One of my most strongly held political beliefs is experts shouldn't rule over non-experts without their consent. I won't try to define for you who exactly the "experts" are because in my world it doesn't matter. Everybody can make that decision for themselves.
Depending on how we define "expert", the intelligent shouldn't rule over the unintelligent. Academics shouldn't rule over non-academics. Intellectuals shouldn't rule over non-intellectuals. The old and wise shouldn't rule over the young and foolish. I mean all of these things.
I believe in expertise without authority. For this reason, I don't really want to be associated with forcing people to wear masks. I'd prefer people do it because they trust health experts and if they don't, it's something between them and the governments which they elected.
I don't want the fact that me and my academic community believe something to become yet another justification for state coercion. As a black man, I'm suspicious of coercive power.
In my ideal world, scientific knowledge empowers individuals to get more of what what they want on their own terms without taking away from others.
Scientific knowledge shouldn't be about putting people in a prison made of other people's reasons which they don't agree with, don't understand, and that say there's only one best choice for everyone.
So in conclusion, I believe that people have a right to autonomy and self-determination. I believe people have the right to be "stupid" and to work on being smarter at their own pace.
Addendum: I don't think my views map well to current politics. It's a bit like what libertarians mean by "liberty" if they were less obsessed with wealth in the form of money and property and defined wealth instead as virtue, self-actualization and strong relationships.
Left and right both capture some of it. The right recognizes the freedom to be what others consider "stupid". The left recognizes the freedom to self-determination outside of the freedom to do whatever you want with property.
Addendum II: No condemnation is either implied or intended concerning any country or any parties in their response to the pandemic. I believe in your autonomy so I'm not trying to tell you what to do. This thread is an ABSTRACT discussion of my personal relationship to politics.
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One of the things I hate most about the cult of IQ is it leads to lot of magical thinking about how the brain works. There’s absolutely nothing shameful about relearning things you use to know.
Research shows forgetting is a normal part of human cognition.
The way to combat the natural tendency to forget is to relearn or retrieve the memory at regular intervals which is known as “spaced repetition”.
Relearning takes the strength of the memory back to 100% and the rate of forgetting is slower the next time.
Infographics of this dataset have been kicking around on the internet for years. It is an insult to real scientists everywhere. For every 10 likes, I will post a new ridiculous fact about how fake and ridiculous this "data" is.
They report data on 185 countries but *104* of those numbers (more than half!) are based on *zero* data collected from people from that country. ZERO.
Rather than acknowledge this lack of data, they decided to guessimate based on surrounding countries.
The IQ estimate for Equatorial Guinea was based on kids in a home for developmentally disabled kids living in Spain. Not even their home country. Spain.
People are getting thousands of likes for spreading this misinformation about sex differences. Let me explain why this interpretation of the data is wrong. 🧵
If you think 100% accuracy is too good to be true, trust your instincts.
The version of the model shown in the plot was basically fed the sex of the participants. That’s why it’s achieving 100% accuracy.
When the model was tested on a subset of people from the same dataset that it had *not* seen previously, the accuracy fell to 90%.
I keep seeing this Huberman clip all over my timeline so let’s use it as teachable moment to learn some statistics.
The basic mistake is not taking the people who are already pregnant out of the pool of people who could be pregnant the next month. Of the starting 100, fewer and fewer will remain each month.
It’s a little tedious to keep track of what number of people aren’t yet pregnant on each round, and then take 20% of that, and then add up all the pregnant people in each round.