The study you linked is interesting but its results are far from "clear" (see its discussion section but that's probably also just bias and hedging or whatever) and it does have fuck all to do with your proposed thought experiment of a Kaspar-Hauser-like child. Even less so with your confident prediction of how a Kasper-Hauser-like child would turn out. I think you probably know this yourself but these kinds of predictions are something scientists would very, very rarely do - because they know the limitations of their work.

I'm kind of weirded out by this exchange, people here rather confidently express quite a bit of stuff that goes against years and decades of training I received when I became a scientist and I think I'll stop replying now. That was the recommendation of a colleague - who actually is a geneticist - I showed this thread to over coffee as well.

I'd also be - again, genuinely - interested in how you come up with that clear of a statement about smart parents and their non-externally-influenced child, how one would approach that as a research question/design and how - practically - useful this piece of data in and of itself would be when most of us are not Kaspar Hauser or any other conceptual model of a human being that exists without external interdependences.

edit: Sorry, to clarify, you are saying that "Two parents of higher IQ are much more likely to produce an offspring of higher IQ than median" because of genetics as the main determining factor?

Correlations between socioeconomic status and success of one's offspring in educational systems does not mean that you can determine genetics as a relevant factor when thinking about how to structure education and if one is interested in the relationship between success (on whatever metric) in education and family trees.

I'm neither a geneticist nor is English my first language but I've always understood "heritability" to be a term that very much has to do with genetics and the Wikipedia link you provided implies the same. If we are talking about other factors/mechanisms that impact success in educational systems and that express themselves over generations and in family structures - sure, that's basically what I'm saying.

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(Long) edit after a cup of tea and a sandwich spent over the Wikipedia-Link you provided:

I must say, I think that's pretty readable even for me as a non-geneticist. In the context of this thread, there is a lot of interesting info about "Heritability and caveats", "Influences" and "Environmental effects". I've highlighted these quotes for myself while reading:

"Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis."

"Heritability measures the proportion of variation in a trait that can be attributed to genes, and not the proportion of a trait caused by genes."

"Contrary to popular belief, two parents of higher IQ will not necessarily produce offspring of equal or higher intelligence. Polygenic traits often appear less heritable at the extremes."

The whole section on "Implications":

"Some researchers, especially those that work in fields like developmental systems theory, have criticized the concept of heritability as misleading or meaningless. Douglas Wahlsten and Gilbert Gottlieb argue that the prevailing models of behavioral genetics are too simplistic by not accounting for gene-environment interactions. Stephen Ceci also highlights the issues with this assumption, noting that they were raised by Jane Loevinger in 1943. They assert that the idea of partitioning variance makes no sense when environments and genes interact and argue that such interaction is ubiquitous in human development. They highlight their belief that heritability analysis requires a hidden assumption they call the "separation of causes", which isn't borne out by biological reality or experimental research. Such researchers argue that the notion of heritability gives the false impression that "genes have some direct and isolated influence on traits", rather than another developmental resource that a complex system uses over the course of ontogeny."

Since this is a US-centered forum, this also seems relevant:

"In the US, individuals identifying themselves as Asian generally tend to score higher on IQ tests than Caucasians, who tend to score higher than Hispanics, who tend to score higher than African Americans. Yet, although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that between-group differences in average IQ have a genetic basis. In fact, greater variation in IQ scores exists within each ethnic group than between them. The scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain average differences in IQ test performance between racial groups. Growing evidence indicates that environmental factors, not genetic ones, explain the racial IQ gap."

All that patent and legal business is probably a more important/existential concern and a go/nogo-factor if you want to be a commercial player in a market-driven environment and less so for an entity like the FSF.

btw: I think I have a reasonably solid idea of a range of fabrication environments, the oldest piece of machinery I'm responsible for in my professional life is about 70 years old (its basic design is decades older) and some of my personal stuff (sewing machines, mostly) is more than 100 years old. I'm really not against using what works at all.

Seriously though, of course you can make a living with old tools - however, even the village metal workshop around here has at least one big-ass laser cutter and a CNC mill next to all their old(er) lathes, mills, brakes, presses and other toys. Many oldschool fabricators I spoke to over the last few years are quite interested in what laser welding brings/will bring to the table. Basically all smaller fabrication companies I've seen (the long tail of the car industry and other bigger industries, mostly) are continually upgrading their infrastructure with all sorts of robots and other automation widgets. And so on.

If you like visual media, the "Strange Parts" YouTube channel is an interesting source for glimpses into modern, mostly Chinese factories: https://www.youtube.com/@StrangeParts/

Since you're asking about pick and place specifically, https://www.opulo.io/ is an interesting example of how far/cheap you can push such machinery (and the design in and of itself is interesting from a manufacturing point of view). Not all that relevant from a mass-production point of view, though.

btw: If we understand "machine shop" as a mass production environment with modern, integrated production lines, it is my anecdotal experience that there is a massive amount of muckery and fuckery involved in getting such an environment to run (usually called "integration" or some such which probably looks better on business cards). There's also a good chance that over the years - or decades - different people will engage in further iterations of the muck-pile to modify the system for new requirements from high on up or weird edge cases, to replace components that are no longer available with other stuff or to do whatever else the day might call for.

I'm also kind of curious as to know what kind of machine shops you base this on. Most production companies, labs and even small fabricators I've seen have continued to develop and to optimize their infrastructure and processes. To take the numbers discussed here: 50 years ago, (C)NC machines, CAD and CAM were in their infancy. And that stuff certainly has changed some things in the world of fabrication.

If "necessity" means work-related: On my work-issued iPhone, I call and (briefly) text with people, triage some e-mail, have a look at calendars, take some in-situ photo/video, refer to a few notes, and so on. I don't have the screen time feature turned on but I guess I'm also below 30 minutes on that phone on most days. The exception being traditional voice calls which occasionally can go on for (much) longer than those 30 minutes, depending on what's happening. However, most of my more regular, scheduled conversations happen in real-life or in Zoom, Webex or other such platforms and not on a mobile phone.

The only work-related thing that I can think of OTOH which really required me to use a mobile device is hardware that requires an app to work (which is fortunately still rare).

- I've lusted over the fantasy of having a pocket knowledge machine / tricorder-like thing since long before PDAs and later smartphones. Okay, still no full tricorder, but boy, are smartphones ever useful. I really like having a pocket GPS, music/audiobook player, translation device, library, basic sensor package, gaming machine, backup for my most important data, password/document manager and general purpose computing device in my pocket.

- I was a child before the web was a thing but I very much grew up on computers and the web and I have seen and/or experienced all sorts of addictive, gamified and otherwise nasty things those technologies brought with it (or enabled). I'm rather happy to have a bit of context from a time before those technologies and I'm also happy about having grown out of most of my computer-related bad habits and behaviours before the web and those technologies were what they are today.

- I made a decision to get off most social media with the exception of a few forum-like things at the point where I felt that it was no longer mostly about expanding real-world connections. Must have been around 10-12 years ago, I think.

- In my personal definition of "social media", I've included most messengers and certainly the way many people seem to use them. This abstinence can cause quite a bit of social friction and peer-pressure and I'm not entirely sure if I could (or would want to) "resist" had I not first grown up without any messenger and later with (occasionally excessive use of) IRC, ICQ and many that came after.

- If I feel the need to publish something, I'll do it via some long-term channel (blog, newspaper, journal, conference, ...).

- Even without being on social media, it's still relatively easy to keep up with current (app-/web-)culture enough to not get laughed out the room or viewed as a hopeless old fart by younger people (which is important to me because I work with them pretty much daily).

- Even without being on social media, it's still quite easy to keep up with the news and important developments in whatever field might interest you.

- Often, I read "my government / bank / other organization made me have an app / a smartphone". In those cases, I often ask myself it it's a matter of convenience or if those voices come from some context that really does not have any other options. Because I really hope there are no countries where you can't get/use any bank account without an app and I even more sincerely hope that most countries make it illegal to require mobile apps (or even internet access) for any important government service as the only option.

Here's the changelog: https://ndocs.repebble.com/changelog

A tank weighs like 60 tons or so. The engine and transmission alone are heavier and bulkier than whole cars, so basically none of the infrastructure you have available in many car factories is dimensioned correctly. Modern armor is composite and includes stuff like ceramic components which you would not have the machines, processes and knowledge for. "Gigacasting" sounds impressive but it's "just" aluminium injection molding that can do relatively big and integrated parts and you can't just fill in some steel-composite armor material mix in the hopper and have a fully formed Abrams fall out the other end of the machine. Things like barrels are forged (I think), which you again would not have the right infrastructure for. And so on and so forth.

My guess would be: It would be more sensible to apply division of labor and - for example - have many of the car factories spit out CNC and cast parts that fit into their usual production envelope and are then integrated into other/bigger systems at your friendly neighborhood US armory (Krauss-Maffei or wherever, more likely), specalized stuff like aircraft parts from their Gigapresses, have them do electrical work for other systems, produce lighter (support-)vehicles, use their skills and infrastructure in quick mass production for things you really need a lot of (shells, basic supplies for your war-torn population's needs, and so on), have their prototyping labs work on more cutting-edge/improvised stuff like the Drones we see in Ukraine and Russia. I'm sure there are plenty more good (terrible) ideas to be had.

Seriously though, if I understand you correctly, you want people to be critical of stuff like location sharing and whatnot but your way there somehow involves to normalize said whatnot completely. I don't really follow.