Since we're talking about incentives, and I know very little about Chinese history... did anyone in the government or in the intellectual class, etc basically have a "Sputnik moment", when you just take a look at what these guys from Europe can do and say, you know, they might seriously fuck us up, maybe we should figure out what they're capable of? Fear of being overtaken is a perfectly valid incentive, in fact it seems to me that's what drove Japan.

I'm not an expert, but when I see arguments like those of Pomeranz and Gunder Frank it seems to me that makes the rise of the West, the Industrial Revolution etc even harder to understand. It's like looking at the end of a blowout football game, and then being told that the score was tied with 5 minutes to go. If Europe had no special advantage at the end of 18c, then how did they rocket so far ahead in so little time? If a superior attitude played no role, then why did China seemingly ignore the rising threat from the West, while e.g. Japan revolutionized their entire society in order to keep up?

Maybe creativity isn't the right word, but... what do Chinese or Japanese intellectuals think about ideas like AI, the Singularity, transhumanism etc? Japan is certainly robot-crazy, but is there an Asian equivalent of Vinge or Kurzweil or even an Eliezer Yudkowsky?

The best defense of Wikipedia is its cost, not its content. 
 
Wikipedia's content in certain areas has far more entries (and will be more up-to-date) than what any conventional encyclopedia can provide, e.g. pop culture, video games, anime, and anything computer-related. Of course, not everyone finds this stuff useful.

bbartlog says: "The lack of effect in the females in the study is striking. I thought perhaps they just didn't have a good enough p-value due to fewer women or something but no, it looks pretty clear that there simply isn't an effect on that side." 
 
Schoenemann et al found no within-family association between brain size and IQ for sisters. Maybe this ties in to the larger male variance, the size-IQ connection is sex-mediated somehow...

I sometimes take Ambien (to get to sleep, not to stay awake). I read somewhere that some big shots like it because it lets you fall asleep when you want to, but there are potentially dangerous side effects (you lose your self-control and don't remember it the next day).

On the contrary, Stallman's place in history is secure. emacs, gcc, etc will be significant from a historical point of view, but he also created the GPL, which will endure just about forever.

Were the Pre-Columbian Americans notably less collectivist/xenophobic? I suppose they did initially welcome the Conquistadors. 
 
Isn't Cochran et al working on an "collectivism" gene? Maybe someone could match it up with HLA diversity.

Mencius says: Probably the most important product of the Austrian edifice is not the ABCT, but simply the conclusion that any quantity of money is adequate - there is no need for the money supply to expand "to meet the needs of trade." 
 
Most of the modern models (e.g. rational expectations) that try to build everything from the ground up are basically neutral in money - it takes some ingenuity to come up with a model where monetary quantities do anything at all. The debates over the gold standard and such are usually only presented as part of economic history or the history of economic thought. Though I've read the historical accounts of Keynes and Friedman's ideas, I must admit I don't understand the deep behavioral reasons behind why they thought dilution was necessary. 
 
Term transformation, as I understand it, is a separate issue from a gold standard, and I don't see anything intrinsically wrong with it - in fact, it seems so obvious that I find it hard to imagine a banking system that wouldn't invent it. There are obviously problems with bank runs and panics, but the benefits - a world where ordinary people can get multi-year loans, can buy cars and houses - far outweigh the costs. 
 
PhysicistDave: Notes on the Theory of Choice by Kreps is what I used, it's compact but covers the fundamentals.

Different Mises - that was Ludwig's brother, Richard.

Mencius says: A basic principle of praxeology is that an option cannot have negative subjective value. That is, a subjectively motivated agent, whatever its motivation, whether it is a human or a little green alien, cannot rationally prefer a position in which it has more options to a position in which it has less. 
 
This doesn't sound any different from what is taught in mainstream decision theory, except they use fancy mathematical notation to do it. Utilities and indifference curves are derived (given some additional assumptions e.g. continuity) from there, but I don't see what would be a deal-breaker in neoclassical economics (again, I don't know much about Austrian theory).

PhysicistDave said: I’ll leave it as an exercise for the student to look back at Fed monetary statistics and see how the theory explains the dot-com bust and the current subprime crisis. 
 
I don't know much about Austrian theory, but are you saying that the Fed's actions caused the dotcom bubble? Having lived through it, I saw plenty of irrational herding behavior in myself and the people around me - I find it hard to believe that Netscape going to 75 the first day was ultimately caused by anything the Fed did. 
 
I find real business cycle theories hard to swallow for a different reason - basically, the RBC people don't think there is a cycle at all, just changes in productivity. So booms must have been caused by some increase in productivity (e.g. a new technological discovery) while busts must be due to a "negative" technology shock - but I haven't seen many convincing examples of just what such a thing might be.

Mencius said:  
You would be extremely mistaken. Rather, today's PL researchers (starting from the foundational metamathematics of the 1930s, no happy coincidence from the UI perspective) invest their government dollars in churning out more and more intricate formalisms. Even their simpler efforts are languages that are simply inaccessible to anyone who lacks the aptitude to get an undergraduate math degree from a good school. 
 
Have you (or someone else) written more on this? I learned to code using c/c++, and I'm wondering whether I should take the time to seriously commit to learning ocaml and friends. If there's some class of problems that the new fancy languages are simply better (or worse) at doing, that would make it easier in figuring out what to study.

Stephen Ceci had a list of these kinds of things (e.g exogenous changes in schooling resulting in an IQ change): "Schooling, Intelligence, and Income"

willy wonka says: 
How can consciousness be irrelevant to intelligence? 
We can tell that some people are smarter than others even if we have no idea how the brain produces consciousness or how intelligence evolved. IQ, g, and all that are solely concerned with _differences_ between people. If there was only one person in the world, or if everyone were exactly the same, then there would be no use for IQ - but we don't.  
 
Skin color is not causative or even highly correlative with sickle cell anemia. 
Not skin color - ancestry. 
 
You would be hard pressed to find a modern biologist who even discusses race other than to debunk the notion. 
How about this one? 
Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity. On the other hand, we detected only modest genetic differentiation between different current geographic locales within each race/ethnicity group. Thus, ancient geographic ancestry, which is highly correlated with self-identified race/ethnicity - as opposed to current residence - is the major determinant of genetic structure in the U.S. population. 
As for twin studies, I assume you mean Jensen's? 
No, there have been dozens of twin studies all around the world, with similar results. From Plomin & Spinath: 
A stronger case has been made for substantial genetic influence on g than for any other human characteristic. Dozens of studies including more than 8000 parent-offspring pairs, 25 000 pairs of siblings, 10 000 twin pairs, and hundreds of adoptive families all converge towards the conclusion that genetic factors contribute substantially to g [4]. Estimates of the effect size, called heritability (see [4] for explanation), vary from 40 to 80% but estimates based on the entire body of data are about 50%, indicating that genetic variation accounts for about half of the variance in g. 
at a certain point you have to ask yourself "Is this really in the name of scientific inquiry?" 
Do differences in outcomes between individuals and groups matter - do you think that it's worth knowing why some people make more money than others, why some countries are vastly richer than others, or why some groups seem to produce more or less scientists, or writers, or engineers? If you care about that stuff, if you want to truly understand the reasons why - then you must eventually come across the possibility that those differences are related to g, the factor that seems to affect nearly every mental ability.

willy wonka says: 
Do genes play a part in intelligence? Possibly. 
 
It's more than just a possibility - it's almost certain.  
 
Do we understand the mechanisms of consciousness? 
 
Consciousness is irrelevant to IQ, which is about _individual differences_. 
 
Are we even close to knowing what makes someone smart? 
 
We know a fair bit about what does _not_ make someone smart. In particular, no one seems to have found any educational or psychological interventions that permanently raise someone's IQ - and that includes being adopted into a different family. Now, it's possible that there are things out there that no one has thought of yet - but at some point, when you've exhausted all the possibilities, the absence of evidence must become evidence of absence. 
 
If we do ever find a genetic source which is causative for intelligence, is it conceivable that the alleles won't be spread across the artificial designations of race? 
 
Sure, just look around. Genes for skin color, hair color, sickle-cell anemia etc still match up with race (or more accurately, ancestral region). There are papers coming out every day from the HapMap that show alleles at different frequencies for different populations. 
 
Now, about Rushton and Lynn. They are obviously interested in the question, and they've drawn a lot of attention - but the most important sources of information don't come from them or the Pioneer Fund. The data on IQ of ethnic groups in the US, the heritability from twin studies, the adoption studies that show little effects of shared environment, the recent papers showing evidence of selection on genes by region - none of them depend on whether you consider those guys credible or not.

Shalizi talks a good game in his g simulation, but by assuming the existence of shared abilities, he's already conceded that a general factor exists. We could take the average of the shared abilities and label it "IQ" - it would predict all outcomes. Now, this does not prove whether this general factor is a _single_ ability, or the combined effect of many - but as Mencius says, in this case the absence of evidence becomes evidence of absence (of abilities uncorrelated with g).

Galor and Moav argue that evolution would respond by building stronger bodies in high-disease environments, and the result would be longer lifespans once those dangers of disease recede in the modern world. 
 
This seems unsupported - I thought the "antagonistic pleiotropy" theory was that things that help you when you're young will hurt you when you're old (e.g. tesosterone makes you stronger in youth, gives you prostate cancer when old, etc). So a high-disease environment could _lower_ lifespan limits by favoring genes that help you survive long enough to reproduce, but then kill you once you've shot your fitness wad (so to speak).

On Shalizi's post: 
 
First of all, I'd agree that g doesn't tell us much about the evolution of the mind, or how the brain gives rise to reason, etc - by definition, g is about individual differences, not about human universals. But that's precisely why people are so (rightfully) worked up about it - what Shalizi derides as "labor market sociology" is the whole reason why most of us care about g: why some people (or groups) might be richer or poorer or more successful than others. 
 
Now, in his simulation, Shalizi has 11 tests, each of which draws upon from 1 to 500 shared abilities. From a psychologist's point of view, this has no single "g factor" - but from the labor market sociologist's point of view, who cares? What matters is that there is a set of abilities that affects _all_ the tests - we could take the average of the 500 shared abilities and label it "IQ". A common factor is important because it means that there _is_ a single number you can use to predict all outcomes, and "multiple intelligences" and the like will not erase the predictive power of the common factor. And, if there are individual or group differences in this factor, then we should expect to see differences in outcomes. 
 
Finally, Shalizi doesn't mention the sheer diversity of the types of tests that show a common factor - not just the usual academic tests, but also of musical ability, reaction time, etc. Sternberg spent a lot of time trying to come up with a test of "practical" or "emotional" intelligence that does _not_ load on g, without much success. I seem to recall that only rhythmic ability does not load on g - if there really are all these independent abilities, why hasn't anyone come up with lots of tests that don't load on g? 
 
Also, he says: The question is whether the index measures the trait the same way in the two groups. What people have gone to great lengths to establish is that IQ predicts other variables the same way for the two groups, i.e., that when you plug it into regressions you get the same coefficients. This is not the same thing, but it does have a bearing on the question of measurement bias: it provides strong reason to think it exists. As Roger Millsap and co-authors have shown in a series of papers going back to the early 1990s (e.g. this one from 1997, or this early treatment of the non-parametric case), if there really is a difference on the unobserved trait between groups, and the test has no measurement bias, then the predictive regression coefficients should, generally, be different. [15] Despite the argument being demonstrably wrong, however, people keep pointing to the lack of predictive bias as a sign that the tests have no measurement bias. 
 
This has been addressed. From the conclusion: 
We conclude that strict factorial invariance is tenable in comparisons of IQ test scores of blacks and whites. We base this conclusion on th
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Would this hypothesized difference show up in HLA genes? 
 
Also, do we know of infections in animals that cause them to not clean themselves (cats not licking themselves)?