What, other than meritocracy, is even possible?

A person's IQ score at age 6 is already a stronger correlation with their future income than any other factor (including their parents income). This is pretty well known.

How does this make a meritocracy unethical? I can tell you, with some degree of accuracy (in aggregate), which members of a class of 6 year olds will fall in society based on a cognitive and spatial reasoning test. But if any one of those "smart" kids simply smokes weed all day and doesn't do anything, obviously, his "station" isn't reserved.

That's the nature of a meritocracy. It encourages those who have talents, to develop and use them.

Otherwise, everyone who is brilliant might just become a poet. The world only needs so many poets.

Skills in leadership are almost entirely down to confidence. People who are good leaders generally have almost irrational confidence.

I wonder if this is genetic, too, or learned?

To be pedantic, "has a substantial genetic component" is just a rewording of "is caused, in substantial part, by genetics"

I suspect they mean "linguistic" skill when they refer to reading.

These are the "general" divisions of learning aptitudes in primary school, reading and math.

In the long run, reading skill seems to tend to dictate aptitudes in reading, writing, speaking, etc.

I regard it as *almost* unethical to NOT have a meritocricy.

Imagine a factory, where you had certain specialist robots that were three times as fast at assembling engines, but average at everything else. For the sake of simplicity, imagine all other robots were at the same level for everything else and had no specialization.

Let's assume all the robots *want* to do easier jobs, because there is more idle time, and all robots are paid a fraction of the production of the factory.

If the specialist robots can be convinced to assemble engines presumably by paying them double to do it), the whole factory makes more cars, and everyone is better off.

Now the specialist robots are being paid more than everyone else. Essentially a meritocricy.

This benefits everyone, however, as all robots are paid more (even if the specialists get larger share). Choosing to not allow specialists to be paid more, essentially, is damning the entire group to substandard status because of an argument against meritocracy, on principle, even if it is simply how the robots are constructed and is unchangeable.

While focusing on racial issues to the exclusion of other things is asinine and silly, it's also asinine and silly to claim that groups of disparate people will not have differing talents and abilities, in aggregate.

Of course, aggregates tell us very little about individuals, and can't (and shouldn't) be used to make policy, social or legal.

Well, that's a bit absurd to claim.

I can certainly genetically differentiate between a Swede and a Spaniard and a Moroccan just as well as I can genetically differentiate between a dalmation, a basset and a corgie.

But this has more to do with regional origin than the relative colour of one's skin, they ARE related and to deny the mere fact is just silly.

Apple's win with the iPhone wasn't the concept of "smartphone", but the concept of "humanist UI design".

The idea of scrolling, zooming, pointing and manipulating objects as if they were paper on a roll, or physical buttons eschewed the previous generation of phones which used a stylus and scroll bars down the side of the window.

It's this humanist user element that represents the revolution if the iPhone, rather than the anything of the "smart" features, which people rightly point out were rather underwhelming when it was released.

That might be overstating one thing, however. The one other innovation was the integration of a full Safari rendering engine, as it was far better than comparable phones at the time. Other vendors assumed that the UI would be too clunky to display full pages on a small screen. Apple, again, worked on the UI and made it work.

You have THREE HUNDRED webpages open?

WTF?

This is completely fallacious.

First, it assumes one single explanation, when a myriad of them exist. The relative unlikeliness of one answer does not result in the conclusive proof for another, especially when you didn't even discuss why you think it was a binary decision.

Second, several sources have been found with 75%-90% left-handed ratio, indicating that there ARE natural causes for specific handedness of naturally occurring amino acids. The most probable source of this is polarized light, which can be created by reflections off water, as well as space phenomena such as pulsars and has been demonstrated to be configured this way in asteroid material.

I'm sorry, I should add.... AGENTS cheat, behind the prosecutors' back. Then prosecutors further cheat.

No wonder the plea rate in the US exceeds 95%.

THIS JUST IN: Prosecutors sometimes lie and cheat to get convictions, regardless of the legality or even sometimes the truth.

I knew this, defence attorneys know this. I'm glad the public is hearing about it.

I don't know statistics for Europe.

In North America, most crimes are near historical lows from the late 1950s. Some crimes (like minor property crimes such as petty vandalism) are somewhat higher than the 1950s, but I think when we're talking about stripping liberties, the conversation seems to center more around crimes that involve massive harm (death, complete destruction of multiple items of property, etc).

But as for Brussels, a brief google search for "crime in brussels" revealed this in the first link:

So, yes, sure Burglaries seem high, but violence is low.

Murder rates in Western Europe as a whole are about 1 per 100,000 people, which is among the lowest in the world, and also among the lowest in the HISTORY of the world.

Granted, Brussels has one of the highest crime rates in Western Europe and has 10 murders per 100,000 people. Today that puts it in "average city" status in the world, but given today's crime statistics, it would would have been considered one of the safest cities on Earth as recently as 1989.

On the other hand, I commend lawmakers and Judges for looking at the data and making a rational decision.

In many places, the politicians enter the discussion with an idea of how things work. Most of the time, they simply refuse to change their mind, damn the evidence.

I tip my hat to the Dutch judges or politicians who reserve judgement, wait for a peer-reviewed or statistically rigorous assessment from an independent body, and then make a reasonable decision from that.

Just because YOU feel it is obvious, obviously many people don't. Good data is the most appropriate counter to ignorant assumptions.

In discussions about government spying and surveillance, there is often a vocal group who says "if you don't have anything to hide, then this spying should not bother you."

The counter argument is that governments have tended to take information they are given and when the right person is in power, or the right sentiment strikes the public, those programs are expanded and distorted beyond their original intent.

I'm sure in the 1970s and 1980s when these programs were first beginning to be set up, they had noble intentions of only ever targeting known criminals and spys, and eventually were justified by saying that if makes people feel more secure in a post-9/11 world.

But the reality is, even without these programs, we live in the safest time that humanity has ever seen. The odds of dying of a freak accident like choking on a grape are more real to the average person than terrorism, or crime.

This is not the right solution to this invented problem.