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The knowledge economy myth
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i believe that twin studies show that r = 0.7.
Twin studies are capturing some nurture and nature though. They'll be exposed to similar womb conditions which is theorised to affect much of brain development and character (specifically testosterone levels in the womb etc). For the non stats people, r = 0.7 can be roughly translated as 70% of the IQ of the twin can be explained by the IQ of the other twin (the real number can be over 80% depending on the study!). The r drops to something like 0.5 for fraternal twins (i.e. twins who only share environment with each other). The number for non-twin siblings is lower again because they don't share identical womb conditions before birth.
Shiny graph from one study:
MZ = Identical Twins
DZ = Fraternal Twins
To give an idea what we expect for heritable and weakly heritable traits (i.e. mostly nature or mostly nurture respectively):
When these studies are done you find different traits fitting into patterns like the above. Some things show very little heritablity in either nature or nurture like the rightmost graph. Some things are strongly geneticly heritable but very weakly environmentally heritable (mostly nature, little nurture) like the middle graph and then some are strongly environmentally heritable but weakly genetically heritable (i.e. mostly nurture, little nature) like the graph on the left.
But yes, there is very strong evidence for IQ to be strongly heritable. On average kids tend towards having an IQ that is distributed around the average of their parents' IQs. Now this does not mean that you won't find exceptional kids who have IQs far in excess of parents! It just means that the average kid will tend towards being as smart as their parents which honestly is pretty blatantly obvious to even the casual observer. Now this is not just a Nature effect, it is also capturing many Nurture effects but really the whole Nature vs Nurture thing is a strawman here, kids tend for both genetic and environmental reasons to be around as intelligent as their parents are. Whether it's more nurture or nature doesn't really change this.
Edit:
Actually the biggest error that's made is to predict academic performance only on the genetic heritability of intelligence, far more factors are at play here and some of them are weakly inherited, some are mostly nurture and so on.0 -
Ah yeah, sure - I'm familiar with the nor operator.It's just a logical operator you can use in If or For statements. It's used in electronics as well as formal logic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_NOR
It's a very simple concept really. But you can build very complicated entities from such simple logical beginnings.
I originally asked about 'not loops' which you had mentioned. You did clarify to 'nor loops' so I was wondering if you were actually talking about something I hadn't heard of, or just the usual operator.
Wondering if perhaps you were just skimming through my posts, and perhaps just missed that detail.Yeah, I think we disagree fundamentally on this one. I agree completely that it's abused as an excuse for poor teaching and uneven resources but I'd argue the opposite tabla rasa stance is abused equally with absurd notions that any kid can be exceptional academically which is blatantly false. The truth lies in between these two extremes. Nature and nurture are both true, your intelligence is mostly dictated by your parents' intelligence but this is only partially genetic the environment your parents provide is dictated by their intelligence and their opinion of education (which is dictated by their own experiences!). We could go around and around in circles for ever on this really.
I'll recommend a book actually that shaped my own thinking a lot: http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9780007240821/Nature-Via-Nurture
Yeah, sure, you could go around for a long time in a nature-nuture debate. Personally, I think nature is very overplayed. I think the idea that peoples natural abilities might mean one kid could be taught elementary logic (say, via game playing) and another could not, at primary school level, is crazy. I really think that everyone should be able to understand basic logic. Clearly many people don't, on a day to day basis (you just have to see the amount of politicians, news paper articles, pub discussions etc that rely on well worn and obvious fallacies). I think that blaming this on varying natural abilities is just an easy excuse for systemic teaching failure. But I'll quite happy concede that this is an opinion, formed on personal observations, and not backed up by scientific research.
I'll take a look at that book you recommended.0 -
Twin studies are capturing some nurture and nature though. They'll be exposed to similar womb conditions which is theorised to affect much of brain development and character (specifically testosterone levels in the womb etc). For the non stats people, r = 0.7 can be roughly translated as 70% of the IQ of the twin can be explained by the IQ of the other twin (the real number can be over 80% depending on the study!). The r drops to something like 0.5 for fraternal twins (i.e. twins who only share environment with each other). The number for non-twin siblings is lower again because they don't share identical womb conditions before birth.
Shiny graph from one study:
MZ = Identical Twins
DZ = Fraternal Twins
To give an idea what we expect for heritable and weakly heritable traits (i.e. mostly nature or mostly nurture respectively):
When these studies are done you find different traits fitting into patterns like the above. Some things show very little heritablity in either nature or nurture like the rightmost graph. Some things are strongly geneticly heritable but very weakly environmentally heritable (mostly nature, little nurture) like the middle graph and then some are strongly environmentally heritable but weakly genetically heritable (i.e. mostly nurture, little nature) like the graph on the left.
But yes, there is very strong evidence for IQ to be strongly heritable. On average kids tend towards having an IQ that is distributed around the average of their parents' IQs. Now this does not mean that you won't find exceptional kids who have IQs far in excess of parents! It just means that the average kid will tend towards being as smart as their parents which honestly is pretty blatantly obvious to even the casual observer. Now this is not just a Nature effect, it is also capturing many Nurture effects but really the whole Nature vs Nurture thing is a strawman here, kids tend for both genetic and environmental reasons to be around as intelligent as their parents are. Whether it's more nurture or nature doesn't really change this.
Edit:
Actually the biggest error that's made is to predict academic performance only on the genetic heritability of intelligence, far more factors are at play here and some of them are weakly inherited, some are mostly nurture and so on.
Hmm. I haven't looked into twin studies in any detail, but I can see a lot of potential for confounding. Could you send me a link to one of them you find particularly convincing?But yes, there is very strong evidence for IQ to be strongly heritable.
Are these twin studies where the twins were adopted? (even thats vulnerable to other biases).
I wouldn't think that is strong evidence for a nature based argument; could all come down to nurture even then. (obligatory: IQ is a flawed measure)On average kids tend towards having an IQ that is distributed around the average of their parents' IQs.
I think this is explained because they tend to learn a way of thinking about things from their parents, and because of other social factors (resources available to parents etc).It just means that the average kid will tend towards being as smart as their parents which honestly is pretty blatantly obvious to even the casual observer.
I see a lot of kids who are smarter than their parents because of better education etc. For example, wouldn't the average IQ of people in Ireland now be higher than 300 years ago?
A strawman? - maybe you mean a red herring! I doubt its done on purpose.Now this is not just a Nature effect, it is also capturing many Nurture effects but really the whole Nature vs Nurture thing is a strawman here, kids tend for both genetic and environmental reasons to be around as intelligent as their parents are.
Anyway, I think its neither. Its relevant.
If some people just naturally can't be expected to learn logical reasoning at primary school, because they lack the natural abilities, then there is little point in teaching it to them.
On the other hand, if they can be taught these things, because their existing lack of facility with them is due to a lack of nurture, then it makes a lot of sense to teach them.
I believe the later, and think it should be a high priority, imo.0 -
Ah yeah, sure - I'm familiar with the nor operator.
I originally asked about 'not loops' which you had mentioned. You did clarify to 'nor loops' so I was wondering if you were actually talking about something I hadn't heard of, or just the usual operator.
Wondering if perhaps you were just skimming through my posts, and perhaps just missed that detail.
Just crossed wires I think. I read a different question than the one I was actually asked.Yeah, sure, you could go around for a long time in a nature-nuture debate. Personally, I think nature is very overplayed. I think the idea that peoples natural abilities might mean one kid could be taught elementary logic (say, via game playing) and another could not, at primary school level, is crazy. I really think that everyone should be able to understand basic logic. Clearly many people don't, on a day to day basis (you just have to see the amount of politicians, news paper articles, pub discussions etc that rely on well worn and obvious fallacies). I think that blaming this on varying natural abilities is just an easy excuse for systemic teaching failure. But I'll quite happy concede that this is an opinion, formed on personal observations, and not backed up by scientific research.
I'll take a look at that book you recommended.
I think the biggest problem is that there's this idea that you've nature on one side and nurture on the other. This isn't the case. Genes can switch on and off in response to environmental triggers. You can have a gene for a certain trait but never develop it because you weren't exposed to the right triggers. The idea of having X gene meaning you develop Y trait is an oversimplification from a time when genes weren't very well understood (I'd argue they still aren't, but anyway), unfortunately this is not common knowledge.
The other biggest problem is that the nurture side in the "war" have conjoured up an image of fatalism surrounding nature. Which is problematic since, well except for a very small few things like Tay-Sachs, it's a lot more complicated than that.0 -
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Well - when I said 'learning a way of thinking' I meant that as a nurture phenomenon.
I do firmly believe that ways of thinking about things are learned. Ok, problem solving skills can be learned - thats becoming more accepted it seems - but I also think the overall process of how we start to approach thinking about something, and how we even think about thinking can be learned and altered.
I think that we pay very little attention to that - I definitely believe you can definitely adopt more efficient learning strategies, and sort of meta-attitudes that make you reason more efficiently, and gain more understanding from subsequent life experience, which then leads to larger differences in accrued understanding over time.
And this is hardly sort of thing is ever taught to people. I think a lot of this is what we call smartness when we talk about someone, and really, I think a lot more of it is learned than we normally give credit for.
I don't believe its such a strong mix of both nature and nurture as you put it.
I think for most of what people do, most of the time, the nurtured way they approach problems and situations totally dominates over their genetically gifted intelligence amounts. I think this holds right through to an IQ test.
Right, I'm tired (no sleep) so I'll try to focus on a smaller part of your argument so I can give you a better answer.
The issue is that if IQ (since we can measure it and it does tend towards being fairly stable over time, learning generally won't affect your performance as an adult you'll tend to stay around the same mark or so I believe) was highly nuture based a simple test for this would be to look at the correlation between siblings and adoptive siblings and see if there was significant difference. There has been a fair amount of work done in this area, the general finding is that adoptive siblings are no more correlated in IQ than complete strangers are yet biological siblings are strongly correlated with each other. I hate linking to wikipedia but it has some study results that correspond well with what I've read elsewhere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Family_environment
This has been repeated in multiple samples so it's a pretty damn strong conclusion. Now the biggest issue with this is the studies tend to deal with middle income, well nourished kids. It gets more complicated if you start looking at low income groups where negative environmental factors start depressing IQ. But this is a side issue and more of interest in terms of the effects of poor nutrition/whatever has on general intelligence (which IQ can be viewed as a proxy for). This is what I was getting at with the mix of nurture and nature going on. It's almost never a simple x=y relationship with this stuff.
Intelligence is strongly heritable. Learning strategies etc help with exam performance and recollection and other such, they don't make you more intelligent. They might make you use your time better etc but this isn't an intelligence issue! Exam performance isn't intelligence.
Overall, I think you're making well fashioned arguments and am enjoying discussing this with you btw. 0 -
the spatial reasoning stuff is the reason why IQs are increasing - the Flynn effect. The thought is that it is effected by video games etc.
Yup, education at school wouldn't really effect it strongly though.Genuinely, I defy anyone to play deathmatch descent II for a week, and not tell me their spatial skills improved afterwards...
Indeed! There should definitely be an hour a week in primary school of FPS.
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So, even though it might not be convincing (you may think I'd deluded, or lying, or otherwise wrong!) as an argument to 2nd parties, if someone makes the argument to me that most intelligence in humans is innate - a strong nature position - I feel I, from my own life experience, have access to a counter example. So; I think this is more than an opinion, in that sense. You might say that I only know how my own development went, and perhaps I'm different, or not representative. This is possibly true - but seems improbable to me.
I've a quite simple argument for you and a neat economic example to follow it that I'll think you'll enjoy.
We all accept height is strongly heritable. People tend to be around the same height as their parents, assuming both are well nourished etc. We also all accept that poor nourishment and other negative environmental conditions can effect things like height. So despite height being strongly heritable environmental factors can play a strong determining role if they are negative. Our genes map out a potential height, our environment decides whether we can grow to achieve it. Pretty uncontroversial stuff yes?
Now, our minds are our brains (if you disagree on this one, you and I must have a chat about mental illness!). Our brains are as much a physical thing as our height is. Now there are a lot more environmental factors going on with our brains than our height but intelligence can be viewed in a simple manner as being analogous to height. Intelligence is about aptitude not achievement. When we say someone is smarter than another person we mean they've got a better aptitude for mental stuff, not that they simply know more than the other person. What we inherit is merely a potential aptitude. Our environments determine how much of this potential we achieve similar to height, just far far more complicated. Nature and nurture can coexist very happily with something like intelligence, and intelligence can be something strongly heritable while still requiring much environmental factors to properly blossom.
Now, I promised you a neat economic example and it is this:
First let's set the ground rules. If some group enjoys an innate advantage over another group then the State should tax the better off group to compensate those who through no fault of their own are worse off. This is the basis for the concept of utilitarian taxes (it's more complicated but this is enough to do us). The basic idea is redistributive justice now you may personally strongly disagree with this as the core rule in taxation policy like I do but let's accept it as our core rule for now. We implement this in a very rough sketchy way in our own economy with our concept of a higher and lower tax band.
We should introduce a height tax. At first this seems absurd but sure enough if you look at the data from across multiple developed countries, income correlates very strongly with height. To the tune of 5,250 Dollars (in 2003) in yearly income more for someone 6 foot versus someone 5' 5" tall after you control for gender, weight and age. Now there are loads of suggested reasons for this like higher confidence for taller people etc but basically if you're taller you'll tend to earn more and it's something you have absolutely no control over. No amount of work will make you taller, no amount of study will either. So given that it's impossible for the vertically challenged to correct this deficit it is only correct that we adjust tax to account for this distribution in income if one follows the rule of redistibutive justice.
So, should we abandon redistributive justice or tax height? Fantastic question I think.
The full paper behind this can be found here: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/mankiw/files/Optimal_Taxation_of_Height.pdf (if you're not into maths, skip the model section)0 -
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Right, I'm tired (no sleep) so I'll try to focus on a smaller part of your argument so I can give you a better answer.
The issue is that if IQ (since we can measure it and it does tend towards being fairly stable over time, learning generally won't affect your performance as an adult you'll tend to stay around the same mark or so I believe) was highly nuture based a simple test for this would be to look at the correlation between siblings and adoptive siblings and see if there was significant difference. There has been a fair amount of work done in this area, the general finding is that adoptive siblings are no more correlated in IQ than complete strangers are yet biological siblings are strongly correlated with each other. I hate linking to wikipedia but it has some study results that correspond well with what I've read elsewhere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Family_environment
That'd certainly be persuasive evidence, if it was thoroughly, properly and repeatedly done.
I'd imagine there's a lot of things to check for - ideally, to be really persuasive, the adoptees would be assigned close to randomly (eg: in case any adoption agency were doing something like putting kids they felt had a already had a particularly hard time with really 'good' parents. Also, you'd need to watch out for things like parents only adopting another kid if their first kid was getting on well in school, or being more willing to adopt a kid with a tough past if their own kids were doing well etc, thus artificially affecting the correlations, or maybe something like keeping adopting kids until they ran into difficulties etc).
You'd only look at kids that were adopted at a young age, into families that only had other natural kids, or kids adopted at a really young age, to minimise this. The latter should be sufficient.
I can think of a huge amount of confounding factors though, even as I type. (What if parents spent more resources on their adopted child because they believed intelligence was genetic and had to be made up for, thus neglecting their own offspring? Or parents that adopt typically do so because they are older and having fertility issues, but also have more income to spend on the adopted child than on its siblings?)
Could get tough to do an analysis right - not saying the researchers wouldn't have thought of these things, but it can be surprising what slips through sometimes.
I'm obviously unfamiliar with the literature; it might be worth having a read of some of the reviews linked from wikipedia when I get back to somewhere with journal access.
If it was that clearcut though, why is the nature nurture debate still raging on? People just don't want to believe the role nature has in predicting intelligence? Or maybe people are biasing their results somehow. It might be one of those areas where its so controversial you have to read the studies and make up your own mind.
Sure, I understand what you are saying about the depressive effects, and the lack of a simple relationship.This has been repeated in multiple samples so it's a pretty damn strong conclusion. Now the biggest issue with this is the studies tend to deal with middle income, well nourished kids. It gets more complicated if you start looking at low income groups where negative environmental factors start depressing IQ. But this is a side issue and more of interest in terms of the effects of poor nutrition/whatever has on general intelligence (which IQ can be viewed as a proxy for). This is what I was getting at with the mix of nurture and nature going on. It's almost never a simple x=y relationship with this stuff.Intelligence is strongly heritable. Learning strategies etc help with exam performance and recollection and other such, they don't make you more intelligent. They might make you use your time better etc but this isn't an intelligence issue! Exam performance isn't intelligence.
No, exam performance is certainly not intelligence.
(Although if we start to talk about IQ (measured by exam) and use it as a proxy for intelligence, as we have been doing, the learnable side of exam performance becomes relevant.)
We're getting to the stage where we have to define intelligence.
I just looked at wikipedia there. It says the standard IQ test is the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Adult_Intelligence_Scale which defines intelligence as ""The global capacity of a person to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his/her environment.""
This seems a little broad to me, actually. I think the word 'global' in there is very important though. I don't think rote learning of a task is very intelligent (eg a computer which repeatedly solves the same complex problem is often very stupid).
I'd almost like to capture the idea of variations on the environment, rather than the existing environment too. I think the definition of 'intelligence' has to factor in ability to adapt to previously unseen, and unforeseen, situations.
Either way, lets work off that definition, or something pretty close to it in spirit.
I'm pretty happy to say that you can learn to get better at 'acting purposefully', 'thinking rationally' and 'dealing effectively' with your environment.
Its definitely something that can be improved by learning. I know this from myself, I'm still improving at dealing with these things, and getting better than I was a few years ago. Sure, the returns are much smaller than when I was younger. But there's still returns to be had, and I work hard to improve at these things all the time.
I think maybe a lot of people just stop trying to learn this sort of thing when they get to a certain level, and that might be why you see diminishing changes on an IQ test after adulthood in real populations.
Again, simply look at the spatial dimension of things. I've seen people who are spatially very weak in some ways, that take up orienteering, in adulthood, and later improve a lot spatially - not just at reading maps, but generally. I don't have studies to back this up, but I consider it almost self evident.
Like, I know I could improve my general arithmetic abilities (one of those measured by the tests) if I drilled doing arithmetic for a while. (bit like the whole Nintendo Brain Age stuff - if you practice, you get a lot better, and would score higher on an arithmetic component of an IQ test)
If you study logic, you get better at what you studied, but your overall ability to analyze situations and arguments also improves.
Surely that means you've gotten more intelligent when you do that? Is there a different definition of intelligence that should be used?
We need an experiment.
Get X random people, give them an IQ test. Split them into two classes randomly. Train both classes over a month for a subsequent IQ test.
One class receives 'placebo' training which is not expected to help them.
The other class receives training expected to help.
Both classes are forbidden from taking other training or discussing tests outside class (ideally they stay in controlled environments, but probably not practical).
Retest both classes, check for differences.
I wonder has anyone done this?Overall, I think you're making well fashioned arguments and am enjoying discussing this with you btw.
Thanks!
Hopefully the discussion is making us smarter :P0 -
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I've a quite simple argument for you and a neat economic example to follow it that I'll think you'll enjoy.
We all accept height is strongly heritable. People tend to be around the same height as their parents, assuming both are well nourished etc. We also all accept that poor nourishment and other negative environmental conditions can effect things like height. So despite height being strongly heritable environmental factors can play a strong determining role if they are negative. Our genes map out a potential height, our environment decides whether we can grow to achieve it. Pretty uncontroversial stuff yes?
Yup, with you so far.Now, our minds are our brains (if you disagree on this one, you and I must have a chat about mental illness!).
Hmm... might have to have that chat, not sure how literal that statement is.
Our minds 'execute' on our brains. The physical hardware of the brain is where the mind resides, absolutely; ask anyone knocked out by a punch. But they aren't quite the same thing. The mind is the name we give to the structure of the entity that exists on the brain. In much the same way as the program running on your computers CPU isn't the same as your computers CPU - the software is not the hardware.
Yes, they are, and also as much a physical thing as my laptop is, or my chair is, or the tree outside is. Made of atoms and stuff.Our brains are as much a physical thing as our height is.
You'd need to argue more than that to show they follow similar rules though (roughly normal distribution etc)Now there are a lot more environmental factors going on with our brains than our height but intelligence can be viewed in a simple manner as being analogous to height.
I'm not sure what you are getting at here. Brains are enormously complex, and their relationship to minds is totally not understood. Its not enough to say that both brains and height are biological things, and then reason analogically from there.
I'm not sure exactly what you are saying here. If you mean by intelligence. our maximum potential future aptitude, at birth, then I don't think thats a useful definition.Intelligence is about aptitude not achievement. When we say someone is smarter than another person we mean they've got a better aptitude for mental stuff, not that they simply know more than the other person. What we inherit is merely a potential aptitude.
Our environments determine how much of this potential we achieve similar to height, just far far more complicated. Nature and nurture can coexist very happily with something like intelligence, and intelligence can be something strongly heritable while still requiring much environmental factors to properly blossom.
So, I agree that we have a limited potential aptitude at birth.
For one, our brain size is only so big in atoms, and we can put some hard thermodynamic upper bounds on the computational complexity that can be undertaken by a human brain of N atoms (assuming the mind stays bound to its birth brain, and cant be externally augmented by chips, biotech, blah-blah sci-fi stuff). So there's definitely a potential maximum aptitude there. I'd also totally believe that it varies from person to person, according to things like genetically determined brain structure, brain size etc.
So there are upper limits on this birth potential aptitude.
But there's also the definition of intelligence as a measure of how smart someone is at performing tasks now (like the definition I got from wikipedia before). I think this is a more interesting thing to talk about.
Basically, I think that most people probably don't come close to achieving our birth potential aptitude.
I think that while we can't really modify our height, our mind is special. We can modify our mind in ways we can't modify our bodies.
We can figure out better ways of approaching problems that substantially alter how efficiently we make use of the computational abilities that our brains grant us.
If you don't believe this, take one basic example:
If I always try and solve multiplication problems like 12*4 by writing out 4 twelve times, and adding it up, and you come along and teach me multiplication instead, I've gotten more intelligent. That'll show up on an aptitude test, sure. But more fundamentally, it will change the tractability of certain classes of problems for me. It'll change how I intuitively reason about certain problems. It brings me closer to the birth aptitude potential I have.
Its possible to do this for whole classes of problem and approach, other than just simple arithmetic. Logical argument and thought can all be improved too - and are.
After time, with such training, performance will improve on those standard tests of aptitude. In a very real sense, in a measurable way, peoples performance will improve. If that isn't an increase in intelligence, I don't know what is.
Now, maybe you are talking about potential birth aptitude.
If you are talking about our birth potential aptitude, then I could see why you think thats fixed. But its not interesting to think about - I don't think any of us come close to achieving what we could if we knew the best way to approach problems generally. We're figuring out stuff all the time.
My mechanical reasoning is better than people in pre-newtonian times, because of my second level education in physics, and because of the better information available to us. This improvement actually does effect my ability to do things on a day to day basis, to problem solve etc.
As another example, I understand what a lever is, and what it does, (sure, many people still don't - but even fewer would in the far past). This enables me to solve real problems more effectively, in a very general setting. Without the education on that topic, I would be less intelligent.
Care to advance a definition of intelligence which would not be covered by these things?
Not previously familiar with the term - doesn't sound like I agree with it off the bat. I do think wealthier people should pay more tax, but it might take me some time to forumlate why I think that. But anyway.Now, I promised you a neat economic example and it is this:
First let's set the ground rules. If some group enjoys an innate advantage over another group then the State should tax the better off group to compensate those who through no fault of their own are worse off. This is the basis for the concept of utilitarian taxes (it's more complicated but this is enough to do us). The basic idea is redistributive justice now you may personally strongly disagree with this as the core rule in taxation policy like I do but let's accept it as our core rule for now. We implement this in a very rough sketchy way in our own economy with our concept of a higher and lower tax band.
It sounds like we should abandon redistributive justiceWe should introduce a height tax.
At first this seems absurd but sure enough if you look at the data from across multiple developed countries, income correlates very strongly with height. To the tune of 5,250 Dollars (in 2003) in yearly income more for someone 6 foot versus someone 5' 5" tall after you control for gender, weight and age. Now there are loads of suggested reasons for this like higher confidence for taller people etc but basically if you're taller you'll tend to earn more and it's something you have absolutely no control over. No amount of work will make you taller, no amount of study will either. So given that it's impossible for the vertically challenged to correct this deficit it is only correct that we adjust tax to account for this distribution in income if one follows the rule of redistibutive justice.
So, should we abandon redistributive justice or tax height? Fantastic question I think.
The full paper behind this can be found here: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/mankiw/files/Optimal_Taxation_of_Height.pdf (if you're not into maths, skip the model section)
(At this point, being 6'6", I should state a potential bias.)
The thing is though, I'm only on a stipend at the moment; I'd be really upset at being taxed because I was taller. It mightn't be a good idea to upset all the tall people- we're bigger than you!
Its an interesting question though. Should heavier people have to pay more for transport? (I'm heavier than the median too, because I'm taller)
If not, then because I'm taller, and have to eat more food, should I get a special food subsidy? Isn't it inconsistent?
I'd have to think about redistributive justice a bit.
Are you mentioning this because smarter people should be taxed more too? Perhaps you should be taxed according to your IQ test results, regardless of what career you go into?
I dunno, I think it makes more sense to tax income, and more from the rich.
Can you not just say that the poorer people need more of the little income they have to live on, assuming somewhat fixed living costs, while the rich can afford to pay more, so they do? And that the only reason not to tax the richer completely is to provide incentive to be more economically efficient and profitable? What does this fall into?0 -
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Ok - that sounds very convincing.
Thanks for telling me about it.
Going to read up on this stuff in more detail at some stage.
Cool, glad you find it interesting. Now look at this graph again, it compares said studies for identical and fraternal twins, MZ and DZ
Basically they picked the traits that showed strong correlation in MZ twins (0.4 and above) and compared them to DZ twins. The sample sizes are the numbers in the columns, all are large enough to be interesting but anything over 1,000 should be taken very seriously.
Look at the difference! I mean, Extraversion, with 9,800 samples for MZ twins and 14,200 for DZ twins! The difference is huge! It's substantial in most other areas too, but in some it reduces the correlation to relatively negligible levels (0.2 or below)*.
In order of similarity of factors before birth:
MZ twins: Identical genes + Identical pre-natal womb conditions
DZ twins: Similar genes + Identical pre-natal womb conditions
Biological Siblings: Similar genes + Different pre-natal womb conditions
Adoptive Siblings: Different genes + Different pre-natal womb conditions
By comparing samples of these four groups we can isolate and analyse the effect of all four different combinations. That's the logic that lies behind these kinds of studies.
*0.2 is still important if it's statistically significant, but it indicates only a weak relationship between the two.0 -
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Hmm... might have to have that chat, not sure how literal that statement is.
Our minds 'execute' on our brains. The physical hardware of the brain is where the mind resides, absolutely; ask anyone knocked out by a punch. But they aren't quite the same thing. The mind is the name we give to the structure of the entity that exists on the brain. In much the same way as the program running on your computers CPU isn't the same as your computers CPU - the software is not the hardware.
Ok, first the philosophical point:
Why have two things when one explains everything? Seriously, think about that and forget any ideas of free will or anything else (you don't want to get me started on free will).
Philosophically you're talking about dualism. The mind being separate to the body. So where is the mind etc? How does it interact with the brain? Why can't we see any of this interaction going on in brain scans?
If your answer is that the mind is the soul, then well, we can stop arguing about it because we'll never agree.0 -
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In general you are right. I dont even agree that the manufacturing industry is "low-skilled" - maybe the work on the line but nothing else - the line manager, the people making the quotas, the guys fixing the line, the technicians, the managers working on supply from factories - just in time etc.
As for the rest of the knowledge economy, yep we are not any more intelligent. I think there are barriers to entry for people competing with Silicon Valley - an established entrepeurial culture, a VC culture, world class schools etc. The smartest go there,
Ireland? Can we compete with China? If I were to be a heretic and discuss race and IQ I would suggest that the Chinese are on average smarter. But of course, I won't.
A friend I have was recently sent a large portion of work to test precisely because the Chinese facility had mucked up testing the product.
Ignoring that we have cultural knowledge of the US market and British markets which are some of the largest markets for software. We speak English as our first language so have no problem reading the online documentation and less problems reading the code (as most keywords are English or maths in programming languages).
So I think we are in a good position to attract that kind of investment. Then you have operations like the new data centre Microsoft built here as it is energy efficient because of extremely regular weather patterns that stay within a predictable range most of the time. With IT moving to cloud computing, there will be many more of these data centres built by companies which we could attract.
These facilities require internal networks that require maintenance which is more jobs and then the broadband networks they will need (which is where we fall down on our arse). Our biggest barriers in these areas IMO are electricity costs and broadband costs/speed/availability and we fail on all 3 of the broadband requirements
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