Factors of mental and physical abilities - a statistical analysis
A review of correlations between human performance on physical and mental tasks, plus a description of how factor analysis is like a cigar
Is there a general factor of intelligence?
This question is a trap. If you try to answer it, you’ll find yourself beset by semantic questions. What’s intelligence? What’s a factor? And if you get past those, you’ll then find a bleak valley of statistical arcana. What do the eigenvalues look like? Do they imply causality?
This is all backward. If your goal is to understand the external world, you can skip the hand wringing and start by looking at the damn data. So let’s do that.
https://dynomight.net/general-intelligence/
This piece has various interactive components and hypnotic rotating videos and stuff that don’t work in email, so you’ll have to use the above link.
As a teaser, there are graphs that look like this:
And there’s also things like this (except imagine that your email client wasn’t waging a War On Fun and so it was animated):
Still didn’t prevent accidental chugging
In other news, I ran across this hacker news thread where my old essay on drinking acetone came up. I thought this was worth preserving:
Cuboid pictures
In other other news, if you’ve ever built a Cuboid DIY air purifier please send me a picture! I’m planning to put together a little gallery of user reports.