I read some of Wendy Doniger’s translation of the The Rig Veda. It’s about ~10% of the hymns in the whole work, but the author claims they’re the more important and evocative ones. There is a reasonable amount of commentary as well.
Two things so far. First, little similarities between Indo-European mythologies I was not aware of, such as the relationship between Indra and his father and Zeus and his father. Second, the Vedic Aryans were truly barbarians. I do not say that in a pejorative sense, but simply descriptive in that these are people who are outside of the gates of civilization. They were most def most total bros.
Reading some of Richard Haier’s The Neuroscience of Intelligence (I got a review copy, though I forgot I’d gotten a Kindle edition earlier). It is a short work, and though I haven’t gotten much through it it reminds me somewhat of Stuart Ritchie’s Intelligence: All that Matters. The main difference is that there is more of a focus on neuroscience.
Psychometrics, like the cognitive anthropology of religion, is a field I take some interest in, but mostly I’ve gotten what I want out of it and do not follow it closely anymore. That being said, I thought I would bring up an issue in relation to intelligence tests.
It is common to assert among many, including many biologists I know, that intelligence testing only measures how well you can take a test. This is false. It is well known that intelligence testing robustly predicts later academic performance to a reasonable degree of correlation. Of course a correlation of 0.50 can be highly significant, and also have lots of exceptions. But that is not a rebuttal, because no psychometrician would assert that their instrument is a perfect predictor, in large part because they also agree that academic performance has other major dimensions, such as conscientiousness, which are not accounted for by these tests.
Probably the major issue that highly educated people do not account for is range restriction. The issue is simple, but often overlooked. One of the professors I TAed for once explained to a class his graduate school did a survey and the correspondence between GRE score and grades to later scientific achievement was low to nonexistent. I asked him what university he went to. He said Stanford, and I immediately pointed out to him that Stanford graduate students are not a typical sample. He grasped what I was getting at because as a biologist he understands range restriction in other contexts, and we did not engage in a debate on this issue any further.
An interesting chart from the book, derived from the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, illustrates that standardized tests are highly predictive, even when you move many sigmas from the mean. Below are results for mathematically gifted 13 year olds and their outcomes as a function of their result on the math SAT at that age:
Remember that a math score of 450 for a 13 year old is not that bad. So the kids in the 700 range are truly exceptional.
To me the regional differences in voting in France are fascinating. I suppose I’ll get the raw data and look at some point myself. More rural de-industrialized areas went for Le Pen, as did the far south, which has long had tensions with its Muslim population (and where the pied-noir population tended to settle; randomly I just found out that the actress Eva Green has a Sephardic Jewish pied-noir mother).
For a while several readers have complained that the archives are incomplete. There are two reasons for this.
One reason is that they were from RSS feeds and so in some cases the source website did not show the whole post. This leads to a cutting off of most of the content. The second reason is that about six months ago I mistakenly removed several years of posts on the aggregator website, so there was a major gap between 2013 and later.
Thankfully Ron Unz’s IT guy had formatted a version of the websites that put them into MySQL files. Because of different versions of WordPress it has taken about a week tinkering here and there, but the full archives are now online (see to the right). Please note that some of the older ones are going to be wonky because of CMS changes (e.g., going from blogger to movable type to blogger to WordPress).
Aside from reader demand one reason I set the archives up is that my archives are pretty valuable for Google. The archives went live overnight and Google has already been hitting them as Analytics tells me that organic search has shot way up.
This is important. I am frankly disturbed how social media drives much of the traffic to this website. Facebook is pretty opaque; you don’t know who the referral is from and what they’re saying. Twitter, I’m not sure Twitter will be around much longer (I think most of the Twitter referral is at least from me).The days of getting links from other blogs are pretty much gone from what I can tell (and to be honest, I don’t link to other blogs much because I don’t read other blogs much anymore)
Google is in many ways a monopoly, but it’s another pipeline to get traffic and have some visibility. More is better.
In the near future I think a lot of ‘media’ is going to disaggregate. We’ve seen many prominent bloggers become the media or join the media. That’s fine, but at some point in the next decade or so I wonder if the media landscape will thin out even more than it has today.
Scientific blogging is in many ways on a downswing. Many scientists go straight to Twitter. There are problems with this. In relation to the epistasis paper in Science I mentioned earlier, here is a bloggy behind the scenes from the first author. The authors tweets are much harder to follow and may not be around years from now.
You have probably heard about the controversy around Rebeca Tuvel, This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like. The problem is with the “academics.” The rank-and-file students are much more tolerant. And it’s not all of the academia. Frankly it is those fields populated by style, posing, and signaling, rather than substance. I think this will take care of itself. These people burn witches for fun and profit. Once it’s less fun, and there’s no profit, they’ll move on.
Is there any reason the public funds should support this behavior:
Others went further and supported Tuvel in private while actually attacking her in public. In private messages, these people apologized for what she must be going through, while in public they fanned the flames of hatred and bile on social media. The question is, why did so many scholars, especially feminists, express one sentiment behind closed doors and another out in the open? Why were so many others afraid to say anything in public?
The worst thing for Tuvel is that she now truly knows what craven cretins her colleagues and peers are.
Just curious if readers are finding many 503’s? I think I finally tweaked the varnish restart script appropriately so that this doesn’t happen much, though I’m worried about comments.
Just a quick shout out to those who are using Amazon link to buy stuff. Looks like more people are using this option. There was one Christmas someone bought an expensive gaming computer and I got $480 total (not just because of the computer). I wouldn’t mind if revenues got that high!
King James asserted that “No Bishop, No King.” I think this was wrong. But what follows from what? That is the question. What if we all agree that truth is not the goal, but social harmony is. What follows from that? I have some ideas. More for later….
Hope the Wonder Woman movie isn’t ruined by DC’s kiss of death.