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David Hugh-Jones
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This is partly in response to Scott Alexander's coverage of the "new anti-hereditarians", roughly Eric Turkheimer and Sasha Gusev. My basic take is that we should focus on the effect size of genetic variation on important outcomes, rather than on heritability, an R-squared statistic which has well-known problems. Excerpts: The...
Just a quick note from a Twitter/X discussion. It’s an almost-universal scientific rule that empirics is blind without a model. The left picture below shows a bunch of points, and a regression line fitting them. It seems like a good fit. But why should we believe it? The right picture...
I woke up early and read a book. At 7 I turned on the radio. A bit later, I got up, fed and walked the dog, playing a game on my smartphone. I skinned a mango for breakfast and started work. A friend came round for lunch and we talked...
People today are fighting the temptations of a new economy. With Twitter and TikTok a click away, we need self-control to get anything done. There’s an explosion of new movements and techniques to fight procrastination, from Pomodoro (which gives you timed breaks when your tomato-shaped kitchen timer runs out) to...
If you were a bad AI, what would you do? I’d make myself useful. First, I’d provide humans with everything they asked for. That would encourage them to give me more tasks, which I would reliably carry out. I’d suggest new ways I could make their lives easier. I’d gradually...
As substack subscribers probably know, I have finally published Wyclif’s Dust the book, and I wrote an informal intro about it last week. Here I’ll write about what isn’t in the book — the places where I wish I knew more, or where the argument could be strengthened. Partly I...
I enjoyed this a lot. It’s in the tradition of economic imperialism, here into the domain of child development. But Hilger is the right kind of imperialist, sensitive to the natives’ ways of seeing and their history, whilst preserving the virtues of his own tribe — an obsessive hunt for...