DISQUS

The airlines already have plenty of incentive to offer "family friendly" flights, especially on long-haul, to segregate those with screaming kids from those without: both sets would be willing to pay extra for the separating equilibrium, but not enough (apparently) to justify the potentially lower loadings on each flight. I can't imagine that the porn incentive adds anything substantial to the one they've already got.

I'd be willing to bet that the modal traveller is willing to pay a lot more for a seat guaranteed not to be beside a screaming baby than for a seat guaranteed not to have wireless internet or other costly mechanisms to keep Lewd from his entertainment.

Chris, I think you're barking up the wrong tree if you're arguing that Liebowitz's research is influenced by funding sources. If there were a betting market in it, I'd be at least 25:1 against. He's just not that kind of guy.

I'd always thought the Randian dream re family was to denounce and abandon parasites, not to fob them off onto an alternative host.

I want to know what makes children born in one's own country more morally worthy than children born abroad; if they aren't, then why don't we also have a positive moral obligation towards every child in Darfur? That the whole thing then becomes prohibitively expensive does not lessen the moral claim of foreign children.

Ok, reading Gil-White.

1. Even if Binet is not cross-culturally comparable, there are intelligence tests that are culturally neutral: Raven's progressive matrices, for example. I don't think that we see big differences in results when looking at IQ as measured by those tests, and results from all tests correlate strongly with one another.

2. The article is almost libelous in its description of Jensen

3. There are many, many other studies of heredity and IQ -- see the APA task force report noted by Brent, above. IQ really looks to be highly hereditary.

I'm really rather surprised that you so revised your estimates on the basis of the Gil-White paper. If anything, the weakness of the critique would make me revise my prior upwards rather than down.

Will: Even if the book gives you some worries about the Binet test, don't all the different IQ tests correlate with each other pretty strongly? If IQ is nonsense, why is it a better predictor of success than is GPA?

My prior on intelligence being primarily heritable (with the remainder mostly being random noise) is about 0.8. Will read the Gil-White chapter though.

This is my dataset. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My dataset is my best friend. It is my life.
I must master it as I must master my life.
My dataset, without me, is useless. Without my dataset, I am useless.
I must run my regressions true.
I must discover stronger instruments than my enemy who is trying to out publish me.
I must produce results before he does. I will . . . .

There aren't many things that make me homesick for Fairfax. Your post today did. Am in NZ. Speculation over potential local loop unbundling has prevented any investment in new capacity for the last few years; they've now mandated unbundling, so I'm not expecting any of the kind of investment outlays you're describing. The top of the line broadband package here has 3.5MB downstream, 512K upstream; costs $80/month for 10GB traffic (can upgrade the amount of traffic but not the speed). Sigh.

ENTJ, though borderline INTJ