Neurobiological origins of individual differences in mathematical ability
“We found that ROBO1, a gene known to regulate prenatal growth of cerebral cortical layers, is associated with the volume of the right parietal cortex, a key region for quantity representation. Individual volume differences in this region predicted up to a fifth of the behavioral variance in mathematical ability. Our findings indicate that a fundamental genetic component of the quantity processing system is rooted in the early development of the parietal cortex…” https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000871
@Robert Ford. If lack of Trump means lack of wokeness, we would expect the whole constellation of oppression narratives to have virtually died during the Obama years. Quite the opposite happened.
Trump is a very loud, very visible symptom of wokeness, not a cause.
Sure, it was present but was it an out of control freight train? Cuz that’s what is now…there’s no one even steering that ship anymore!
@Robert, on this one, I guess I just go with Zach Goldberg’s graphs of the use of “Woke” buzzwords in media; seems like the trends are pretty constant with no “Trump jump”. That matches kind of what I think I experienced in the online communities that trended towards the demographics that have mostly “gone Woke” (skew college educated, skew young, skew geeky, skew ethnically diverse). E.g. the stuff that was at the time called “Social Justice Warrior” thinking pretty much just seemed to accumulate at a constant rate that hasn’t really increased or decreased since 2016 – that is, we’re pretty much now at the same increase in this stuff in 2020 relative to 2016 as we were in 2016 relative to 2012 and in 2012 relative to 2008 (mainly through the zealots getting more intense rather than it becoming more broadly supported).
Like, I’m not an American so it’s not for me to say who you guys should vote for, but if you want to vote for Biden (who seems most likely to win) do so because you believe that he offers better leadership, and a better mix of policies and so on. The normal democratic reasons. Don’t do so because you think this is going to be placate these folks and stop their waving about with all the stuff they wave about with; if you did so it would be your equivalent of the “Peace for Our Time” (they wouldn’t treat it as a binding compromise).
I don’t know; even if were true, the whole idea that people should vote for any candidate because it will placate some set of people would would otherwise terrorise the rest of civil society (through protests and deplatforming and lawfare and investigations on conjured up pretexts and so on) seems like a profoundly undemocratic development in civil society. Just waaay too minoritarian (in the sense of giving vast levels of political power to a small number of very determined citizens with resources, no other focus in life and no scruples). One that even if it worked, you just shouldn’t engage with.
> an out of control freight train?
It’s been on exponential growth trend at least from the start of Obama’s second term, maybe a little earlier. These are the graphs I remember off the top of my head: https://archive.is/pkirc.
The latter was generated using a tool the NY Times put up for measuring lexical frequency in their articles over time. They took that tool down at the end of 2016 from what I can tell, so that might be where the X axis ends. Quite likely they took it down because people were pointing out trends like that.
Yeah, I’m familiar with all the graphs and stuff. I mean, this was our chance. Trump literally passed legislation banning CRT. I live in MI and I didn’t vote in 2016 because I worked at a woke college and I wanted revenge. I got my revenge but was it worth all this? Nah. AND it didn’t stop it. realistically, how does electing Trump have anything to do with stuff like this? https://www.vogue.com/article/emily-ratajkowski-pregnant-announcement-digital-cover
Trump banned cathode ray tubes? Seems a bit extreme.
@Robert, I can’t really blame you for it (not being Captain Hindsight here), but yeah if not voting in 2016 (or anyone voting for Trump) as a protest vote against “Woke” then that kind of is a bit futile. Just as today trying to use your vote in any way to placate them would.
I guess to reiterate (perhaps a bit tiresomely) at a bit more length, Trump seems to have made his offer to the US on his policy intentions pretty clearly. On foreign policy, a more hawkish, national interests stance on international trade and institutions and treaties, along with an anti-interventionist or isolationist “realist” stance on distant military conflicts. Then on domestic policy, more general deregulation, more immigration restrictionism and enforcement, more policing and some continuing criminal justice reform, a pro-domestic manufacturing and mining industrial policy, and more stimulus from spending and tax cuts. (In some senses to me this all seems just a promise of a return to being a “normal country” that acts like a typical country does. Typical governments are self interested when negotiating treaties and obligations, they run policies that they believe will develop their industry, they don’t police foreign states, they promise to control their borders and use them to manage immigration to the benefit of their voters, etc. They don’t either act in some sort of “global interest” or pretend to, when they’re not.)
Those are the concrete things he, I guess, can actually offer to do. If that seems to not be a good offer, or he just not competent enough to actually do it, or you just think it’s pointless because the rest of the US political machine will work together to stop it, or the tweets and character are just too annoying, or you don’t trust that he really wants to do it (all just stuff he says to be able to plant an enrich cronies), then those are all valid and yeah, vote for another candidate, or don’t vote.
But those are the things he’ll actually have the power on… whereas while he offers at least a token, often somewhat confused old guy, resistance to “Woke” and left wing activist disorder, there’s not much he can actually do about it (definitely within US law). Or that conversely not voting for him would achieve either.
Obviously on the things that he can do, the concrete policy, his offer obviously is pretty reversed compared to the general idea of this cosmopolitan, interventionalist universal American empire which leads and dictates foreign and trade policy to the rest of the “liberal international order” (which many of the “Woke” folk often *kind* of actually support, just with its historical “stains” of “White Supremacy” and capitalism cleansed by their leadership and their preferred policies). Those people who’ve known nothing but the growth of that aspiration since their political maturity, largely in the 1980s, would find a shift against the direction (the “Right Side of History”) deeply upsetting. So it’s tempting as a protest vote against that as well as the related “Woke” phenomena. But ultimately the vote should probably weight more than a protest; it’s not like the people being protested towards listen much even.
I’m not really placating anything, the guy is objectively insane.
Fair enough, if your thing is that he’s bonkers, that doesn’t have much to do with “Hate Woke? Vote Biden”, or Trump voting being responsible for the ongoing Awokening and that voting for the other guy would “fix” it.
“The book details his occasional tendency to eat only one or two foods, like carrots or apples, for weeks at a time. Besides developing a sunset-like hue — which those who worked with him are quoted as remembering — there are other health issues that can come from adhering to such a limited diet, says Elisa Zied, registered dietitian and msnbc.com contributor. …
“Jobs also believed that his commitment to vegan diets meant his body was flushed of mucus — and that it meant he was free from body odor, so he didn’t need to wear deodorant or shower regularly. Unsurprisingly, the book quotes former coworkers saying that he was very, very wrong.”
Jobs was famously said to create a “reality distortion field” around himself.
They both seem to be high achieving people who are, um, different.
Matt, yeah that’s what I mean. A “revenge” vote doesn’t effect wokeness…having a functioning society would though. Biden can get us moving in that direction.
Relatedly, I’m finishing up “Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop” and it’s convinced me of how insane the national conversation is now and how it’s likely at least partially caused by our Party system. How bizarre is it to talk to someone, anyone (everyone) who’s “values” just happen to all agree with everyone else on their “team?” Like talking to robots. I don’t know any true Liberals at all. Like…literally zero. Change the way we vote and it may free up the discussion, people won’t feel the pressure to conform as much.
Why 14 Critics of “Social Justice” Think You Shouldn’t Vote Trump
Couple papers might be interesting (not much about this week that I’ve seen):
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.27.351692v1 – “A curated dataset of modern and ancient high-coverage shotgun human genomes” – “Over the last few years, genome-wide data for a large number of ancient human samples have been collected. Whilst datasets of capture SNPs have been collated, high coverage shotgun genomes (which are relatively few but allow certain type of analyses not possible with ascertained captured SNPs) have to be reprocessed by individual groups from raw reads. This task is computationally intensive. Here, we release a dataset including 34 whole-genome sequenced samples, previously published and distributed worldwide, together with the genetic pipeline used to process them. The dataset contains 73,435,604 sites called across 18 ancient and 16 modern individuals and includes sequence data from four previously published ancient samples which we sequenced to higher coverage (10-18x). Such a resource will allow researchers to analyse their new samples with the same genetic pipeline and directly compare them to the reference dataset without re-processing published samples.”.
I’m not sure exactly what could be done with these samples differently than with capture, but among the samples resequenced to higher coverage are ZVEJ31, which is basically an EHG sample (Combed Ware Culture from Latvia), and KK1, which is Kotias, one of the CHG samples. No Yamnaya/Steppe samples or Middle Neolithic HG in Europe, but some early Neolithic samples and quite a few more Western Euro HG and intermediate HG.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.06.328203v2 – “Ancestry inference and grouping from principal component analysis of genetic data” Update of this paper by Florian Prive (which was kind of a comparison to his https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/36/16/4449/5838185 – “Efficient toolkit implementing best practices for principal component analysis of population genetic data” paper) , which has some interesting figures on the Euclidean distance on PCA of participants in UKBiobank between different groups of country of birth.
I was surprised at first that the results indicated that most of the Ugandan born individuals clustered in South Asia, and most of the Singaporean born individuals clustered with Brits, but of course this is pretty consistent with the actual history, where most Singapore born among the fairly old Biobank cohort would be White Brits born out in Singapore when it was British Empire, and same for the Ugandan Indians who migrated to Britain… Similar results for place of birth in many other ex-British colonies. If Biobank were a recent cohort, results would likely be quite different!
I do think the Biobank approach of just sampling a massive amount of population is interesting from a perspective of looking for ancestry structure, relative to projects like Human Origins or HGDP which aim to sample differentiated groups.
After removing subseting to balance out overrepresented samples in Biobank, there is still some ancestry space in Biobank that is not covered by 1000 Genomes… Maybe not covered by HGDP too?
Neurobiological origins of individual differences in mathematical ability
“We found that ROBO1, a gene known to regulate prenatal growth of cerebral cortical layers, is associated with the volume of the right parietal cortex, a key region for quantity representation. Individual volume differences in this region predicted up to a fifth of the behavioral variance in mathematical ability. Our findings indicate that a fundamental genetic component of the quantity processing system is rooted in the early development of the parietal cortex…”
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000871
Hate wokeness? Vote for Biden.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/hate-wokeness-vote-biden/616845/
Agree.
@Robert Ford. If lack of Trump means lack of wokeness, we would expect the whole constellation of oppression narratives to have virtually died during the Obama years. Quite the opposite happened.
Trump is a very loud, very visible symptom of wokeness, not a cause.
Sure, it was present but was it an out of control freight train? Cuz that’s what is now…there’s no one even steering that ship anymore!
@Robert, on this one, I guess I just go with Zach Goldberg’s graphs of the use of “Woke” buzzwords in media; seems like the trends are pretty constant with no “Trump jump”. That matches kind of what I think I experienced in the online communities that trended towards the demographics that have mostly “gone Woke” (skew college educated, skew young, skew geeky, skew ethnically diverse). E.g. the stuff that was at the time called “Social Justice Warrior” thinking pretty much just seemed to accumulate at a constant rate that hasn’t really increased or decreased since 2016 – that is, we’re pretty much now at the same increase in this stuff in 2020 relative to 2016 as we were in 2016 relative to 2012 and in 2012 relative to 2008 (mainly through the zealots getting more intense rather than it becoming more broadly supported).
Like, I’m not an American so it’s not for me to say who you guys should vote for, but if you want to vote for Biden (who seems most likely to win) do so because you believe that he offers better leadership, and a better mix of policies and so on. The normal democratic reasons. Don’t do so because you think this is going to be placate these folks and stop their waving about with all the stuff they wave about with; if you did so it would be your equivalent of the “Peace for Our Time” (they wouldn’t treat it as a binding compromise).
I don’t know; even if were true, the whole idea that people should vote for any candidate because it will placate some set of people would would otherwise terrorise the rest of civil society (through protests and deplatforming and lawfare and investigations on conjured up pretexts and so on) seems like a profoundly undemocratic development in civil society. Just waaay too minoritarian (in the sense of giving vast levels of political power to a small number of very determined citizens with resources, no other focus in life and no scruples). One that even if it worked, you just shouldn’t engage with.
> an out of control freight train?
It’s been on exponential growth trend at least from the start of Obama’s second term, maybe a little earlier. These are the graphs I remember off the top of my head: https://archive.is/pkirc.
The latter was generated using a tool the NY Times put up for measuring lexical frequency in their articles over time. They took that tool down at the end of 2016 from what I can tell, so that might be where the X axis ends. Quite likely they took it down because people were pointing out trends like that.
Yeah, I’m familiar with all the graphs and stuff. I mean, this was our chance. Trump literally passed legislation banning CRT. I live in MI and I didn’t vote in 2016 because I worked at a woke college and I wanted revenge. I got my revenge but was it worth all this? Nah. AND it didn’t stop it.
realistically, how does electing Trump have anything to do with stuff like this?
https://www.vogue.com/article/emily-ratajkowski-pregnant-announcement-digital-cover
Trump banned cathode ray tubes? Seems a bit extreme.
@Robert, I can’t really blame you for it (not being Captain Hindsight here), but yeah if not voting in 2016 (or anyone voting for Trump) as a protest vote against “Woke” then that kind of is a bit futile. Just as today trying to use your vote in any way to placate them would.
I guess to reiterate (perhaps a bit tiresomely) at a bit more length, Trump seems to have made his offer to the US on his policy intentions pretty clearly. On foreign policy, a more hawkish, national interests stance on international trade and institutions and treaties, along with an anti-interventionist or isolationist “realist” stance on distant military conflicts. Then on domestic policy, more general deregulation, more immigration restrictionism and enforcement, more policing and some continuing criminal justice reform, a pro-domestic manufacturing and mining industrial policy, and more stimulus from spending and tax cuts. (In some senses to me this all seems just a promise of a return to being a “normal country” that acts like a typical country does. Typical governments are self interested when negotiating treaties and obligations, they run policies that they believe will develop their industry, they don’t police foreign states, they promise to control their borders and use them to manage immigration to the benefit of their voters, etc. They don’t either act in some sort of “global interest” or pretend to, when they’re not.)
Those are the concrete things he, I guess, can actually offer to do. If that seems to not be a good offer, or he just not competent enough to actually do it, or you just think it’s pointless because the rest of the US political machine will work together to stop it, or the tweets and character are just too annoying, or you don’t trust that he really wants to do it (all just stuff he says to be able to plant an enrich cronies), then those are all valid and yeah, vote for another candidate, or don’t vote.
But those are the things he’ll actually have the power on… whereas while he offers at least a token, often somewhat confused old guy, resistance to “Woke” and left wing activist disorder, there’s not much he can actually do about it (definitely within US law). Or that conversely not voting for him would achieve either.
Obviously on the things that he can do, the concrete policy, his offer obviously is pretty reversed compared to the general idea of this cosmopolitan, interventionalist universal American empire which leads and dictates foreign and trade policy to the rest of the “liberal international order” (which many of the “Woke” folk often *kind* of actually support, just with its historical “stains” of “White Supremacy” and capitalism cleansed by their leadership and their preferred policies). Those people who’ve known nothing but the growth of that aspiration since their political maturity, largely in the 1980s, would find a shift against the direction (the “Right Side of History”) deeply upsetting. So it’s tempting as a protest vote against that as well as the related “Woke” phenomena. But ultimately the vote should probably weight more than a protest; it’s not like the people being protested towards listen much even.
I’m not really placating anything, the guy is objectively insane.
Fair enough, if your thing is that he’s bonkers, that doesn’t have much to do with “Hate Woke? Vote Biden”, or Trump voting being responsible for the ongoing Awokening and that voting for the other guy would “fix” it.
Was Steve Jobs “objectively insane”?
NBC NEWS The strange eating habits of Steve Jobs
“The book details his occasional tendency to eat only one or two foods, like carrots or apples, for weeks at a time. Besides developing a sunset-like hue — which those who worked with him are quoted as remembering — there are other health issues that can come from adhering to such a limited diet, says Elisa Zied, registered dietitian and msnbc.com contributor. …
“Jobs also believed that his commitment to vegan diets meant his body was flushed of mucus — and that it meant he was free from body odor, so he didn’t need to wear deodorant or shower regularly. Unsurprisingly, the book quotes former coworkers saying that he was very, very wrong.”
Jobs was famously said to create a “reality distortion field” around himself.
They both seem to be high achieving people who are, um, different.
Matt, yeah that’s what I mean. A “revenge” vote doesn’t effect wokeness…having a functioning society would though. Biden can get us moving in that direction.
Relatedly, I’m finishing up “Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop” and it’s convinced me of how insane the national conversation is now and how it’s likely at least partially caused by our Party system. How bizarre is it to talk to someone, anyone (everyone) who’s “values” just happen to all agree with everyone else on their “team?” Like talking to robots. I don’t know any true Liberals at all. Like…literally zero.
Change the way we vote and it may free up the discussion, people won’t feel the pressure to conform as much.
Why 14 Critics of “Social Justice” Think You Shouldn’t Vote Trump
https://areomagazine.com/2020/10/27/why-fourteen-critics-of-social-justice-think-you-shouldnt-vote-for-trump/
Couple papers might be interesting (not much about this week that I’ve seen):
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.27.351692v1 – “A curated dataset of modern and ancient high-coverage shotgun human genomes” – “Over the last few years, genome-wide data for a large number of ancient human samples have been collected. Whilst datasets of capture SNPs have been collated, high coverage shotgun genomes (which are relatively few but allow certain type of analyses not possible with ascertained captured SNPs) have to be reprocessed by individual groups from raw reads. This task is computationally intensive. Here, we release a dataset including 34 whole-genome sequenced samples, previously published and distributed worldwide, together with the genetic pipeline used to process them. The dataset contains 73,435,604 sites called across 18 ancient and 16 modern individuals and includes sequence data from four previously published ancient samples which we sequenced to higher coverage (10-18x). Such a resource will allow researchers to analyse their new samples with the same genetic pipeline and directly compare them to the reference dataset without re-processing published samples.”.
I’m not sure exactly what could be done with these samples differently than with capture, but among the samples resequenced to higher coverage are ZVEJ31, which is basically an EHG sample (Combed Ware Culture from Latvia), and KK1, which is Kotias, one of the CHG samples. No Yamnaya/Steppe samples or Middle Neolithic HG in Europe, but some early Neolithic samples and quite a few more Western Euro HG and intermediate HG.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.06.328203v2 – “Ancestry inference and grouping from principal component analysis of genetic data” Update of this paper by Florian Prive (which was kind of a comparison to his https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/36/16/4449/5838185 – “Efficient toolkit implementing best practices for principal component analysis of population genetic data” paper) , which has some interesting figures on the Euclidean distance on PCA of participants in UKBiobank between different groups of country of birth.
I was surprised at first that the results indicated that most of the Ugandan born individuals clustered in South Asia, and most of the Singaporean born individuals clustered with Brits, but of course this is pretty consistent with the actual history, where most Singapore born among the fairly old Biobank cohort would be White Brits born out in Singapore when it was British Empire, and same for the Ugandan Indians who migrated to Britain… Similar results for place of birth in many other ex-British colonies. If Biobank were a recent cohort, results would likely be quite different!
I do think the Biobank approach of just sampling a massive amount of population is interesting from a perspective of looking for ancestry structure, relative to projects like Human Origins or HGDP which aim to sample differentiated groups.
After removing subseting to balance out overrepresented samples in Biobank, there is still some ancestry space in Biobank that is not covered by 1000 Genomes… Maybe not covered by HGDP too?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/27/indian-caste-bias-silicon-valley/
India’s engineers have thrived in Silicon Valley. So has its caste system