andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2012-03-06 11:00 am
andrewducker) wrote2012-03-06 11:00 am
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Interesting Links for 06-03-2012
- 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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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"?
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Ta for the perfectly timed heads-up, Andy :)