Niccolo Soldo on porous borders and populism; Rob Henderson on elite privilege; Peter Gray on the long decline of children's play; prediction of IQ from brain waves
Regarding the lack of freedom for children, how much do you think the rise of cars plays a role? Cars drive fast and will instantly kill a kid if there is an accident. Therefore, you have to watch the kids, so they do not accidentally get hit by a car. This worry did not exist when there were few to no cars.
There have been lots of cars around kids for generations.
In other countries where urban areas are swarming with kids, there still are. It seems to me that there has been extraordinary investment in improving and widening sidewalks everywhere, but in many places they are hardly used. My recollection is that kids in America used to also walk and bike a lot, and for good distances, despite all the cars and poor or non-existent sidewalks. But now, for better or worse, it's rare to see any kid go far on foot or on a bike. I check out bike racks on occasion to get a feel for this trend, and even for large high schools or colleges you just don't see many bikes in the racks compared to cars in the lots.
A modern housing development is often different in material ways from those post-war through early-70s neighborhoods that many of us grew up in. They hadn't yet realized they could make the lots so narrow that there was scarcely room for one person to park between driveways. Down here people have so many cars that between the umpteen curb cuts of the driveways, and the street lined up and down with cars, making visibility difficult - the street is not a very friendly place to play.
And the yards hardly merit the word, of course. They sort of gesture at the idea of a yard, to make people feel confident they've bought the thing called "single family home".
It's overdetermined by lots of contributing factors. But there are plenty of old neighborhoods laid out a long time ago when kids moved around a lot on their own, and with a comparable number of kids now, but the kids aren't walking or biking. And where I live there are plenty of new 'dense' developments of townhouses crammed together advertised as single-family homes, and there are kids, but again, not walking or biking much. And when I was a kid in a not dense neighborhood, I would bike around a lot, and see lots of other kids my age on bikes. My father would send me at nine on my bike to the closest store to get milk and cigarettes, and they knew us there so that was cool with them. Can't even imagine that now. The past is a foreign country and somehow I immigrated to this one without moving.
Progressives are importing voters- it really is that simple. Were I the governors of the border states, I would raise by a factor of ten the numbers of buses being sent to the West Coast, Northeast, and upper Midwest. Conservative political donors should want to fund this since I can't think of any better way to spend these donations. I would even pay the illegal immigrants to take the bus ticket.
"Pointer from Alexander Kruel. I think that this points in the direction of IQ being innate. If environmental factors are important, this effect would have to be mediated through changes in brain wave patterns. "
It shouldn't be strange that the environment affects the brain and possibly intelligence. There was a study of Buddhist monks which found that they had higher resting gamma waves than usual. Presumably the monks were not from the same genetic background and the result is from their training i.e. their environment.
It's not too hard to get a ballpark feel for how smart someone is with a short conversation. Some people can fake it for a while, but not forever. I think the AIs will be good at figuring it out too, and harder to fool, so we don't need brain waves. And the AIs will have the stats and correlations for genes and info on family relationships. They will probably be prevented from expressing the truth (in the censoring countries formerly known as the west) but they'll know it to a very high level of confidence nonetheless.
You don't think something that's "nurture but not nature" will show up in brain waves? Neural activity obviously *is* the mediator for all learned/environmentally-caused psychology! If you have PTSD, what happens is that the events in your life affect your brain, and then your brain affects your behavior. Same would go for the learned/environmental portion of intelligence.
". . . no one wants the whole libertarian package of open borders with little or no welfare state." Well, *a practically negligibly small number of people* want this; you shouldn't say "no one."
My wife and I are raising four kids at home with no extended family nearby to help. They are very much 21st-century kids. Most of my parent peers have 1-2 kids, so we are an anomaly in having 4. It is a big strain, especially the younger ones, but it was an important goal in my life to have kids.
The richest people wanting to defund the police does not ring true with my experience of that time and the “rich” people i know. And police were only defunded in a few places.
Its policy, not police. Where they weren't defunded, they were defanged. Instead of cops enforcing all our laws, they're indulging on bear claws. Where I live the fully manned and funded police department can't be made to bother with grand theft costco anymore unless it's over $1,000, though it was a fraction of that quite recently, because they don't want to make too many arrests of too many of the wrong people.
It seems that many younger college students & recent grads are both elite-wannabes and holders of luxury beliefs. The latter because they want to be elite, but know they’re not, really.
Luxury belief holders try to cheaply signal elite status without having the wealth or even a wealth of responsibility.
"I do worry about the Progressives, because it seems to me that they are indulging in what Rob Henderson calls “luxury beliefs.”
I know it's a bit obnoxious to nitpick about coinages, but I still wish he had chosen a different term than 'luxury'. These beliefs are more like classic pollution externalities, and no one ever called what was coming out of the smokestacks "luxury emissions". More like "Remote-Fallout Beliefs."
Yes, I know that luxury can be used in precisely in that sense of "capable of remaining ignorant and/or indifferent about the consequences." E.g., "I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know; that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives."
Still, 'luxury' doesn't really hit hard enough to get at the real trouble with these beliefs. It's not so much that the price of consequences is widely distributed but only able to borne by a privileged few, but that the people espousing such beliefs, advocating for their implementation in state policy, and executing and administering those policies, are often almost completely insulated from the fallout they are causing to be dumped on other people. "My policies, your problem."
In the past the best pollution externality analogy would be Acid Rain. I burn my coal and the sulfur goes up into the sky and doesn't rain back down again until it's a thousand miles away. Fallout from nuclear tests is another good example. Few remember the acid rain scare so today they would probably say carbon emissions from richer countries hitting hardest where poorer people aren't burning much carbon.
This was a common criticism of Warren Court era judges all the way up and down the hierarchy of insanity. They didn't have to live or raise their kids in the neighborhoods where they were letting all those criminals go, so had little personal interest in balancing the impact on law and order with ideological imperatives.
Now, judges are supposed to be neutral and 'disinterested' in the sense of having no stake in the outcome. But that only makes sense in cases of private scope. And when judges got into the business of making public policy, they needed to be made as personally interested in the outcome as it was possible to make them, for instance, requiring them to reside with their families for the year in the neighborhood of a randomly selected felon whose conviction he reversed or whose sentence he reduced.
"Yes! Live your beliefs! Be the change you want to see happen!"
There are always a few tragic stories of some very, very naïve, and very delusional, but also good-hearted progressives doing exactly this, then suffering the predictable consequences. But, even today, most judges are still just barely smart enough to know what would happen, and that, if they had to live out the consequences of their holdings, they would spin the law as necessary to avoid such consequences at all costs.
You absolutely should worry about libertarians, because they wield the most influence in the GOP.
I would even venture to say - Abbott and pals do not choose to police the border nearly as much as they could - not because of a fear of federal reprisal or something - but because ultimately they do not have the philisophical underpinning that would permit them to do so. They do have cunning enough to know that the border crisis can be a political tool.
I know conservatives want Abbott to be more than he is.
And there is no conservative "bench" in Texas.
The scions of the wealthy all went east to college.
It doesn't matter anymore, they've made eVerify safe for illegal immigration, so progressive jurisdictions can now make it mandatory as soon as their voters get the memo on the inside joke. What does 'verify' mean, anyway? A guy hands you a form and you search a database to see if it matches a record in there. But now it's not too hard to get good documents including employment authorization from the federal government on your say-so, and the feds send the info to the database, so of course it always matches.
"You absolutely should worry about libertarians, because they wield the most influence in the GOP."
Could you give a few examples of what you have in mind here? I am having some difficulty coming up with examples of libertarians having a great deal of influence over GOP policy.
The most obvious example is Texas itself, where it has been policy for my adult life to look the other way at illegal immigration because it was associated with cheap labor and getting rich. Your immigration problem is some Texas pol's buddy's chance to build a hundred identical hideous red brick schools.
The local news (TV news, we have no other) last night ran down a story about a wealthy businessman - he's in the business of buidling barriers, rammed earth or the like, and he has built a long stretch of the border wall.
Having the wherewithal to do so, he just made it his business to stop up the river that runs through his (recreation) ranch. Like - no allowance for any flow, right across the channel. Without a single permit, from the Army Corps or any other entity.
This should have been blown up yesterday. But it's Texas, land of the libertarian. See the history of Clayton Williams' daddy and Comanche Springs and the town of Fort Stockton. That set the tone.
With regards to immigration, hasn't much of the discussion been about how the Federal government doesn't allow state and local government to address illegal immigration? I don't know what the state and local authorities try to do, but I have heard quite a bit about the conflict between state and local.
As to the river thing, I don't understand how that is a case of GOP policy being influenced by libertarians. Is the state policy that land owners can block a river (making a lake I presume) at will regardless of effects on those downstream, as pushed through by libertarian politicians?
Very probably. I look at the GOP and see no interest in preservation of tradition, nor in conservation. I see acquiescence to the leftward drift, and occasional talk about fiscal restraint which never bears fruit. I see posturing in which liberty and freedom are frequently referenced. I see tacit acceptance of all the bromides of the left. And then, surveying all this forest, the libertarian-inflected Abbott looks about him for what is important to do, and overrules some town’s local heritage tree ordinance.
Ellwanger’s depressing essay makes it easy to picture Trump and others using our southern border calamity (again) as an election flash point. It remains a galvanizing issue to most Americans. As you say, voters want to see a different plan because we cannot afford the luxury beliefs.
The exact reason it is even possible for anyone to use the border as an election flash point is precisely because voters can't get a different plan, they can only get a different President.
People talk a lot about how Congress should do more legislating with bipartisan compromises and so forth, especially on immigration. That sounds nice, but there's a reason it doesn't happen that isn't just "polarization" and "primary elections".
It's because under the current scheme of our administrative state - which is obsolete - and our current jurisprudence - which is insane - any bargained-for compromise can't actually manifest in reality.
So why should any congressman waste his time trying to legislate or compromise? That's why these congressmen don't have high opinions of the "legislate more bipartisan compromises" crowd.
The trouble is that whatever non-"""emergency""" immigration reform law Congress might try to make requires 'prosecution' in the technical legal sense of the word, and, crazy as it sounds, the Executive retains discretion to ignore any such requirement almost entirely. And there is nothing to be done about it that isn't either completely impossible or instantly generative of a Constitutional crisis.
And "ignore the law almost entirely" is a completely fair description of what is happening and how we arrived at the current continuous-crisis situation. So long as Presidents get to decide which laws to enforce or not, against whom or not, then nothing matters except Presidential elections, and every issue is an election flash point.
Boy, that last link screams “overfitting” to me. I only read the abstract but geez. Synthetic data, several “optimized” hyperparameters, a neural network, 100% training accuracy, a starting dataset of 50 records? All classic telltale signs of overfit models. I (and I hope the data scientists that report to me) would never even entertain the *idea* of an analysis like this, let alone conducting and publishing it.
That said, maybe I don’t understand the abstract or whatever field this is?
I’m referring to the link that Arnold’s quote is from. I guess I’m actually referring to the second-to-last link in the post, the Science Direct paper. To my eye, based on the abstract (didn’t read the actual paper), the analysis looks completely bogus, mostly because of overfitting, which is really hard to avoid with neural networks.
Thanks. I would have never figured out that was the part you were referring to.
I don't know about overfitting, maybe because I know so little about neural nets, but I see other concerns.
- IQ is only an estimate of intelligence so it has a error too. Do we know how these errors interact?
- It seems like the middle of the 7 bands would be a really small IQ range. How many of the errors are in that band? Likewise, the bands at the extremes, especially high end, will have a very large range of IQs.
- I have trouble with these bands. Maybe you'd have to exclude or have a range for people at the extremes but I'd think determining within 5 pts or something like that would be a better measure of whether it works.
That all said, it still seems possible or even probably that there is some correlation between brain waves and IQ. That in itself seems interesting.
Sure, totally possible that there’s a correlation between brain waves and IQ. And that would be really neat! All I’m saying is that, from a data-analysis perspective (which is my background as the head of data science at a Fortune 500 company, not that that really matters*), this analysis appears really spurious. So spurious that I would never let my team draw these types of conclusions from this type of data, let alone publish/promote them.
* Just to be clear, all these thoughts are my own, having nothing to do with my job/career.
Regarding the lack of freedom for children, how much do you think the rise of cars plays a role? Cars drive fast and will instantly kill a kid if there is an accident. Therefore, you have to watch the kids, so they do not accidentally get hit by a car. This worry did not exist when there were few to no cars.
There have been lots of cars around kids for generations.
In other countries where urban areas are swarming with kids, there still are. It seems to me that there has been extraordinary investment in improving and widening sidewalks everywhere, but in many places they are hardly used. My recollection is that kids in America used to also walk and bike a lot, and for good distances, despite all the cars and poor or non-existent sidewalks. But now, for better or worse, it's rare to see any kid go far on foot or on a bike. I check out bike racks on occasion to get a feel for this trend, and even for large high schools or colleges you just don't see many bikes in the racks compared to cars in the lots.
A modern housing development is often different in material ways from those post-war through early-70s neighborhoods that many of us grew up in. They hadn't yet realized they could make the lots so narrow that there was scarcely room for one person to park between driveways. Down here people have so many cars that between the umpteen curb cuts of the driveways, and the street lined up and down with cars, making visibility difficult - the street is not a very friendly place to play.
And the yards hardly merit the word, of course. They sort of gesture at the idea of a yard, to make people feel confident they've bought the thing called "single family home".
It's overdetermined by lots of contributing factors. But there are plenty of old neighborhoods laid out a long time ago when kids moved around a lot on their own, and with a comparable number of kids now, but the kids aren't walking or biking. And where I live there are plenty of new 'dense' developments of townhouses crammed together advertised as single-family homes, and there are kids, but again, not walking or biking much. And when I was a kid in a not dense neighborhood, I would bike around a lot, and see lots of other kids my age on bikes. My father would send me at nine on my bike to the closest store to get milk and cigarettes, and they knew us there so that was cool with them. Can't even imagine that now. The past is a foreign country and somehow I immigrated to this one without moving.
Progressives are importing voters- it really is that simple. Were I the governors of the border states, I would raise by a factor of ten the numbers of buses being sent to the West Coast, Northeast, and upper Midwest. Conservative political donors should want to fund this since I can't think of any better way to spend these donations. I would even pay the illegal immigrants to take the bus ticket.
What do you think the odds are that Europe ends up with a lot of Gaza refugees when this is all over?
Why has that not already happened?
100%.
"Pointer from Alexander Kruel. I think that this points in the direction of IQ being innate. If environmental factors are important, this effect would have to be mediated through changes in brain wave patterns. "
It shouldn't be strange that the environment affects the brain and possibly intelligence. There was a study of Buddhist monks which found that they had higher resting gamma waves than usual. Presumably the monks were not from the same genetic background and the result is from their training i.e. their environment.
It's not too hard to get a ballpark feel for how smart someone is with a short conversation. Some people can fake it for a while, but not forever. I think the AIs will be good at figuring it out too, and harder to fool, so we don't need brain waves. And the AIs will have the stats and correlations for genes and info on family relationships. They will probably be prevented from expressing the truth (in the censoring countries formerly known as the west) but they'll know it to a very high level of confidence nonetheless.
You don't think something that's "nurture but not nature" will show up in brain waves? Neural activity obviously *is* the mediator for all learned/environmentally-caused psychology! If you have PTSD, what happens is that the events in your life affect your brain, and then your brain affects your behavior. Same would go for the learned/environmental portion of intelligence.
". . . no one wants the whole libertarian package of open borders with little or no welfare state." Well, *a practically negligibly small number of people* want this; you shouldn't say "no one."
My wife and I are raising four kids at home with no extended family nearby to help. They are very much 21st-century kids. Most of my parent peers have 1-2 kids, so we are an anomaly in having 4. It is a big strain, especially the younger ones, but it was an important goal in my life to have kids.
Gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers in this racket.
Indeed. We have five, so maybe we’re still JV. Ours are very much less 21st-century kids than their peers, and it is partly due to logistics…
The richest people wanting to defund the police does not ring true with my experience of that time and the “rich” people i know. And police were only defunded in a few places.
Its policy, not police. Where they weren't defunded, they were defanged. Instead of cops enforcing all our laws, they're indulging on bear claws. Where I live the fully manned and funded police department can't be made to bother with grand theft costco anymore unless it's over $1,000, though it was a fraction of that quite recently, because they don't want to make too many arrests of too many of the wrong people.
Who do you know that wanted to defund the police?
I don’t know any, I think, but find it highly credible as a luxury belief.
Millennials primarily. But not many. Older, richer people understand the importance of police. Not that the police are perfect.
It seems that many younger college students & recent grads are both elite-wannabes and holders of luxury beliefs. The latter because they want to be elite, but know they’re not, really.
Luxury belief holders try to cheaply signal elite status without having the wealth or even a wealth of responsibility.
"I do worry about the Progressives, because it seems to me that they are indulging in what Rob Henderson calls “luxury beliefs.”
I know it's a bit obnoxious to nitpick about coinages, but I still wish he had chosen a different term than 'luxury'. These beliefs are more like classic pollution externalities, and no one ever called what was coming out of the smokestacks "luxury emissions". More like "Remote-Fallout Beliefs."
Yes, I know that luxury can be used in precisely in that sense of "capable of remaining ignorant and/or indifferent about the consequences." E.g., "I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know; that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives."
Still, 'luxury' doesn't really hit hard enough to get at the real trouble with these beliefs. It's not so much that the price of consequences is widely distributed but only able to borne by a privileged few, but that the people espousing such beliefs, advocating for their implementation in state policy, and executing and administering those policies, are often almost completely insulated from the fallout they are causing to be dumped on other people. "My policies, your problem."
In the past the best pollution externality analogy would be Acid Rain. I burn my coal and the sulfur goes up into the sky and doesn't rain back down again until it's a thousand miles away. Fallout from nuclear tests is another good example. Few remember the acid rain scare so today they would probably say carbon emissions from richer countries hitting hardest where poorer people aren't burning much carbon.
This was a common criticism of Warren Court era judges all the way up and down the hierarchy of insanity. They didn't have to live or raise their kids in the neighborhoods where they were letting all those criminals go, so had little personal interest in balancing the impact on law and order with ideological imperatives.
Now, judges are supposed to be neutral and 'disinterested' in the sense of having no stake in the outcome. But that only makes sense in cases of private scope. And when judges got into the business of making public policy, they needed to be made as personally interested in the outcome as it was possible to make them, for instance, requiring them to reside with their families for the year in the neighborhood of a randomly selected felon whose conviction he reversed or whose sentence he reduced.
"Yes! Live your beliefs! Be the change you want to see happen!"
There are always a few tragic stories of some very, very naïve, and very delusional, but also good-hearted progressives doing exactly this, then suffering the predictable consequences. But, even today, most judges are still just barely smart enough to know what would happen, and that, if they had to live out the consequences of their holdings, they would spin the law as necessary to avoid such consequences at all costs.
You absolutely should worry about libertarians, because they wield the most influence in the GOP.
I would even venture to say - Abbott and pals do not choose to police the border nearly as much as they could - not because of a fear of federal reprisal or something - but because ultimately they do not have the philisophical underpinning that would permit them to do so. They do have cunning enough to know that the border crisis can be a political tool.
I know conservatives want Abbott to be more than he is.
And there is no conservative "bench" in Texas.
The scions of the wealthy all went east to college.
This is why e Verify never goes anywhere.
It doesn't matter anymore, they've made eVerify safe for illegal immigration, so progressive jurisdictions can now make it mandatory as soon as their voters get the memo on the inside joke. What does 'verify' mean, anyway? A guy hands you a form and you search a database to see if it matches a record in there. But now it's not too hard to get good documents including employment authorization from the federal government on your say-so, and the feds send the info to the database, so of course it always matches.
Republicans tanked the e Verify requirements last time. Most Dem voters would be in total agreement making it a crime to hire an illegal alien.
"You absolutely should worry about libertarians, because they wield the most influence in the GOP."
Could you give a few examples of what you have in mind here? I am having some difficulty coming up with examples of libertarians having a great deal of influence over GOP policy.
The most obvious example is Texas itself, where it has been policy for my adult life to look the other way at illegal immigration because it was associated with cheap labor and getting rich. Your immigration problem is some Texas pol's buddy's chance to build a hundred identical hideous red brick schools.
The local news (TV news, we have no other) last night ran down a story about a wealthy businessman - he's in the business of buidling barriers, rammed earth or the like, and he has built a long stretch of the border wall.
Having the wherewithal to do so, he just made it his business to stop up the river that runs through his (recreation) ranch. Like - no allowance for any flow, right across the channel. Without a single permit, from the Army Corps or any other entity.
This should have been blown up yesterday. But it's Texas, land of the libertarian. See the history of Clayton Williams' daddy and Comanche Springs and the town of Fort Stockton. That set the tone.
With regards to immigration, hasn't much of the discussion been about how the Federal government doesn't allow state and local government to address illegal immigration? I don't know what the state and local authorities try to do, but I have heard quite a bit about the conflict between state and local.
As to the river thing, I don't understand how that is a case of GOP policy being influenced by libertarians. Is the state policy that land owners can block a river (making a lake I presume) at will regardless of effects on those downstream, as pushed through by libertarian politicians?
There’s a strong presumption in favor of bad and disruptive actors, which obv. is the antithesis of conservatism.
As for immigration, they liked until they didn’t - or rather, until they found it useful to complain.
The GOP has controlled Texas virtually my entire adult life.
The subject of immigration never once came up. This is not a coincidence.
Possibly we are operating on different definitions of libertarian then. I don't see how these are examples of libertarian influence on the GOP.
Very probably. I look at the GOP and see no interest in preservation of tradition, nor in conservation. I see acquiescence to the leftward drift, and occasional talk about fiscal restraint which never bears fruit. I see posturing in which liberty and freedom are frequently referenced. I see tacit acceptance of all the bromides of the left. And then, surveying all this forest, the libertarian-inflected Abbott looks about him for what is important to do, and overrules some town’s local heritage tree ordinance.
That’ll show them!
I should add that the last Texas politician who had any thoughts about immigration was Barbara Jordan, a Democrat, and she’s been dead a long time.
Ellwanger’s depressing essay makes it easy to picture Trump and others using our southern border calamity (again) as an election flash point. It remains a galvanizing issue to most Americans. As you say, voters want to see a different plan because we cannot afford the luxury beliefs.
The exact reason it is even possible for anyone to use the border as an election flash point is precisely because voters can't get a different plan, they can only get a different President.
People talk a lot about how Congress should do more legislating with bipartisan compromises and so forth, especially on immigration. That sounds nice, but there's a reason it doesn't happen that isn't just "polarization" and "primary elections".
It's because under the current scheme of our administrative state - which is obsolete - and our current jurisprudence - which is insane - any bargained-for compromise can't actually manifest in reality.
So why should any congressman waste his time trying to legislate or compromise? That's why these congressmen don't have high opinions of the "legislate more bipartisan compromises" crowd.
The trouble is that whatever non-"""emergency""" immigration reform law Congress might try to make requires 'prosecution' in the technical legal sense of the word, and, crazy as it sounds, the Executive retains discretion to ignore any such requirement almost entirely. And there is nothing to be done about it that isn't either completely impossible or instantly generative of a Constitutional crisis.
And "ignore the law almost entirely" is a completely fair description of what is happening and how we arrived at the current continuous-crisis situation. So long as Presidents get to decide which laws to enforce or not, against whom or not, then nothing matters except Presidential elections, and every issue is an election flash point.
Boy, that last link screams “overfitting” to me. I only read the abstract but geez. Synthetic data, several “optimized” hyperparameters, a neural network, 100% training accuracy, a starting dataset of 50 records? All classic telltale signs of overfit models. I (and I hope the data scientists that report to me) would never even entertain the *idea* of an analysis like this, let alone conducting and publishing it.
That said, maybe I don’t understand the abstract or whatever field this is?
I'm guessing this comment is related to brain waves and IQ but I have no idea where you are reading from. Help?
I’m referring to the link that Arnold’s quote is from. I guess I’m actually referring to the second-to-last link in the post, the Science Direct paper. To my eye, based on the abstract (didn’t read the actual paper), the analysis looks completely bogus, mostly because of overfitting, which is really hard to avoid with neural networks.
Thanks. I would have never figured out that was the part you were referring to.
I don't know about overfitting, maybe because I know so little about neural nets, but I see other concerns.
- IQ is only an estimate of intelligence so it has a error too. Do we know how these errors interact?
- It seems like the middle of the 7 bands would be a really small IQ range. How many of the errors are in that band? Likewise, the bands at the extremes, especially high end, will have a very large range of IQs.
- I have trouble with these bands. Maybe you'd have to exclude or have a range for people at the extremes but I'd think determining within 5 pts or something like that would be a better measure of whether it works.
That all said, it still seems possible or even probably that there is some correlation between brain waves and IQ. That in itself seems interesting.
Sure, totally possible that there’s a correlation between brain waves and IQ. And that would be really neat! All I’m saying is that, from a data-analysis perspective (which is my background as the head of data science at a Fortune 500 company, not that that really matters*), this analysis appears really spurious. So spurious that I would never let my team draw these types of conclusions from this type of data, let alone publish/promote them.
* Just to be clear, all these thoughts are my own, having nothing to do with my job/career.