If your opinion of Cofnas is based mainly on what other people have said about him, or based on quotations from things he's written, I'd highly recommend you:
On your recommendation, I have just (fairly quickly) read the paper. I'm not impressed. It appears to assume that "some philosophers and scientists" have objections to race-based intelligence classifications based upon a belief that environmental factors alone are responsible for individual variation - then argues that this is false.
The reason why I object to group-based arguments about intelligence is specifically because the intra-group differences are bigger than the inter-group differences (though I also agree with some - though not all - of the critique made by the addendum/critique/reply linked under the abstract).
"Men are taller than women" is sometimes used to teach introductory ANOVA, sometimes to argue for a diversity of crash test dummies, but also to argue at "women" are less good for something because "they" are shorter. The first is trivial. The second would mostly be better dealt with by dealing with the broad range of human heights (5th/95th percentiles?) rather than merely adding an "average woman" to the existing average man one. The third is bogus because When many men are shortarses and many women are taller than me. So we're again generally better measuring people's actual height for things where it matters. Whichever group differences in intelligence are found, you're going to end up with overlapping distributions, making the groups a crappy proxy for individual variation in any case. But that's exactly what the author advocates doing in their section 4.
If you want to establish which genes are linked to intelligence then go ahead. It's not particularly important or glamorous work as far as I can see, but whatever - the academy has always had plenty of heterodox interests in it. But people jumping from nucleotide polymorphisms to grand social policy (that just happens to echo a century's worth of rightly-discredited eugenics advocacy) deserve the scepticism they get in my view.
When you wrote this sentence, were you referring to Cofnas?
"But people jumping from nucleotide polymorphisms to grand social policy (that just happens to echo a century's worth of rightly-discredited eugenics advocacy) deserve the scepticism they get in my view."
If so, what is the 'grand social policy' that Cofnas advocates or has advocated?
As far as I can tell from the paper, the only thign that seems like a policy proposal is that educational programs should be tailored to different ability profiles (and what he said about Head Start). But him saying that maybe we should fund different educational interventions isn't eugenics, or abouyt treating individuals differently depending on their race/ancestry. The paper argues against using group differences to blame or rank anyone. (See section 5.2 as it's the main point there.)
The overlapping-distributions point makes sense: even if group differences turned out to be partly genetic, group mean/median IQ or whatever isn't a good proxy for individuals from that group. So if you have a policy that is based on group membership (not individual assessment), it's going to be poorly targeted and end up wasting resources.
Section 4 endorses 'tailored' programs and doesn't explain how they'll be targeted. He doesn't say they'd be targeted by group membership, though. He references Jensen 1969 (https://gwern.net/doc/iq/1969-jensen.pdf) and in that paper Jensen advocated individual testing, not assignment based on race/ancestry. From page 78:
The important distinction between the individual and the population must always be kept clearly in mind in any discussion of racial differences in mental abilities or any other behavioral characteristics. Whenever we select a person for some special educational purpose, whether for special instruction in a grade-school class for children with learning problems, or for a "gifted" class with an advanced curriculum, or for college attendance, or for admission to graduate training or a professional school, we are selecting an individual, and we are selecting him and dealing with him as an individual for reasons of his individuality.
Right, but if you use ntfy.sh you can get proper mobile push notifications (instead of keeping the app running and using long polling or websockets).
If you use the public version of ntfy.sh then you don't need to do anything to set this up. If you self-host, you need your own Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) account and (for iOS) your own Apple Developer account so you can use APN.
Also the docs point out >Using Firebase is optional and only works if you modify and build your own Android .apk. For a self-hosted instance, it's easier to just not bother with FCM.
Who cares? Battery consumption of Gotify is negligible (it uses websockets). Same with CPU/RAM. What's the benefit of giving Google your notifications?
Publicly hosted version is nearly useless if you'd like to use it to send notifications from your tiny workers/scripts/processes in the big datacentres - I have a minuscule worker in CF that needs to send one notification once every few days, and I *ALWAYS* get a 429. Always.
So this is good maybe if you're using it to sent from your laptop to your phone.
Yes exactly, it's an easy way to build a web-based app and run it on iOS and Android, accessing the native API through a javascript bridge. There's also NativeScript in that space
The complaint says "within or from New York or to persons in New York". But Kalshi is headquartered in Manhattan, right? So how can they continue to offer all event contracts nationwide without operating 'within or from New York'? Would they have to immediately move their HQ and fire all New York based employees?
As far as I can read it, no such attempt has been made. New York is saying certain things are illegal in New York. It seems New York is not attempting to have any say over what Kalshi does outside of New York, when it does not involve New York residents.
Yes, it's mighty inconvenient to have an office in a state that thinks your business activity is illegal. Maybe don't do that.
As I said earlier, the complaint says "within or from New York OR to persons in New York" (emphasis mine).
This is inconsistent with your statement "It seems New York is not attempting to have any say over what Kalshi does outside of New York, when it does not involve New York residents."
That sounds like a voluntary action they can decide to do, not something the state of New York is telling them to do. As far as I can tell, all they're being asked is to not break New York laws within New York. It's unfortunate if that was the whole extent of their business.
If a state decided to make trampolines illegal (sale, use and manufacture), it would suck to own a trampoline factory in that state. That's still not a nationwide ban.
I grew up in the UK. When I started working full time, I had three academic things on my CV:
- 11 GCSE grades
- 4 A level grades
- 1 University degree
For virtually all of these, the grades/results were determined by exams taken at the end of a period of study:
- GCSE exams taken at ~16yo
- A level exams taken at ~18yo
- University finals taken at ~21yo
At the time, I thought it was very very strange that my GCSE grades for English Language and English Literature were not based on exams, but on a bunch of essays I had written over a two year period.
It seemed strange because those past essays did not measure my current capability, but something else.
But this (measuring students on performance over multiple years) is the norm here in the US. Sure, many students take the SAT or ACT or various AP exams. But many students enter university with their academic performance measured on their high school GPA, which seemingly doesn't even attempt to measure mastery.
(281 points, 118 comments)