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Crowstep


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 06 08:45:31 UTC

				

User ID: 832

Crowstep


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 06 08:45:31 UTC

					

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User ID: 832

Great job. If we're going to have PMC it might be worth adding failson

I'm pretty sure demand for fast food is much more elastic than you're suggesting. You can't use misanthropy as an excuse for ignoring the fact that consumers do respond to higher prices and firms respond by lowering them.

Plus cheaper food, cheaper clothes, cheaper flights, cheaper cars and longer lives.

Housing is getting more expensive due to regulation & immigration rather than cost disease, and healthcare spending is going up because the developed world has a larger proportion of older people who are living longer (partly due to better healthcare). In countries with good housing regulation and immigration control, house prices go down over time.

Free trade and specialisation are the forces pushing prices down. If you abandon them for mercantilism, you get expensive essentials and expensive consumer goods.

I think we can cherry pick the data and have it any way we want in picking our specific cases to compare that make our points.

Jeroboam's list wasn't cherry-picking. It's literally a list of the richest Americans.

But let's expand it to Britain and see what we get.

  1. James Dyson - Wikipedia suggests a wealthy enough background for his parents to afford private school, but nothing spectacular. Made his fortune as an entrepeneur.
  2. Jim Ratcliffe - Solidly working class background. Father was a joiner and they lived in a council house
  3. S.P. Hinduja - Seems to have inherited a family business, which started with his father's work as a trader in colonial India
  4. Hugh Grosvenor - A literal aristocrat
  5. Michael Platt - Father was a university lecturer and mother was an administrator. Upper middle class background
  6. Denise Coates - Seems to have inherited her father's business. Her father had a working class background
  7. Anthony Bamford - Seems to have inherited a family business. Comes from a long line of businessmen
  8. Richard Branson - Father was a lawyer, mother was an air hostess. Made his own fortune.
  9. Andrew Currie - Wikipedia says he went to a grammar school, which means he passed the (meritocratic) test to get in
  10. John Reece - Seems to have worked his way up through various businesses, although not much information

So we have one aristocrat, a mixture or working and middle class backgrounds, and a few inheritors of family businesses. Seems to me like IQ is the main factor here. Even those who inherited their wealth have demonstrated their high IQ through successfully managing large businesses, and of course, IQ is arguably more heritable than wealth, since wealth can be squandered in a way brain cells can't.

Also, from the new Scientist article you posted:

On the surface, Zagorsky’s analysis confirms the findings of previous studies linking higher intelligence with higher income. “Each point increase in IQ test scores is associated with $202 to $616 more income per year,” he says. For example, a person with a score of 130 (in the top 2%, in terms of IQ) might earn about $12,000 more per year than someone with an average IQ score of about 100.

On the surface, people with higher intelligence scores also had greater wealth. The median net worth for people with an IQ of 120 was almost $128,000 compared with $58,000 for those with an IQ of 100.

But when Zagorsky controlled for other factors – such as divorce, years spent in school, type of work and inheritance – he found no link between IQ and net worth. In fact, people with a slightly above-average IQ of 105 , had an average net worth higher than those who were just a bit smarter, with a score of 110.

So IQ predicts both earnings and wealth, but goes away when you control for years spent in school (a consequence of IQ), type of work (a consequence of IQ), divorce (a consequence of IQ) and inheritance (which obviously correlates with IQ, since you need a high IQ to earn enough to pass on a significant amount to your children).

That study controls away the very thing it's supposed to be measuring.

I really don't think Zendaya was mere diversity casting. She's a popular actress and her character is described in the books as being 'skinny, with an elfin face' and having 'darkly elfin features'. When I heard she was being cast as Chani, I immediately thought she was the perfect choice. And if we're in agreement that the Fremen should have been Bedouins, well, here's what a real Bedouin girl looks like. You can hardly claim Zendaya is too dark to play the sci-fi version of her.

I'm pretty sure they cast the character as an African woman because the actress playing Chani (Zendaya) is biracial, and if her father is going to played by European Javier Bardem, one African parent is necessary for her ethnicity to make sense.

Although frankly I'd have preferred if they'd recast all the Fremen with Arab actors. It may not be canon, but in my head the Fremen are Bedouin, damnit!

Who is 'them' in this context? Bob isn't planning to marry twins, he's planning to marry an individual woman.

Sorry to call you out over a minor thing but the misuse of the gender neutral they is a terrible grammatical trend. Why withold information from your listener if that information is built into the grammar of the language you're using?

I think you'd do better to emphasise personal risk to him. In the vein of 'she clearly has a high libido and seeks sexual novelty, how do you think she'll react when she gets tired with her married sex life?'

Appealing to (your) revulsion or asking him to not marry the woman he loves because of abstract second order effects isn't going to help.

I can assure you, the fact that France doesn't measure statistics based on race doesn't mean that it lacks urban dysfunction or racial grievance. In fact, I'm not sure if this policy makes any practical difference compared to other European countries that do measure this stuff.

And while police and other organs of the state may not officially measure race or ethnicity, they do measure 'where your grandparents were born' which is effectively the same thing.

Median white household income in 2021 was $74,932, median black was $48,297

Which, notably, is around $1,000 higher than the 2021 median household income in the UK, as well as higher than 2/3 of European countries.

I guess it really demonstrates how much these are really zero-sum status concerns. Black Americans are, globally speaking, rich.

'Weak affirmative action' as you describe it, doesn't exist. It can't exist, because, outside of academic studies with fake resumes, there is no such thing as two equally qualified candidates. Equally qualified candidates would have to be literally identical, and real candidates obviously differ in terms of their work experience, academic background and interview quality.

In practice, 'tie-goes-to-the-runner' acts as a fig leaf for more aggressive discrimination. I've seen this first hand. I had to shortlist candidates for an academic programme, giving each one a score. This list then went to the higher-ups, who simply removed the five lowest scoring male candidates, even if they had higher scores than the female candidates. The remainder were given offers. Although the official guidance said preference should be given to the 'minority gender' when deciding between two equally qualified candidates, in practice they just penalised the male candidates.

When I say that women civilise men, I mean within marriages. My expectation is that a higher female to male ratio would lead to fewer marriages as more men play the field as they do at college campuses with similarly lopsided ratios.

My gut is that we'd see more male misbehaviour rather than less. Women have a civilising effect on men.

I would expect a situation with more women would lead to more promiscuity and less stable marriages, more children born out of wedlock, and generally more rootless lives among underclass men.

I've heard it myself a few times from young women, although I would describe it more as a flippant comment, in the vein of 'Oh, big oil will never let electric cars succeed'. I'm not sure about the extent that they literally believed it.

I also saw the 'I wish exceptional women had the confidence of mediocre white men' meme just this morning from a woman who literally has a PhD.

This is just a straight up gish-gallop. None of these arguments address the central HBD thesis (individuals and groups differ in personality and intelligence, and these differences are at least partly genetic). Most of them are non-sequitors, some are just straight up lies.

To address just one randomly selected point, 'Africans have greater genetic diversity than the rest of the world'. This is entirely meaningless because genetic diversity does not guarantee phenotypic diversity on any one trait within an ethnic or racial group. For example, all SSAfrican ethnic groups have darker skin than every ethnic group in Europe. Their genetic diversity doesn't provide a range of skin tones matching the breadth that we see in humanity as a whole, so why should we assume that same genetic diversity would provide a range of IQs matching humanity as a whole.

The Ashkenazi Jews obviously have less genetic diversity than the whole of Subsaharan Africa, but that doesn't stop them having the highest IQs in the world.

I guess a question I would put to a HBD-skeptic would be:

Why do IQ scores correlate with brain size, academic achievement, income and criminality? What is the cause of these correlations if not intelligence?

Seems unlikely. People drank a lot in colonial America, something like three times as much as moderns. My understanding is that the Puritanesque turn against alcohol was a reaction against that, and was carried along by one of America's regular religious revivals.

Putting on my lateral thinking hat, couldn't you just...cheat on her?

Obviously, breaking up with her would be dumb and you would regret it. But you also say that you're currently long distance. Some carefully planned infidelity could scratch your casual sex itch and hopefully make you realise how little you're missing out on.

Of course, you would be betraying your girlfriend's trust, and there is a risk that you get caught even if she doesn't live near you. I suspect that your 'sleepy conservative hometown' isn't overflowing with loose women, and if you are religious then, as you say, the Bible is pretty clear on infidelity.

It goes without saying that if you do listen to the suggestion from the devil on your shoulder some asshole on the internet, you should never tell her or anyone else.

The Gulf states do not have open borders. You can't work there without a visa, and they aggressively deport visa overstayers and foreign criminals.

Plus they are not democracies, don't give citizenship to foreigners (or make it extremely difficult to get) and don't give welfare to non-citizen residents.

The Western countries that we're talking about are democracies that rarely deport illegal immigrants or foreign criminals, give welfare freely to both legal and illegal immigrants and give out passports like candy.

Maybe The Art of Resilience? Or The World's Fittest Book, from the same author?

I started reading the first one before getting bored, but from what I recall it was about him swimming around Great Britain to break some record. Seems to match what you're looking for.

The end of the speech is particularly beautiful:

I'm not trying to have grandkids so they can fund Medicare. I want my kids to have kids so they can learn the Christmas morning is actually better as a parent than as a kid. I want my daughters to have sons and my sons to have daughters, and to care intensely what happens to them, and watch as that transforms their whole perspective on the opposite sex. I want them to see all the little imperfections and embarrassing things that they were insecure about as kids in this other person who's just the best and realise that all that was completely okay and not a big deal it didn't make them unloveable. You're supposed to observe your life again in third person.

Your premise rests on the assumption that AI and robotics are a magic money cheat that will allow a nation of retirees to be kept in the manner to which they have become accustomed. You might be right, and I certainly hope you are. Infinite wealth for humanity sounds great. But on the (perhaps more than) slim chance that technology doesn't go foom and solve all our economic problems, it's probably worth worrying about birth rates.

If only so that politicians don't have an excuse to import millions of low-IQ workers to maintain the dependency ratio.

No, he's not, he's an object lesson in why you don't go to a corrupt shithole under military rule by Nazis and start advocating for the country they're in a state of total war with.

Nazis? Do you believe that Zelensky is a Pythonesque Jewish Nazi or are you using the Russian government's definition of Nazi?

60% infidelity seems insanely high. Figures from the UK* show adultery given as the reason for divorce by 7.5% of men and 8.7% of women. Crime victimhood figures show 5% of adults being victims of domestic violence. Either Americans are far worse than I thought or those figures are wrong. My money is on the latter.

*It's worth noting that until 2022, the divorcing partner was forced by law to given a reason for divorce. Hence most divorces were either codifying separations that had already happened (one of the reasons allowed) or recorded as 'unreasonable behaviour', which was the essentially the dump stat for amicable divorces.

Focusing on stranger violence by men is misleading. When it comes to domestic violence, child abuse and infanticide, there is a much greater balance. Depending on the figures you look at, it is easy to find studies showing that women commit the majority of domestic violence (both reciprocal and non-reciprocal), the majority of child abuse and the majority of infanticide. In addition, lesbian relationships are the most abusive and relationships between gay men are the least abusive, which suggests that men being more violent in general than women is not that relevant when specifically looking at violence within households.

And let's be frank, women's groups oppose men having custody of children because they are reflexively pro-woman. Talking about domestic violence is the best soldier-argument they have, but that doesn't mean it's the most honest. Courts never award custody to known abusers, but that isn't what feminists campaign against. They campaign against laws that allow ordinary, non-abusive men the right to see their children for any meaningful amount of time. These kind of laws exist in countries like France and the Netherlands, and their introduction did not increase family violence. If feminists campaigning against presumption of shared custody laws were really interested in equality or child welfare, they would know this. But as Bryan Caplan points out, their guiding belief is not that men and women should be treated equally by the law (most people believe that), rather, it is the belief that society generally treats men better than women. If men and women are two opposing teams in zero-sum conflict, then any concession to team man is a loss to team woman. Hence, legislation which involves treating men and women equally before the law, which encourages children to have stronger relationships with their fathers and which helps both men and women to not be bound by their gender roles is opposes by activists who supposedly support all these things.

I think you could look at the existence (or absence) of lobbying groups arguing for either side.

If women were being screwed over by divorce courts, we would expect feminist groups to campaign for their reform, whereas as far as I can tell, most feminist lobbying is to stop reform of the divorce courts. Men's groups campaign for the right to see their children, women's groups campaign against laws that would allow them to do this. Divorced men campaign against permanent alimony, divorced women campaign to keep it.

The very fact that the miniscule and powerless men's rights movement focuses mostly on unfair divorce laws suggests that perhaps they might have some legitimate complaints. After all, even if the law is written in a gender neutral manner doesn't mean it needs to be applied evenly. Hell, two-thirds of divorcing women acknowledge that men are treated unfairly when it comes to child custody. I struggle to think of any woman who is known for losing out from an unfair divorce ruling, and yet multiple men come to mind immediately.