force_reboot

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?

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.

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.

Isn't the concept of an "information bubble" already inherently relativistic? sevenless was simply pointing out the relativism cuts both ways.

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.

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.

Yes, that is an equivalent phrase, but much less commonly used than 加油 and "gi' det gas".

I mean in English it isn't used as a generic encouragement, while in Mandarin and Danish it is.

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".

Proponents of diversity engage in non-Bayesian updating whereby if a non-diverse company/city/person does well, they update their prior that the system is rigged, but if a diverse company/city/person does well update their prior that diversity has economic benefits.