today I started a list: things I'll do when I'll have a lot of money.
I understood how used I am to being so close to poverty when I wrote stuff like a 20 bucks bluetooth speaker and a set of screwdrivers.
🇳🇱
@arteteco the difference between a rich person and a poor person is that a rich person spends most of their time trying to think of ways they could spend/invest money they don't have yet, a poor person thinks up ways they will spend money they don't yet have :)
Though I think this applies a bit farther above the poverty line than you are dealing with too. Obviously you gotta cover the basic needs first. but someone told me that once and it stuck with me.. how you spend (in your head) the money you dont have yet says everything about your financial future.
@freemo I don't think I understood this, a rich person spends time thinking of ways to invest and the poor on ways to spend, you mean?
@arteteco Pretty much yes.. basically how you have mentally ear marked the money you dont have yet whether it be mentally earmarked as a means to create some new company or project, or on indulgences.. basically as you say investment vs personal spending.
@freemo Oh, I see now, makes sense. I don't have a rich future ahead of me, it seems =D
I think in the US you people are more attuned to that kind of entrepreneurship and personal economic growth, which is something I appreciate and I should learn from.
To be sure, as long as I have the basics and a bit more I'm alright, I'm not complaining, was just playing with my mind 😁
I dunno, I think america has become the HQ for ideological quests in many ways. I generally see americans as being extremists in everything. Most americans are radically ideological, while others dont care much at all about ideological quests, there is very little middle ground.
Contrast that with europe where most people tend to be centrist with a small minority at the ideological extremes.
that has not at all been my expeirnce as someone who lives in both america and europe. Though it is what you hear most often.
The leftists in america in my experience are **far** more extremist than anything I've ever seen in europe. In fact most europeans I know who have spent any real time in america tend to mock american leftists for their absurdity. Same is true for our right leaning people, also generally considered extreme.
@amerika I'm not sure, I don't think I know enough about the US to speak, either by statistics or by personal experience. From the biased internet view, US seems more "ideologist" than most countries I know, arguing a lot about principles. If the matter was what works and what not, I'd see very different political debates, more based on science and facts
In my view, it's likely hitting all fields
The need to "publish or perish" has a high cost, and much research being pushed through is cherry-picked and/or filtered.
Still, peer review and others reproducing hard-science should continually preen the knowledge base, if it works right.
there is an expectation that you know certain theories and schools of though before you go onto more obscure or complex ones for sure. but that isnt dogma. Studying a thing doesnt inherently create dogma for the thing.
I study religion in some depth and while there is plenty floating around in the way of dogma when it comes to religion I have never adopted that dogma because I only study the topic, I dont adopt the faith.
I also never experienced teachers pushing too much dogma. Generally they care if you prove your point using logic and data, they dont force your conclusions. Most teachers not just accept dissenting thought they encourage it and want you to try to disprove theories, they even tend to promote projects where you attempt to do so.
the only reason scientific thought tends to align is because we have all went through the science and tried to disprove it and ultimately found we were wrong and could not.
Not sure that is a great example.. Your not talking so much about dogma or wasted careers as you are talking about observing scientific progress where competing ideas and theories are over time refined and confirmed.
@TradeMinister
I am very familiar with it. Individuals have wrong theories all the time, and thats how science is suppose to work, thats how we learn we are wrong and ultimately what is correct.
And every generation, we find out that settled science from the previous was nonsense.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-industry-shifted-blame-to-fat.html
Sometimes funding can derail science and create some issues, no doubt.. A prime example of that is the whole autism vaccine nonsense where basically someone paid a bunch of money to a small minority of crooked scientists to produce a easily debunked paper. Even though the whole of the scientific community quickly rejected the paper its very existence was used as fodder by some for years to come. So yes a person with some money can certainly use psudo-science to cause some harm.
But these sorts of situations never get very far, they certainly dont pass any comprehensive peer review, and generally is not what we see from the majority of the scientific community.
Lots of areas are not explored because they are politically incorrect.
Let's look at IQ research.
There has been a great deal of research around IQ, even going so far as to investigate IQ differences among cultures we think of as different races, alot of that research is ongoing. Better IQ tests designed to be suited for tribal cultures with little contact with the outside world have been developed over the years for exactly that reason.
The issue is simply certain assertions have been made so often in the past and debunked so thuroughly, and almost always done under extreme bias, that most scientists arent going to rehash the same old nonsense unless someone actually comes up with a compelling high quality science, which is rarely the case in certain areas.
Every once in a while I come across some moron with a clearly racial bias trying to argue blacks are inherently lower IQ than whites, and every time when i give them the time and effort to review the evidence of their claim it is completely laughable the lack of evidence and the amount of bias they employed to collect it. Obviously when 99% of people arguing a particular point are always crackpots even if there is a valid point somewhere among them it isnt going to as easily get attention. Extraordinary claims take extraordinary evidence.
Hard to say. I mean we see studies that suggest black people have genetic deficiencies other races do not all the time. for example it is well known and established science that blacks have a much higher incidence of sickle cell anemia than non-blacks. Despite this effectively looking like they are genetically inferior in that regard, and thus would be something you might think couldn't get published, it tends to be free published and fairly well accepted science.
The reason such studies stand little chance of getting published isnt so much about the biases in the industry, its about the fact that we have tested the hypothesis for over a 100 years in great depth and never once have found anything to support that assertion. So naturally its not something you will see getting published unless there is some pretty solid and reproducible data, and there never is.
If I can chip my humble 50 satoshis on this, African people have way higher genetic diversity than the rest of humankind, not having experienced the bottleneck from getting out of Africa.
It's easier, therefore, to find higher diversity of problems too, and the sampling can wildly affect the results of any research. Talking about "black people" or Africans is really like putting together all the rest of humankind, papuasians, native americans, latins, australian aborigenal people etc, and say "see, they have this and that".
My main point is, we can't talk about "African people" as a group and pretend it makes sense.
This is something that until more recent genetic discovery was not well known, so a lot of studies even from a recent past have a huge bias in that sense
+bonifartius 𒂼𒄄
@arteteco @freemo @manarock @amerika @TradeMinister regarding this, i think what most people not familiar with science don't see is that the different populations have developed different traits in adaption to their environment, and that those traits don't have any intrinsic value apart from this. they just may not match our environments anymore.
people also usually have problems regarding how statistics work. the (questionable, as IQ is a constructed bullshit value imho) IQ experiments say something about how good a group performs in an artificial test. people then apply those results to individuals, but the math doesn't work this way.
Look up Raven's progressive matrices (and ensuing projects)
I am well aware of it. In fact it was ont he back of my mind when i was talking about how scientists have tried to design culturally neutral IQ tests.. They were a good first attempt but ultimately had some flaws and since then there have been many iterations and improvements on the idea.
Actually, results are consistent, suggesting the original tests were on point.
How do you figure? Presuming the original test was not on point and for whatever reason put one group of people at a disadvantage to another, why would you expect that would be proven out by inconsistency?
If the disadvantaged group was at 20% disadvantage they would consistently score 20% lower than their actual score. Consistency would be preserved whether the test was on point or not.
You're assuming the original tests were flawed.
IQ tests measure memory, reaction time, and ability to compare items.
Not as much bias there as people would think.
No I'm not assuming, I draw that conclusion from evidence. If it were not influenced by ones environment (culture) then the results from such a test would remain consistent even after one attains new knowledge or cultural influenced.
Since this is not at all the case and we have countless examples showing the IQ results from these test change as the conditions of a persons life change and their exposure to ideas change, then it is trivial to conclude (based on evidence, not an assumption) that these tests are not measuring an intrinsic immutable quality.
@amerika @TradeMinister @arteteco @freemo @manarock i assume that trying to measure intelligence as a scalar value is flawed. if two persons of identical intelligence take those tests, the one which has trained with similar tests will be better.
Unless one for political reason dismisses Murray et al., he extensively made the case (with abundant data) that IQ (as a proxy for core intelligence) correlates very highly with general life performance and outcome. In other words, stupid people make bad choices, have poor understanding of the idea of the future and poor impulse control, etc.
That said, it's not a unique factor. The mostly Indio Latinos who come here as workers aren't obviously the smartest people around, but can generally work anyone else under the table and pride themselves on being 'muy trabajador', real hard workers.
@amerika @TradeMinister @arteteco @freemo @manarock those are exactly the tests i think of when talking about IQ tests. IMO, they measure how good people perform solving artificial problems. types of intelligence are too widely varied that this would make sense. i'm not really good with mathematics, but have less problems with theoretical computer science. i've come to think that maybe the different approaches to notation and thinking about problems are a reason for this. maybe i've just had bad people teaching math to me?
@amerika @TradeMinister @arteteco @freemo @manarock the point i want to make is that the presentation of the test generates a bigger error than one assumes because brains can work radically different inside, they are a black box.
This perspective is easily demonstrated by the fact that there are some sorts of tests you could give tribal africans who would significantly beat out non-africans every time. Obviously that no more proves africans are superior either, just shows that each group is going to be better suited to the types of tests that are suited to their culture.
@MilquetoastQT @TradeMinister @amerika @arteteco @freemo @manarock maybe, i guess the usual way math is taught has also never really sparked my interest. i'm
also not really good at doing things for the sake of doing them :)
@bonifartius
Yes in fact that is exactly the issue they try to address with more modern approaches to this problem.
Early on we found african tribes did very poorly on ordinary IQ tests intended for europeaners.. but it was obvious why, a typical IQ test asks questions and references ideas taht they have never been exposed to and that are culturally significant.
Similarly an IQ well suited to a specific tribe would be nonsense to someone who is in europe. I mean hell they cant even speak the same language.
@arteteco @manarock @amerika @TradeMinister