Interesting Links for 06-03-2012
Mar. 6th, 2012 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- Replacing Trident makes no sense
- 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.
- Did you ever read Goats? Would you like it to be finished? There's a Kickstarter...
- The terror inherent in explaining homosexuality to children
- The Politics of Star Wars
- Algernon's Law - can anyone spot the obvious flaw?
- More left-wing people need to be educated about economics
- Why do people leave their religion?
- The UK is planning on opening up a tax loophole.
- Jesus is a Rorscach blot - everyone sees what they want to.
- The New Networked Feminism: Limbaugh's Spectacular Social Media Defeat
- Teen rape tackled in Home Office advertising campaign
- 24bit 192kHz Music Downloads are Very Silly Indeed
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no subject
Date: 2012-03-06 11:51 am (UTC)So in the event of the mortgage holders not being able to make their repayments and the cash price of the home having fallen we, through the government, take the hit.
One the one hand, one might ask why the government is protecting private lenders from losses on their lending. You might also worry about taxpayers being left to pick up the cost of providing subsidies mortgages to relatively well off people i.e. we are guaranteeing the loans of people with jobs and not providing social housing directly to those not in employment.
On the other hand, this might be a cheap way of providing a Keynsian boost to the economy.
My usual back of a spreadsheet useful only as a contextual starting point number crunching follows.
Say average cost of a new build house is £100k. The scheme aims to help 6,000 borrowers buying new build housing. Be generous and assume that that housing would not have been built but for the scheme.
That’s £600m of house building over the next few years.
The direct cost of the scheme would be any guarantees the government has to pay out.
Assuming £600 mn of loans guaranteed for the first 25% of capital losses is £150m of guarantees. With a 1% delinquency rate the direct cost to the government is going to be about £1.5m spread over a couple of years.
The next point is slightly off because the Scottish government doesn’t collect income tax or pay social security but there would also be the net gain of switching some builders’ labourers from unemployment benefit to waged employment, probably paying a little bit of income tax.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-06 12:02 pm (UTC)There are so MANY flaws it's hard to know which one to find first.
1) The "requires a leap". A slight increase in intelligence may be no evolutionary advantage, a massive increase in intelligence might be.
2) The "lessons of prehistory". The same argument could have been made at any point in pre-history "Clearly these neanderthals could not be more
intelligent or evolution would have made them that way hence increased intelligence would be an evolutionary disadvantage". Evolution in the traditional sense is very very slow (which is why many people think human changes are now governed by memetic not genetic changes).
3) The "we're going that way anyway". The Flynn effect is the name for the effect whereby IQ scores have systematically been increasing throughout the world (arguably slowing or reversing equally). There's moderate evidence that evolution (or societal influence... or something) is currently increasing our intelligence incredibly rapidly in evolutionary scales.
4) The "evolution is not that good at optimising". The red squirrel
turned out to be pretty good in its environment. The grey squirrel was better. There are countless examples of species being killed off by introduction of another set of species (most of South America's large animal life died off rapidly in an event known as the "Great American Interchange" when the North American animals proved simply better at competing in that niche). People tend to assume that evolution produces things maximally fit for their local environment, forgetting that the local environment includes the species extant... so if there's nothing in particular preying upon an animal, there's no need for it to develop a way to avoid that.
5) The "it can't easily evolve". A wheel is a tremendously good solution for moving things but it has (arguably) never evolved (there are some microscopic organisms which arguably use such a mechanism). You can read a lot of tracts on why "wheel evolution" is difficult. It may be that the mechanism to create three times intelligence is relatively easy to engineer but difficult to evolve -- that is we're far more likely to get there from gene manipulation than from evolution.
6) The "optimising the wrong thing". Evolution doesn't improve what most people think it improves. Evolution improves an animals ability to replicate its genes (either through having children or promoting survival of kin). A peacock is a tremendously silly design from most points of view apart from aesthetic... a male peacock is hugely compromised by its design being that thing which female peacocks fancy. So, for example, if the article had argued "any attempt to artificially create a land animal larger than the elephant would automatically fail because all these changes would have a cost and the elephant is already optimised" we'd know it was silly (because there have been such animals). But evolution is no more trying for "smarter" than it is for "larger".
7) The "no selection pressure for that". (Variant of above) Is there actually selection pressure on humans to be intelligent, indeed is there any selection pressure on humans at all? Humans aren't significantly predated, in the developed world, humans rarely die before the end of their reproductive age. While people often say they find intelligence attractive, do intelligent people have more children? Indeed, many people (often nasty people) argued the complete opposite, that unintelligent people have more children and any evolutionary effect is lowering not raising intelligence. While I'm not going to comment on that, it is in no way clear at all that there's any evolutionary pressure right now to raise intelligence. Indeed the most dominant selection pressure on humans in the developed world is probably that we evolve a strong desire to have children.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-06 12:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-06 12:47 pm (UTC)There's also a lot of handwaving about what the author assumes is an evolutionary advantage.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 02:40 am (UTC)I don't know what this objection is supposed to be. Large mutations, as in multiple simultaneous mutations which all work together, are exponentially rare. This is why the creationists focused so much on the eye, and why the step-wise incremental multiple evolutions of the eye were so important: because the odds of multiple simultaneous mutations is so small it might as well be zero.
> The same argument could have been made at any point in pre-history "Clearly these neanderthals could not be more
intelligent or evolution would have made them that way hence increased intelligence would be an evolutionary disadvantage".
That doesn't mean the argument is wrong. For example, buying a lottery ticket is net expected value; yet some people still win.
We don't know that Neanderthals were not smarter. Brain size correlates with IQ in existing homo sapiens, and skull volume was both smaller than Neanderthals and may have shrunk since then to now. (This is discussed in footnotes.) And as already pointed out, humans pay heavy prices for their large heads as it is: maternal mortality was no joking matter.
> The Flynn effect is the name for the effect whereby IQ scores have systematically been increasing throughout the world (arguably slowing or reversing equally)
Yep. There you go: we've hit the genetic ceiling, now that environmental variations like iodine deficiency have been eliminated. Where are your cheap easy fitness-improving intelligence increases now?
> 4) The "evolution is not that good at optimising". The red squirrel turned out to be pretty good in its environment. The grey squirrel was better.
I really don't see how this is relevant.
> It may be that the mechanism to create three times intelligence is relatively easy to engineer but difficult to evolve -- that is we're far more likely to get there from gene manipulation than from evolution.
You're just agreeing with EOC loophole #3 here.
> 6) The "optimising the wrong thing". Evolution doesn't improve what most people think it improves. Evolution improves an animals ability to replicate its genes (either through having children or promoting survival of kin).
Agreeing with EOC loophole #2.
> 7) The "no selection pressure for that". (Variant of above) Is there actually selection pressure on humans to be intelligent, indeed is there any selection pressure on humans at all? Humans aren't significantly predated, in the developed world, humans rarely die before the end of their reproductive age.
Free efficiency gains in intelligence is never a bad thing; if nothing else, evolution can just starve the brain of resources, maintaining a constant intelligence level, and sending the free-up resources to other fitness-increasing things like muscles or a gut that can handle more kinds of food (see footnotes). There will always be selection pressure for efficiency.
There certainly may be dysgenic pressures now, but they can't have been operating for more than a century or so and are correspondingly small in effect, inasmuch as Gregory Clark has documented superior reproduction by the rich in England up to fairly recently. Even by the most pessimistic estimate I've seen, there's not been more than 20-30 points of potential average lost. So here too we would not expect to see any cheap easy big IQ gains.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 08:25 am (UTC)So for what you say about (1) Yes, large mutations are rare. That is my point. A human created invention might be able to create something that evolution could not -- a huge increase in intelligence with no loss of "evolutionary fitness" which evolution could not find because it requires such a major change that it's incredibly unlikely. (If you've ever played much with genetic algorithms, unless you take some fairly "whacky" cross breeding, they get stuck in local minima easily).
2) If you don't believe neanderthals had a lower IQ, consider a point where something like a chimpanzee (or of equivalent intelligence, I've no idea which hominid would be in that point on our evolutionary journey but there must have been one) was the most intelligent animal on earth. Now consider the argument "clearly being more intelligent than a chimpanzee will lead to a loss of evolutionary fitness or chimpanzees would be more intelligent".
3) You have no evidence whatsoever that we have "hit the evolutionary ceiling". If you want to make the argument that evolution cannot make us more intelligent without a loss of evolutionary fitness you must first establish whether we are currently doing so. The best evidence available is that currently we are getting more intelligent at a startlingly rapid rate. A rate so rapid that in evolutionary terms, if it continues we would have astounding intelligence on an evolutionary timescale. A lot of people have hypothesised that this slowing is due to various nutritional factors but this is a long way from established. At the moment, then, the bald statement that evolution cannot on its own improve our intelligence seems a plainly silly one to make. Not only is there no evidence for it, the evidence seems against it.
4) If we're to reason about whether surgery or other interventions can increase our intelligence without a decrease in fitness because evolution can't we must first establish that evolution can't. This is another attack on that hypothesis. It turns out a grey squirrel was a much better "fit" for the environment than a red squirrel but in some parts of the world a grey squirrel did not evolve. Similarly it may be that a much more intelligent person would be much more evolutionary fit and, if we reran the clock of evolution, we'd all be ten times as smart and sitting here reading articles about how it's impossible to make us a hundred times as smart.
5) If we're reading the same thing (the first article) loophole 3 appears to be "the intervention may be simple, give major enhancements, but result in a net loss of fitness" -- I have no idea how that is relevant. If our task is "moving over flat terrain" a wheel is a simple intervention that increases fitness for task which evolution has not come up with. So I don't see how that is the same.
6) I think I must be looking at the wrong article loophole 2 here appears to be "the simple interventions may not lead to a major enhancement". I have no idea how that is relevant. What I'm talking about is that evolution is not optimising smartness. It could well be that evolution could make us ten times as smart but that has no gain or loss in evolutionary fitness. If that's the case then it probably won't happen through evolution.
7) "Free efficiency gains in intelligence is never a bad thing" In evolutionary terms neither are they a good thing unless they are needed in the environment. You seem to have a weird idea that evolution increases "efficiency". This is simply untrue... evolution increases only the fitness to replicate genes. This is not the same as increasing fitness. Why on earth would evolution tinker around making us better at digesting things or more muscular unless a really significant proportion of people were starving or dying because they were insufficiently muscular?
no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 08:09 pm (UTC)> 2) If you don't believe neanderthals had a lower IQ, consider a point where something like a chimpanzee (or of equivalent intelligence, I've no idea which hominid would be in that point on our evolutionary journey but there must have been one) was the most intelligent animal on earth. Now consider the argument "clearly being more intelligent than a chimpanzee will lead to a loss of evolutionary fitness or chimpanzees would be more intelligent".
Where are the Neanderthals now? Or chimpanzees? It's very possible that humans in the past were so evolutionary unfit that they almost went extinct ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans ). And it's not clear how well humans are doing now: the population takeoff only began a few thousand years ago, and there are serious issues about our collective fitness being harmed by increased intelligence (nukes, etc.).
(Depending on how you cut the timelines, Neanderthals lasted longer than humans have so far - stone tool culture remains from 300k years, apparent extinction 50k years ago, 250k lifespan; humans only began to appear 200k years ago, and are behavioristically like us 50k years ago...)
> 3) You have no evidence whatsoever that we have "hit the evolutionary ceiling". If you want to make the argument that evolution cannot make us more intelligent without a loss of evolutionary fitness you must first establish whether we are currently doing so. The best evidence available is that currently we are getting more intelligent at a startlingly rapid rate.
The Flynn effect has stopped in modern countries; dysgenics have been confirmed in many samples and surveys. Ceiling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_progression
The Flynn effect is not going to save you in this argument; you should stop appealing to it.
> 4) If we're to reason about whether surgery or other interventions can increase our intelligence without a decrease in fitness because evolution can't we must first establish that evolution can't. This is another attack on that hypothesis. It turns out a grey squirrel was a much better "fit" for the environment than a red squirrel but in some parts of the world a grey squirrel did not evolve. Similarly it may be that a much more intelligent person would be much more evolutionary fit and, if we reran the clock of evolution, we'd all be ten times as smart and sitting here reading articles about how it's impossible to make us a hundred times as smart.
So you're appealing to the possible existence of *entirely different species* to rescue the claim that small easy fitness-improving IQ gains are possible?
Seriously? What's next, you're going to tell me the existence of computers disproves the argument because they're so much better at arithmetic?
> 5) If we're reading the same thing (the first article) loophole 3 appears to be "the intervention may be simple, give major enhancements, but result in a net loss of fitness" -- I have no idea how that is relevant. If our task is "moving over flat terrain" a wheel is a simple intervention that increases fitness for task which evolution has not come up with. So I don't see how that is the same.
A wheel is not a simple intervention for evolution.
> 6) I think I must be looking at the wrong article loophole 2 here appears to be "the simple interventions may not lead to a major enhancement". I have no idea how that is relevant. What I'm talking about is that evolution is not optimising smartness. It could well be that evolution could make us ten times as smart but that has no gain or loss in evolutionary fitness. If that's the case then it probably won't happen through evolution.
How is that not relevant?
Besides, an increase in intelligence by 10 times being completely fitness neutral is about as likely as flipping a coin 10 times and it landing on edge each time...
('Sir, we've developed a new supersonic jet that goes 10 times as fast!' 'Excellent! How many billions will we profit or lose by deploying it immediately to all our biggest airline customers?' '$0 and 0 cents sir! Apparently the premium our customers are willing to pay *exactly* offsets the increased fuel consumption!')
no subject
Date: 2012-03-08 10:47 am (UTC)Now, that red squirrel. The guy who wrote the essay "no simple changes to an animal could possibly make it more hippity-hoppity eat-ity-nutity than a red squirrel because otherwise nature would have evolved the red squirrel to be better" is looking pretty dumb now. Nature had evolved something much better for that ecological niche, it had just done it elsewhere. It turns out that there was a pretty similar animal which was much better at doing the things that red squirrels do but nature had not evolved it. Why not? Because evolution is not optimising what you think it is. It is not in the business of building the perfect creature to occupy a niche efficiently (despite what discovery channel documentaries say). Only a moderate knowledge of biology will find you huge numbers of examples of invasive species which turn out to be much better in the niche than the invasive species. Take home message: what on earth makes you think evolution is good for optimising "smarts"?
Besides, an increase in intelligence by 10 times being completely fitness neutral is about as likely as flipping a coin 10 times and it landing on edge each time
Why -- what is your evidence for this? And remember, fitness here is evolutionary fitness, not fitness for being smart, not fitness for earing money, not fitness for qualifying for Harvard. Do you have any evidence whatsoever that more intelligent people have more children? Unless that huge intelligence increase actually results in more propensity to succesfully rear children to breeding age it's not increasing evolutionary fitness. It may increase a lot of other types of fitness.
Date: 2012-03-09 04:40 am (UTC)That's not necessary at all. The argument is simple: any increase to intelligence will have one of a few properties, or else evolution would already have increased it.
Intelligence could be increasing... as long as the increases had one of the properties.
> The Flynn effect (whatever it is) is certainly much larger than this. So before you begin your essay on "why evolution cannot increase our intelligence" you must first show it is not doing so. You really cannot -- if there were an underlying evolutionary change on an evolutionary timescale it would be so small it would be absolutely swamped by the astoundingly rapid changes in human IQ.
Already addressed Flynn. So your whole objection comes down to 'there might be some process operating now', which is just an argument from ignorance?
> Why -- what is your evidence for this? And remember, fitness here is evolutionary fitness, not fitness for being smart, not fitness for earing money, not fitness for qualifying for Harvard. Do you have any evidence whatsoever that more intelligent people have more children?
I don't. All my evidence points strongly in the other direction - exactly consistent with what I just said, about the fitness neutrality being extremely unlikely, and increases either being fit or unfit. If merely somewhat smart people *already* suffer big fitness penalties as evidenced by low fertility, then that makes it even *less* likely that being 10x smarter would be exactly fitness neutral!
Re:
Date: 2012-03-09 09:17 am (UTC)I do not think we are going to agree on the other matter of the fitness neutrality of intelligence.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 08:12 pm (UTC)Because muscles are *metabolically expensive*. Because digestion is *metabolically expensive*. See the footnotes on the chimpanzees, muscles, and guts!
(For god's sake, I'm not putting in all those references, links, and footnotes because they look pretty.)
no subject
Date: 2012-03-08 10:53 am (UTC)I think this highlights your confusion between "fitness" in a weird role-playing game sense "Wow, that thing is smarter and stronger, it's obviously better" and "fitness" in the evolution sense "that thing sure can propogate its genes". This is why you automatically believe that a change in intelligence if it has no other costs will change evolutionary fitness.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-09 04:43 am (UTC)Fitness gradients don't have to be big. Even in the developed worlds, pressure could come from various things: from slightly decreased homicide, from the ability to resort to manual labor to earn one's bread, to slight reduction in injury rates.
As people in finance say, a free option is never a bad thing. If using it would not be better than your existing options, well, you just let it expire unused. Muscles are a lot like an option: if you don't need them, you can just digest them and use the protein or calories for something else. See my previous point about additional efficiency in brain construction being useful even if no additional intelligence would be useful.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-09 09:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-06 12:07 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-06 12:35 pm (UTC)That's discussed in the article, no?
no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 02:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-06 12:20 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-06 12:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-06 12:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-06 12:36 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-06 12:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-06 12:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-06 12:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-06 12:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 02:52 am (UTC)I'm glad you picked that example. Do you know how dogs get such a good sense of smell? By devoting a huge chunk of their expensive calorie-sucking protein-built brain to it. And keep in mind, dogs already have smaller brains than their wolf forebears - so the instant they no longer needed as much brainpower (because the humans were doing some thinking for both), their brains shrunk. And you are arguing that their brains should have *increased* under their pressures?
no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 04:06 am (UTC)But it DID.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-06 12:28 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2012-03-07 02:47 am (UTC)In any case, it's just one example.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-06 04:18 pm (UTC)their religionthe Church of England?I really can't care very much. I'm not a Christian, which makes it easier to see the parochialism of most Christian churches. How many Christians laugh at a "non-denominational church"?
no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 12:13 am (UTC)Ta for the perfectly timed heads-up, Andy :)