| Thursday,
December 15, 2005
Subject: RE: Plots of mean IQ and per capita real GDP
My only point is that one needs to be very careful in asserting causality
for GDP, since so many other things can appear causal when they probably are
not. Correlation does not surprise me, but it may very well be the case that
countries with higher GDP also have better infant nutrition and health
systems which causes higher mean IQs.
Kerk Phillips
To which I replied
Yes, but is it astounding that higher IQ produces
better public health? I would have thought this an obvious prediction.
Everyone kicks against the pricks here, because IQ is not PC. I welcome open
discussions on this.
I was arguing reverse causality. That is, where per
capita GDP levels are higher and people re wealthier they are willing to
spend more on health, particularly neonatal and infant care, in this case.
Or they are willing to pressure the government to provide it even if it
means higher taxes. Where this kind of health care is better IQ is higher.
I realize that the causality could easily run the
other way. That is higher IQ people will be able (on average) to provide
better quality health care and presumably also be able to produce more
efficiently yielding higher GDP per capita.
It is also possible that higher IQ and higher GDP are
both caused by some unobserved phenomenon so that, in reality, neither of
them causes the other.
The problem is that all these scenarios are consistent
with the given evidence as near as I can tell. To establish causality you
would most likely want to look within countries over time. If you observed
IQ jumping up and then GDP rising a few years later, and if you also could
establish that this was not being caused by some other factor (i.e. rule out
a substantial multicolinearity problem), then there would be compelling
reasons for believing that IQ causes GDP.
Until then, while the evidence is interesting and
certainly indicates that the whole issue is worth more attention, it doesn't
seem overwhelming.
I suppose part of this general skepticism is due to
seeing all sorts of data mining in the past when it comes GDP differences
both across countries and over time. Prior to Levine & Renelt it was fairly
easy for a researcher to show correlation of GDP with some random factor
like ice cream sales and then argue that he had found a previously
undiscovered engine driving GDP.
The PC-ness of the hypothesis doesn't bother me at
all. If higher IQ does, in fact, contribute significantly to higher GDP,
then knowing that can only be good. But one must be careful that the
evidence not only supports that hypothesis, but also eliminates competing
ones.
Kerk Phillips
Oh come now. Common sense says that smarter people
take better care of themselves and their children. One predicts: Higher IQ
people will take better care of themselves, insist on better public health,
avoid hazards, be more productive, and have more resources to prevent
kwashiorkor and rickets and childhood protein deprivation. Why in the world
strain to find some other explanation?
It is not a matter of straining to find some other
explanation. I am quite sympathetic with the notion that higher IQ is one of
many significant causes of higher GDP. As you point out, it seems a matter
of simple common sense. However compelling common sense is, it not the same
as proof.
My alternative hypothesis of higher GDP leading to
higher IQ makes as much sense, though I admit this is only my opinion. In
reality, I would guess these two effects feed back on each other in a fairly
complex way and probably interact with other factors. Of necessity, the real
world is always more complicated than any model of it.
If we really want to understand what makes some groups
of people wealthier and better off than others (which I think both of us
do), then we need to examine the data critically and in ways which allow us
to distinguish between alternative hypotheses.
Other researchers (I hesitate to use the word
scientists, since most of them are economists and there is terminological
baggage there) have looked critically at other explanatory factors for
differences in GDP. It has been discovered that simple correlations and
curve-fitting exercises between these explanatory factors can be misleading
for reasons laid out in my earlier emails. It would seem natural therefore
that when any new explanatory factor is examined, such as IQ, it should be
subjected to the same tests as earlier ones. This is the point I was making.
As for why I am straining, if that is the right term.
Understanding what drives GDP is more important than satisfying intellectual
curiosity. Policymakers of the future may well base their policies on the
results of today's research in this area. (If there is a general consensus,
and then with a long time lag) If societies assume the higher IQ causes GDP
and base policies on that assumption when it is wrong they would, at the
least, waste valuable resources and possibly do real harm. If they assume
the reverse, the same applies.
I see a parallel here with the global warming debate.
We have competing explanations which make sense, but which cannot be
distinguished by an examination of the current data. One can assume that
one's favorite explanation is the correct one. Or one can appeal to the
data, either by examining existing data in more sophisticated ways or by
gathering more data.
And my God man, I would not think that the proposition that smart people
produce more and are healthier is exactly NEW.
Perhaps a bad choice of words on my part. "New" only
in the sense that the linkage has not been tested as rigorously as things
like infrastructure spending, primary & secondary school enrollment, R&D
spending, measures of political & economic freedom, ethnic composition of
the population, and a whole host of other factors.
I hope I'm not flogging a dead horse here. I'm merely
pointing out that a correlation does not imply causation. Maybe this is an
obvious point and I should just shut up. But when the abstract says "As a
rough rule of thumb, an increase of 10 points in mean IQ results in a
doubling of the per capita GDP," the implication is certainly causation from
IQ to per capita GDP. I am pointing out that the evidence is consistent with
that causation, but does not necessarily imply it. Based on the
curve-fitting described it would be just as valid to say "As a rough rule of
thumb, a doubling of per capita GDP results in an increase of 10 points in
mean IQ."
If IQ were examined simultaneously with GDP per capita
in 1960, real investment as a percentage of GDP, and primary school
enrollment rates, (which DO appear robustly correlated with GDP) the
contribution of IQ in explaining GDP could well be lower than reported. If
this has not already been done, someone should do it.
Kerk Phillips
I pointed out a positive feedback as well as
a negative one in my earlier online response. Thank you for the discussion.
And see below
=====================
Subject: Proxmire passes
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/obit_proxmire;_ylt=
Al.WBW_DLQz.uD9ZQCdvrxWs0NUE;_ylu=X3o
DMTA2Z2szazkxBHNlYwN0bQ
I never knew he replaced "Tailgunner Joe."
Steve
** "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on
a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of
Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
Robert Wilensky
I was never one of Proxmire's
admirers. But of the dead, speak naught but good. RIP
==========
The American Enterprise: Unlimited Government
Dear Jerry,
An excellent critque of "Big Government Conservatism":
"...This division of labor in Constitutional
interpretation is another instance of the streamlining of modern government.
By removing one bone of political contention, it generates a much higher
volume of legislation. By leaving the sorting out of Constitutional issues
to the courts, the branch with the least democratic sanction, it ensures
that resistance to governmental growth will be sporadic and anemic. The
politicization of judicial appointments is in large part a result of the
courts having acquired, through a process of incremental conquests of their
own and incremental abdications by the political branches, de facto
exclusive authority to interpret and apply the Constitution...."
"...If a federal program were established to give
financial assistance to Boy Scouts to enable them to help old ladies cross
busy intersections, we could be sure that not all the money would go to Boy
Scouts, that some of those they helped would be neither old nor ladies, that
part of the program would be devoted to preventing old ladies from crossing
busy intersections, and that many of them would be killed because they would
now cross at places where, unsupervised, they were at least permitted to
cross....”
<http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/issues/articleid.18895/article_detail.asp>
On a separate note, in my youth I used to think Robert
Heinlein's "Crazy Years" from his future history series was pretty funny-I'm
not laughing now. He was, if not the only one, one of very few who
recognized that Western Civilization as we knew it was drawing to a close.
Hopefully our future turns out as well as his stories.
Take Care, Rod Schaffter
-- "Science is wonderful at explaining what science is
wonderful at explaining, but beyond that it tends to look for its car keys
where the light is good." Jonah Goldberg
Big Government is not Conservative. The
conservative view is that government is a blessing and good government is
not merely a major blessing, but nearly a miracle; but there are many things
that government should encourage, but not do. The Red Cross is one example.
The various health foundations such as the March of Dimes is another. There
are many more. (And of course organizing local Civil Defense organizations,
which are quasi-governmental, is well within the province of the Federal
government.) As Tocqueville observed, America made effective use of
"associations" in doing much of the work that in Europe was done by
government bureaucracies.
The United States is now losing scientists
and engineers as well as manufacturing jobs. Lithium batteries were
developed at MIT by a professor of Chinese ancestry. They are now
manufactured -- in China. I will have more on that technology at another
time.
The Western Lands are becoming the
Twilight Lands. There is still time, but the days are growing short.
==========
Subject: A handful of interesting technologies -
Nicotine vaccine continues to show promise "NEW YORK
(Reuters Health) - Research with a new nicotine vaccine shows that the
vaccine is safe and well tolerated, with higher doses producing a greater
rate of abstinence."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051201/hl_nm/nicotine_vaccine_continues_show_promise_dc_1
Growing meat in a dish
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas_section2-9.html
Hmm. When they start rolling this out in production, I
wonder how many workers, truckers, and ranchers will lose their jobs? And
will the Meat Vat in the back of the meat department at the local grocery
require enough supplies and services to provide replacement jobs for them
all?
Seeing with sound
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas_section3-14.html
Locating shooters by sound
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas_section3-19.html
Preventing suicide bombers
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas_section3-8.html
--Gary Pavek
=========
"It Pays To Read the Original Study -- Home Computers"
by Donna Garner 12.12.05
It pays to read the original study rather than to rely
upon a special interest group such as eSchool News to add its "spin." If I
were to read just the eSchool News article (posted below), I would be led to
believe (1) that a child simply cannot graduate from high school unless
he/she has a home computer; (2) that minority children cannot graduate
unless they are given laptops -- undoubtedly at the taxpayers' expense, of
course. Those are the conclusions that a special interest group such as
eSchool News obviously wants the reader to reach. However, laborious as it
can be, I have learned to read studies for myself and to evaluate the
results on my own. I try to notice who is sponsoring a particular study
because that can also make a big difference as to the credibility of the
results. There is a tendency for those with personal agendas to read more
into their results than the statistics show.
As I located the original study and read it for myself
("Are We Really A Nation Online? Ethnic and Racial Disparities in Access to
Technology and Their Consequences" by Robert W. Fairlie, University of
California, Santa Cruz and National Poverty Center, University of Mighican,
Sepember 20, 2005, Report for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
Education Fund), I found the following statements: Income differences are
partly, but not entirely responsible for ethnic and racial disparities in
computer and Internet access. Even among individuals with family incomes of
at least $60,000, blacks and Latinos are substantially less likely to own a
computer or have Internet access at home than are whites. [Evidently money
is not the only reason why some people have computers and some do not even
though there are groups in our country who try to point to poverty as the
sole reason for every ill. Perhaps some families simply do not see the need
to purchase computers. That is their choice.]<snip>
* * *
I love computers and spend much of my day on one, but
I know well-educated people who choose not to use them and do not have them
in their homes. My complaint with the eSchool News article and with some of
the conclusions that Fairlie has reached is the over-reaching assumptions
which are represented as fact. Of course, we want all students to graduate
from high school with a quality education; but their having laptops in their
homes may or may not be a contributing factor toward student academic
success.
http://www.freepress.net/docs/lccrdigitaldivide.pdf
Donna Garner
Reading the original is a good idea, but
it is also a good idea to remember that most political statements are
incomplete at best and usually full of outright false statements.
=============
Subject: 2p worth on Talin again
Dear Dr Pournelle,
In response to Talin's observation on the worth of
DVDs outside the region they are coded for, png (Mr Glaskowsky) stated that:
"DVD publishers the world over release region-free discs. They play
correctly on every DVD player, anywhere in the world. The publisher gets to
decide whether to apply region coding or not, and you get to decide whether
you want to buy that disc or not."
None of these statements is generally true. Nearly all
DVDs in commercial release are region-coded. This became a major problem in
New Zealand in the wake of a judicial finding that the practice of selling
or renting DVDs not coded for domestic use (region 4) was illegal.
Specifically, it violated the provisions of the Sale of Goods Act; such DVDs
were "not of merchandisable quality", and therefore quite literally
worthless, as Talin noted. Similar scenarios have played out all over the
world.
The Government was obliged to respond. With NZ's
accession to the TRIPS accord, mandating a hardware solution deregionalising
DVD players) was not an option. Instead, the right of publishers - or anyone
else - to import such DVDs for sale or rent was struck down by legislation.
Rental houses like Blockbuster were given a short period of grace to
restock.
Mr Glaskowsky is correct that works unencumbered by
copyright restrictions will always be with us (though distribution of such
things will not, because the major chains of distribution won't have a bar
of it). What really made me snort however, was the declaration that
"Nobody's making up any new laws. It's just new technology, and it's very
wrong of you to misrepresent one as the other. New technology isn't like new
laws, it's just like new technology".
Having just been through Law School's Intellectual
Property paper, I can assure Mr. Glaskowsky that new laws absolutely are
being created, and always have been, in response to the threat of new
technology to vested interests. I would cite numerous examples - the DMCA
for starters - but I'm sure your readers know perfectly well what these laws
are.
The curious thing for me is that the United States
justifies such laws on the basis of the original Constitution's explicit
provision for copyright. That's all very well, but I would have thought the
First Amendment, as a later change to the Constitution, superseded any such
copyright - at least in so far as it threatens free speech. SCOTUS decisions
clearly show however that IP rights trump free speech.
png is also on shaky ground when it comes to "The fact
is that cryptographic DRM built on secure operating systems will be deployed
within the next several years, and it will be totally effective." Yeah,
right <Insert rude noise>. Sorry about the snide tone there. But I'd love to
see Bruce Schneier's reaction to "Contrariwise, I know that anyone who
thinks it won't work doesn't understand the technology."
I too have a degree in digital electronics, and
another in engineering science, and a CCNA, and I'm making progress on my
law degree (heck, I don't party or take drugs and my kids are almost grown -
what else is there to do with spare time?). But I do not share Mr.
Glaskowsky's confidence in the ability of manufacturers to outsmart legions
of hackers.
Furthermore, they don't want to. Even Windows NT's C2
certification was only for stand-alone non-networked systems. It doesn't
seem to have harmed MS' market share. To the extent that consumer OS's are
progressively more secure, they become less usable.
The last point made by png has much more interest. "As
technology improves, the value of copies made using purely analog techniques
will decline, and the ability of the authorized players to detect and refuse
to play these unauthorized copies will improve."
This might be a reference to VEIL and its relatives,
designed to plug the 'analogue hole'. That has still not been approved by
Congress. In a way I hope it will be, because the consequences of such a
thing will be quite dramatic. It's important because history so far has
shown that people are quite willing to live with inferior quality so long as
it's free, or much cheaper.
The grubby individuals I chase for excessive bandwidth
use on our systems seem to love their grainy copies of "The Incredibles". It
turns out that they don't have high definition TVs. And if they did, their
eyesight and hearing is not generally so good that they care about the
difference - this is especially true of the hearing of rock music
aficionados. Ten minutes after leaving the theatre, the memory of a movie
session is no better than that of the moviegoer's unscrupulous neighbour who
watched it on his PC.
Both of them can bring up the movie in conversation at
the pub the following day. And twenty years from now people won't be
settling for something like today's "blurry DVD copies of 4K-line
digital-video movies". They will be settling for something just a couple of
years behind the cutting edge.
The law will try to stop them; and to the extent that
the law prevents the great unwashed from doing what they want, the lawmakers
will be removed from office. Talin wondered if this meant it would be
"illegal for people to write operating systems".
It's arguable that applying Linux to an Xbox, for
example, is already a violation of the DMCA - though it certainly does have
non-infringing uses. Writing operating systems does indeed help pirates.
That's why the recent Grokster decision effectively makes it illegal, as
Talin foreshadowed, "to write operating systems" for DRM-protected hardware.
This simply won't fly in the real world, however, if
only because the biggest DRM pirates are commercial firms themselves. In a
time of rapid change trade secrets should have little value. In fact they
are fiercely protected, less for their novelty than for how much they would
reveal about how much firms violate each others' copyrights and patents.
Sony, for example, hired First4Internet to do their
dirty work - and that crowd stole from other firms left and right, including
Apple. Sony's XCP rootkit was capable, among other things, of translating to
Apple's "FairPlay" DRM, which is used in iTunes. (The fact that
First4Internet didn't use Apple code to do this - they ripped of GPL'd
software instead - is irrelevant; it was still Apple's IP they were
infringing, which is probably why that portion of XCP was disabled at the
last minute.)
But the biggest violators are the hardware
manufacturers. It's impossible for microcircuit-based industries not to step
on each others toes, however, so a sort of honour among thieves ensures that
only end-users are subject to the force of the law.
Regards, TC
-- Terry Cole System Administrator,
OU Physics
tcole@physics.otago.ac.nz
For Mr. Glaskowsky's
reply, see next week.
==
Subject: response to png
As far as publishers restricting rights - when I walk
into a store, notice a CD or book on the shelf, and think "hey, that's cool,
I should grab that", and take it up to the register, pay for it, and walk
out with it in my hand - there is no implicit agreement there, there is no
implicit enumeration of rights or carefully laid-out contract. I have given
the store money; the store has given me the object. The object is now mine
to do with as I please to the same extent the money was. That is all there
is to it. If that was not the store's intent they need to make much more of
a big deal of explaining to the customer all the restrictions on
seemingly-reasonable actions they can take before the sale is completed. A
contract is not valid if one of the two parties does not agree to it, and in
this case the contract the customer is implicitly agreeing to is very
simple: "it's mine."
The stores don't stop the customer short and explain
all the rights and restrictions the publishers impose, of course, because
that would hurt sales. But that leaves the door wide open for the customer
to take the simplest conclusion of what the exchange actually involved. If
you don't defend it you lose it, and the publishers try to defend the extra
rights they're trying to extract from this material far later than the point
of purchase - far later than the point at which the customer agreed to what
they thought the deal was. They have the money and the lawyers, so they can
keep trying to defend that ground for a while, but it will not be a winnable
battle, because human beings simply do not think the way the publishers want
them to. We are not that far from monkeys, we are still territorial, and we
think, instinctively, "it's mine".
Working with that instinct rather than against it is
the only way to go. Laying down extra rights and restrictions and arguing
about whether they are enforceable in the end only enriches the lawyers.
As far as "secure operating systems" go:
My computer DOES NOT have the right to overrule my
decisions. Ever. For any reason.
My computer is a tool. It does what I tell it to do.
If it does not, it is useless to me, and it gets chucked out the window.
I DO NOT and WILL NOT trust my computer. That is the
whole entire point. I do not because I am the human being in the
relationship and I am the one capable of making judgments about what is and
is not appropriate for me to be doing - even to decide, at times, that it is
appropriate for me to be breaking a law.
Kent Peterson
urquan@rocketmail.com
"... there was always a minority afraid of something,
and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the
past ..." - Ray Bradbury, _The Martian Chronicles_
==
Subject: .png's response to Talin
Dear Jerry,
Busy on project sale, so no time for lengthy comment.
Short version, to .png: not no, but Hell NO!
(after some more thought) slightly longer comment:
The weak point in any crypto system is usually the key
distribution. Back during the cold war, I was in an operational unit of the
ASA. We had a very secure crypto environment. Our keys changed on a regular
basis. The keys were distributed by one or two (usually two) guys with guns.
That was secure. The chance of getting shot and/or going to federal prison
works wonders for security. In the case of commercial systems, especially
mass market systems, they are too cheap to employ such measures, not to
mention the publicity problems.
All of the existing systems have been hacked at one
time or another. And it is almost always through the key distribution. In
the case of Echostar (dish network) the new improved Nargra 2 system just
replaced Nargra 1 which had been really cracked open. Nargra 2 was cracked
before it was released. And so it goes. So, believe what you want, whatever
is done will get undone. Of course publishers can try to sell sealed PC's,
but then they will not be PC's anymore. I won't buy one, most of the people
I know won't ether.
And lets not forget the 100 million Chinese engineers
that want to make some money. To them, hardware is property, software is,
well, free.
Hollywood has seen technology make most of their ways
of doing business obsolete. So join the rest of us who have to re-invent
ourselves every few years or cease to exist.
Phil Tharp Mountain View
=======
Dear Jerry:
In regard to Mr. Tharp's post that ASA codes were
hacked. Not so. John Walker and the rest of his spy ring sold those codes to
the Soviets. More specifically, they sold the key cards for the coding
machines. We were innocent of this until a low level Soviet SIGINT unit sent
a message over a coded system that came up in clear before being
automatically being sent on to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. It was a
Christmas greeting from our opposite numbers on the other side of the Fulda
Gap. Naturally there was Hell to pay. The system could not be cracked by
other than the most advanced computers, which they did not have and we had
few of. Unless you had a key card. Then it was very easy.
I was a junior NCO in ASA Headquarters Europe at the
time.
Sincerely,
Francis Hamit
TOP
CURRENT
VIEW Thursday |
