@jwray

*facepalm*

You realize the link you just posted is titled "IQ dominates socioeconomic background data for white men" (my emphasis).

Sure, there is a correlation between IQ and crime and it is hotly contested to what that actually means.

To some, that means only dumb criminals actually get caught (meaning we don't know the true average IQ of criminals because the smart ones get away with it).

To others, it reflects the socioeconomic status of the people most likely to commit crimes (i.e. likely grew up poor in a neighborhood without strong educational opportunities and therefore does not share the cultural values that IQ tests inherently load into the questions and furthermore the test-taker may be openly hostile to standardized test-taking).

To still others it reflects the RESULTS of crime (i.e. leading a criminal lifestyle makes it more likely that you are going to suffer traumatic physical injuries to the head that literally make you dumber).

The 7-8 point difference you quoted is not nearly enough to make a difference on the crime rates. 100 IQ is the normally distributed mean and Japanese people on average, score around 106. For reference, a standard deviation on the IQ test is 15 points, meaning that for all intents and purposes Japanese people are still roughly in the same ballpark as Americans with their 98-point average.

And literally the first Google search result when I looked up Japanese IQ scores was this one, explaining how national average IQ scores correlate with the per capita income and national rates of economic development.

In other words, economic factors correlate with IQ, which correlates with negatively with crime, which seems to further reinforce the idea that socioeconomic forces are a key factor in criminal behavior.

Look, we're getting really far afield of what the video is about. I think it is a no-brainer that few gun crimes are committed in Japan because guns are so heavily regulated. We do have stabbings, in fact we have mass stabbings (which is something you don't see so often in the U.S.). The thing we both agree on is that it is impossible for the U.S. to replicate these crime statistic results, whether that be for cultural reasons or whatever other cause you want to throw out there.

Uhhh... you are aware of the atrocities Japanese soldiers committed less than a century ago during WWII, right? And I think you're confusing psychopaths (who may or may not be violent) with those suffering from a psychosis (a complete mental break with reality).

Either way, mental illness is a huge problem in Japan and in fact treatment of mental illness is one area where their socialized medicine is sorely lacking behind other countries.

I don't know of any credible studies that say that mental illness rates are lower in Japan than in other developed countries, but I do know that the overwhelming majority of crimes in pretty much any country are actually committed by people who are legally sane.

So, despite what you may believe, "genetic" predisposition is an unlikely factor in explaining Japan's crime rate. Besides which, criminologists agree that whatever role genetics plays in people becoming criminals it isn't nearly the most important factor and is dwarfed by environmental factors (see this for a scholarly article on the topic and <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29760212>this for a popular news article).

You're trying to paint this as two equal parts of the recipe for crime when in reality it's more like "add two cups of environmental and a dash of genetics/personality/whatever."

Crime does happen here. The kinds of stuff I hear about on a daily basis in the news: crimes of desperation (homeless guy stealing to survive), thrill-seeking crimes (stealing a bike because you're young and stupid and the chances of getting caught are pretty low), crimes of passion (i.e. domestic violence, drunken bar fights, etc.), organized crime (i.e. yakuza), and the big one--sexual assault.

Sexual assault is so prevalent in Japan that there are actual signs warning women of areas where they are likely to be groped or have men expose themselves. There are train cars for women only so they don't have to get groped on the way to work or school. I mean, how fucked up is that?

So it isn't all rainbows and unicorns over here. Crime happens, and unfortunately is much more likely to happen to you if you're a woman. Still, even accounting for that the crime rates here are ridiculously low, for the reasons I stated above.

Sorry, that's pretty culturally-ignorant thinking right there.

Japanese people are not "meek" or "inhibited" any more so than Americans are. There are different cultural rules about self-expression but there are most certainly loud, aggressive, and flamboyant people here. They just express themselves in different ways than your typically loud, aggressive, and flamboyant American would.

You might think socioeconomic factors were a reason for the lack of crime, but you'd be wrong there too. Japan has a higher poverty rate and lower median income than the U.S.

The low crime rates here can much better be attributed to cultural factors. Every Japanese person is raised with the belief that it is shameful cause problems to the people around them, whether that be family, schoolmates, or co-workers. Getting arrested is about the most shameful thing you could do here. Just being suspected of a crime will likely get you fired from your job, before you are even tried.

And let's not forget the role the justice system here plays. If you get arrested you are almost 100% going to get convicted because the odds are massively stacked against you in the court system. You are basically guilty until proven innocent. Read this for more info about it.

And people here know this. They also know that Japanese prison is hellish. You won't be raped or assaulted there like in the U.S. but you will know exactly what is like to have all of your freedom stripped completely away.

You add to all of this the low unemployment rate of Japan, the high regulation of all weapons (including knives), a robust social system for helping the unemployed (although unfortunately lately a lot of people seem to be falling through the cracks), a nationalized health insurance plan (I pay a $1 co-pay to take my daughter to the doctor and all prescribed medicines are free), a strong social stigma against drug use, and the ability as an island nation to strictly police the borders to prevent the influx of illegal goods (i.e. drugs/guns) and you get the low crime rates in Japan.

tl;dr

There is little incentive to commit crime in Japan because the both social and legal repercussions are extremely severe, and there is little need to resort to crime to survive (plentiful jobs and robust social security). Likewise the opportunity to commit crime is lessened because of the strict regulation of weapons, drugs, and borders.

EDIT: I will say that on more than one occasion I've thought that a career criminal in the U.S. who suddenly found himself in Japan would feel like a kid in a candy store. Because of the lack of crime, people here don't take precautions against it--some people leave doors and windows unlocked when leaving the house, you'll see laptops or iPads left in cars in plain view, and people carry ridiculous amounts of cash on them (I'm talking like on the order of $1000 or more in some cases). On the one hand it can be reassuring but on the other hand I seriously worry about these people when they travel overseas.

@harlequinn

Dude, you've clearly got some anger issues that need working out. How you can still be this upset a month later about a thread I literally forgot completely about until you resurrected it, I have no idea.

Since you seem hellbent on interpreting everything I say as some atheistic screed you'll probably think I'm being sarcastic. But in all seriousness... you need to talk to somebody about this and it clearly isn't me.

Once again (non-sarcastically) best of luck to you.

Good post, I was just looking into how Bitcoin works a week ago and this video helped solidify what I learned online. I can see the appeal of cryptocurrencies to criminals, hackers, or your garden variety government conspiracy theorist but I don't really see why an average person would have any interest in this, particularly given the volatility of the exchange rates between cryptocurrencies and the real world or the potential for hacking/losses due to errors in the system (see the disastrous Mt. Gox case here in Japan).

@harlequinn

Okay, now you're devolving into personal attacks and completely baseless assumptions (ironically something you accused me of earlier). So, I'm just going to wish you the best and move on.

For what it's worth, I don't blame you getting defensive. I understand challenges to your beliefs can be disorienting, especially when they are so deeply held as part of your identity like religious ones are. You seem to think I'm being sarcastic or something, but in all honesty: good luck to you.

@harlequinn

Yeeeaaaaaah...

Judging by the incoherent rambling of that last post, it looks like I struck a nerve. I mean, come on man. You claim you can't remember everything you read, but in this case you somehow didn't remember that the Christian god is omnipotent--a fundamental doctrine of every major denomination of Christianity in existence today? That's seriously your defense?

Quit your bullshit. You tried to shut down @newtboy and got yourself shut down instead. I'm sure that's frustrating and contributed to the nonsensical nature of that last post, but still....

To answer in all seriousness your subsequent questions:

1) Yes, atheism has brought me immense peace. It felt great to let go of religion--Christianity specifically--especially all the guilt-tripping and fire-and-brimstone bullshit that went along with it. As a side bonus, I felt relieved that I was no longer financially subsidizing a bunch of pedophiles (I left long before the major scandals broke in mainstream media).

2) No, I'm not angry but I am certainly annoyed at all the numb nuts who keep blowing themselves up, discriminating against the LGBT community, and trying to tell women what they can and can't do with their bodies using only their Bronze Age (or older in the case of religions like Hinduism and Buddhism) superstitious beliefs as the rationale for their behavior.

3) No, I am not vegan. Just had fried chicken for dinner tonight.

4) Yes, I had to Google the exact passages but I knew the bible said somewhere that god was omnipotent because, as a former Christian, I'd read through it several times before. Sorry to hear you are so "forgetful" about the holy text that forms the backbone of your religion. Actually, I know you're not forgetful; the point the guy in the video is making is that most Christians choose not to look at the parts of the bible they don't like or even worse make ridiculous convoluted arguments to try to explain them away (as you tried to do here in explaining away god's omnipotence/omniscience).

Moving on, the "tenability" of Christianity has nothing to do with "Tradition." The whole thing is a house of cards. It doesn't matter in the slightest whether you want to interpret any holy text in the world literally or through some collective interpretation by an ostensibly educated priest-class. What makes all religion untenable is the fact that it is 100% made up bullshit. There is as much evidence for the existence of a Christian god as there is for Zeus, Thor, Santa Claus, or the tooth fairy (i.e. none).

Finally, no, I don't need to come up with a system to replace religion. It already exists and it is called "using reason and compassion." The idea itself that we need some system to control us or protect us from ourselves is archaic and frankly anachronistic in this day and age.

Now, I mean this in all seriousness--I wish you the best. I was you once, a long time ago, trying to stave off the cognitive dissonance of being a rationale human being yet also believing in a religion. I'd argue with atheists just like you're trying to do now. But the thing is... they made good arguments. The stuff they pointed out stuck with me. At first I'd shrug it off, but the facts nagged at me and nagged at me until I finally set out to prove those pesky atheists wrong--only to find out through research that everything they were saying was 100% correct.

Like I said in the previous post, you'll either face the facts or turn away and hide from them. I can't tell you if you'd be happier or not without religion--no one can. What I can tell you is that at the very least you would no longer be contributing to a collective hive-mind that has very real and very negative effects on the world we live in, regardless of whatever benefits the religion may bring to you personally. Either way, I sincerely wish you peace.

@harlequinn

Why should you re-read the bible? Because, like most Christians, you clearly demonstrated that you don't know what it actually says (which is the point of the video), and yet here you are telling @newtboy that he doesn't know anything about it except for hearsay. So... hypocrisy much?

But then you double-down and are now trying to argue with me that the Christian god is not actually considered omnipotent--despite me pointing out three places in the bible where it explicitly states "he" is. Although I'm not at all surprised that a religious person is arguing against facts, I actually agree with the sentiment. If a Christian god truly existed, one look at the state of the world would tell you that "incompetent" is a better descriptive adjective than "omnipotent."

Look man, I get it. You're invested in your religion. I was once too, and just like you argued with atheists about these kinds of arcane points (i.e. is the Christian god omnipotent?) before slowly realizing it is all bullshit and that humanity at this stage of development would be much better off without religion (and by religion I mean any philosophical way of life that uses "faith" as it's primary source for finding truth instead of rational thinking). I don't deny it served a purpose once as a unifying social force, but its day is done. One day you'll either come to the same conclusion or you'll ignore the mountains of problems it causes in the world because you feel it brings you some measure of peace or clarity or whatever. I hope it's the former for you.

Unfortunately, knowing a lot of religious people, I expect it will be the latter. In which case, I can only hope your religion brings you only happiness and you keep it from damaging others' lives as much as possible.

You might want to re-read your bible (I refuse to capitalize it).

Revelation 19:6:

And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.

Also Matthew 19:26 “with God, all things are possible” and Luke 1:37 “with God nothing is impossible” make it clear the Christian god is omnipotent without actually using the word.

And even if it wasn't explicitly written, in practice every major sect of Christianity follows the doctrine that the Christian god is both omniscient (i.e. going to judge everyone for their sins on judgement day) and omnipotent (i.e. can do anything, such as create a universe from nothing).

EDIT: So @newtboy's original comment stands. The bible's inconsistencies are too huge for anyone not completely indoctrinated into Christianity to ignore.

The best way to explain it is that the Founding Fathers of the U.S. basically predicted that someday there could be an outcome like the most recent election, where people voted based on their emotions (fear, anger, hatred--all the Dark Side stuff) and not on logic or reason.

The Founding Fathers didn't trust the common man to be educated enough to always make reasonable decisions and wanted to ensure that there was a brake in place to prevent "mob rule." That "brake" is the Electoral College, a collection of (ostensibly) politically-educated individuals who could prevent demagogues (like Trump) from taking power.

I think this is the first time in history where the Electoral College can do the job it was intended to do. If the Electors put aside political partisanship, they'll recognize how putting a completely inexperienced, hate-inducing liar into the White House is a terrible idea and ensure Trump doesn't get the Presidency.

Of course, Electors not voting along party lines is in actuality highly unlikely to happen as, in the end, Electors are all long-standing and high-ranking Democrat or Republican Party members. I mean, if you were a Republican Elector whose party had spent the last eight years without a Presidential win, watching time and again as legislation in a Republican controlled congress gets vetoed down by a Democratic president, even a man like Trump is going to start to look tempting. So the safe bet is that Trump gets elected anyway and the Elector College proves itself again to be a pointless institution for this and all the other reasons explained in the video.

Science "works" when scientists bother to actually try to replicate claims, no matter how bizarre they may be. And as this video and my comment shows, that's not happening in a number of scientific fields. Which is really, really bad for human knowledge and society in general, as billions of dollars and countless work-hours get wasted since researchers base future research on what turn out to be unreliable past claims.

The "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" flies in the face of everything the scientific method espouses. Evidence is evidence. It is not supposed to matter who finds the evidence. Someone who is famous in the field should not be given more benefit of the doubt than someone who is not, yet that is exactly what happened in Shectman's case. He was removed from his lab and an actual expert in the field, Linus Pauling, verbally abused him for literally decades.

That's not how science is supposed to work at all. If someone finds evidence of something that contradicts current theory, you're supposed to look at their methodology for flaws. If you can't find any flaws, then the scientific method demands you attempt to replicate the experiment to validate it. You're not supposed to dismiss evidence out of hand because the person who found it isn't a leading expert in the field. In Shectman's case, other labs replicated his results and the "experts" still wouldn't budge... to this day in fact Pauling refuses to admit he was wrong.

Conversely, there are too many papers out there now with shoddy methodology that shouldn't even be published, yet because the author is a name in the field they somehow make it into top-tier journals and get cited constantly despite the dubious nature of the research. Again, that's not how science is supposed to work.

"Spurious bullshit," as you called it, is not being weeded out. Rather it is being foisted on others as "fact" because Dr. XYZ who is renowned in the field did the experiment and no one looked closely enough at it or bothered to try to replicate it. The spurious bullshit should be getting weeded out by actual scientific testing (like the studies in the video that were found to be unreliable) and not by mob mentality.

Theoretically, science works great. However, as has already been noted, in the real world in certain fields, the pressure to publish something "substantial" combined with the inability to get grants for certain experiments because they aren't "trendy" right now causes scientists to self-limit the kinds of research they undertake, which is not at all great for increasing human knowledge.

Another problem is the "expert opinion" problem--when someone with little reputation in the field finds something that directly contradicts the "experts" in the field, they often face ridicule. The most famous recent case of this was 2011 Nobel Prize winner Dan Shechtman, who discovered a new type of crystal structure that was theoretically impossible in 1982 and was roundly criticized and ridiculed for it until a separate group of researchers many years later actually replicated his experiment and realized he had been right all along. This web page lists several more examples of scientists whose breakthrough research was ignored because it didn't match the "expert consensus" of the period.

Finally, in the humanities at least, one of the biggest problems in research that uses a quantitative approach (i.e. statistics) is that researchers apply a statistical method to their data, such a as a t-test, without actually demonstrating that whatever being studied follows a normal distribution (i.e bell curve). Many statistical tests are only accurate if what is being studied is normally distributed, yet I've seen a fair share of papers published in respected journals that apply these tests to objects of study that are quite unlikely to be normally distributed, which makes their claims of being "statistically significant" quite suspect.

There are other statistical methods (non-parametric) that you can use on data that is not normally distributed but generally speaking a test of significance on data taken from a normally distributed pool is going to be more reliable. As is noted in this video, the reason these kinds of mistakes slip through into the peer-reviewed journals is that sometimes the reviewers are not nearly as well-trained in statistical analysis as they are in other methodologies.

Thanks!

If I'm doing the math correctly, the universe is expanding at around 46 miles per second, which is around 165,000 mph. Is there some reason why humans could not overcome this speed limit? It doesn't seem that exceptionally fast (no where near as fast as the speed of light), and if you accelerate slowly to it, like over several days or weeks, the g-forces involved wouldn't be that extreme, would they? The video didn't really explain why we could never go fast enough to overcome the expansion rate.

Also, I thought most theortical physicists like Stephen Hawking believe that in the future technology could advance enough to allow us bend space-time and hence travel "faster than the speed of light" without actually travelling faster than the speed of light, basically like folding a piece of paper and sticking a pin through both sides. When you lay the paper down flat, the two holes will seem quite far away from each other, but when you fold the paper, the holes are right next to each other. Our current understanding of physics doesn't rule out the possibility (at least from a mathematical perspective) although generating the energy necessary to perform such a feat would of course be problematic.

Thanks for getting this Sifted!