pja

You have just demonstrated that you don’t understand Taleb’s critique. Admittedly, his basic critique is buried in tons of verbiage, but your response here is an irrelevance.

IQ measurements are next to useless on an individual level because a) IQ measurement is terrible & non-repeatable with very large variance between successive tests for any given individual & b) IQ doesn’t measure the thing you actually want, which is task-specific performance: it has terrible correlation with any given task-specific measure, barely rising above “vaguely related”.

At the population-level, IQ suffers from terrible statistical issues, including circularity affecting outcomes (SAT tests in the US are a particular problem), and inter-population differences that make comparisons extremely noisy. The field is also historically full of charlatans who literally made up data out of thin air, even before you start in with the problems with the actual data they drew upon & the stats they applied to it.

Ultimately, It doesn’t matter that you can measure some “factor” and show that there’s a weak correlation with lifetime wealth, or prison likelihood or whatever if that measurement is an otherwise useless one: Using IQ as a measure of an individual is wildly inappropriate. Using it as a population measure is next to useless because of widespread issues with both the input data & the statistical analysis done to torture some kind of correlation out of said data & call the job done.

Finally, when you’ve done all these population level stats on your so-called “g-factor” and squeezed some kind of vague relationship between various groups & your “g-factor” out of the data, what are you doing that /for/? What good do you expect to do in the world with that information? Because the only real-world use seems to be advocating for blocking the immigration or education of specific groups of people, despite the fact that, as has already been pointed out, you cannot use IQ on an individual level because it has extremely poor predictive value at the individual level. Sounds ... kind of racist don’t you think?

The seed oil / sunburn thing is something I saw going around online just this week. Is there /anything/ behind it at all or is it just another chunk of LessWrong science by anecdata?

High-end stats is kind of Taleb’s thing, so he gets to be as insufferable as he likes dunking on IQiots imo.

Yeah, he needs an editor. But the relentless dunking on IQiots is worth the verbiage imo.

This Twitter post from the guy who was synthesising the stuff in the US seems convincing: https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1689476909208600576

Not a superconductor - the hints of superconductor-like properties were due to a combination of iron contamination in the Pb forming iron fragments which (surprise!) show ferromagnetism & Copper Sulphide which shows a very similarly anomalous temp/resistivity profile (but is not a superconductor).

The most likely outcome (i.e., not a superconductor, lab error due to honest scientists being fooled by their own experiments) seems to be probably the true one.

Here’s another classic non sequitur: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fwayy8oc30ygb1.png

Why does it tend to collapse into pseudo-religious babble when it goes off the rails? I guess it tends to be very repetitive, so maybe the training set has turned religiosity into some kind of attractive basin in the output space? Once in, you can’t get out again.

It’s as if it’s a markov chain with a bigger token space to work from. Oh wait.

He got publicly embarrassed by a disabled person, I know that much. But he would have been like this anyway.

Agreed, I read this as saying that the cop would otherwise have got away with it & that this was a /bad/ thing.

Also, the experimenting on babies thing is hilarious.

Ah, that’s why you were asking about it?

& yeah, a naïve digital physics model is going to run slap into issues with both Bohmian constaints on locality & the fact that it’s unlikely your lovely new model predicts anything taking the current model and ignoring all the philosophical problems (because they don’t actually matter) fails to predict. I would be very surprised if Wolfram isn’t aware of this.

There are some intriguing hints of something deeper in the holographic principle, which suggests that everything that happens inside a bounded region of space can be inscribed on the surface of that volume: You could imagine some kind of process occurring on the surface of a volume that’s connected to the interior in ways that would be non-local from the interior’s POV, but might be entirely local on that surface.

But none of this is developed anywhere near the point that you can wave at one of Wolfram’s favourite automata & go “well, if you run that on the surface of a volume then Quantum Physics & Gravity drop out naturally.” It’s all handwaving & “it might work like this” & a bunch of very theoretical physics that doesn’t, at the current time, actually correspond to real world physics very much, if at all.

Sneerclub abides!