"Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki, spiritual leader at the Dar al-Hijra mosque in Virginia, one of the nation's largest, which draws about 3,000 worshipers for communal prayers each Friday, said: ''In the past we were oblivious. We didn't really care much because we never expected things to happen. Now I think things are different. What we might have tolerated in the past, we won't tolerate any more.''
''There were some statements that were inflammatory, and were considered just talk, but now we realize that talk can be taken seriously and acted upon in a violent radical way,'' said Mr. Al-Awlaki, who at 30 is held up as a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West: born in New Mexico to parents from Yemen, who studied Islam in Yemen and civil engineering at Colorado State University."
A new generation! Of course, as you would probably say, in 2001 al-Awlaki was a good-Muslim but by 2003 he had become a bad-Muslim. You may also believe that you decide who is a Muslim, and the new al-Alwaki was not a Muslim at all...
The line between these categories seems pretty thin, however. For instance, the US taxpayer funds the Palestinian Authority, and one wing of the PA is the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which blows up buses and stuff. Al-Aqsa is an "unofficial" arm of Fatah, however, and the PA is "officially" distinct from Fatah. So while many on the far left endorse the PA, few on the far left endorse Al-Aqsa.
Imagine if rightists got to let themselves be wilfully taken in by this transparent game of three-card monte. Any fascist who didn't send any Jews to Auschwitz, personally, himself, could claim to be totally in the clear. Perhaps the SS is just the "armed wing" of the Third Reich, etc, etc. And if you're Petain or Franco, you had nothing to do with that at all. Etc, etc, etc.
No one can enlighten anyone; you have to enlighten yourself.
Where did you get this picture of the pre-1968 world? For instance, your picture of classical Europe as "hardcore unrestricted capitalism" is frankly bizarre; you seem to be projecting 19th-century classical liberalism, a left-wing ideology in its day, back two or three centuries:
My turn: feel free to undarkly enlighten me. Watch this movie, or even skim it, then tell me that all is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds:
When this film was made, most women didn't have to work; now they do. When this film was made, African-Americans had a 25% illegitimacy rate, which Moynihan thought terrifying; now they have an 75% illegitimacy rate (with whites at 25%). When this film was made, women in college were treated like ladies; today they're treated like Casanova's whores. When this film was made, Detroit was America's third-largest city; today it's a ruin.
Tell me again what your abstractions have done for women and African-Americans? For Detroit? For anyone, for anywhere? Can you find me a population that was struggling in 1966 and is thriving now? Can you find me a place that was a shithole in 1966 and is gleaming now? I can sure as heck find a lot of examples in the other direction...
Your "ideas" are abstractions. These abstractions are new (they are a product of 19th and 20th-century ideology). The realities behind them (charity, social mobility) are anything but new. For instance, Cardinal Wolsey was born into a poor family:
In general, the answer to your question is "the Catholic Church." This was not a perfect institution. Ours are not perfect, either. The present has had many opportunities to give you its view of the past; the past has had no opportunity to give you its view of the present.
This is why it's a great idea to try these cases on Hacker News. (I'm only half kidding.) Always and everywhere, if you sit on a jury and listen only to the prosecutor or defense attorney, you will come to the conclusion they want. This is for the same reason you can't tell what a magician is doing with his hands: he's an pro, you're an amateur.
3. Josh Ryen told the police he thought three men committed the attack. He later changed his story.
"When Josh was rescued the day after the murders, he could not talk because his throat had been slashed. He could only squeeze the police officer's hand in response to questions. The story that Josh was finally able to tell police was that he was awakened in the middle of the night by his mother's screams. When he and his friend Chris went to investigate, he saw the bodies of his parents and Jessica and the backside of one unfamiliar person, so he ran and hid. Then he heard Chris screaming, so Josh ran back towards his friend. At that point, something struck him in the head, knocking him unconscious. He awoke later in a pool of blood.
When later queried by investigators, Josh spoke of three Mexicans who had come to the house earlier and thought they could have done it because they had been there once before. However, Josh never said he saw three people commit the murders. He consistently told different investigators that he saw only one attacker. The triple murderer theory is merely speculation based on the visit of the three Mexicans and twisting of a little boy's words.
Additionally, Josh was an eight-year-old boy who was startled awake by a horrific murder and was brutally attacked. It is unsurprising that probing questions by adults and the power of suggestion later tried to confuse his story. Most important however, Cooper was not convicted on the limited testimony of an eight-year-old. He was convicted by the mountain of other evidence incriminating him."
1. The girlfriend of a former inmate friend of Cooper's, thought her boyfriend might have been involved in the murder. She turned his bloody coveralls over to the local Yucaipa sheriff's substation, but they threw out the coveralls without testing them.
"This girlfriend, Diane Roper, was dismissed by law enforcement as completely lacking credibility. She was a professed witch who claimed she had a vision during a trance that the murder had been committed after she heard about the Ryen case. However, she had no substantive reason to believe her boyfriend was involved with Cooper the night of the murder. In fact, she told sheriff's investigators that she did not even know to whom the coveralls belonged. She said she "just knew" from the vision that the coveralls were connected to the case. By the time the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department heard about her fantastic story, they had Cooper in custody with mountains of evidence (see above) against him. Based on their limited resources and already having the likely killer in custody, the San Bernardino County police chose not to expend precious time and money chasing Roper's crazy story."
As for the other evidence:
"The victims died from numerous chopping wounds later determined to have been inflicted by a hatchet or axe and stabbing wounds inflicted by both a knife and an ice pick. Later that day, bloodstained items were found in the vacant house where Cooper had stayed, including a button from a prison jacket identical to the one he was wearing when he escaped. A police criminologist also found evidence of blood on the carpet, in the bathroom sink and in the shower along with Cooper's footprint. Hairs from the shower drain and the bathroom sink were consistent with those from two of the victims.
A bloodstained hatchet from the vacant house was later found near the Ryen home. The sheath from the hatchet was found on the floor of the bedroom where Cooper had slept. Some hunting knives and at least one ice pick were also missing from the vacant house. A strap fitting one of the missing knives was found in the same bedroom. Shoe prints were found in the Ryen home and the vacant house next door matching the unique pattern of shoes issued exclusively to prison inmates. The prints indicated shoes of Cooper's size and brand that he had recently received in prison.
While most of the blood samples taken at the murder scene were determined to have come from the victims, one sample was conclusively determined to have come from a black person with the same blood group as Cooper. The sample was too small to determine if it was Cooper's rare blood type.
The Ryen station wagon was found several days after the killings in a church parking lot in Long Beach. Hairs found in the car matched those of Cooper. Tobacco issued exclusively to prison inmates, which Cooper smoked, was found in the vacant house and in the Ryen's station wagon.
Two days after the murders, Cooper befriended a couple in Mexico and joined them on a boat trip up the California Coast. Weeks later, Cooper was arrested on a boat off of Santa Barbara after the woman reported that he had raped her at knife point, threatening to kill her if she woke her husband. Following his arrest, several items taken from the vacant house in Chino were discovered on the boat.
At his trial, Cooper admitted staying in the Chino house but denied any involvement in the Ryen murders. Josh Ryen, who miraculously survived his injuries, testified that he awoke on the night of the murders after hearing his mother's screams. He remembered being hit from behind when trying to investigate but was unable to identify his attacker.
For the 19 years following his 1985 conviction, Cooper's claims of trial and sentencing errors have been reviewed by California and federal courts. In 2000 he won a delay of his execution so that new DNA testing could be performed on various blood and saliva samples found at the murder scene, in the stolen station wagon, and on a bloody t-shirt found near the Ryen home. The DNA from all of these samples was found to have come from the same person. This DNA was then compared to DNA from Cooper's blood. It matched. The odds of the match being by chance were 1 in 310 billion."
When you hear one side of the story, always look for the other -- whether or not it's a criminal trial. Adversarial justice works.
The Ryen account is a little far down that page. Since we heard one story in anatomical detail, how about another?
"The first time I met Kevin Cooper I was 8 years old and he slit my throat. He hit me with a hatchet and put a hole in my skull. He stabbed me twice, which broke my ribs and collapsed one lung. I lived only because I stuck four fingers in my neck to slow the bleeding, but I was too weak to move. I laid there 11 hours looking at my mother who was right beside me.
I know now he came through the sliding glass door and attacked my dad first. He was lying on the bed and was struck in the dark without warning with the hatchet and knife. He was hit many times because there is a lot of blood on the wall on his side of the bed.
My mother screamed and Cooper came around the bed and started hitting her. Somehow my dad was able to struggle between the bed and the closet but Cooper bludgeoned my father to death with the knife and hatchet, stabbing him 26 times and axing him 11. One of the blows severed his finger and it landed in the closet. My mother tried to get away but he caught her at the bottom of the bed and he stabbed her 25 times and axed her 7.
All of us kids were drawn to the room by mom's screams. Jessica was killed in the doorway with 5 ax blows and 46 stabs. I won't say how many times my best friend Chris was stabbed and axed, not because it isn't important, but because I don't want to hurt his family in any way, and they are here.
After Cooper killed everyone, and thought he had killed me, he went over to my sister and lifted her shirt and drew things on her stomach with the knife. Then he walked down the hallway, opened the refrigerator, and had a beer. I guess killing so many people can make a man thirsty."
There's one fact that is never mentioned in this story.
Methane is lighter than air (about 0.7th the density of air). The methane leak is above Porter Ranch (about 1200 feet, a fact that is mentioned).
You know that and I know that. But do most NYT readers know that? If not, why doesn't the writer mention it? He does mention elliptically that the town residents are smelling mercaptans, not methane. He doesn't mention that the methane can't possibly be reaching them. It seems like this simple science fact would bring a lot of clarity to the picture.
(In related news, the greenhouse effect is O(log n), as a function from greenhouse gas concentration to thermal forcing. I'm sure everyone here knew this as well.)
Whenever I see smart geeks talking about tons of CO2, I always wonder what percentage of them know whether the Arrhenius effect (temperature forcing as a function of CO2 concentration) is exponential, linear, or logarithmic.
I recommend Malcolm Muggeridge's autobiography for a compelling look at the circle of Western journalists in Moscow in the '20s and '30s, of which Muggeridge was a part. Scott Alexander has a good review:
You either stayed in that circle or dropped out; there was no in-between. Of the reporters listed in the link, W.H. Chamberlin is the only other one who defected. Duranty (whose Pulitzer the NYT still refuses to return) was the norm, not the exception.
Also note that Thompson was part of the most bloodthirsty wing of New Dealists (eg, Rex Stout, also seen in the link) who supported prewar and postwar anti-German atrocities. It was certainly Nazi policy from 1941-45 to kill as many Jews as physically possible, but it was also Allied policy from 1941-45 to kill as many Germans as physically possible -- and that policy by no means stopped on a dime in May 1945:
"Dorothy Thompson, the well-known columnist, writes: 'Russia does not want to make an isolationist policy. Russia wants a friendly Europe in a friendly world, with a system of collective security. There are signs of such hostility in both Europe and America to Russia that it gives Russian leadership some reason for suspicion. As things look at present, it is by no means certain that defeat of Germany will assure a non-Fascist Europe or one prepared to adopt a good-neighbor policy toward Russia."
Her views in 1946 are standard 1946 post-FDR New Dealism (after the Anglo-Soviet split); her views in 1943 are standard 1943 New Dealism. You're just hearing the party line; God only knows what she actually thought, and when.
It would be much easier to fight the memory hole if we didn't have these ridiculous copyright laws, but a lot of original WWII propaganda (not cherry-picked by modern hagiographers) remains on line. It's often pretty appalling reading.
I'm not sure any intellectual who collaborated with Hitler should get points for warning the world about Stalin. Or vice versa.
If Harper's had written an article called "Who Goes Bolshevik" in 1941, it could have been much shorter: "pretty much everyone." Or at least, everyone who mattered. If you wanted the truth about Stalin in 1941, you'd do much better with the Voelkischer Beobachter than the New York Times.
I think a very small amount of stylometric analysis would cast a lot of doubt on this theory.
Satoshi's grammar is always perfect. His sentences are tight. He's clear and to the point. Wright rambles; his grammar is terrible; he seems to have no idea what a comma is for. Scanning his blog for a minute, he comes across as the kind of slightly dotty kook who would try to convince people he's Satoshi with this kind of "leak."
I'll stick with the current mainstream theory, thanks...
TLDR: the researchers you admire are part of a school that disagrees with Dr. Hsu's school.
Or at least, sort of disagree. It's not that they have any results showing a method for increasing either IQ or mathematical capacity. They just don't feel that it's entirely, completely, totally and utterly proven that such a method (which the entire education industry has spent the last century searching for) doesn't exist. Well, sure. Obviously, in an empirical science, negatives are pretty hard to prove.
But let that be. Suppose your guys are totally right. It used to be, in days gone by, when perhaps the spirit of science was better understood, that everyone interested in science understood that a hundred flowers bloomed, contending schools are a great and normal thing, and scholars can disagree -- without attacking each other personally as failed physicists, college administrators, etc.
Let alone elitists, racists, and Trotskyist wreckers. Speaking of the spirit of science, and schools thereof, I wonder what your position on Professors Boas, Gould and Mead might be? Do you regard them as conclusively guilty of scientific fraud? Or do you feel that in some way the jury remains out? What do you feel Professor Turkheimer's views on the question might be?
This has to be the nicest, most reasonable-sounding ad hominem argument I've ever seen.
But it's still an ad hominem argument. Is there any way you actually disagree with the post? What would you say to Dr. Hsu if he were in the room?
Also, what is your evidence that he's not in touch with experts in psychometrics and human genomics? I don't know him, but I have very much the contrary impression.
Your evidence (of the absence of sexual dimorphism in the human brain) is that rats with identical genes can be trained in different directions? (Your second link is behind a paywall, for me anyway.)
> I'm trying to figure out how you would even begin to do an objective study of what you're looking for since by the time kids present meaningful interests, they're already irrevocably influenced by society and their parents' expectations.
What you're saying is that your hypothesis (the absence of human sexual dimorphism in brain neuroanatomy) can't be proved false by any practical experiment. Nor can the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Imagine you lived in a world (perhaps the world of 100 years ago) in which everyone believed in human sexual dimorphism in neuroanatomy. (BTW, here's the top link I get when I google that: http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/6/490.short). Lacking MRI scans, these uneducated people give as evidence the fact that girls prefer dolls and boys prefer tin soldiers.
Your job is to convince them otherwise. You say: my theory is that it's possible that girls prefer dolls and boys prefer tin soldiers because of thousands of years of cultural conditioning, etc. You've offered an alternative hypothesis to explain facts that both of you observe.
You haven't even begun to explain why your hypothesis should be believed over the existing null hypothesis. Your listeners ask: what evidence makes your hypothesis more plausible than mine? That genetically identical rats can be trained to do different things? What does this tell me about human sexual dimorphism?
But actually, it's not as bleak as you think. Society today has enough parents and scientists who believe in the absence of sexual dimorphism above the neck, that this experiment has not gone unperformed. One example:
No, I'm asking you to produce evidence for a hypothesis you seem to believe. I don't have any hypothesis of my own.
If you tell me that the Sears Tower and the Empire State Building are the same height (a hypothesis), you should show up with evidence that they are the same height, or some other a priori reason to believe that your hypothesis is more likely to be true than untrue (for instance, if both buildings were the product of the same prefab factory).
[1] is a rat study. How it relates to any hypothesis about XY versus XX humans is beyond me.
If XX and XY humans have different interests/aptitudes, that's a very parsimonious explanation for the toy aisle at Walmart, right?
But if your hypothesis is true, we need to search for other explanations. For instance, Walmart and other toy stores might be controlled by a conspiracy of conservative Christians who believe in different gender roles, and are willing to sacrifice profits (from boys buying Barbies, girls buying cars, etc) to support their goal of an unequal society. Is this the hypothesis you're proposing? It also needs to apply to Target, etc, all of which have the same boy/girl aisles.
I'd love it if articles like this came with links to scientific evidence that XX-chromosome humans have the same distribution of interests and aptitudes as XY-chromosome humans. Alternatively, maybe HN readers have some such links?
At the very least, I'd hope reasonable people could agree that in a universe where this scientific hypothesis isn't true, or turns out not to be true, this situation looks very different from the way the article (which seems to assume it is true) presents it. Certainly, Occam's razor being a thing, any falsification of this hypothesis would be a very parsimonious explanation for the statistical disparities being observed.
> Students don't need "protection" from free speech, nor does anyone need to be rescued from the "mockery" and "humiliation" of an accusation of communism.
> Demands for journalism-free "safe spaces" are bad, but so too is the idea that accusations of communism are so beyond the pale that people need to be shielded from them by institutions.
Or:
> Demands for journalism-free "safe spaces" are bad, but so too is the idea that accusations of witchcraft are so beyond the pale that people need to be shielded from them by institutions.
Can you honestly be unaware that we live in a world where no one gets fired for being a communist, or a witch? But...
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/19/us/nation-challenged-ameri...
"Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki, spiritual leader at the Dar al-Hijra mosque in Virginia, one of the nation's largest, which draws about 3,000 worshipers for communal prayers each Friday, said: ''In the past we were oblivious. We didn't really care much because we never expected things to happen. Now I think things are different. What we might have tolerated in the past, we won't tolerate any more.''
''There were some statements that were inflammatory, and were considered just talk, but now we realize that talk can be taken seriously and acted upon in a violent radical way,'' said Mr. Al-Awlaki, who at 30 is held up as a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West: born in New Mexico to parents from Yemen, who studied Islam in Yemen and civil engineering at Colorado State University."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki
A new generation! Of course, as you would probably say, in 2001 al-Awlaki was a good-Muslim but by 2003 he had become a bad-Muslim. You may also believe that you decide who is a Muslim, and the new al-Alwaki was not a Muslim at all...
The line between these categories seems pretty thin, however. For instance, the US taxpayer funds the Palestinian Authority, and one wing of the PA is the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which blows up buses and stuff. Al-Aqsa is an "unofficial" arm of Fatah, however, and the PA is "officially" distinct from Fatah. So while many on the far left endorse the PA, few on the far left endorse Al-Aqsa.
Imagine if rightists got to let themselves be wilfully taken in by this transparent game of three-card monte. Any fascist who didn't send any Jews to Auschwitz, personally, himself, could claim to be totally in the clear. Perhaps the SS is just the "armed wing" of the Third Reich, etc, etc. And if you're Petain or Franco, you had nothing to do with that at all. Etc, etc, etc.
[Edit: spacing.]