Interesting Links for 06-03-2012

[andrewducker]

• Replacing Trident makes no sense
  (tags: nuclearweapons politics uk )
• New mortgage scheme gets go-ahead in Scotland.
  I'm not convinced by this - the reason the banks want a large deposit is in case the prices fall. If this happens then the government will be left in debt.
  (tags: housing mortgages scotland )
• Did you ever read Goats? Would you

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

Re the Mortgage Indemnity scheme. I think your note pretty sums up the situation. Although I’ve not been able to find the actual policy document yet I think what they are proposing is a scheme whereby the government (you and I) stand guarantor for the first tranche of any capital losses

[steer]

Algernon's Law - can anyone spot the obvious flaw? There are so MANY flaws it's hard to know which one to find first

[ciphergoth]

At least some of these are discussed in the article.

[steer]

Indeed, for example the Flynn effect was mentioned and described as "slow"! (I kid you not.)

There's also a lot of handwaving about what the author assumes is an evolutionary advantage.

[ext_671975]

> 1) The "requires a leap". A slight increase in intelligence may be no evolutionary advantage, a massive increase in intelligence might be

[heron61]

Algernon's Law - can anyone spot the obvious flaw?

The clear and often quite profound difference between personal disadvantage and evolutionary disadvangate is one flaw that leaps clearly out at me. For example, a species where individuals didn't suffer and effects from aging and didn't die of old age would either have to deal with overpopulation or (if reproduction rates were sufficiently slow) problematically slow evolutionary change. OTOH, from a personal perspective not aging would be awesome. Did you mean that obvious flaw, or another one?

I can see a few other only somewhat less glaring flaws, such as assuming that evolution must have hit upon the global optimum intelligence, rather than merely a local optimum that could be greatly improved upon, or the rather obvious fact that most people with very high IQs don't tend to resemble RPG characters who have to pay for their high intelligence with a host of mental disads.

[ciphergoth]

"The clear and often quite profound difference between personal disadvantage and evolutionary disadvangate is one flaw that leaps clearly out at me"

That's discussed in the article, no?

[ext_671975]

Indeed; EOC loophole #2. One of the most common.

[andrewducker]

The argument in Algernon's Law is basically "If there was a simple way to increase human intelligence then nature would already have delivered it."

The flaw is that dogs could say the same thing. Or monkeys could. Or humans could say it about their sense of smell.

We arrived where we are, evolutionarily speaking, through a series of tiny adjustments to fit in well in a specific situation. If the situation has changed (and things like The Flynn Effect and our massively different living conditions compared to our ancestors indicate it has) then small changes might viably improve us in ways that weren't viable in the past.

[ciphergoth]

But there wasn't a simple way for any of those animals to improve their intelligence. There was only a complex way fraught with downsides. Apes paid a huge price to increase their intelligence.

[andrewducker]

There must have been many, many, simple ways for them to improve their intelligence, one tiny step at a time. They didn't change all at once, after all.

[steer]

Incidentally, it is worth pointing out also that the Flynn effect is incredibly rapid in evolutionary terms. If we take a really modest estimate of 10 IQ points in 100 years... (some studies have seen more than 3 times that)... now project that onto an evolutionary timescale of (say) 100,000 years. That makes 10,000 points of IQ increase in that span.

OK, it's a totally silly projection (ludicrously so) but the point is that the best current evidence is for an absolutely startlingly quick increase in IQ when we're thinking about evolutionary timescales.

Of course there's lots of "what does IQ testing really measure" sort of arguments to be made.

[nancylebov]

I'm not sure that the argument from Jewish genetic defects holds up-- those defects are very rare.

I'm inclined to think that the Jewish advantage is mostly cultural-- because Talmudic study was highly valued for a long time, parents were more likely to see their children's intelligence as an advantage rather than a threat to their status.

It's possible to find unintellectual Jews, though in my experience it's not easy. I've been keeping an eye out for anti-intellectual Jews, and haven't found any.

[ext_671975]

The defects *have* to be relatively rare for heterozygote advantage to be fitness-improving in the postulated Ashkenazi historical context. If half your infants die of genetic diseases, you need the other half to be basically Supermen who bed Lois Lanes every other day to make up for your losses. At a rate like 1% or whatever the real rate is, then it becomes more possible for a small increase in IQ to have enough of an expected-value to pay for the genetic defects.

In any case, it's just one example.