Mrdthree

Two recent homicides motivated a revenge killing in Dallas by Micah Johnson.To seek justice, the sniper, Micah Johnson applied the logic of social justice: (1) collective punishment, (2) all whites are guilty; (3) all white cops doubly so; (4) the scales of justice are balanced by killing cops in Texas whenever civilians are killed by cops in Minnesota or Louisiana. The principles of America are to hold individuals responsible for their own actions in a political system that operates from Blackstone's formulation: it is better to let 10 guilty men go free than one innocent men be punished. There is no room for the presumption of innocence or individual justice in the mind of an SJW who asserts races or classes of people are guilty at birth.

I think its a day when we need to stand together in solidarity, face the extremists and say today we are all a little gay. sorry couldnt resist.

That clarifies alot. It sounds like it is a process that is true when you do repeated experiments with a random variable that has a convex distribution (two tailed distribution). A good model might be: (1) You are given the IQ of one parent. (2) You pick the IQ of the second parent from the population conditioned on the IQ of the first parent (as per whatever the correlation of parental IQ is-- I suppose this could be a cultural parameter). This would clearly be a case of regression to the mean. (3) Compute the IQ of the offspring as the average of the two parents. Here the variability could be symmetric as there is no reason to suppose an asymmetric curve here (assumption?) hence the child is uniform noisy reflection of the parental IQ mean. (4) send offspring to (1). SO lets apply this model to the immigrant case: (1) Suppose there is a native breeding pool with an IQ of 100 mean. (2) Suppose there is a foreign breeding pool with an IQ of 80 mean. Suppose an immigrant of IQ 130 from the foreign breeding pool (2) enters the native breeding pool (1) and picks a mate from (1). To which mean does his lineage regress? (A) a mean of breeding pool (1)? (B) a mean of breeding pool (2)? or © a weighted mean of breeding pool (1) and pool (2)? According to the model above, one should expect the regression to the mean came from picking a mate and regression to the mean would entail (A)-- a regression to the mean of breeding pool (1). If the immigrant ghettoizes then two possible outcomes can occur depending on whether the immigrants are an isolated breeding pool; (1) suppose immigrants form an isolated breeding pool, then mates will be selected from a distribution that is characteristic of the immigrants in that country and regression to the mean will involve regression to the immigrant community mean. The quality of this mean may depend on immigration laws. (2) suppose the breeding pool is open, then the emigre population will more closely resemble the foreign breeding pool and regression to the mean will move to case (B). SO I was wrong (correlation does not resist regression to the mean). And I was right-- regression to the mean is not guaranteed-- it depends on the behavior of immigrants and their statistics.

1. Gene expression is a physical process with noise. Even Twins reared together have only 88% correlated IQ http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304898704577478482432277706 2. If IQ is inherited, then children of high IQ parents (regardless of immigrant label) inherit a high IQ. 3. Yes it is possible to make smarter kids from dumber parents suppose four genes make smart. father={smart, dumb,dumb, smart}, mother={dumb, smart dumb dumb}, kid picks 1 gene from each parent and gets={smart, smart, dumb, smart}. or brainfolding... I think my post was dropped by mediator? If so response was if dumb people have more reproductive successful (dumb) children then mean IQ will drop regardless of starting point-- i.e. a mean IQ of 100 has to reflect some type of equilibrium.

If the number of fertile offspring is inversely proportional to IQ and IQ is 60%-80% heritable, the mean IQ of any breeding pool will collapse. Hence if given a simple literal translation, this algorithm will fail, regardless of initial IQ of the breeding population. In other words, the fitness function with regard to IQ is not a simple inverse linear function. What does the function look like? It probably has an inverted 'U' with IQs below 60 producing few surviving grandchildren and IQs above 180 producing few surviving grandkids (Newton hates everyone).

My point is that reversion to the mean or an IQ heritability of 60-80% conflict. I tend to think the IQ heritability claim is stronger. In which case we need to reasons why it doesnt apply to immigrants. Your claim may be a valid hypothesis: reversion to the mean occurs because immigrants tend to inbreed and have a higher rate of latent genetic diseases. But is this strong enough to override a trait whose heritability is 60-80%? has it been tested?

The theory that smart immigrants from low IQ countries show a propensity to reversion to the mean IQ is inconsistent with the claim that the claim that IQ is 60-80% heritable Problem 1: If it is assumed that IQ is 60-80% heritable, then it follows that a smart immigrant is more likely than not smart by virtue of genetics. This means it is unreasonable to assume that an immigrant from a low IQ country is smart by pure environmental causes. This also means it is more likely than not that the intelligence of the immigrant is a heritable trait that will be passed to offspring. These are forces that resist the claim of reversion to mean. Resolving this contradiction is done either by assuming that (1) IQ is somewhat less than 50% genetic, this would eliminate the bias of inheritance and assure reversion to the mean. (2) if the premise of >50% heritability is kept then reversion to the mean requires additional assumptions like: smart immigrants tend to mate within their group and to randomly with respect to IQ.

Curious if you were able to make it to the talk?

There is a fact of agency or self-ownership that is immutable-- you are the agent of your body and cant be deposed. ('possession' or 'hypnotism' could be thought experiment alternatives) Property and ownership are concepts there to establish priority in the face of competition. In the absence of competition I suppose you need only demonstrate control to prove ownership. This would be the case where agency proves self-ownership. However in a social setting, where competition exists, you have to start finding reasons that are (socially?) acceptable to justify priority of control. From this point of view questions of self-ownership start to look a whole lot like rights..

If self ownership is about agency then you are the defacto owner of your body—no one else can compete with you to overcome your position of agency (hypnotism?). Put another way: Other people have indirect control over your arms and legs and must move them by external force. You can move your arms and legs using a direct and non-mechanical agency; you move your mind and body by acts of will. These observaitons are medieval I believe and the basis of notions of inalienable rights-- your right to control your body directly is inalienable.

Looks interesting. Not sure if the questions I have fall under beliefs and customs of muslims but: (1) Cultural appropriation--what do Muslims feel are original contributions to science and mathematics from the non-Muslim world; what sorts of things do they see as having unacknowledged muslim origins. (2) Diversity in Islam; sects, divisions, races, stereotypes. How do Southeastern Asian (Malaysia, Indonesia) and Arab muslims see each other? What do muslims make of American muslims, is Farrakhan an infindel to Sunnis? (3) How do muslims view their history of ruling over Christians in the middle east and Southern Europe? I heard that property was not allowed to be inherited by Christians in the Ottoman empire. Is this a muslim belief or an imperial design? (4) What about all the ethnic and religious cleansing-- again do they feel this is un-islamic?

I like the ship analogy. But more interesting here is what McBeer said-- that the ship is not entirely rebuilt during the journey (* facts below). Specifically, cortical neurons do not replace their DNA. There are not many other cells in the body that can say this.. only perhaps egg cells in females (** facts below, other examples welcome). So one can ask why a part of the ship is never replaced in total during our journey. It could be coincidental or it could be crucial to understanding the self. I do not know. Whatever role it plays, it would be amusing to think that it ties into Penrose's theory of microtubule vibrations. They do after all have in common that I do not understand them (*** facts below) Were arguments to get scientific, my position would be that the role genetics plays in maintaining neural structure is not well enough understood to confidently say how much sensory information is encoded using epigenetic memory storage on DNA (methylation or histone modification). It seems likely that at most it could be low pass filtered versions (or other filters) of what is going on at the synaptic level. Which is a little less than the case of repair the ship but dont replace the helmsman. (* it is well known that mature nerve cells suspend mitosis. The new fact brought to the table is that base pair replacement in DNA is negligible in neurons outside of cell division. It exists as neurons have mechanisms of DNA repair but as per McBeer's citation their net effect is negligible) (** Female egg cells are suspended in meiosis (egg generation) prior to birth but all the DNA replication that will be done has been done and only the 'dealing of the cards of fate' remains-- the last 2 divisions of meiosis-- the segregation of parental contributions (chromosomes) to make a unique egg) (*** Nope dont understand it. Insert(laugh). But I keep annual tabs on the Penrose's idea because I have sympathies for the hypothesis that consciousness is a field or substance. Penrose's last update here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22925839)

Add on to brain discussion: a cell is 99.9% water, nucleotides, protein, lipid and carbo. DNA: C-14 replacement here would be done solely by DNA repair mechanisms. Protein: There is a high level of turnover for proteins in a cell, driven by the ubiquitin and other systems (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22397/) Lipids: in secretory cells like neurons there is substantial lipid turnover. (membrane repair and vesicle recycling); https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-turnover-rate-of-the-lipids-in-the-cell-membranes-of-the-brain Carbs: are mainly metabolic in animals so replaced but the structural ones probably cycle with proteins. water.... well osmosis. So the scary thing is that the self may well be DNA linked. I think we can build a new variant of the Penrose theory now: consciousness is quantum entanglement of microtubules with DNA.