This piece from Cosma Shalizi about IQ/g was going around a few years ago. Not being a statistician, I spent several days attempting to understand it.

Eventually, I did.

I was not impressed.

After all that reading and looking things up, though, I grew too bored with it to write about it.

His argument, like many academic arguments with some hidden political agenda, reduces to attempting to define the problem or quality in such a way that no one ever does, and then “proving” this ridiculous definition of the property does not exist.

It’s all obfuscated of course in fancy talk that few people can understand, but that’s what it boils down to.

Luckily I’m clever enough to understand it and then realize it’s mostly bullshit.

To clarify what I am talking about, is there a thing called “love?” Or the “mind?” Or “trust?”

If so, where are they? How do you locate them statistically?

Hint: you cannot.

Therefore in Shalizi’s world they do not exist.

Obvious balderdash like this is what occurs when academic discourse is strained through politics.

Personally, I don’t think g is nearly as important or as “real” as many make it out to be. But I do believe it exists and is measurable, that something is being measured there.

“Proving” that it’s not any one thing you can point to in the real world is about as good as proving that bicycles aren’t airplane pupae – utterly worthless.

For a more nuanced and thorough (and technical) refutation of Shalizi’s hack piece, read here.

Shalizi and his piece are beloved for political reasons.

I don’t care about political reasons.

I care about whether g is useful and what it can tell us. I believe it can tell us something, though it’s over-emphasized.

Defining it in bizarre ways and making category mistakes about it, and then proving that it doesn’t exist using specious methodology, is not really that helpful.

(See also this piece.)

I don’t drink hot coffee or hot tea. Can’t stand either one of them, really, except in very small doses.

I’m a medium super-taster, so both taste as bitter to me as eating raw coffee grounds would taste to regular people. I do drink sweet tea, though, and like the taste of iced coffee as long as it’s 80% sugar and 20% coffee.

I also don’t like plain water especially if it’s in a plastic container as I can taste the plastic. But even in a glass container, I don’t like its taste as it invariably though being tasteless (allegedly) tastes like its container.

It’s probably been 20-30 years since I’ve finished a whole glass of water. In fact it’s been so long now I can’t remember the last time it happened.

Something I’ve noticed is that society as a whole has gotten vastly more prudish since the 80s, when I first started actively observing culture with a critical eye.

I don’t know why, exactly. Is it just cyclical? Is it permanent? I don’t like it much. Feels very puerile. Both the Left (including many/most feminists) and the Right (conservatives and their ilk) seem to support this shift, so what changed?

In one small example, when I was a kid in Florida (where it is very fucking hot), it was not at all unusual to see a woman in a bikini top in the grocery store in high summer. Now it never really happens. No one thought anything of it then, but now it’d be a scandal.

It’s not just an American phenomenon. That’s why I linked to stories about the French also becoming more prudish and Canada with its renewed war against sex workers.

What’s going on? Whatever it is, it doesn’t bode well.

It would take approximately five trillion dollars a year to provide every over-18 adult in the US with a basic income of $20,000 a year.

That seems like a lot of money, but it is completely doable. Especially when you consider that it would mean most Social Security payments could over time be rolled into this and eliminated. That’s around a trillion a year currently.

So, then, four trillion a year to provide a population of approximately 245 million adults with a BI of $20,000 a year.

Well, where would this money come from?

Actually, it doesn’t have to come from anywhere. The US is a fiat currency state; it can create money at will.

Yes, inflation, and all of that. That is an issue. But the main reason that inflation has been made such a bugaboo is that it harms the interests of the rich far more than it is likely to harm the plebeian’s.

In times of increasing structural unemployment, depressed aggregate demand, and nearly non-existent inflation, sending money to people – especially if phased in gradually – is far less of an issue than you’ve been led to believe. A BI would have a large net positive effect on the economy, though it would over time make the very rich less so – which is why it has no chance in hell of seeing the light of day.

Most of the fear of the BI is drummed up by employers who don’t want people to have better alternatives to the demeaning and degrading jobs they now are forced to hold. It’s a lot easier to say “hell no” to that job at McDonald’s if you have $20,000 a year coming in no matter what.

But if you are one of those who naively and against all facts believes that in this case the money must come from somewhere – as if there is a money fairy just blessing the “real” money out there – then consider this: the top one percent of earners control 40% of wealth in the US. By golly, I think I’ve found where it could come from!

I started writing about the BI due to this post. I was going to pick on this person more due to them having bought in – like most people on the Left (and Right) – to the story which the plutocrats have put in front of them.  But then I wasn’t feeling quite as snide as usual and I also realized that the unsophisticated economic views on display are what most people are programmed with so that they do not resist. Not their fault.

As usual, the predictions that the new Apple watch will fail are completely wrong. For so many reasons.

Every product Apple has released has been predicted by large portions of the tech press – who continue to willfully misunderstand why people buy Apple products – to be imminent failures.

But it actually sounds pretty fucking cool to me.

Weather, Calendar, Messages, and Maps are obvious uses for a tiny wrist computer. (The Maps app can use a well-placed “wrist tap” to tell you which direction to turn while it’s giving directions.) You can also sketch a little doodle on the touchscreen and send it to a friend.

Apple continues to do something that no other company has done so successfully for so long: design products that quickly go from, “Why would I ever need that?” to “How did I live without that?”

I’ve learned with Apple and its prognosticators that the more vehemently they predict a product’s failure, the more likely it is to succeed.

Some people never learn.

Apparently the trailer park where I lived out the first years of my life is still around, and it looks much improved from when I ambled through its beer-can-bestudded lanes.

I have only dim memories of it as I was young, but it was squalid and noisy back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

Neal Stephenson called North Florida “the trailer park capital of the world.” This is for good reason, though now I think areas like St. Petersburg, Sebring and Tampa compete for this title since so many near-indigent retirees now move to 55+ retirement trailer park communities in those places.

I remember moving away from Paradise Village — what a misnomer! —  and how happy my parents were when we did. I’d never known anything else so I had no idea what to expect.

Because I’ve been reading off a screen routinely since I was four years old, I bet this is not true of me.

Other than a few rich people and those working in universities, I was in the first small wave of true digital natives. This despite growing up very poor. Luckily my dad had labor to trade as a mechanic and was obsessed with computers. (He would’ve sooner sold just about anything than get rid of our one old rickety computer we had when I was 4-7.)

If we’d had no computer in the house, my life would be very, very different and much worse.

I’m a lot more comfortable reading off a screen and always have been. Even more so now that fonts have improved so much due to the availability of high-DPI displays.

For some things – like field guides – physical books are still a bit better. For everything else, just give me a screen please.

One of the main techniques used to allow and permit the rest of the US avoid addressing its racial issues is pretending that all racism resides only in the Deep South.

I grew up in the Deep South, and yes there is a lot of racism there. I knew personally several KKK members in my hometown. However, I left as soon as I could and it turns out there is a lot of racism elsewhere, too.

Surprise!

The main difference I’ve noticed is that the racism in the South is a bit more overt, while in the North/West it’s more covert.

What this means is that if your name is Shaniqua or Rakesha or some other appellation considered stereotypically black, in Seattle or in Mobile you still won’t get that job but in Mobile someone might actually tell you it’s because you have an “ethnic” name or worse. In Seattle, they’ll pretend that you just “weren’t a fit.”

Results are the same, the execution is just a bit different. See the movie Far From Heaven for a good fictionalization of this dynamic.

This isn’t by any means exact, because of course unconscious biases are present and nearly impossible to quantify, but I’d say that in the Deep South, about 60% of those over 50 are actively, consciously racist, while it’s more like 40% in the rest of the US.

While for those under 50 in the Deep South it’s more like 30% and about the same in the rest of the country, too.

But those numbers aren’t really important to argue over. The point I am making is that many activists point at the evil South and say, “We need to fix all the racists over there!” Meanwhile, they ignore all the racists right next to them because the ones in the South are “worse.”

I’ve wondered for years when the copyright cartels would start going after VPN users.

Looks like that time has arrived.

Never mind all the legitimate uses of VPN. Governments and many corporations who spy on you already hate it as it prevents them from doing that, so it’s a natural target.

VPN won’t go away, though. It can’t. However in the future, it will require licensing and also your traffic to be monitored by using a government-mandated man-in-the-middle attack. (That is without getting too technical your traffic will be required to go through a proxy of sorts “for your safety” where it will then be examined.)

The licensing scheme will basically mean a private user without a company sponsorship won’t be able to sign up for a VPN account. This is the future, alas. It’s the only way they can keep control, so they will do it.

It would have been worth the geek racist outrage if every single role in The Hunger Games films had been a person of color.

That would have been so much fun, and not only for that reason – but that’s a damn fine one.