Comments on: Medicine, As Not Seen On TV

By: Free Northerner

Free Northerner — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 05:03:38 +0000

[…] How medicine works. […]

By: John Maxwell IV

John Maxwell IV — Sat, 05 Jul 2014 23:55:18 +0000

Maybe there’s a selection effect where people whose problems are easy to diagnose tend to have those problems quickly diagnosed & solved, and they don’t tell their friends (you) about them?

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By: Nancy Lebovitz

Nancy Lebovitz — Fri, 04 Jul 2014 04:03:56 +0000

Another ambiguity in all this is whether you mean recreating an industrial society (able make things in large quantity at low cost) or being able to make a single industrial thing from scratch, even at very high cost.

I suspect you’re wildly underestimating the amount of very specific knowledge that goes into a factory.

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By: Nornagest

Nornagest — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 22:54:03 +0000

@Silas — I’ll see if I can dig it out of my library this weekend.

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By: Silas Barta

Silas Barta — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 18:53:42 +0000

@Nornagest: I’d like to hear more about that. It sounds like a great way to ensure a well-connected, deep understanding (“Level 2″ as I would call it), and applicable as a technique for programmers.

I hate when people in a position of informational or social authority have a superficial understanding, especially when they insist that “everyone’s like that”.

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By: Michael Edward Vassar

Michael Edward Vassar — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 12:49:41 +0000

India and China, at the times when they closed their borders, were substantial parts of the world population. The causal theory
Trade Barriers -> Poverty
predicts that their closing their borders should have visibly impoverished both them AND the rest of the world. By contrast,
Oppressive leadership -> Trade Barriers -> Poverty
predicts that under such conditions they would become poor while the rest of the world did not.

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By: Douglas Knight

Douglas Knight — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 12:16:17 +0000

The graph doesn’t show standard errors, but many of the studies have small standard errors, including those from 1888, so more data from 1888 is not needed.

The problem is that the difference between studies is large. Is this a real effect, or is there systematic difference between studies? This is not a question that can be resolved by more studies. A thousand studies from 1888 that all had the same mean would not explain the range of means today.

If the difference over a century is meaningful, then so too is the difference today. Then Finns and Australians are much faster than Americans. Woodley et al don’t notice that this follows from their methodology, probably because they are idiots, but maybe because they are frauds. If this is true, it is easy to test, unlike the conclusions they want to draw. More likely it is systematic differences between methods of measuring reaction time. That is my explanation. And it is very easy to test: just get the equipment from the various tests and apply them to a single sample of people. It doesn’t have to be a good sample; a classroom of undergraduates will do.

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By: Doug S.

Doug S. — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 09:01:02 +0000

Funny story: My mom once got a large, awful-looking rash with blisters on her leg and knee. We thought it might be an infection of some sort and took her to a nearby hospital. They admitted her and gave her antibiotics. A day or so later, someone figured out that the rash was actually caused by poison ivy and they stopped the antibiotics.

I’m not sure who it was that played Dr. House that time, but I guess sometimes it happens.

Incidentally, according to the internet, severe cases of poison ivy can be treated with… steroids. Go figure. (I suppose that even if antibiotics and steroids do fix everything, you still have to figure out which one to use!)

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By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 07:58:24 +0000

You’re saying the variance is too high, that there’s too little data in 1888.

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By: Douglas Knight

Douglas Knight — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 03:42:58 +0000

No, the conventional wisdom and the truth is that bisexual men and exclusive lesbians are rare.

I don’t know why Ewald and Cochran talk about male homosexuality and not female. I don’t know any attempt at a precise comparison of fitness. As above, that might be the answer, but I suspect that they follow the conventional wisdom that lesbians are made, not born. I don’t know of any principled attempt to evaluate the evidence that produced the conventional wisdom, but I believe that the point estimate for shared environment contribution to female homosexuality is positive, while the shared environment contribution for males is zero. The error bars are pretty big, though.

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