commit serious felonies is probably not considered a basic fact for folks who believe that blacks have also a greater proportion of being disenfranchised. It's probably more like a tautology.
Omitting the distinction between being a convicted criminal and being a criminal is what makes your statement racist, and non-factual.
We don't have any sure mechanism to determine the incidence of criminal activity in the general population. Most rigorous academic analysis I have seen shows no statistically significant difference in criminal activity between races. (Which is in contrast to convicted criminals.)
Furthermore, it's not just a matter of ISPs. Because of its refusal to censor various kinds of content, sites like 8chan have been refused service from various sites that process donations.
As someone with a PhD in economics, and a believer in the what the mainstream econ departments teach, I still found this article very reasonable. I hope no one will take this article to be saying that orthodox economics is fundamentally flawed because at no point is that argued. Instead they argue that behavioral biases exist and are well enough understood that we can in some cases craft policy based on them, instead of the standard economic assumptions.
My favorite points were
- Unpack ‘animal spirits’. These arise in the minds of economic actors. We can unpack the biases behind them and do something about them – an indeed BIT is currently working on such a project.
The debate on "animal spirits"[0] is ongoing, but the potential payoff from understanding them is huge. They deserve more research using more modern ideas and methods.
- Promote rainy-day saving. Recent work suggests that the behavioural and economic effects of having even small amounts of saving are even larger than previously thought.
There are two contradictory arguments often made in regard to poverty and rational behavior: (A) poor people are completely constrained by their poverty and unable to make the "right" decision to save and (B) poor people are unable to make rational decisions because poverty affects their decision making ability. I am mostly in the (B) camp and as such, I think that helping poor people to behave more rationally is a great idea. However it does require honestly stating that poor people do make bad decisions, even if anyone else in that situation would have done the same.
The weakest point IMO was
- Trial light-touch ways to improve estimates by key economic actors. Encourage the use of estimation frames.
This is based on a claim that is much more general, and therefore requires more evidence. I would like to see a lot more studies on improving estimation accuracy in general, before I accepted that there is some general formula to make people's estimates more accurate.
[0] A term of trade for Keynes' original, but discarded by the mainstream, idea that markets were moved by irrational exuberance/pessimism by society as a whole. The main advocate of this theory today is Robert Schiller.
I have a PhD in economics, and your claims about monopolies and competition aren't accurate.
Economic theory doesn't state that monopolies always arise, at least not under the circumstances you are describing. If you can buy your competitors, or make a legally binding contract to compete, the yes, monopolies are inevitable. And as you say, inelastic demand does make monopolies more likely, though your intuition that medical goods have inelastic demand may be wrong, e.g. see the RAND health care study where they randomly assign people insurance types, and find the high deductible group consume less healthcare even in emergency situations.
In the general situation, no theory guarantees that monopolies arise in the absence of regulation (apart from the above to cases which aren't the regulation you're discussing).
>Rational actors will spend up to their expected monopoly profits to create a Nash Equilibrium where new entrants into a market will be unprofitable.
In economics, anything that relies solely on Nash Equilibrium is doubtful. In most situations, Nash Equilbria are not unique, and therefore it's hard to say what will actually happen. If the Nash Equilibrium is unique, usually some stronger equilibrium concept applies like dominant strategy equilibrium.
In your case it would be more accurate to say that committing to drive out potential competitors can be a Nash Equilibrium for some parameters.
On what basis do you say that meta-analysis is not credible? From my stats background, (but without any direct experience in meta-analysis) I would say that they could be problematic because the N is very small and so have a lot less to work with, and more temptation to use fancy statistical techniques with hidden assumptions. On the other hand, what do you do when you have 50 studies of varying quality, no one of which is has such a compelling methodology as to eclipse the others? In that case it seems like meta-analysis is the least bad option.
Your point is a good one but in medicine the issue tends to be that a lot of studies with varying controls and endpoints are being lumped together and presented as a coherent whole. In reality the distortions (and in some cases biases of the researcher) that are introduced leave the data often untenable. You are absolutely right that powering medical studies correctly is a critical issue. It is also critical that when making pronouncements about important treatment modalities that the research be of the highest quality.
Meta-analyses are often used in so creating so called evidence based medicine standards which are sometimes cost cutting efforts dressed up like research.
As a trauma surgeon recently said to me recently, "They said they designed it using evidence based medicine. They didn't say whose evidence".
One thing that is glossed over slightly in these discussions is the distinction between collections of sound-meaning compound characters where the rebus is the same but the words aren't cognate, and where the words are cognate.
I've read in some places that the scribes attempted to use the same rebus for cognate words but I everything I could find online was a re-hashing of wikipedia (or wherever the wikipedia article is sourced from) which states "However, the phonetic component is not always as meaningless as this example would suggest. Rebuses were sometimes chosen that were compatible semantically as well as phonetically."
I'm not sure how important this really is or how many characters that share a common rebus are cognate. But to my aesthetic senses I much prefer characters to contain etymological information than just the pronunciation when the character was first written.
Almost certainly. One fascinating aspect of language is that many metaphors that are baked into language appear in many languages. E.g. In English we can form the future tense with modal verbs, "I will..." and "I am going to..." and in Chinese there are similar modal verbs "我要..." and "我去...". In both languages the idea of intention, or motion, are used as a metaphor in forming the future tense. Or 加油, an expression of encouragement similar to "put your foot on it" which has no equivalent in English, but does in Danish, "giv det gas".
How is a person supposed to prove that their views are "fair and accurate" or a "fair comment" and a "genuine belief"? These are highly subjective, and none of them helped Andrew Bolt, a reporter who was sued under these laws.
Note that you won't even grant that the author is quoting the law in good faith. How is a person supposed to show that their "racist" views are held in good faith?