Every so often I read Next Big Future. I've got two good reasons. First is to lift up my spirits and motivation by reading about Progress. And second is to know what tools I will be able to play with to redesign the world. There is a downside to reading that blog and the reason I can never recommend it. It is its myopic dishonest hypocritical lying racist fuck of an author Brian Wang.
Well, three stories caught my attention in that vein.
Intelligence
There's this story about the role of motivation in intelligence testing which turns out to be very large. Now, as you know, most Asian children are put under incredible pressure to test well. And if you're a reader of that racist fucker Brian Wang then you know most Asian countries score an average of 15 points above Western countries. Well here we have a study that says 10 points of that is down to motivation!
Hmm, at last an obvious explanation for the phenomenon and it's ... a confounding factor. Of course. And this all goes to show we can't say anything at all on the subject with any authority. Is Brian Wang going to admit this? Fuck no. There is no indication in that article that Brian has even caught the obvious implications.
Incidentally, the more laid back Asian countries like Thailand score at the 85-90 IQ points. Which is again exactly as predicted. So much for Wang's Chinese racial supremacy theories.
Longevity
The second story that catches my cynical eye is this crap about "herbs" lengthening life of fruit flies, and based on that tenuous evidence going straight to clinical trials in humans. Which is bullshit since lots of stuff, caloric restriction comes to mind, that lengthens life in fruit flies and worms has no effect whatsoever on higher animals except to make them constantly aggressive, miserable and angry.
We are not talking here about a little dieting that just makes people fatter, we're talking about serious shit that warps their personalities.
Anyways, so this story goes on and on about how he "doesn't recommend it" for people but of course he fucking does. It reminds me of Brian's stories about domes around cities that never account for cleaning city streets and buildings. Or his story about the wondrous wool-mud bricks that are so much better than unfired bricks ... that conspicuously fail to compare against fired bricks!
Trains
Finally, there's an interesting article about high speed trains that perfectly illustrates what a hypocritical lying racist fuck Brian Wang is.
Back when the Chinese high speed trains were supposed to run at 350 kph, he made a huge deal about it. Even though their most important systems would use entirely Western technology (not made in China as he implied) and just accept the tearing up of tracks for political reasons (not exactly attractive or sane).
But now that the Chinese government has nixed those stupid plans, he talks about how that isn't a big deal and saying "[other people] are making a big deal of it [which I never did]" which of course is a blatant fucking lie. No it isn't a big deal, BUT HE CLAIMED IT WAS!
It was a big deal to him because he claimed that going at 350 kph was proof the Chinese had assimilated the technology and improved it. Which was a blatant giant fucking honker of a lie. So he lies now about what a big deal it supposedly isn't in order to cover up his previous odious lies. What a disgusting filthy lying son of a bitch!
Other Lies
I've previously written about how fusion will never be viable which was in reaction to a pro-fusion bunch of crap by Brian Wang. He is a big fanboi of fusion. He is also a big fanboi of space travel, which is why I wrote there's no reason whatsoever to go to space. My post about how some engineers confuse SF with reality was written as a reaction to him saying that's his mode of operation!
Other People's Lies
I even wrote about how internal FTL may be possible in reaction to him. Because you see, this fucker thinks the laws of physics are no obstacle to engineering. He also thinks expanding the Fermi Paradox to the entire universe is no obstacle to engineering! Incredible what a moron he is.
In any case, FTL is NOT possible and Fermi Paradox is an absolute obstacle to its viability. However, unlike Brian Wang, I am intellectually honest so I do admit that internal FTL may be possible. FTL used NOT for exploration or expansion of a civilization but purely internally to keep the civilization cohesive.
Though there's an awful lot of stupidity and intellectual dishonesty by people talking about wormholes. There is no fucking way wormholes "just happen" to have zero distance internally. And there is no fucking way that masses like black holes all curve space conveniently "inwards" where the distortions can meet into wormholes. Ugh, that's just self-serving delusional crap.
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5 comments:
There's this story about the role of motivation in intelligence testing which turns out to be very large.
That study is probably bunk: http://statsquatch.blogspot.com/2011/05/bad-apple-in-duckworths-iq-motivation.html
Okay, first of all, it is a fact that IQ is hugely overblown since it only varies by a factor of 4 between 50 and 200 IQ points, whereas analysis and synthesis both vary by orders of magnitude. Synthesis varies by greater than 3 orders of magnitude.
Second of all, Bryan Caplan is a noted liar and I have known him to be a liar since I first encountered him which would have been almost 20 years ago.
Thirdly, the objection of high-stakes versus low-stakes isn't relevant since the "national average IQ tests" which Brian Wang is trumpeting will invariably be low-stakes.
Fourthly, any objection to Duckworths result is not credible since the correlation between intelligence and impulse control is so fucking high. In fact, impulse control is the primary inherited factor of intelligence.
Now you tell me, how the fuck is impulse control supposed to have no impact on motivation? That just isn't even remotely credible.
Duckworth's study may be preliminary and it may have fatal flaws but its conclusion is almost certainly true based solely on things the "IQ is down to genetics" crowd have been saying themselves!
The situation is eerily reminiscent of Brian Wang's complete lack of intellectual honesty.
Alternatively, I'd really like to know how you can determine the arrow of causality between impulse control (or motivation) and intelligence.
I am not saying anything on the matter at all beyond that intelligence is unimportant because it has low variability. On the contrary, it is YOU trying to claim that intelligence is important. And so it is up to you to prove it.
Technically, analysis is also measured on a log scale. It's measured in the amount of time that needs to pass in order for a concept to spontaneously morph in a person's head.
A person possessing analysis will take hours for new and unfamiliar concepts to morph in their heads. A person not possessing analysis will take seconds. Which means that analysis varies by a factor of greater than 10,000.
But this is a severe underestimate of the variability of analysis since I have seen people not possessing it having a concept morph into its logical negation over a period of seconds. For something like that to happen to me would require years. So the variability is between 10 million and 100 million.
Intelligence doesn't vary by even a factor of 10 from the most retarded to the most intelligent people!
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