Being "99.9 percent identical" doesn't necessarily preclude substantial genetic variation in intelligence just like it doesn't preclude such variation in height or skin tone.
I was asking what the basis is for your confidence that it positively isn't substantially genetic.
We know that intelligence is highly heritable, which leaves a few possible explanations, genetics being one of them (along with prenatal nutrition, prenatal lead exposure, etc).
If you're going to claim that genetics is only a small part of the reason that it's heritable, then that has its own burden of proof that needs to be met.
On the other hand, corporate taxes advantage large multi-national corporations over smaller companies because they have the resources and capability to manoeuvre around the rules and pay a lower relative tax rate.
A government should be able to achieve control through Pigovian taxation, regulations and fines. I'm not convinced that a blanket corporate tax (which does indeed facilitate targeted tax breaks) is necessary beyond the other tools that already exist.
The whole point is for stakeholders to eventually get paid in a taxable event; either shareholders through a capital gains taxable event or employees through an income taxable event.
Some tech companies are hoarding cash but I don't believe this is due to incentives created by taxation, although I could be mistaken.
What share price is higher? The lemonade stand, or the identical lemonade stand with a huge bag of money kept beneath the table? If you are a shareholder you only care about one thing.
If the first lemonade stand did a stock buyback it would be worth just as much as the second lemonade stand. If the first lemonade stand issues a dividend and holders of the stock automatically buy more stock, then the share price will also be exactly the same as the second lemonade stand.
Why do companies do dividends or stock buybacks? Because they think investors can do better investments elsewhere with the money.
What about a third lemonade stand that took their huge sack of cash and instead paid their employees six figures? This would be the stand that is worth less to the shareholder, as that money in the sack has left the lemonade stand entirely and is now being spent by the employee elsewhere in the economy with a portion of it used for different taxes. This is also the stand that is worth the most to the public, as this sack of cash is no longer kept under a lemonade stand and is instead being used to pay sales taxes, property taxes, and income taxes. The fallacy is that many believe corporations are like this third stand, when really they are much more like the first or the second, where it is better for the shareholder and worse for the public to keep as high of a portion of money out of taxable pockets as possible and to pay as little as possible for labor.
Greed, son, greed. That is why 5 people in the US have more money than the bottom 100 million. They didn't work hard to become that rich, they stole it by not paying wages, health care, benefits, or sharing the wealth. Because they do not have to, nothing prevents them from keeping it and paying low wages in an economy where the ONLY jobs are working for them. (Look at the most recent jobs reports, delivery and couriers grew by double digits, most everything else fell: what do you do when there literally are no other jobs except delivering goods to people and peeing in bottles because you don't get a break?)
Apple has paid hundreds of billions of dividends to shareholders the last few years. It's borrowed money to do it because it would be taxed if it repatriated funds to pay dividends with.
If the corporate tax rate was reduced to zero it would have zero reason to keep foreign profits offshore, it would just repatriate them and pay dividends directly.
>Apple has paid hundreds of billions of dividends to shareholders the last few years. It's borrowed money to do it because it would be taxed if it repatriated funds to pay dividends with.
Yeah, the reason why this strategy works is because Apple can pay dividends today and just wait for the inevitable tax holiday that comes when a republican president enters the white house. Similar schemes work with cryptocurrency in Germany. Holding onto Bitcoin for one year grants you tax exemption from capital gains. So you just borrow against your Bitcoin for one year.
Corporate taxes have been gamed so much they are purely cosmetic at this point, with some harm done to smaller companies. A better tax code is needed.
I'd argue no tax code is needed, just treat C corps like S corps and LLCs.
1) Increase the incentives to save and invest in the U.S/
2) Restore progressivity to the tax code by taxing profits when paid to investors on a progressive rate based on their tax brackets.
3) Repurpose hundreds of thousands of accountants into doing actual business finance and development of wasting their efforts reconciling the differences between GAAP & a super convoluted Tax code accounting (and searching for loopholes)
4) Simplify business decisions and reward honest management based solely on GAAP accounting with no more "angles" to take advantage of tax code loopholes.
Right. That's great: the richest employees of apple get richer, and the people doing the worst labor live in dorms and work 18 hour days.
> If the corporate tax rate was reduced to zero it would have zero reason to keep foreign profits offshore,
Again, you seem to be ignoring the abundant evidence. Trickle down has never worked. Corporate tax rates are the lowest they've EVER been (down from >80% in the early 80's) and money still flows out of the US.
The vast majority of Apple dividends are paid to investors, not employees.
The "worst labor" are jobs that are so much better than typically brutal Chinese rural labor jobs that thousands of applicants stand in line for hours to get them. And Apple audits its labor practices, unlike solely owned Chinese companies.
And the corporate tax rate has never been 80% in the U.S. it was 40-46% in the 1980s and highest ever was 53% in late 1960s. And corporate tax rates were lower than todays rates for the first 163 years of U.S. history, they were first raised above 20% in 1940 to help fund the war.
And even though the current corporate tax rate is historically low, it's still an impediment to returning foreign profits. Repatriating foreign profits costs a minimum of 21%, more with state taxes. For companies it's still cheaper (and legal) to keep the profits in their foreign subsidiaries and wait for a repatriation window, or borrow against some of the deposits to pay dividends.
I don't think the argument is trickle down economics. The argument is that there is a race to the bottom and simply opting out from the race is the only way to win.
Trickle down doesn't work because republicans love pumping the supply side of the economy even when it is fully saturated. The days of a weak US economy are long gone. The real problem is that savings exceed investments. You either let the government create viable investments for the private market, or you just let the government invest directly.
There has never been anything such as "trickle down economics", it's merely a political label to demonize lowering the tax rates on investments.
Arthur Laffer tried to argue that tax cuts would lead to an increase in growth enough to produce the same or more tax revenues, which clearly didn't happen. But tax cuts did clearly lead to an increase in growth.
Right now, even under the lower Trump corporate rates, if you want to invest in a U.S. Business you will lose 33-50% of your profits to Federal and State taxes. Thats a tax on investment, reinvestment and savings. If you want to convert savings to investment, just cut those taxes.
No-no doubts the incentive of rich people wanting to be richer but I don't see how greed answers the question. What would the incentive be to just let the money sit in the company forever? Greed would be to maximize the outtake.
If I'm a greedy shareholder, then I want dividends and cap gains, which are both taxable outside of company tax.
How does hoarding cash inside a company, which is out of my personal reach, help me to satisfy my greed? I can't buy a yacht with it until I get the money out.
He wrote a scathing article falsely claiming that the poverty rate was increasing (contra to Pinker's claim), when according to his own data in that same article - it was actually steadily decreasing.
If you look at the below thread by Hickel, Roser is very uncivil (for an academic), childish and misdirecting. He also does not answer Allen's criticism. Hickel on the other hand remains very composed and courteous.
Roser also keeps constantly misrepresenting degrowth with a straw man that the global South needs growth. He has been told time and time again that every degrowth demand is only for the rich countries and everyone agrees the poorest countries needs growth, but still he makes the same claim over and over.
From this behavior, I've come to see Roser as a bad faith actor.
The tone of these particular tweets should be parsed in context.
If you think that someone has been operating in bad faith towards you for years, eventually you lose interest in engaging and choose the "block" option, which is what Roser did today.
Also, Hickel himself has engaged in uncivil rhetoric previously, e.g an unprovoked accusation of "mansplaining" in 2019.
I understand that academics are just humans, and can lose their temper like the rest of us.
However what I find very troubling is that the main point that Hickel raised in the blog post[1] – GDP data has the particular potentially crucial problems Allen has raised when used to assess historical poverty – Roser chooses to not actually address it, but instead throws blanket statements of there being continued discussion between academics of different datasets and their merits.
However this particular graph of historical extreme poverty is used by the most powerful people in the world to advocate for continuing with the status quo. That is why it caught Hickel's attention. It is therefore very important that the heading of the graph is very well justified.
As a layperson reading Allen's research, and knowing there is a discontinuation point in the graph 1981 when the dataset changes, I think the graph ought to be labelled very differently. Roser continuing to label it as "extreme poverty" knowing there is an ongoing debate about what data if any is a good proxy historical poverty, and not answering head on Allen's criticism, really makes me not trust Roser.
Respectfully, I think this misses the point a bit.
Roser himself says that there could very well be valid criticisms that Hickel is correct on and he is incorrect on. The criticism that Hickel recently raised and that you mention here (regarding the validity of pre-1981 data) sounds like it could be one of these.
But productive dialogue between them was largely precluded by perceptions of bad faith and aggressive language ("mansplaining", etc) going back to before Allen's paper.
Now, regarding the specific criticism about pre-1981 data, I found this[1] and this[2] which seems to claim that the older data is adjusted for non-market income. Although, I haven't digged into it properly, so I can't comment on who is correct here.
"we want to emphasize is that those estimates of poverty do take into account non-market transactions such as subsistence farming.
"Yes, over the last two hundred years, there has been a major shift from people farming for their own consumption towards people working for a wage and purchasing goods in the market. But historians know about history and where non-market sources of income make up a substantial part of total income, it is very obvious that money would represent a rather silly indicator of welfare.
Just as we need to adjust for price inflation, accounting for non-market sources of income is an essential part of making meaningful welfare comparisons over time. Estimates of poverty and prosperity account for both market and non-market sources of income, including the value of food grown for own consumption or other goods and services that enriched the lives of households without being sold in a market."
"suggest an effort to misrepresent at the very least UC Berkeley's position."
This is a non-sequitur.
The decision to keep the identity of the contact anonymous and the presence of a dead link (when a slightly redacted version of the full conversation is still available) doesn't automatically suggest that they're trying to misrepresent UC Berkeley. What an unjustified stretch.
You don't see any problem with someone selectively quoting from what they claim is "UC Berkeley's official position", while not pointing to an actual source of that "official position" in UC Berkeley itself, or the entire conversation?
How are we to know that Yngve Hoiseth did not make up the entire conversation, or that they didn't simply choose the passages of the email exchange that support their view, only?
If this is an "official" exchange, why the lack of transparency?
The lack of transparency "suggests an effort to misrpresent".
I could perhaps see a charitable interpretation if the author of the blog post (Guzey) did not accuse the author of the book (Walker) of "deliberate data manipulation", gave the opportunity to the target of the accusation to explain himself, did not misrepresent himself as a "researcher" (pointing to his blog posts as examples of his "research"), did not link to a friend's blog post for "UC Berkeley’s official response", etc, etc.
The author of the blog post is not leaving a lot of room for charitable interpretations.
But in any case, what charitable interpretation do you propose?
He still seems to be twisting and misrepresenting the NSF guidelines of 7-9 hours to mean the point value of 8 hours.
No, Walker, 63 percent of people don't have unmet sleep needs, as you are still falsely claiming. You're either being dishonest or you are too innumerate to understand what an interval is.
But you do have the knowledge to verify some of the accusations, because much of them don't require any knowledge to verify.
He's often just pointing out logical internal contradictions in the text (point 2) or lies/mistakes about what the author claimed a source said when in fact the source said no such thing (point 4 about WHO and point 5 about NSF).
Also, I don't agree that he's misrepresenting himself. He didn't claim that he had an academic appointment. He claimed that he's a researcher, of which professional academics are a strict subset. After reading his excellent article, I'm in agreement with him that this is a suitable label.
Your other criticisms of his About page are just odd. So what if he puts his hobbies on there, or is reaching out to biology people? That's normal for an About page.
Unfortunately, I have no way to tell what is a "logical internal contradiction in the text", because I am not knowledgeable in the subject matter of the text and so cannot follow its internal logic.
I disagree that a "researcher" is a loose label that anyone can assign to themselves without qualifications. For example, a reiki healer could claim themselves to be a "researcher" but this would be misleading.
Writing an article arguing that an author of a book has perpetrated academic fraud is evidence against any claim of careful research. Claming academic fraud is really the nuclear option. The first thing to do when one finds fault with someone else's work is to contact the other person and ask for clarification. If things get to the point where one feels the only way forward is to "go public" with an exposition of the other person's work faults, then one should include the other person's explanations or reactions, if any were given, or details of the attempts made to contact that other person.
As I say above, this was not done to any reasonable degree and the only attempt at anything like it is misleading and links to an email conversation claimed to be an "official response" by UC Berkeley (rather than the book's author) but that is impossible to verify.
The overall impression is of a one-sided argument, lack of transparency, attempts at deception and misrepresentation and overall disreputable and underhanded tactics. Such actions by the article author do not suggest they are a "researcher" of any repute, except maybe in their imagination.
"Researcher" isn't synonymous with "academic", but it's not synonymous with "blogger" either.
Part of my point is that an actual researcher, i.e. a professional, would have followed due procedure, contacting the author of the book privately and asking for clarifications, and generally giving the other person an opportunity to examine and respond to criticism.
Academics criticise each other's work constantly but this is acceptable because the purpose is to improve one another's work, not to tarnish each other's reputation and drag their name through the mud.
As things are, it is clear to me the blog post above is meant to kick up an internet storm with accusations of "deliberate data manipulation" and the misleading statements about an "official response" from Berkeley etc. These are the actions of a scandal-monger, not a researcher.
He worked as a research assistant for a professor for three years and is now engaged in amateur research which he shares on his blog, some of which has received positive feedback from some highly credible people.
Also, "researcher" doesn't imply "professional", since amateur researchers exist.
The self-appointed title of "Researcher" is appropriate, in my opinion. There are people in industry who receive that designation ("Real Estate Researcher") that are less deserving.
"Academics criticise each other's work constantly but this is acceptable because the purpose is to improve one another's work, not to tarnish each other's reputation and drag their name through the mud."
But this is not an example of regular academic work that's being criticized.
This is a book that contains health advice being consumed and actioned upon right now by thousands or millions of laypeople. Guzey is therefore trying to warn regular people who might believe and follow bunk advice and suffer health consequences. He makes this intention clear.
James Randi's service to the public as a skeptic was proportional to the amount of noise he made when he would come across and debunk frauds like Uri Geller. (I'm not saying Walker is a fraud, but the public danger of bunk health wisdom is similar to that posed by conmen like Geller.)
I do still agree with you, however, that it would've been better to discuss the allegations with Walker in private before publishing them. Having read Walker's response now, though, I don't believe it would've made much of a difference. He's still misrepresenting official adequate sleep guidelines, willfully or otherwise, by saying that anyone who gets under 8 hours has "unmet sleep needs", contradicting the NSF.
"kick up an internet storm with accusations of "deliberate data manipulation""
You're right - the accusation of "deliberate" is definitely a big mistake, and he should remove that since it assumes intent when that hasn't been established.
On the whole, though, aside from sparse mistakes like this (along with the mistake that you noticed of not making it clear that the Berkeley communication was unverified), I feel that the article is rather constrained.
Gelman also noticed this measured tone and explicitly complimented the author on it.
I don't know if you've listened to any of Wagner's music? Most of it is long stretches of impossibly delicate melodies, almost lullaby-like, but these are occasionally interrupted by sudden spasms of noise, great blaring horns, thumping drums and men an women vocalising at the top end of the human volume range. I remember a caricature of Wagner drilling into a human ear with a hand-cranked drill.
What I mean to say by this is that when you hear Wagner's music, the impression is of powerful, loud music. Accordingly, when you read an artcile that spends most of its time in a low-key "measured" register but starts off with a big, splashy accusation of deliberate data manipulation, the impression is one of an article written to provoke.
Regarding "researcher", the author could have identified himself as an "ex graduate research assistant", but he identifies himself as a "resarcher", which sounds more important and experienced. This is the tactic of people who want to embiggen the impression of themselves and claim more expertise from themselves. Even if such embiggenment is not necessarily the purpose of calling oneself a "researcher" when one is not a professional researcher, anyone who really really wanted to avoid giving the impression that they are trying to make themselves sound more knowledgeable than what they are, would have shied away from calling themselves a "reseacher".
Finally, "researcher" on its own means absolutely nothing at all. "Biology researcher", "computer science researcher", "neuroscience researcher", "geology researcher" etc, give precise information. The author of the article calls himself an unqualified "researcher" and he is, indeed, unqualified to do so. That is a typical tactic of charlatans the world over and it should give you and everyone else who thinks the author has any expertise to discuss what he's discussing, pause. That goes for the economist blogger also, I don't think he has payed as much attention to the article and its author as I think you assume.
As I've argued at the start of this thread, it is important to understand who is writing the article we are reading. In Ideal Science World it doesn't make a difference who says something, only what they say. In the real world it's not that simple. Because academic integrity is valued extremely highly, accusing someone of academic fraud immediately places the accuser opposite the accused in moral standing. For an academic, his or her reputation (of being a good scientist) is everything. Therefore, when making such accusations, the character of the person making them is important to scrutinise carefully, because simply making an accusation of academic fraud can destroy an academic's career and an accuser may have no other goal than to destroy the accused person's reputation.
When the accusations come from a professional critic (another academic) with a good standing in academia, the chance that accusations of fraud are only made to destroy the other persons' career are harder to accept. But when it's some guy on the internet with a blog, that changes the maths very much indeed. Anyone can throw mud on the internet. Because it's the internet, you need to understand who it is who's speaking, before you look at what they are saying.
Author here, was pretty surprised to see this on HN when browsing over my coffee this morning. Your interpretation is correct, you use an encoder-decoder model to figure out what the dimensions of the task best for learning are.
The drawback is you can only learn tasks which are relatively similar (any time you restrict what motions are possible to improve learning, you obviously restrict what tasks are possible). The benefit is that you can learn tasks which do fall within the learned motion ranges a lot more quickly.
The best analogy within 'classical' control is task space control, where you do control in cartesian dimensions rather than the joint positions. But this has its own drawbacks in that you have to define these controllers manually, and Cartesian space is not sufficiently expressive / appropriate for many tasks.
Being "99.9 percent identical" doesn't necessarily preclude substantial genetic variation in intelligence just like it doesn't preclude such variation in height or skin tone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ