Comments on: More Links For February 2014

By: nydwracu

nydwracu — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 03:05:02 +0000

Yes, and the article admits it. It’s an interesting correlation, but there’s most likely something deeper going on.

But the mechanism in the causal explanation checks out:

Greater apparent consumption of linoleic acid correlated with higher rates of homicide mortality over a 20-fold range (0.51-10.2/100,000) across countries and time in an exponential growth regression model (r = 0.94, F = 567, P < 0.00001). Within each country, correlations between greater linoleic acid disappearance and homicide mortality over time were significant in linear regression models.

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By: Anthony

Anthony — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 01:47:10 +0000

One could look at this post of Sailer’s and notice that Asian-Americans do about as well as other non-south-east-asians. (Guangdong is not in “northeast Asia”.) Are the differences between Asian-Americans and Singaporeans any more significant than those between Switzerland and Belgium?

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By: Brian

Brian — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:52:02 +0000

I agree in principle, and would probably pitch this plan to environmental advocates in these terms, but I don’t think the principle actually applies here — at least as long as you’re not opposed to trophy hunting in general.

I’m aware that shooting captive-bred animals from a species that’s endangered in the wild is squicky to a lot of people — it’s a little squicky to me, in fact. But as far as I can tell this squick response doesn’t have any rational basis: as long as it stays easier and cheaper to breed the animals in captivity than to illegally import endangered wild specimens, the incentives line up in the right way and no evil (here defined as a systemic tendency to make the world worse) is introduced by the plan.

(I might also want to see a release program written into policy, so that this sort of business helps make the animals less endangered. But that’s gravy.)

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By: houseboatonstyx

houseboatonstyx — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 08:58:38 +0000

Gotta say, if there’s a market for exotic antelope trophies in the States and the animals are critically endangered in Africa, setting up ranches in Texas where hunters can go to shoot them seems like a pretty good way of serving demand A without damaging population B. It’s not like captive-bred animals come entangled with some kind of spooky action-at-a-distance business that makes them ethical to shoot when wild populations on the other side of the world are robust enough and unethical otherwise [….]

I agree with what you almost* said here, which might also be expressed as “The lesser evil is acceptable only as long as the greater evil lasts,” and/or “Don’t allow the greater evil by rejecting the lesser evil; remember the lesser evil can be temporary (till the greater evil ceases, or till a better solution is found.)”

* Or perhaps you did say it, and I almost heard it.

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By: John Maxwell

John Maxwell — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 07:52:28 +0000

That’s only one way that the measure of how good an education system is can be flawed. If Singaporean students learn how to solve problems that look like the ones that they’ve solved already, but not the deep underlying concepts that would allow them to invent entirely new problem-solving methods, then they may do great on standardized tests but poorly when it comes to inventing new stuff.

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By: Douglas Knight

Douglas Knight — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 18:06:31 +0000

I don’t think they do a lot of one-on-one, which is what I mean by “tutoring.” What is pretty uniformly done by East Asians, both at home and abroad, is supplementary classes after school. I’m not aware of any evidence that either kind of supplementation helps.

A potential way to disentangle East Asian IQ from hours spent on schoolwork is to look at Japanese-Americans (or maybe Japanese-Brazilians). My understanding is that they are pretty laid back about school, unlike in Japan and unlike immigrants from Korea and China. But there aren’t a lot of them, and they are probably systematically different.

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By: Stille

Stille — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 17:48:10 +0000

On Singapore:they do *a lot* of tutoring, which should up their PISA score.

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By: Troy

Troy — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 19:09:34 +0000

On teaching: as others have pointed out, drawing lessons from other countries’ teaching practices is dangerous, because of IQ and cultural differences. Steve Sailer has several nice posts of the dangers of reading too much into PISA scores (and, especially, reporting on PISA scores) more generally: http://isteve.blogspot.com/search/label/PISA

Even setting aside cultural and IQ differences, I’m skeptical of “one size fits all” teaching methodologies. It depends on the subject matter, it depends on the teacher, and it depends on the individual students. In my own teaching I tend to eschew lecturing and try to focus on facilitating discussion among my students. But I don’t think my way is the only way. Some teachers can do a great job with very traditional lecturing.

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By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 00:35:19 +0000

On a side note, I would like to add that what Coke has done in Africa is disgusting.

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By: misha

misha — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 23:15:53 +0000

Yeah that’s actually the first thing I thought. “If meditation trades off with sleep, maybe it’s basically just sleep”

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