> still marvel at the OLPC XO-1, also derided as a toy but one of the most amazing computers ever built
Sorry, I was with you until the moment you described a pretty standard AMD Geode GX2 SoC with a pretty poor transflective LCD as "most amazing computer ever built". Let me guess, you worked with Nicholas? the self-promoting self-described father of web tablets who claimed to have saved millions of children when really he just chewed up millions of UNDP funds that could have gone towards genuinely life-changing projects?
Wow. I did volunteer some with OLPC early on, but no to all of that.
I'm talking about the water proof, sandproof, nearly indestructible laptop with the always viewable screen over there on my shelf with awesome user serviceability that "retailed" to me for less than $200 USD. By comparison my modern Chromebook (via CodeStarter), similar street price today as XO-1 then, has a much nicer processor, raw specs but can be easily killed by cat, coffee, or child and is useless outside (screen vs sun) or more than 1 day from a power tap (batteries) and is almost unrepairable by users. I like it but it's not the same kind of thing at all, and it's out-of-the box Linux is much less hackable and educational ... hence CodeStarter.
There's plenty of discussion around about the software stack (Sugar), the newer hardware (XO > 1), and no end of people discussing the organizations in Boston, Florida and elsewhere all over the Internet if that's what you were looking for ... but that really has nothing to do with what I said.
> at least from a moral point of view I don't see that we did something wrong.
You did. You lied on your Thai tourist visa application form. It explicitly said:
"I hereby declare that the purpose of my visit to thailand is for pleasure or transit only and that in no case shall I engage myself in any profession or occupation while in the country"
> They lived there as tourists so paid a lot more into the local economy than locals
How did you determine that? I've lived as a hippie in India, similar to what Steve Jobs did. I spent 0 money and lived off the temple welfare system. I was exploiting the generosity of people who had a thousandth the resources and welfare that I had. I wasn't alone. There were hundreds, if not thousands of other Westerners doing similar things.
They put more into the Thai economy (renting a house, buying products, paying for services) and didn't take any money out (all earnings were from existing clients abroad).
It might contravene visa issues from a literal read, but I think the intent was fair. Many Australians would call this "the vibe of the thing" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJuXIq7OazQ
By that logic. Rental prices would go up, as foreign demand for property increases, pricing locals out of the market in the process, because they cannot compete with foreign earned salaries. Not just rentals, goods and services go up.
Increased strain on policing and hospitals. Strain on Thailand's subsidised public transport system, subsidised diesel fuel, subsidised water utilities.
No tax revenue from foreign workers as they don't declare in Thailand despite being required to do so by law. The only exception being VAT.
The general point of nomads working in Thailand is the ability to lower outgoings beyond what you could do in North America or Europe. Nomads don't spend cash like tourists and that makes them a drain on the economy.
So what's Thailand got to lose from allowing foreigners to set up shop. Well the huge fees required to be legal for one.
> Could you explain how you formed that conclusion?
It appears that Mobile Jazz is a company that caters to western audiences, most of the work they will be doing will be for western clients who wouldn't hire Thai workers. The workers just happen to be out of office when they do their jobs.
"For a thousand years, China has been ruled by a cognitive meritocracy selected through the highly competitive imperial exams. The brightest young men became the scholar-officials who ruled the masses, amassed wealth, attracted multiple wives, and had more children."
Author manages to squeeze a topping of first semester Introduction to China with a thick crust of massive unsubstantiated overreach.
"hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications."
Nice autopraise, mildly disguised.
"After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness."
Seriously? There was an otherwise intelligent guy working for us who started spouting this kind of drivel. We noticed it all started after he got assigned a female manager and then subsequently a non-white manager. Some people have mild racial hangups, which they then externalize in odd ways like China peril.
I too am rather skeptical of the claim of 15 points per generation.
Look at the intense selection on the Ashkenazi Jews over maybe 1500 years which has only produced an average IQ of 115 (there are alternate theories for their high IQs).
Selection of dog breeds for intelligence (German Shepherds, Jack Russell terriers, Poodles vs eg King Charles Cavaliers, Corgis) seems to have produced a large gap but it took a long time - dogs have been domesticated for ~5,000 years.
Generally selection works quickly at first, by filtering the population for the desired trait. Then it slows dramatically as the process is limited by new beneficial mutations which are rare.
It is noteworthy that genes for high IQ seem to come at a price. Read up about Einstein's son Eduard for example.
Final point: maybe parents will not want to select for IQ. Maybe they would prefer to select for beautiful daughters for example?
>Selection of dog breeds for intelligence (German Shepherds, Jack Russell terriers, Poodles vs eg King Charles Cavaliers, Corgis) seems to have produced a large gap but it took a long time - dogs have been domesticated for ~5,000 years.
Dogs have been domesticated since the dawn of civilization (and probably before), but those specific breeds are relatively new. GSDs are just over a century old, Jack Russells slightly older, poodles several hundred years old and Corgis positively ancient at almost 1000. Note, too, that intelligence was not the sole quality they were bred for. The Russian Silver Fox is a great example of the massive changes that can occur in only a few generations if artificial selection for a single trait is performed.
That said, I agree with the gist of your argument: 15 pts of Iq per generation seems ludicrous.
The selection in Ashkenazi was not done in the same way proposed here - filtering took whole lifetimes. In this system, you compress the whole "live 50 years and have slightly more / fewer children" step into one procedure.
This one is equivalent to picking the best one of 50 naturally occurring children, and raising them alone, every generation.
If Michael Jordan he had 50 children with a similarly elite mother, most of them would regress to the mean - but the best one could conceivably be near his level. If he had only one kid, it's very likely that the kid would regress significantly.
Also, of course there are negatives to high IQ but most of the time, this selection method wouldn't be done for that level. Two people of IQ 100 would be able to reliably have children of IQ 115, and those kids would have happier, longer, healthier lives, with no increased risks. [see the scottish IQ study; iq at age 11 was linked to a lifetime of better outcomes]
That is the real benefit of this technology - to give people the option of gradually bringing out the best of what's already inside themselves. I don't want to be forced to give my kids a random selection of my genes - I want to exercise some control. And of course there could be problems - perhaps +IQ genes might lie next to other, undetected bad genes. But that's random, and we're already completely subject to it.
The Ashkenazi thing is bullshit. If you follow the references in the Wikipedia article looking for hard statistical evidence of higher IQ you end up with very thin sourcing from two iffy papers.
The Flynn effect in the U.S. already seems to be causing about 3 points of IQ gain per decade. If a generation is 25 years, that's 7.5 IQ points per generation. It doesn't seem unreasonable that if you explicitly selected for this trait you could double the rate of evolution.
> <dogs domesticated> somewhere in the 19-32k year range
I have read numerous different accounts. It appears that the selective breeding of different breeds is actually much shorter even than 5,000 years. Most breeds are less than 1,000 years old.
This bothered me more than the autopraise. He (and, if he is to be believed, China) are proceeding from the assumption that IQ can be reduced to a set of switches in the genome.
What if there are alleles that select for intelligence--but also select for a mixture of cancer, OCD, suicidal depression, and plain batshit crazy?
It's also worth considering that your hypothetical might be anything but! At extremely high levels of intelligence the rate of extreme social disorders skyrockets up to "most" (I recall the cutoff for 50% happening at ~165 IQ, but it continues to rise even after that, limited primarily by our lack of data on IQs much higher). I'm not entirely sure if this analogy is appropriate, but just as organisms with more cells are more likely to produce cancer, it seems minds with more thoughts racing through them are just as damaged by some small percentage of errant thoughts (some are extreme delusions, some are just the product of the isolation of a brilliant mind growing tired of a world, retreating from it, losing touch with how to interact with excellence and subtlety, and seeing even less subtlety in the world, simply growing more tired of it, ending with many extremely intelligent people simply unable to interact with others in any normal way).
This. The generalization of intelligence to just a single number, or even a bunch of numbers, strikes me as a foolish over assessment of our current collective understanding of human intelligence.
So, let's say we have a number. It correlates with ability to solve a number of different puzzles, lines up with our understanding of certain dangers (iodine deficiency, etc.), is consistent, explains some variation of the success in certain tasks or areas that are not explained by experience or upbringing.
I'm not saying it captures every element of our experience, but surely we can point to it and say it represents some subset of our understanding of the idea we point at when we say the word "intelligence". It really isn't competing with anything that's remotely as useful. IQ, although it has faults, seems to be a relatively cheap, standard, well understood metric, that also explains quite a few other phenomenon. If you give me two regression analyses, one of them using IQ and one not, I cannot imagine what understanding you would gain by refusing to acknowledge the former -- and that mistake seems like precisely the type of "foolish over assessment of our current collective understanding" that you deride.
I'm not arguing that IQ doesn't measure anything, my point is simply that it is a one dimensional measure of something for which we do not know how many dimensions there actually are.
I score very highly on IQ tests, but I've worked with a great many people who I would guess do not score more than slightly above average but nevertheless bring a lot to the table that I cannot.
I guess my point is that using IQ as an authoritative measure of "intelligence" is missing the forest for the trees (well I suppose to best fit the metaphor it would be 'tree').
The word 'racist' succeeds in generating an emotional swirl with unpleasant connotations while failing to communicate what is meant when it is used. It's just a lazy expletive.
Your masterful logician skills appear to have failed to notice that the author being wrong and being racist were unrelated. One can be racist and right, or non-racist and wrong, but in this case the author is wrong about where China is coming from and going to, and then later also keeps flashing his racist colors.
Not all observations are extrapolations from a single observation.
What? Let's knee-jerk our way into legislating thought-crime, really?
No thank you. Free-speech also means speech you do not like, otherwise you don't actually have free-speech. But rather just, "state-approved speech".
That's a really sad world to live in, even more so with the state-sponsored and state-seeded social-ostracism we already have in place to control freedom of speech.
I don't know much about the actual conditions in North India. But this article contains some markers that are at best suggestive of exaggeration, at worst maybe falsification. Eg, high levels of descriptive details that don't seem to be relevant and also don't mesh together:
1. Sunita’s family in the north Indian village of Mukimpur
2. When nature calls, the 26-year-old single mother and her four children head toward the jungle next to their farm of red and pink roses, to a field of tall grass, flecked with petals, where the 7,000 people of her village go to defecate and exchange gossip.
This article points to multiple causes: 1) cultural/social issues about where the proper place to defecate is 2) lack of education about germ theory and various fecal pathogens etc. 3) problems with bureaucracy converting money into action 4) lack of emphasis on the issue versus other issues 5) difficulty impacting the huge # of people living in India (problems of scale). These all seem pretty valid to me. I'm sure there are other causes as well and I'd like to learn more... what would you add?
Those aren't the real problems. The article is distracting from the real problem and now you are contributing to that.
The problem is that there is no plumbing and sewage in many areas and no resources to build it. There is no running water. The budget that the local government has is say 100 units. Installing a sewage system costs 1000 units. Installing running water for the whole village costs 3000 units. Its just not going to happen.
The problem is that resources are not being allocated fairly. One of the main things that sustains that lack of equality is racism. Racism is a huge problem, even here in this thread. It is often disguised as a disparagement for "lack of education" or "cultural issues" or "population".
These are not toilets like we think of toilets. These are porcelain Port-a-Potties. A very small septic tank directly underneath the toilet which has no water to clean it and must have the feces scraped out by hand.
Would you really consider that to be sanitary? To have a Port-A-Potty installed in your studio apartment? There is no running water in the house or neighborhood. There is no truck to come pick up the Port-A-Potty. Actually its buried in the ground. Someone is going to have to lean in and scrape the feces out.
Or, since there is 4 acre open field about 1/8 of a mile away which is often downwind, people who can walk should go take their shit over there, rather than leaving it in the house, where we will have to smell it all the time.
There is something similar to racism going on, and the article does mention it: the social caste system, in which it is considered taboo to adopt behaviors of the untouchables, even if such behaviors may be beneficial to avoid cholera.
It's all about prioritizing. Creating a bunch of port-a-potties is a cheaper, and more possible, short-term solution than upgrading the water infrastructure for a country of a billion people. Yes, I said billion, because yes, that is a factor. Ignoring it won't make it easier.
I'll agree, putting a port-a-potty inside my apartment isn't a great solution ... but now we're arguing placement, not the validity of using it instead of an open field.
As for cleaning out the port-a-potties ... if the Indian government who's installing these things isn't allocating some funding or encouragement to cleaning and maintaining, then that's another resource-allocation problem. Here again, we're discussing a bad (or at least, imperfect) implementation of the goal, not the validity of the goal itself.
It's also worth noting that in a sense it's not even upgrading water infrastructure - if a large region has next to no waterworks to begin with, that makes this even more difficult.
Lastly, just because it doesn't look like Western sanitation, doesn't mean it's not a better temporary solution. I would even suggest that for an area with very little water infrastructure to begin with, it may be too much to expect them to go straight to a system like you'd see in Berlin (or, I'm guessing, New Delhi).
>The problem is that resources are not being allocated fairly. One of the main things that sustains that lack of equality is racism.
I see how lack of plumbing/sewage/running water is a major issue (thank you for adding that) but I was put off by you pulling the race card without substantiating it at all. Unless you can provide some evidence, racism does not seem to be the issue here -- lack of plumbing is the issue.
Saying that a country is a "developing nation" or slamming a culture or talking about lack of eduction or talking about population, these are all the same types of racist things that British colonialists have used to disparage India or other countries for hundreds of years.
Even "developing nation" is a racist term used to cover up extreme inequality to the point of repression where the rich white countries hoard fuel and control and then point at brown people and say they are inferior and just haven't caught up yet. Where the reality is that those countries have advanced civilizations going back thousands of years and just aren't being allowed their fair share of the resources and so cannot "develop" every part of their country.
Or more generally, not even specifically British people or white people or any group, this is on a spectrum with classism. And its the same issue -- unfair distribution of resources is excused by pointing at the resulting situation and implying that the people have inferior qualities that cause the situation.
I don't see how "developing nation" implies that these people have inferior qualities. It implies that these people are progressing faster than "developed nations", though they are for the moment still poor. You could call it classism, because it recognizes a wealth disparity, but I don't see how you can distribute resources more "fairly" without recognizing wealth disparity.
Your argument is correct, but you seem to place quite a lot of trust in Census numbers. As someone who has seen some of the actual Census surveys out in the country, that is rather amusing. Making population numbers up, or roughly estimating them is quite common.
Now your structures argument makes sense, so I'm guessing this is more like 600-700 people (most Indian families live in large joint households, so 6 people a house is not uncommon).
Just western media? I myself am quite ignorant of media from other places in the world. In your experience is there a type of media that is more truthful in the way it describes situations?
From my perspective, the emphasis isn't on the details of the description. Rather, the core of the article is really an account of the problem of sanitation. India has so many people that I just glossed over the number of people in the village. Thus this possible discrepancy didn't bother me.
I tried to find where in the article it says anything that might back up "already been convicted of being part of a terrorist cell". The closest I found is where it says: "already in jail for being part of a cell that considered attacking a Territorial Army base in the town.". This sounds a bit like a thought crime to a laymen like me and the verbiage flags my weasel alarm. Also, could you clarify where you're getting the term "nation's infrastructure" because all I saw was: "discussing attacking the town's TA headquarters". If we accuse everyone who's pissed off at the town council / home association and starts talking about blowing them up of terrorism, then we'll need a much bigger prison system.
TA is the UK Territorial Army, approximately equivalent to the US Reserve Forces or National Guard.
The group were convicted of discussing the idea of driving a bomb under the base's gate attached to a remote controlled car [1]. They didn't actually do it. They also discussed obtaining weapons, but didn't do that either. They did arrange to attend terrorist training camps in Pakistan, but its not clear from the news reports whether they actually travelled there.
EDIT: According to [2] one of the group did go abroad for training.
That sounds a bit disconcerting. I've discussed things like how to beat airport security, plant bombs to do the most damage, and in general ways to circumvent security measures. It's simply an intellectual curiosity, one even necessary to make things safe, and protect against those who think the same, but with intent of causing harm.
If the discussion alone is the damning part, with disregard to the intent... coupled with some prejudice, and add irrational fear.
Media may have used the term "discussed" but they were convicted for plotting. By legal definition, in order to commit a crime there has to be a proved conscious intent and actions taken. Even grouping together is considered an action, I assume for 16 years they've dome more than that. There was also existing home made bomb.
Sorry this guy is a criminal and a murderer, his value to society is pretty low to considering he hasn't done anything of a value in his life, except moving to UK.
Just to note, TA is the territorial army, a fully trained reserve branch of the military, so probably reasonable to count as part of the national infrastructure/defence.
I do agree that "considering attacking" does sound slightly weasely and like a thought-crime; hopefully they were seriously considering it.
Yes, in most definitions or terrorism, the key part is (trying) to create terror to further your goals. It doesn't really matter whom you'd attack, be they civilians, structures, organisations, armed forces, or whatever. The difference between terrorists and freedom fighters and (national) armies becomes blurred fast, though.
If people would just quit being afraid of this stuff, by definition, 'terror' wouldn't be created, would it?
Telling people the rapture will happen at 2:30pm tomorrow would in fact create terror in the minds/hearts of certain people. Are you a terrorist if you tell people that Jesus is coming back tomorrow afternoon?
Yes, terror is certainly in the eye of the beholder, although academic definitions are a bit more nuanced than those being used by the public.
The subtle difference is between using terror to reach a goal and using some action to reach a goal with a side effect that people experience terror. For example:
A group of hackers could hack into the bank accounts of the 1% to distribute their wealth among the other 99%. They don't have any intention to create terror and probably think that the 1% can easily take. Of course, the 1% will see it as an act of terror. And probably journalists, lobbyists, politicians will spin it and use it to create terror among the larger populace.
Another group of hackers is hacking into facebook accounts to make people's secrets public to try to get the public to care about privacy and not to put their trust blindly into social media. In this case, they would use terror consciously as a means to this end.
Yes and no. Getting shot is terrifying to you, but the other army isn't shooting to terrify you, but to incapacitate you and your colleagues to reach some (strategical) goal. The terror is just a happy side effect. On the other hand, armies could also use acts of terror to reach some goal. For example, instead of just taking soldiers prisoner of war, you could just cut off their heads and put them on a stake at the front. Or raping all the women in the occupied territory (although that could also be a way to 'lay claim to the land and people' by creating a generation of mixed bloods, I suppose. In that case, it wouldn't be an act of terror, although everyone on the receiving end would be plenty of terrified)
EDIT: Though as the defence counsel for one of the four pointed out, they remained free for another 7 months after the alleged plans, so it's questionable how likely they were to have been carried out.
TA = Army Reserves, not town council / home association!
The article might make it appear they jokingly talked/thought about a bomb, but others make it clear there plans were concrete. It mentions them going to "meet the brothers" at a training camp where duties would include "helping them making the bombs". I think it becomes a crime when it goes from curious learning to definitive plans. They weren't just thinking something socially unacceptable, they were planning to cause harm.
It sounds like they only charged him for this after he gave up the keys he was previously withholding. While I disagree with the power this law gives, its less extreme if its only used when they can prove the password was both covering up a crime and not forgotten. More of a deterrent, and slightly less of a thoughtcrime.
>> This sounds a bit like a thought crime to a laymen like me and the verbiage flags my weasel alarm.
Conspiracy is a crime, though. A guy can be charged for saying something like, "Let's plan out how we're going to kill my wife. You go buy a gun..." The police don't have to wait until the guy actually kills his wife before arresting him.
It sounds like some other people in the terrorism case pleaded guilt, and there are even details of the planned attack. Technically a thought crime, but the kind of thought crime you want to stop becoming a 'reality' crime.
We're all so easily swayed by propaganda to label someone "murderous thug". Odd how we never had a trial, never had concrete verifiable data and easily label them as such. We sweep those collateral casualties under the rug the same way the "barbaric" people we purport to be attempting to "civilize" do. I worry about us and our future.
Sigh. I don't know whether you're being sarcastic. You're focusing on a country when we should be thinking about individuals. What I see is a population set that is currently excluded from survival due to the pricing of certain chemicals. This population set exists both in India and in our own backyard. There are 2 ways we can get access to a solution for that population set. One, allow generics to compete after a certain period. This tends to be natural, since reverse engineering a drug takes some time. During that time, big pharma can price the drug to maximize profit, after that, they have to compete better if they want to hold on to that profit.
I don't feel conflicted. Patent protection was established as a mechanism to encourage and facilitate innovation and to encourage inventers. The question I ask myself is whether the current system is sufficiently balanced. In my opinion, it is not. It is way too much in the favour of large pharma. A good way to check that it is, would be to examine the books of a pharma company and check what percentage of profit (not earnings) goes to R&D versus other areas like say marketing. This journal article suggests that marketing spending is 20 times higher than that on R&D. [1] http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e4348 That causes me to be skeptical of pharmaceutical company claims that the generics industry is killing innovation. I've even heard a pharma marketeer use the term "Indian generics terrorism" which is exceedingly callous given that we're basically choosing to deny life to those individuals who can't afford big pharma marketed drugs. The patent system was not intended to be used to justify such behavior.
Why should they be spending all their profits on R&D and not marketing?
Do you refuse to wear name-brand clothes because they spend 90% of their profits on marketing?
Marketing was the example in the article. It is also one that catches my attention because I was aware of a case where my personal physician was pushing a particular drug and I was aware that pharma salesmen (marketeers) are permitted to encourage physicians to favor their products through controversial freebies like free trips to company seminars in the Bahamas, etc. I have no hate for marketing. If I had found a article contrasting how much is spent on legal versus R&D, I would have used that. And, by chance, yes, I do refuse to waste an extra dime on clothing just for a logo.
Sorry, I was with you until the moment you described a pretty standard AMD Geode GX2 SoC with a pretty poor transflective LCD as "most amazing computer ever built". Let me guess, you worked with Nicholas? the self-promoting self-described father of web tablets who claimed to have saved millions of children when really he just chewed up millions of UNDP funds that could have gone towards genuinely life-changing projects?