I haven't spaced on this, but I'm going to take a beat to generate a more rigorous reply. In the meantime: I think the evidence, both from twin studies and from genomics, for genetic determination of intelligence is very weak, has gotten weaker, and describes an effect too small to be relevant to the gaps we're discussing in this story; bringing racial IQ science into a discussion like this is arson.
I'll do my best to back those points up tomorrow.
It's a little weird that you called out Gusev, above; on this topic Gusev, though a geneticist himself, seems more like a popularizer of current research than someone going out on a limb with his own. But check his references: the scientists whose studies he cites seem to be saying the same thing he is.
When asked what their favorite part of the trip was, they responded..
The hot tub.
At the hotel.
My kids light up the most when I am fully engaged with them, fully present, entertaining their ideas, and asking questions.
Their favorite family trip so far? When we traveled to Arkansas to mine for crystals. AKA, dig in the dirt all day. They saw it on a YouTube video. They asked to go. So we obliged. I had never been to Arkansas. It's beautiful.
We stayed at a resort, Diamonds Old West Cabins, with a huge playground outside the cabins, archery, and a bubble party every evening at 6 pm.
I’m not dismissing test prep altogether. My point is that test prep isn’t the huge unfair advantage it’s made out to be. It can help you familiarize yourself with the format of the test, and learn some techniques for certain kinds of problems. But at the end of the day, what’s being tested is your vocabulary, basic high school math, logical reasoning, and reading comprehension. The prep classes don’t help you with that.
And insofar as the prep classes are helpful, you can get nearly all the benefits with a small investment. When I was prepping for the LSAT, I got a 167 (out of 180) on my first practice test. Nearly all my missed answers were on the “logic games” section. So I went on some Internet forums and found recommendations for PowerScore’s Logic Games Bible, which is $34 used on Amazon. I’ve got a relatively poor visual-spatial memory, so I learned some tricks in the book for using diagramming as a crutch for that. I ended up with a 176, entirely due to improvement in logic games.
So I can’t say prep never helps—the difference between a 167 and a 176 is the difference between a top-25 law school and a top-10 one. But the vast majority of people can do what I did to prep. You say “what about homeless kids or kids who don’t have Internet access” but at the end of the day you’re talking about a process that’s extremely accessible to the overwhelming majority of even poor kids. Which is a lot more than you can say for any of the alternative metrics for filtering applicants.
Antarctic sea ice extent is currently at the same level it was at this time of year in 1980, actually a little higher. Use Charctic to see for yourself:
Arctic sea ice extent is currently tracking the 2010-2020 average. Nothing much is happening in terms of Arctic sea ice extent at the moment and that's been true for a while. There has been a steady decline since 1979, which is the earliest year Charctic shows. But data exists for much longer. This is unfortunately standard for climatology, they truncate many data sets starting at this time and then declare records based on that truncated data set. That's not because nobody cared about the poles before the 80s, people definitely did.
Here are some examples. In the 1990 IPCC report, we can see satellite data for the Arctic going back to ~1972 and it shows a huge rise in sea ice extent during that decade ([1], p224, figure 7.20). This data is no longer shown on modern graphs.
This 1985 report [2] is by the US Department of Energy "Office of Basic Sciences Carbon Dioxide Research Division", it covers many topics around the construction of global climate models. Figure 5.2 on page 181 shows data on sea ice extents going back to the 1920s, citing Vinnikov et al. It shows a massive fall in sea ice from the 1920s to about 1955, when it turns around and starts climbing again. This data is corroborated by news reports. In the 1920s there were reports about melting ice caps. These were the dustbowl years and the 20s-30s were very hot. But in the middle of the century that turned around and by the mid 1960s the climate had been cooling for decades. The NYT reported [3] that:
The United States and the Soviet Union are mounting large‐scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid, why parts of the Arctic sea ice have recently become ominously thicker and whether the extent of that ice cover contributes to the onset of ice ages.
Sea ice continued to thicken and by 1975 newspapers were reporting a consensus of experts that the future had a lot more ice in it, claims made credible by the growing Arctic ice conditions [4]:
In the last decade, the Arctic ice and snow cap has expanded 12%, and for the first time this century ships making for Iceland ports have been impeded by drifting sea ice [...] Many climatologists see this as evidence that a significant shift in climate is taking place [....] No scientists are predicting a full-scale Ice Age soon, but some predict that in a few decades there might be little ice ages
So the Arctic and Antarctic have changed quite a bit in the 20th century. They grow, they shrink, and scientists know this but no longer are willing to show these old datasets because the picture they paint is not a very interesting one. It certainly would not convince anyone that climatology is the key to saving the planet from doom.
Probably relevant for the HN crowd: there's a bunch of very geeky next gen fitness guys that keep up with the cutting edge of fitness research, and occasionally expand it themselves. If you're reading them, this kind of thing is being discussed for years, with new studies just moving the odds a bit in favor of the current hypothesis. Yes, they're very Bayesian, explicitly so.
A few names/links, pick and mix as you will - they're all good:
In particular, mindustry can actually run scripts within the game to automate a lot of things. If you like factorio you're going to like these 2 games.
Take a look at eggs, for example (page 21 as numbered in scans, 27 in the PDF). In 1920 egg prices fluctuated between $0.528 and $0.924 per dozen. Adjusting that price by consumer price index, it's something like $7.02 to $12.29 per dozen in current dollars. Back then people were forced to produce their own food, spend a larger portion of their income on food, or simply go without. Poverty that would force someone to eat cheap eggs now would force them to eat no eggs back then.
Over the last decade, airlines spent 96% of their free cash flow buying back stock[1]. This improves the stock value for investors (and executives). Rather than requesting bailouts and rule changes, imo they should be selling that stock to raise capital.
I posted a list of them a while ago. For several years I was interested in alternative worldviews -- grand sweeping theories of reality. Here's my list:
I'll do my best to back those points up tomorrow.
It's a little weird that you called out Gusev, above; on this topic Gusev, though a geneticist himself, seems more like a popularizer of current research than someone going out on a limb with his own. But check his references: the scientists whose studies he cites seem to be saying the same thing he is.