[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-january-2025
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31:08
Highlights From The Comments On Lynn And IQ
Shaked Koplewitz writes: Doesn't Lynn's IQ measure also suffer from the IQ/g discrepancy that causes the Flynn effect? That is, my understanding of the Flynn effect is that IQ doesn't exactly measure g (the true general intelligence factor) but measures some proxy that is somewhat improved by literacy/education, and for most of the 20th century those were getting better leading to improvements in apparent IQ (but not g). Shouldn't we expect sub Saharan Africans to have lower IQ relative to g (since their education and literacy systems are often terrible)? And then the part about them seeming much smarter than a first worlder with similar IQ makes sense - they'd do equally badly at tests, but in their case it's because e.g. they barely had a chance to learn to read rather than not being smart enough to think of the answer. (Or a slightly more complicated version of this - e.g. maybe they can read fine, but never had an education that encouraged them to consider counterfactuals so those just don't come naturally). Yeah, this is the most important factor that I failed to cover in the post (I edited it in ten minutes later after commenters reminded me, but some of you got the email and didn’t see it). https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-lynn
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22:41
How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates
Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country. Typical of his results is this paper, which ranged from 60 (Malawi) to 108 (Singapore). Lynn’s national IQ estimates (source) People obviously objected to this, and Lynn spent his life embroiled in controversy, with activists constantly trying to get him canceled/fired and his papers retracted/condemned. His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions/activities and his somewhat opportunistic methodology. Nobody does high-quality IQ tests on the entire population of Malawi; to get his numbers, Lynn would often find some IQ-ish test given to some unrepresentative sample of some group related to Malawians and try his best to extrapolate from there. How well this worked remains hotly debated; the latest volley is Aporia’s Are Richard Lynn’s National IQ Estimates Flawed? (they say no). I’ve followed the technical/methodological debate for a while, but I think the strongest emotions here come from two deeper worries people have about the data: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to
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9:36
Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats
I was surprised to see someone with such experience in the pharmaceutical industry say this, because it goes against how I understood the FDA to work. My model goes: FDA procedures require certain bureaucratic tasks to be completed before approving drugs. Let’s abstract this into “processing 1,000 forms”. Suppose they have 100 bureaucrats, and each bureaucrat can process 10 forms per year. Seems like they can approve 1 drug per year. If you fire half the bureaucrats, now they can only approve one drug every 2 years. That’s worse! https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bureaucracy-isnt-measured-in-bureaucrats
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17:21
On Priesthoods
Some recent political discussion has focused on “the institutions” or “the priesthoods”. I’m part of one of these (the medical establishment), so here’s an inside look on what these are and what they do. Why Priesthoods? In the early days of the rationalist community, critics got very upset that we might be some kind of “individualists”. Rationality, they said, cannot be effectively pursued on one’s own. You need a group of people working together, arguing, checking each other’s mistakes, bouncing hypotheses off each other. For some reason it never occurred to these people that a group calling itself a rationalist community might be planning to do this. Maybe they thought any size smaller than the whole of society was doomed? If so, I think they were exactly wrong. The truth-seeking process benefits from many different group sizes, for example: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/on-priesthoods
Ireland