November Links

The acheivment gap isn't about teachers. If that piques your interest, Scott Alexander has more than you could possible want to know about the subject.

The ad campaign that made lesbians love Subaru.

Robin Hanson advises you to chase your reading.

From the Biodeterminist's Guide to Parenting:

One interesting observation is that with a few exceptions, places at more extreme latitude have higher IQs. Again, useful for the racists. But epidemiologists have a better explanation: parasite load. Tropical jungles are crawling with parasites. The North Pole generally isn't. Sure enough, when they run the studies, parasite-infestedness of an area correlates with national IQ at about r = -0.82. The same is true of US states, with a slightly reduced correlation coefficient of -0.67 (p<0.0001). The effect was found to do better than other things one might naively expect it to be a proxy for, like temperature, latitude, evolutionary novelty of environment, et cetera. It's pretty robust. And it holds up in quasi-experiments. When an area eliminates parasites (like the US did for malaria and hookworm in the early 1900s) the IQ for the area goes up at about the right time.

GiveWell's updated list of top charities is mostly anti-malaria work and deworming, which means that your marginal dollar also contributes to the global project of raising IQ.

A literal millionare next door. He didn't donate to AMF, but instead left his fortune to the local library and hospital.

The rest of this post is election analysis, so stop reading here if that doesn't interest you. I've put it under a cut for the defensively apolitical.

Post Thanksgiving Review

I'm back at school after a rather unproductive Thanksgiving break. I studied a little bit this afternoon, but that's pretty much it. Five whole days down the sink of history.

This was far from unpredictable--as usually my optimism about a visit home was unwarranted. If left to our own devices, I'll just be getting into gear for academics when Mom or Dad will interrupt with some task or distraction. On a good day, they'll leave me be at eight or nine pm, but by then my motivation is mostly exhausted.

I'm thinking the optimal solution would be moving back my sleep schedule so that I wake up earlier, go to bed when I'm released in the evening, and study before either of them can concoct tasks to use up my time. I'll try this out fully over winter break in preparation for my eight am electrical engineering lecture. For various, interrelated reasons this shift seems less drastic than it would have a few months ago. Slowly becoming a boring, lonely adult has a few advantages.

This coming week will mostly focus on the upcoming aerodynamics exam and structures group project. Wednesday will also be the first Jayhawk Rocket Design meeting in about a month, since we finally have funding and thus can resume work on our hybrid engine. Or so I assume. There's not much time before the semester ends, but I assume we're sticking with the plan I was told.

Personally, I'm open to contributing a bit over winter break. My travel plans are no more and finding an excuse to spend less time with my parents is probably a good thing. And I do worry about losing my edge during such a long break. Hell, I'm worried about my ability to focus tomorrow. A month is probably too long, but when you haven't had a term off since 2013, you'll take it.

Weekly Review

I didn't write anything last night because I was tired. After the flight dynamics even doing pretty straightforward homework was beyond my motivation. But today I feel a little better so let's at least make an attempt at this.

The most obvious thing is continued academic struggles. That might be abating--I understood everything on the structures exam, or know that I could understand it--but homework and projects are still a challenge. A good deal of that is organization. My mind processes and arranges information in what appears to be an unusual fashion, judging by the fact that I'm so frequently frustrated or outright baffled by the way other people put things. On a bad day it feels like I'm speaking an entirely different language. Perhaps it's possible to translate, but informational biliguality is still a good way out.

Going back to the subject of information I could understand, I need to teach myself differential equations again. They're showing up in both structures and aerodynamics quite suddenly, and though I might be able to get by anyway, it would be nice to review them. After the last aerodynamics test, where I lost unnecessary points because I couldn't remember how to perform basic derivatives and integration, I finally logged in to Khan Academy again and have been using it daily since then. My plan was to review calculus all the way through, but because I'm usually watching only a few videos per day I'm still in limits. Over break I may jump ahead to diff eq, or perhaps flip through my text books again.

On a more prosaic note, winter weather has arrived. I'm naturally less that thrilled, but have amassed a reasonable quantity of warm clothes so hopefully hypothermia can be avoided. The gas bill is gonna be nasty when it comes.

Weekly Review

Time for another weekly review post.

First of all, election. I'll write up my thoughts properly at some point, possibly this weekend, but for now let it suffice to say that I'm surprised with the result and very much disappointed with my fellow Americans' reactions to it. That's what you get for having expectations.

The most immediate consequence is that I messed up my sleep schedule by staying up too late waiting for a final call. I'm still paying for that. Academically the situation is mixed. I did much better on the last flight dynamics exam than I'd expected, but structures is still challenging me. Over the weekend I spent a lot of time in the library working on that and aerodynamics, but clearly more time is needed. My laptop's battery life was a serious limiting factor in how long I stayed each day, so next time the charger goes with.

For similar reasons, I didn't write as much as desired, but that will probably change in the coming days. Of course, there's two exams next week, so my schedule isn't exactly wide open.

On a bright note, the rocket design club secured funding yesterday, so we'll be getting back to work on the hybrid engine after Thanksgiving break.

First Impressions

I've finished the prologue of Guns, Germs, and Steel, and want to write down a few brief thoughts.

Firstly, Diamond makes a considerable effort to assure his readers that he's not a eurocentrist. I can understand why he feels the need to do this, but from my perspective it just made him come across as a smug progressive.

It's perhaps worth noting that my general affect for Professor Diamond has been mostly negative, due to his reputation as, shall we say, a skeptic of civilization. For someone like me, with allergies, asthma, nearsightedness and an ideological affinity for modern world, that sort of mindset rubs me the wrong way.

I'm reading this book, not out of a genuine desire to fairly evaluate the works of people I disagree with, but because it was recommended. Not to me personally, but in general, by educational YouTuber C.G.P. Grey. In a pair of videos, Grey presented Diamond's hypothesis from the book, which sufficiently piqued my interest for me to suspend my suspicions and pick up a copy from the local used book store.

Getting back to the book itself--I think the prologue dismisses several alternative hypotheses out of hand. Now I'm not a professional geographer, so maybe there's a strong body of evidence that those hypotheses are indeed wrong, and Diamond's explanations are intended for convincing a lay audience, rather than a contrarian such as myself. Since in all likelihood the truth is an amalgamation of these possible causes, I'm willing to overlook these seemingly weak arguments.

Certainly I haven't been dissuaded from reading onward. The first chapter is clearly written and informative. My advice would be rather for a certain sort of reader to skip most of the prologue and its disclaimers, heading directly for the meat of the book.

Contrarianism and Systematization

Recommended Reading: The Glory of Systems, Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism

An idea I've been kicking around awhile is that contrarianism arises, in part, because of differences in systematization between individuals or groups. What I mean by this is that certain people are much more concerned with explicitly laying out the reasons behind their actions, beliefs, and behaviors than others. When this happens (particularly if the less systematizing people happen to be older or in a position of greater authority), contrarianism is a common response.

Perhaps contrarian isn't the right term. What I'm trying to describe might be contradictorian. Basically, an individual who goes out of their way to question your intentions and poke holes in your argument.

This was precisely me before my parents accidentally introduced me to Objectivism. I didn't have satisfactory answers to any of life's questions, but so far as I could tell, neither did anyone else. And because middle school me was a total nerd, that was a problem. I wanted explanations, desperately. I got into plenty of losing arguments trying to show other people that theirs were insufficient.

Part of the reason nerdy people get into weird belief systems, from the occult to Ayn Rand, is because those systems provide at least superficially complete worldviews. Many of them paper over important questions or internal contradictions, but they're a level or two higher than the soup of contradictions doled out by the schools and what's left of Christianity.

I'm not sure this is actually a bad thing, but then again my contrarianism eventually sent me back to the center after realizing how little certain anarcho-capitalist types care about consequentialist concerns. Based on my limited observation, the usual failure mode is to keep going up a notch until your peer group is all equally satisfied and nobody questions anything further. I was lucky insofar as someone sufficiently sideways of me to not pattern-match as "enemy" showed me new alleys of inquiry. If that hadn't happened...who knows.

At the very least, keep this problem in mind if you have children.

Weekly Review

It's Thursday, so let's try this weekly review thing again.

My major observation is that I don't tend to be very productive on Tuesday nights, after I get back from the SEDS meeting. There's usually assignments due the next morning, but nevertheless I'm very unmotivated to complete them at that late date. My proposed solution is designating that as mid-week relaxation time (barring any exams on Wednesday) and finish that homework over the weekend.

Next Tuesday is election night, so I don't expect to get anything done that night, anyway.

Speaking of the election, I've given up on my plan to write an extended post about the case for third-party votes. My outline keeps spiraling out of control, and there's no way I'm writing a 15,000 word treatise on the failings of the American political system before Tuesday. It's also been really boring. Perhaps once the dust settles I'll rework it as a post-mortem.

I've finished House of Leaves and will be posting my review of it....eventually.