No, that usage of "only" indicates that the result contravenes expectation or accepted belief. Example: "I only fell off the bike 25 times out of 26 attempts this time! That one other time, I managed to ride it for fifteen whole seconds!"

TFS: "The study shows also a slight gender cap: in all countries, boys generally perform a bit better than girls, but this applies only to math."

PISA 2012 Overview: "Boys perform better than girls in mathematics in only 37 out of the 65 countries and economies that participated in PISA 2012, and girls outperform boys in five countries." (For the curious, they're Jordan, Qatar, Thailand, Malaysia and Iceland.)

The Guardian article didn't get this wrong. What the hell, submitter?

I doubt you appreciate how marvellously simple-minded a Roomba truly is. I speak with certainty when I say that they are dumber than even our most celebrated politicians.

It's definitely on the list.

It's also not legal to eat an adult human with his or her consent, so that's not really a question with the same properties.

You misunderstand; I argue that alimony is an example of why marriage is a financial arrangement and not merely ceremony.

No, we shouldn't stop them from having sex with each other; that's an inherent paradox in giving non-cognizant organisms personhood. In fact it's a pretty good reason not to do it!

The thing about transgenics and hybrids is that they evoke really strong, directionless emotional responses from people. If you invent a 3D printer that can generate living human tissue and print off an entire human body, but only from the neck down, then there will be people who throw a fit and get the heeby-jeebies, even though the body never had the biological potential to be a full person and is inarguably less intelligent than a fruitfly! I think we'll need to develop more tiers of personhood before we can really address hybrids—and I think these developments will probably have uncomfortable consequences for the legal classification of the anencephelous and the brain-dead.

No, it isn't, due to alimony. A marriage is a life decision where two people choose to pool their resources. If the terms of the agreement permitting this decision are breached and the marriage nullified, then depending on the specifics of the marriage, one partner may be economically disadvantaged. Divorce law is essential to making sure that the two partners of the relationship get appropriate and fair recognition for the work they put into the marriage's success. Normally I'm not one for boiling personal matters down to money, but in this case it seems pretty obvious.

Humans legislate lots of things that animals do all the time. Murder? There's a law for that. Theft? There's a law for that. Sex? You bet there's a law for that. The argument that "animals do it all the time" is totally hypocritical to the premise of law.

On top of that, adult male gorillas can have the physical strength and body mass to force their desires on humans, and a tribal culture that promotes getting their way. The health and safety of both parties needs to be considered before engaging.

Marriage is a contract in modern law, not just a ritual; this is why informed consent matters. It has been shown that chimps and gorillas have intelligence comparable in many regards to that of a child; most importantly it is still debates as to whether or not they have theory of mind. Thus, no sex and no contracts, and no marriage. Alimony, for example, is problematic.

Other primates, even chimpanzees and gorillas, cannot give informed consent, so marrying them would never be justifiable for the same reason marrying a four-year-old is not reasonable. We need a whole lot more evolution and/or alien contact and/or resurrection of neaderthals and/or robots before there's anything non-human to meaningfully get freaky with.

As for limits on personhood (re worms), there are a number of animal rights movements, all with slightly different agendas. I'm sure there are probably some who go so far as to include worms, but the science doesn't really favour it since many worms (such as the laboratory scientist's favourite, Caenorhabditis elegans) are dumber than a Roomba.

Okay, maybe he was just a... dragon.

But he was still TROGDOR!

On the plus side, Dayan and Abbott is actually a graduate-level text, but you're utterly right. To keep up with just the unsupervised learning methods that it covers requires at least a stats course, a linear algebra course, and a couple of calculus courses. To make things worse the newest edition is 8 years old, which is a significant portion of the lifetime of the modern cogsci field.

You might appreciate this blog, which is at least about availability and help might get you more well-read, but even disregarding the educational gap, the field is the intersection of ML and medicine, two areas that are both extremely high-pressure and high-prestige. It will probably be the last discipline that breaks out of the cathedral and finds the bazaar.

It's important to not over-generalize when talking about genetically-modified foods. Monsanto uses a particularly unsafe technique to do of its lot of engineering where they simply bombard plants with mutagens until they get what they want; the normal strategy that comes to mind (splicing genes selectively) has a very low chance of causing human health problems. By contrast, mutagenic treatment just Fucks Shit Up indiscriminately.

Also, you're more than likely already a guinea pig, so how would you do controls?

I wouldn't go so far as to assume that the FDA is completely overrun. A little under 50% of drugs fail FDA approval on their first application. FDA rejection is costly, and companies have been increasingly been aggressive about doing their own testing first in order to make sure that they don't languish forever in a nightmarish backlog like the one that the USPTO suffers from. I used to know someone who had exactly the sort of near-executive-level pharmaceutical responsibility; as far as I could tell, a lot of the collaboration between FDA people and companies is actually about trying to expedite testing and safety.

On top of that, you have competitive pressures. Nothing is better for a company if they can discover that their competitors have cheated regulations or produced an unsafe product; the battlefield is aggressive and collaborations usually end in backstabbing. If you can produce evidence that another company lied to the FDA or that their products pose a health risk, it can potentially destroy that company. This is one case where a competitive market can be a positive force if the rules are set up right.

That all being said, the FDA does have corruption issues. The Wikipedia article on on regulatory capture lists some much more perverse cases, though, like how the agency responsible for cleaning up after oil spills was renamed and then restructured into oblivion in the days following the Deepwater Horizon spill.