I think all your concerns are valid but they are not necessarily insurmountable. The FSF or whatever other entity could do just what you suggest and seek certification within the current legal frameworks. They could also talk to the carriers and negotiate individually which is probably going to be quite annoying and slow but it's not impossible and it's not like that's not done in the commercial space. The could build mechanisms into the hard-/firmware that takes your device off whatever regulated spectrum/provider if you modify anything that is in regulated territory (as watched over by some form of maintainer-quorum-signing-negotiation-structure). I'm sure there are many mechanisms and processes one could come up with that could keep with regulatory or other control aspects while still keeping things open.
All that patent and legal business is probably a more important/existential concern and a go/nogo-factor if you want to be a commercial player in a market-driven environment and less so for an entity like the FSF.
Correlations between socioeconomic status and success of one's offspring in educational systems don't mean that intelligence is inherited in the genetic sense. If you're seriously arguing this, you're very close to flirting with eugenics and the like.
> If you're seriously arguing this, you're very close to flirting with eugenics and the like.
Please don't be so eager to reject eugenics that you end up being anti-science. The idea that some percent of intelligence is genetic is entirely reasonable, not something to refuse to consider.
I did not say nor mean to imply that genetics do not have anything to do with IQ or intelligence. Also, context matters - this is a thread about how to structure educational environments and about certain specifics of the military. Genetics are a factor that is going to be of limited practical use in this domain, at least as far as I can fantasize OTOH.
> I did not say nor mean to imply that genetics do not have anything to do with IQ or intelligence.
Please explain what "Correlations between socioeconomic status and success of one's offspring in educational systems don't mean that intelligence is inherited in the genetic sense." means because it sure looks like an argument that the genetic component isn't real.
Especially because you posted that in response to someone talking about heritability in very general terms, so your comment can't be interpreted as a nitpick about which evidence goes where. And I can't think of any third interpretation.
> this is a thread about how to structure educational environments and about certain specifics of the military
The idea being presented is that it's easier to run good schools when you have smarter students with smarter parents.
So the inheritability of intelligence over a single generation is critical to the argument.
Maybe what I actually meant to express becomes more clear if I re-phrase and expand the the sentence a bit:
Correlations between socioeconomic status and success of one's offspring in educational systems does not mean that you can determine genetics as a relevant factor when thinking about how to structure education and if one is interested in the relationship between success (on whatever metric) in education and family trees.
I'm neither a geneticist nor is English my first language but I've always understood "heritability" to be a term that very much has to do with genetics and the Wikipedia link you provided implies the same. If we are talking about other factors/mechanisms that impact success in educational systems and that express themselves over generations and in family structures - sure, that's basically what I'm saying.
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(Long) edit after a cup of tea and a sandwich spent over the Wikipedia-Link you provided:
I must say, I think that's pretty readable even for me as a non-geneticist. In the context of this thread, there is a lot of interesting info about "Heritability and caveats", "Influences" and "Environmental effects". I've highlighted these quotes for myself while reading:
"Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis."
"Heritability measures the proportion of variation in a trait that can be attributed to genes, and not the proportion of a trait caused by genes."
"Contrary to popular belief, two parents of higher IQ will not necessarily produce offspring of equal or higher intelligence. Polygenic traits often appear less heritable at the extremes."
The whole section on "Implications":
"Some researchers, especially those that work in fields like developmental systems theory, have criticized the concept of heritability as misleading or meaningless. Douglas Wahlsten and Gilbert Gottlieb argue that the prevailing models of behavioral genetics are too simplistic by not accounting for gene-environment interactions. Stephen Ceci also highlights the issues with this assumption, noting that they were raised by Jane Loevinger in 1943. They assert that the idea of partitioning variance makes no sense when environments and genes interact and argue that such interaction is ubiquitous in human development. They highlight their belief that heritability analysis requires a hidden assumption they call the "separation of causes", which isn't borne out by biological reality or experimental research. Such researchers argue that the notion of heritability gives the false impression that "genes have some direct and isolated influence on traits", rather than another developmental resource that a complex system uses over the course of ontogeny."
Since this is a US-centered forum, this also seems relevant:
"In the US, individuals identifying themselves as Asian generally tend to score higher on IQ tests than Caucasians, who tend to score higher than Hispanics, who tend to score higher than African Americans. Yet, although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that between-group differences in average IQ have a genetic basis. In fact, greater variation in IQ scores exists within each ethnic group than between them. The scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain average differences in IQ test performance between racial groups. Growing evidence indicates that environmental factors, not genetic ones, explain the racial IQ gap."
> Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis.
This is just about race & IQ and already cedes the genetic argument that you were refusing to believe - because the evidence is so overwhelming.
> Contrary to popular belief, two parents of higher IQ will not necessarily produce offspring of equal or higher intelligence.
Not necessarily is load-bearing here in an extremely misleading way. Two parents of higher IQ are much more likely to produce an offspring of higher IQ than median.
You’re basically just cherrypicking arguments that support your incorrect supposition when compared to a mountain of evidence on the other side.
Why do you insist on saying that I "don't believe" in genetic components when I've literally said the opposite? The people who wrote the stuff on the Wikipedia site I was provided with and their (researcher-)sources seem to try to tell you and me both "hey, this is an interesting field of study but it's very complicated, many genes are involved, we are far from understanding them or being able to model them, be very careful with interpreting correlations and for (m)any practical purposes (such as thinking about how to structure educational environments), you really should consider quite a lot of things not directly related to genetics." What's so controversial about that and what overwhelming evidence does that go against?
edit: Sorry, to clarify, you are saying that "Two parents of higher IQ are much more likely to produce an offspring of higher IQ than median" because of genetics as the main determining factor?
> "hey, this is an interesting field of study but it's very complicated, many genes are involved, we are far from understanding them or being able to model them, be very careful with interpreting correlations and for (m)any practical purposes (such as thinking about how to structure educational environments), you really should consider quite a lot of things not directly related to genetics."
I'll say the same thing as you: context matters. Someone trying to say that smarter parents lead to a smarter student body doesn't need to model any genes and they don't need to care about the difference between things that are transferred genetically and things that are transferred socially.
> because of genetics as the main determining factor?
Does that matter? While the word "heritability" was used, and that term "very much has to do with genetics" as you say, that person didn't directly mention genes and didn't attribute any particular percent to genes. The original argument is the same whether genes are 80% or 20%.
Again, the person I was originally replying to called intelligence "highly heritable". That does mean a genetic argument and I replied to that and not a generic assertion that there are mechanisms in play that have influence on the expression over generations.
Absolutely agreed. I got bogged down in the genetics portion, but it is not actually a necessary component of the argument I'm trying to make - merely that kids are like parents.
you’re not arguing in good faith and now you’re motte-baileying. you said:
> Correlations between socioeconomic status and success of one's offspring in educational systems don't mean that intelligence is inherited in the genetic sense. If you're seriously arguing this, you're very close to flirting with eugenics and the like.
the obvious reading is that you do not believe in a genetic component to intelligence - and in fact say that a belief in “this” is arguing for eugenics.
> Sorry, to clarify, you are saying that "Two parents of higher IQ are much more likely to produce an offspring of higher IQ than median" because of genetics as the main determining factor?
Even if you remove all environmental factors, two smart parents are more likely to have a smart kid than the counterfactual.
My original answer was a condensed and far from comprehensive one-sentence reply to another condensed one-sentence-reply (that included the phrase "highly heritable" which is how the whole genetics argument started). Why is what you apparently perceive this original one-liner to mean so important to you? I've expanded on the points I was trying to make quite a bit. And again: The researchers who look at those things seem to be the ones telling us that the relationship between intelligence and genetics is complicated and many, many non-genetic factors are in play, no? Did I miss some big new movement on deterministic genetics in education or some such since I've sat my basic biology, psychology and sociology courses? Do you know stuff that's not on Wikipedia? Help me out here, please - and I'd politely ask you to refrain from insulting my good faith.
I'd also be - again, genuinely - interested in how you come up with that clear of a statement about smart parents and their non-externally-influenced child, how one would approach that as a research question/design and how - practically - useful this piece of data in and of itself would be when most of us are not Kaspar Hauser or any other conceptual model of a human being that exists without external interdependences.
> Why is what you apparently perceive this original one-liner to mean so important to you?
Well because you basically accused most people of being eugenicists simply for believing something that is most likely true and clearly implied a strong position that you are now retreating from. It's clearly an incendiary one-liner where previously the conversation was not so.
> The researchers who look at those things seem to be the ones telling us that the relationship between intelligence and genetics is complicated and many, many non-genetic factors are in play, no
There are massive biases in academia that encourage researchers to hedge results like this. When you ask anonymously, the answers & beliefs are clear.
> Snyderman & Rothman (1987/1988) — mailed survey to ~1,020 academics; 661 replies. Experts overwhelmingly agreed that IQ has substantial within-group heritability, and among those willing to give a number, the average estimate was ~60% for U.S. populations.
Also https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4804158/ which is going to be a lower bound because it focuses on international differences.
Adoption studies pretty clearly upper bound the amount that these complicated non-genetic/non-prenatal factors can be causing differences in tested adult intelligence among Americans.
> I'd politely ask you to refrain from insulting my good faith.
Again, you started your entry into this conversation by leveling accusations of eugenics. The responses you get are going to be tinged by that.
> how you come up with that clear of a statement about smart parents and their non-externally-influenced child, how one would approach that as a research question/design
Adoption studies can provide an upper bound (excluding pre-natal environment). Also GWASs paired with mendelian randomization can provide a lower bound.
No, I said one is "close to flirting with Eugenics" wich is rather not the same than accusing anybody of being an Eugenicist and I stand by that point. However, you and the other person insisting on (mis-)interpreting my original one-liner now seem to do the "retreating" and to say that the post I was replying to somehow "clearly" was about the generalized notion of kids being like their parents instead of being very specifically about genetics.
The study you linked is interesting but its results are far from "clear" (see its discussion section but that's probably also just bias and hedging or whatever) and it does have fuck all to do with your proposed thought experiment of a Kaspar-Hauser-like child. Even less so with your confident prediction of how a Kasper-Hauser-like child would turn out. I think you probably know this yourself but these kinds of predictions are something scientists would very, very rarely do - because they know the limitations of their work.
I'm kind of weirded out by this exchange, people here rather confidently express quite a bit of stuff that goes against years and decades of training I received when I became a scientist and I think I'll stop replying now. That was the recommendation of a colleague - who actually is a geneticist - I showed this thread to over coffee as well.
> your proposed thought experiment of a Kaspar-Hauser-like child
Oh my god this is the most malicious possible reading of "remove all environmental factors".
They're talking about making the environments match, for fuck's sake.
The bulk of your comments are arguing that heritability is very complex, which is completely compatible with the words "highly heritable". And you still haven't explained why the term "eugenics" was relevant to anything anyone else said. If it's something about race, a superficial similarity across millions of people in shifting groups has very little to do with the correlations between child and parent that share 50% of their genes, but even if those were the same the comment still didn't say anything that got anywhere near eugenics!!
> the post I was replying to somehow "clearly" was about the generalized notion of kids being like their parents instead of being very specifically about genetics
I didn't use the word "clearly". You're misquoting now too?
And I still believe they meant the entire complex mess you're talking about, yeah. I think you have zero justification to barge in and say it's a complex issue, and the person making a single sentence comment must have meant the most simple possible version, there's no way they were referring to the entire complex issue already without your help, in a context where the distinction doesn't even matter.
Even if you're done replying I hope you see this: If you were actually talking in good faith you're doing a very bad job at giving anyone the benefit of the doubt for how they word things.
seems like a disbelief in heritable intelligence (absurd) is drawing some to use the US military as a shining star of schooling innovation without strong evidence. so seems clearly relevant and useful in this domain to identify which interventions actually work and which are just composition fx
What do you think "the heritability of IQ" means? It seems from the thread that you believe it's genetic causation of intelligence. Is that what you're claiming?
I think that's how zevon interpreted it, so that's what I responded to.
Personally I would include other methods. And for the argument about schools method doesn't really matter.
Edit: And I don't know if genetics are the biggest factor in single generation inheritance, especially at a younger age, but I do think they're a reasonably significant factor after looking at various estimates.
Right, just so we're clear that heritability isn't genetic determinism; it's a correlation statistic. All sorts of things are heritable that are absolutely not fixed by genetics. And there are things fixed by genes that aren't meaningfully heritable!
Of course it's not determinism but it is statistically causal. The point is the distribution of the student body is going to be different in a pretty significant way.
You said correlation, I said "causal" because it's going from parent to child.
"statistically" meaning any individual child could have any IQ, and genes are only one factor out of many, but when you measure the entire group the graph of IQs is going to look different.
A comparison would be like, filtering IVF in 50 couples based on X/Y chromosomes and measuring height. That filter doesn't decide how tall a child will be, but it does shift the average. The filter would cause a height change, on a statistical basis.
This is all very fuzzy. "Heritability", of the sort that we have numbers from peer-reviewed articles on, means something specific, and that specific meaning is not genetically causal.
That wiki page lists a lot of evidence that a meaningful chunk is genetically causal. Is there a strong reason for me to think otherwise? Even the pessimistic numbers from gene mapping that are cited are .1-.2
I mean, start with the fact that it's a correlation statistic and not a causal statistic and just work your way back from that. Heritability --- of the kind with a research literature cite record --- is simply the ratio of phenotypical variation to genetic variation. The number of fingers on your hand is not, in that statistic, highly heritable.
I don't think there's a Wikipedia cite that's going to get you over that speed bump in your argument.
A lot of those studies work very hard to split apart the genetic (and sometimes including epigenetic) factors at point of sperm meets egg, the environmental factors in the womb, the parenting factors, and/or the rest of the post-birth environment. They're not doing a simple ratio.
And to the extent that research successfully isolates the genetic factors, we know it's not some outside factor causing a correlation, and we know it's not IQ causing genes. Anything isolated there is genes causing IQ.
I think you should take a beat and read up on assortative mating; also on heritability, which is a population statistic, not a measure of any single person. As it stands, this response you just wrote doesn't make sense.
If you just measure genes and IQ, then assortative mating screws up that statistic very badly.
When researchers do studies specifically designed to isolate different factors, it's different. Please stop ignoring this part of my argument!!
Assume the most extreme case of assortative mating possible. Every child inherits two genes that list the exact IQ of its parents.
Do those genes correlate with the IQ of the child? If they do, there's only a few ways for that to happen. The causal factor could be how they're parented, or the environment, or the genes themselves. If you correct for the first two across a statistically large sample, and still see an effect, then it must be the last one.
> not a measure of any single person
I know. I'm saying each data point inside the statistic is arrived at in a specific way. Cause and effect only go via certain paths. It's easy to make mistakes about cause and effect by forgetting about paths, but you can categorize them and only some paths are possible. Any statistically resilient correlation has a cause somewhere.
Molecular and behavioral geneticists absolutely, in modern studies, attempt to deconfound heritability statistics. Within-family and sibling regression are two of those techniques. When you use those study designs, heritability plummets for IQ, but not for traits like height.
I'm not trying to stake out a position about whether IQ is in any sense genetically causal or fixed. I'm saying that it's much more complicated than the Wikipedia page on "Heritability of IQ" would suggest. That's the only reason I dipped into this thread. You can believe whatever you want to believe, but this is an actively (indeed, furiously) studied open question, and the answer is definitely not "twin studies from 20 years ago set a heritability number that resolves the question".
I know it's complicated, but you seemed to be arguing pretty strongly that the genetic component is zero which while possible is not well supported by the evidence.
If you're not trying to stake out a position then you did a very good job of convincing me otherwise.
I don't know where I implied it wasn't complicated?
Also my original statement was just that it's "entirely reasonable".
I think if you read the thread history you'll see that I said nothing of the sort. But a conclusive answer to the question of how much direct genetic influence there is on intelligence (outside of disease/disability genetics) is very much not supported by current evidence. It's an open question. Right now: it's not looking great for the hereditarians (define them as "there is a very strong genetic component to cognitive ability"), but that could change as molecular genetic methods improve. Nobody knows.
I don't know what you think that means, but if you took "peer reviewed evidence" from the 1990s as scientific truth, you'd arrive at an answer that is outside the mainstream of even hereditarian scientists today. Further, things like twin studies can't be evidence of genetic causation. I gave an example of why not upthread.
I think we are way too deep in the weeds for this to be productive, and we're the only two people reading this. If it wasn't clear, I was trying 1-2 exchanges ago to find an off-ramp for this. I'm not telling you what to believe, I'm just saying that twin study heritability statistics don't settle the question. We should be able to agree comfortably there.
What do all these machine shops without any need for modern machinery and processes actually do?
Seriously though, of course you can make a living with old tools - however, even the village metal workshop around here has at least one big-ass laser cutter and a CNC mill next to all their old(er) lathes, mills, brakes, presses and other toys. Many oldschool fabricators I spoke to over the last few years are quite interested in what laser welding brings/will bring to the table. Basically all smaller fabrication companies I've seen (the long tail of the car industry and other bigger industries, mostly) are continually upgrading their infrastructure with all sorts of robots and other automation widgets. And so on.
No one said that they had no need for modern machinery. It's an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach. If you have a manufacturing process that was dialed in perfectly 20 years ago, and your customer(s) is still buying those parts, made on that machine, there is no benefit to moving them to another machine that now has to be set up just right, have the new parts coming off it QC'd to make sure that they are identical to what came off the old one, etc.
It's work that you don't need to do and that you won't get paid for. If the old machine breaks, then maybe it would make sense to move the job to something newer.
I used to work with someone whose entire business was retrofitting old machine tools with modern controllers when the decades-old electronics failed. You'd be amazed how much of this stuff is still out there.
Well, you kind said that literally. And I did not say that one should needlessly move processes to different infrastructure without a good reason. Anyway, I don't think our opinions are very dissimilar.
btw: I think I have a reasonably solid idea of a range of fabrication environments, the oldest piece of machinery I'm responsible for in my professional life is about 70 years old (its basic design is decades older) and some of my personal stuff (sewing machines, mostly) is more than 100 years old. I'm really not against using what works at all.
If you don't have a very good marketing department, I'll still kick you out of business if I can double or triple the amount of widgets I can make because I started with the same machines you did - but I upgraded them with better controls, attached a few robot arms and now run a lights-out widget factory tended by a fraction of the workforce you employ while you reminisce about the good old times...
I'd also like more comprehensive write-ups on such topics but either I haven't found the right sources yet or all the people who know how to set up and keep modern fabrication infrastructure going are too busy raking in the cash and making stuff. ^^
If you like visual media, the "Strange Parts" YouTube channel is an interesting source for glimpses into modern, mostly Chinese factories: https://www.youtube.com/@StrangeParts/
Since you're asking about pick and place specifically, https://www.opulo.io/ is an interesting example of how far/cheap you can push such machinery (and the design in and of itself is interesting from a manufacturing point of view). Not all that relevant from a mass-production point of view, though.
That sounds catchy but I think it doesn't survive further inspection. People mucking around with machines and processes were rather instrumental in creating lathes, steam power, rockets, computers, looms, software, CNC-machines and all those other puzzle pieces we have available to make stuff. They are also instrumental in developing those things further.
I'm also kind of curious as to know what kind of machine shops you base this on. Most production companies, labs and even small fabricators I've seen have continued to develop and to optimize their infrastructure and processes. To take the numbers discussed here: 50 years ago, (C)NC machines, CAD and CAM were in their infancy. And that stuff certainly has changed some things in the world of fabrication.
Machine shops, and serious software shops don't fo their mucking about in prod. Any machine shop experimentation that takes fown the production line is like Google or Meta going partially or fully offline - which has happened - but is also financially painful, so they do all they can to avoid it.
Sure - I guess this is generally true for most work domains, not just machine shops and serious software shops. However, the argument I was responding to was that there is no mucking about in the "real world" and that there is this difference between mucky software people and the serious creators of real stuff. Which I don't agree with.
btw: If we understand "machine shop" as a mass production environment with modern, integrated production lines, it is my anecdotal experience that there is a massive amount of muckery and fuckery involved in getting such an environment to run (usually called "integration" or some such which probably looks better on business cards). There's also a good chance that over the years - or decades - different people will engage in further iterations of the muck-pile to modify the system for new requirements from high on up or weird edge cases, to replace components that are no longer available with other stuff or to do whatever else the day might call for.
May I ask what you do that requires doing it on the phone?
If "necessity" means work-related: On my work-issued iPhone, I call and (briefly) text with people, triage some e-mail, have a look at calendars, take some in-situ photo/video, refer to a few notes, and so on. I don't have the screen time feature turned on but I guess I'm also below 30 minutes on that phone on most days. The exception being traditional voice calls which occasionally can go on for (much) longer than those 30 minutes, depending on what's happening. However, most of my more regular, scheduled conversations happen in real-life or in Zoom, Webex or other such platforms and not on a mobile phone.
The only work-related thing that I can think of OTOH which really required me to use a mobile device is hardware that requires an app to work (which is fortunately still rare).
Basically anything work related (mostly checking email, calendar, Slack, JIRA, etc) that happens when I am not near my computer. Like a lot of people in IT, we're always "at work".
Interesting blog post. A few thoughts on smartphones, presence and whatnot:
- I've lusted over the fantasy of having a pocket knowledge machine / tricorder-like thing since long before PDAs and later smartphones. Okay, still no full tricorder, but boy, are smartphones ever useful. I really like having a pocket GPS, music/audiobook player, translation device, library, basic sensor package, gaming machine, backup for my most important data, password/document manager and general purpose computing device in my pocket.
- I was a child before the web was a thing but I very much grew up on computers and the web and I have seen and/or experienced all sorts of addictive, gamified and otherwise nasty things those technologies brought with it (or enabled). I'm rather happy to have a bit of context from a time before those technologies and I'm also happy about having grown out of most of my computer-related bad habits and behaviours before the web and those technologies were what they are today.
- I made a decision to get off most social media with the exception of a few forum-like things at the point where I felt that it was no longer mostly about expanding real-world connections. Must have been around 10-12 years ago, I think.
- In my personal definition of "social media", I've included most messengers and certainly the way many people seem to use them. This abstinence can cause quite a bit of social friction and peer-pressure and I'm not entirely sure if I could (or would want to) "resist" had I not first grown up without any messenger and later with (occasionally excessive use of) IRC, ICQ and many that came after.
- If I feel the need to publish something, I'll do it via some long-term channel (blog, newspaper, journal, conference, ...).
- Even without being on social media, it's still relatively easy to keep up with current (app-/web-)culture enough to not get laughed out the room or viewed as a hopeless old fart by younger people (which is important to me because I work with them pretty much daily).
- Even without being on social media, it's still quite easy to keep up with the news and important developments in whatever field might interest you.
- Often, I read "my government / bank / other organization made me have an app / a smartphone". In those cases, I often ask myself it it's a matter of convenience or if those voices come from some context that really does not have any other options. Because I really hope there are no countries where you can't get/use any bank account without an app and I even more sincerely hope that most countries make it illegal to require mobile apps (or even internet access) for any important government service as the only option.
Good time to bring it back. You used to have to sideload the iOS app for years and the new app makes using an old Pebble with an iPhone so much easier. :) I've been using the app for a few weeks and it generally works well but not everything is already functional. No voice replies, no health tracking, no canned messages, yet, for example.
The people at google or apple. Perhaps your phone manufacturer if you don't use a first party phone. The cell phone companies (approximately but they can triangulate pretty well). Potentially any retail establishment[1]. As facial recognition technology becomes more mature it won't even require a phone.
[1] This one is a little uncertain because it relies on tracking bluetooth / wifi radios and you have to do a pretty complex setup. Simply establishing presence is harder (and ofc the whole thing can be blocked by secure operating systems).
Well, I happen to use a phone without Google's or Apple's services in my personal life. And if I were to go out for something the authorities would not agree with, I most certainly would not carry any phone, smartwatch or whatever while doing so. Maybe an iPod Classic or something to listen to some tunes while I get myself a bloody nose at the Fight Club, collect rich people's body fat from beauty clinics to blow up capitalism or whatever else I might get up to on a quiet evening out.
Seriously though, if I understand you correctly, you want people to be critical of stuff like location sharing and whatnot but your way there somehow involves to normalize said whatnot completely. I don't really follow.
All that patent and legal business is probably a more important/existential concern and a go/nogo-factor if you want to be a commercial player in a market-driven environment and less so for an entity like the FSF.