Links

Two favorites for today:

• Ron Unz:  American Pravda.  HT: Tyler Cowen.  Contra Cowen, I don't think the piece is hard to summarize.  "Treat the media like a branch of government.  It acts like it.  It's basically pro-government, pro-central power, independent of party, over the last 60 years"  Mark Levin would say "pro-fascist".  Some feedback guys might say that insofar as you want stories from the government agents, you have to be figuratively (or better) in bed with the government agents, which means large media organizations inevitably end up pro-government.
• Crazy left-central libertarian line:  The problem is therefore size of organization.  Large banks, large media organizations, large governments.  The problem is the size itself.  The size guarantees the problems.
• Related:  How to edit a news story in a pro-administration (pro-Democrat in this case) fashion.
• Reason via CoyoteBlog:  Gay Gun Rights

Update:

• And number 3: Crypto-Anarchism.  Sign me up.  Oops, I signed up with the Cryptonomicon, but folks are getting a whole lot better at this stuff.

On expert practice

There's an article running around the HBD-osphere that Isegoria linked to, and then hbdchick that points out that among experts, deliberate practice isn't enough/the whole thing.  Indeed, among experts, it's only about 1/3 to 1/4 of the whole thing.  This leaves room for a lot of innate-ness.

Please note:  This is among folks who already had insane amounts of deliberate practice.

If you look at professional basketball players, it may appear that only about 30% of the variance in pro BB players is based on height.  But that doesn't mean that height explains only 30% of the issue.  It means that after you've passed the height-bar and the athletics bar, then height is only 30% of the difference between folks who've passed both.

A dude my size, at 5'10", has about a 1 in 100,000,000 chance of being a pro-basketball player (I can think of 2 dudes under 6 feet tall ever playing pro-hoops).  A 6-6 dude has a 1 in 1400 chance.  An average 7-footer has about a 1 in 6 chance of being a pro-.  Clearly, height isn't 30% of the issue.  Height, however, may only explain 30% of the variance, after you're there.   Among the top 0.00001% of all basketball players, height explains 30% of the variance.

I played one-on-one hoops with my high-school buddy roughly every day of high school.  I was 5'9" back then, and he was 5'5", faster and more dextrous than me.  In several hundred games, almost all of which were played with his getting 2 points to my 1 per basket, he never once won a game.  4 inches, and some pretty decent hops made a darn good run for me.

So...what does the study address?  What is true among the super-elite experts?   I can believe that among the super-elite experts, the primary variance isn't any longer how much you've practiced.   Among folks in the first 2000 hours of practice?  Not even close to believing that correct, deliberate, feedback-based practice isn't the dominant factor.

Agile software explained

Sumdood wrote some pretty smart stuff about Agile software, teams and feedback systems over at this site.  I'd recommend it.

Usefulness?!?

While it's against site policy to be useful, rather than just thoughtful, I find this sufficiently anarchic and sufficiently useful to make an exception:

Don't pay speeding-camera tickets.

Attractiveness universals

While I'm being hugely incorrect, and I have a headache, so I can't really write software til the advil kicks in.

We know that there are some pretty potent human universals in female attractiveness.  Most with pretty solid evolutionary expecteds.  Do any of my smart readers know anything (research, not opinion) besides what I'm about to list, that's well established as a cross-cultural universal:

Waist-hip ratio, which predicts current fertility phenomenally well.
Youth (close to 15), which predicts remaining lifetime fertility quite well.
Facial symmetry, which predicts health well by measuring prenatal and childhood parasite load.
Leg-Total Height ratio, which predicts who knows what, but more is better, and high-heels fake it.
Eye whiteness, which measures parasite load.
Paleness/Blondness/Big-Eyed-ness, which are all big evolutionary proxies for youth, as above.
Hair length/luster, which measures parasite load/general health.

slenderness?   Insofar as it predicts youth.  Within limits.  But most of that is captured by W/H ratio, and I'm not sure what's left for slenderness.  And it's cross-culturally more variant.

Anything else?

Semi-retirement

Also, as per Aretae's rules...feedback wins.  Freud was 2/3 right.  Evolutionary sexual selection drives pretty much everything.  If you're doing something that prevents you from getting laid, there's strong pressures to stop.  That's not my problem right now.   When sexual selection is out of the way, then Marx was 2/3 right.  Economic selection drives pretty much everything.  If you're doing something that prevents (or even probabilistically reduces) your chances of making real money, there's strong pressures to stop.


As per my last "I'm not blogging much" post, I'm doing a lot of things away from blogging.


Specifically, 5 things.

I'm working.

I'm actually spending time with my family, when they're not in California.

I'm writing a book with a friend who writes better than I do, on Aretaevian themes applied to business, software, marketing, etc.  (first chapter done this month -- will need intelligent reviewers).  Direction:  The Lean Startup, but less focus on startup, more on underlying principles, and examples.

I've got the first version of an Android app written to do montessori style algebra (and the architecture supports montessori-style math from Algebra thru differential equations).  Montessori-style = experiential rather than dydactic learning, forcing the territory-map-words model to work right, rather than idiotically pushing from words to maps.  I'm currently (yesterday-start) doing a massive refactoring that constitutes almost a full, ground-up rewrite of the system, that I should be done with this week or so...and then onto the Android market, port it to iOS, and on the iPad.   Other folks (with math and education backgrounds) I've shown it to have said it's the best thing they've ever seen in math education.  It maps very well to my theory, and to best practices in my 20 years of math-education experience.

Also, in coordination with the book, and the impending (within 12 months) end of my contract in Texas, friends and I are spinning up a consulting business based on Aretaevian principles (not unrelated to the book), with our first/training consulting gig probably before September.

Between these three things, I'm likely going to be hitting some publicity.  Bad things about publicity is that if you're playing in a normal-space, then having unsanitary opinions available for web-search isn't the best way to get a real win.  Also, I write rather poorly, and while I appreciate that y'all have been tolerant of my bad writing in order to consume the ideas, it's not good advertising.

In summary:

1. I'm too busy to be blogging seriously
2. It's economically disadvantageous to me to have my unsanitary opinions visible to the world, given my current projects.  I was going to list, but pretty much everything I actually think can and would be used against me in the court of public opinion, if it came out, and became useful to someone.  
3. Until I have fuck-you money, economically disadvantageous wins.

This blog will be moving to private/invitation-only sometime in the next couple weeks, and it won't be that frequent, and I will probably turn off RSS syndication.  Please send an email if you want included on the list.  Also, I don't especially want this post linked.  If you ain't reading me regularly, you probably aren't someone who should be on the private list.

QoTD

As per my standard line, but now using Scott Alexander's words.  There's two+ possible paths.  The correct path if we're moving towards a post-scarcity world is thoroughly different than the path if we're moving towards a zombie apocalypse.  I think a major chunk of my disagreement with my more conservative commenters on this blog comes down to that line.

I argue for optimization in a good world, and that behaving as if you're in a bad world when the world is good is a giant cost.

They (you) argue that optimizing for a good world when you should be preserving for a bad world is a bigger cost.  This I agree with.   Then they argue that we're headed towards a bad world.  Which I disagree with massively.  Then they argue that behaving as if you're preparing for a bad world has relatively low costs, or even benefits even in a good world.  I also deeply disagree with that line.  Regardless, this isn't a place to rehash the disagreement, just to name it.

The quote is from Robin Hanson:

Our industry era institutions consistently forgo the extra cooperation advantages of strong family clans, to gain more flexibility and specialization.

In one sentence, it's the disagreement.

Interesting sequence of days?

May the Fourth be with you
Cinqo de Mayo
Revenge of the Sixth
??? (Could bracket the US participation in the two European theatre world wars with May 7th, twice)
Fibonacci Day

Evolution Rant

What would it mean to actually believe in evolution?  Yes, I'm assuming that words have meanings, and that we're not just using them as social signaling around which groups we belong to, and which ones we don't.  Yes, that's a big assumption.  Nonetheless, I persist in my question: What would it mean to actually believe in evolution?

That's actually the wrong question.  Evolution isn't a topic about which one can believe or not.  Evolution is a topic that one can understand better or worse.  But believing in evolution makes as much sense as believing in math.  And disbelieving in evolution makes as much sense as disbelieving in math.  Except evolution is a much harder concept than most math.

Refactoring the question:  What other positions are required if one understands evolution even moderately well?

• Game Theory wins (Evolution is a special case of game theory).  For almost all situations, the rules (if known) specify a single best play.
• Intelligence is a win occasionally in narrow ecological niches, but brains are expensive, and therefore for any given ecological niche, there is a brain cost vs. brain benefit optimization problem to solve.
• Different ecological niches produce radically different behaviors.
• Reproductive (inclusive) fitness necessarily drives everything biological.
• Reproductive fitness necessarily drives most human behavior as well.
• In humans, brains better be optimized to pursue reproductive fitness.
• A generic truth-seeking brain does not do that anywhere along the evolutionary path
• In mammals, the costs of bearing young are distributed disproportionately among the sexes.
• In mammals, correct game theory play for reproduction between men and women are different.
• In particular, attitude (both mental and genetic) towards risk should be a huge (the largest?) gulf.  One should expect more variance among males than among females.  
• This means that roughly all (10:1) of the worst people in the world on most axes should be males
• This also means that roughly all (10:1) of the best people in the world on most axes should be males
• Also, roughly all violence should be by and to males.
• Physical dimporphism is also HUGE.
• In mammals, if the brains of males and females were identical in interests or capabilities, it would be a failure of evolution to function.
• Humans are mammals, and so everything said about mammals applies to humans as well.
• On a human generation timeline of about 25 years, we have about 400 generations since the dawn of Agriculture.  This has implications for what our bodies are optimized to eat.  This doesn't mean we know what that is, or that it is perfectly stable, but not taking it into account would be insane.
• With 25 year generations, the out-of-Africa diaspora of the human race occurred around 4000 generations ago.  There has been a lot of time for different subpopulations (races) to optimize differently.
• Given that evolution works on the brain, the brains of different human subpopulations should be optimized differently as well.  Finding out how is the question, not whether.
• As per generic home vs. traveler diversity, there should be more human genetic diversity in Africa than there should be in the rest of the world put together.  

These are all basic consequences of taking evolution seriously.  Did I miss any of the big ones?

Remembered after:

• Ethics are pretty obviously an evolved-in response.  Almost certainly a way to get tribal game theory to work well.  

Roissy Watch

WTF?  (behind WashPo registration, but Damn!)