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I like the paper, and I think it makes many valuable points. I especially like the semantic wave model, because that's exactly how you learn mathematics. And it

I like the paper, and I think it makes many valuable points. I especially like the semantic wave model, because that's exactly how you learn mathematics. And it also explains why (high-quality) abstractions are so important. But of course everything has to be taken with a grain of salt. For example, their recommendations at the end on how to access papers is not very good. Ever heard of Sci-Hub and VPNs? It is obvious why they cannot mention this in their paper, but it is also equally obvious then that if there was evidence linking race or gender with programming ability, they would not mention it, for pretty much the same reasons. I also don't like their example of achieving a Nobel Prize as something that practically no one can attain. Yes, that's true, but that is because Nobel Prizes are artificially limited to a few people a year. I think many, many more people can achieve that level of expertise than just a few per year.

tsimionescu 3y ago
It should be noted that the very idea of studying links between "race" (skin color) and intelligence is deeply suspect. No one is studying things like correlation between hair wavyness and intelligence, or penis length and intelligence, etc. And yet skin color is exactly the same kind of trait: something you were born with and that is tied to the genetic baggage of your parents, with no remotely plausible direct link with intelligence (unlike, say, skull size, which at least had some plausible priors). You can even (somewhat) change the color of your skin if you really want. Now, there may be, at least in principle, families, and by extension populations, who are more or less intelligent, on average, than others. But "race" has little to do with that: these types of studies only look at skin color as a proxy for population, and that is obviously silly on genetic grounds. Dark skin is a dominant trait, the children of a lighter skinned parent and a darker skin parent will usually have darker skin and be assigned the racial category "black" in such research, even though genetically they are just as much a member of the lighter skinned population as the darker skinned one. Even worse, this often persists across a few generations, so a child with 1 dark skinned grand parent and 3 light skinned ones will often be dark skinned themselves, and thus be called "black" in many such studies. So, the reason you should be very very much concerned with citing studies that find links between "race" and intelligence is that the very premise is wrong in the vast majority of the literature.
- auggierose 3y ago
  They didn't say that there is no correlation between penis length and programming ability, so maybe that is something worth looking into. I would have found the idea that next token prediction leads to the results it led to deeply suspect and silly as well. In fact, I did, until I tried out ChatGPT. A posteriori, that next token prediction works as well as it does suddenly makes sense. Race is obviously a difficult term, as about any other term that classifies a human and tries to derive socially and economically important properties from it. Basing it on "black" or "white" is indeed silly, as you rightly point out. I really hate forms at the GP where you have to enter things as Caucasian etc as well, because these groups don't really make much sense biologically either.
antifa 3y ago
> but it is also equally obvious then that if there was evidence linking race or gender I dunno about "equally" obvious, but what people colloquially refer to as race is an asthetic parent category for a 1000 ethnic population groups, and what such experiments are actually measuring may be a lazy proxy for poverty.

tsimionescu 3y ago

It should be noted that the very idea of studying links between "race" (skin color) and intelligence is deeply suspect. No one is studying things like correlation between hair wavyness and intelligence, or penis length and intelligence, etc. And yet skin color is exactly the same kind of trait: something you were born with and that is tied to the genetic baggage of your parents, with no remotely plausible direct link with intelligence (unlike, say, skull size, which at least had some plausible priors). You can even (somewhat) change the color of your skin if you really want. Now, there may be, at least in principle, families, and by extension populations, who are more or less intelligent, on average, than others. But "race" has little to do with that: these types of studies only look at skin color as a proxy for population, and that is obviously silly on genetic grounds. Dark skin is a dominant trait, the children of a lighter skinned parent and a darker skin parent will usually have darker skin and be assigned the racial category "black" in such research, even though genetically they are just as much a member of the lighter skinned population as the darker skinned one. Even worse, this often persists across a few generations, so a child with 1 dark skinned grand parent and 3 light skinned ones will often be dark skinned themselves, and thus be called "black" in many such studies. So, the reason you should be very very much concerned with citing studies that find links between "race" and intelligence is that the very premise is wrong in the vast majority of the literature.

auggierose 3y ago
They didn't say that there is no correlation between penis length and programming ability, so maybe that is something worth looking into. I would have found the idea that next token prediction leads to the results it led to deeply suspect and silly as well. In fact, I did, until I tried out ChatGPT. A posteriori, that next token prediction works as well as it does suddenly makes sense. Race is obviously a difficult term, as about any other term that classifies a human and tries to derive socially and economically important properties from it. Basing it on "black" or "white" is indeed silly, as you rightly point out. I really hate forms at the GP where you have to enter things as Caucasian etc as well, because these groups don't really make much sense biologically either.

antifa 3y ago

> but it is also equally obvious then that if there was evidence linking race or gender I dunno about "equally" obvious, but what people colloquially refer to as race is an asthetic parent category for a 1000 ethnic population groups, and what such experiments are actually measuring may be a lazy proxy for poverty.