Esperanza
1yr ago
Google's board was heavily influenced by Bill Campbell, a Svengali-like figure in Silicon Valley. He like the cut of Sundar's jib and chose him as the bright young thing that should be promoted. Most of Google's board was in awe of Campbell, so gave the nod to Sundar when it came time to put a PM in charge of Chrome, replace Andy at Android, replace Alan as boss of all engineering, and then replace Larry as CEO. It is difficult to capture quite how much influence Campbell had on Google's promotion decisions. Even after his death, Google's board would ask "What would Bill say?" Why Campbell liked Sundar is another question entirely. Sundar is not technical at all - his undergraduate and masters is in materials science, which has nothing to do with IT (well, outside of chips). Bill liked non-technical, slightly unpolished people. It may be that Sundar was the one he met that day.
Esperanza
1yr ago
When I think of Pichai's character and reputation, I think of my mother, who ascended to a relatively senior position (after taking several years out to have children) in a very large business by being relatively quiet and speaking softly and authoritatively at the end of meetings while the men around her would shout and argue and fight.
I don't know your mother, who may well speak softly and authoritatively, but I don't think Sundar is like that at all. He always managed up, and once he achieved positions of power, completely ignored his reports. No-one claims that Android was more successful under Sundar than it was under Google. Then, when Sundar ran all of engineering, I don't think anyone can point to something achieved during that time, other than the huge success of AI research. It is hard to give Sundar credit for that, since he completely mismanaged bringing that work to product, and let Google, who did most of the research, be eclipsed by OpenAI. Since he became CEO in 2015, it is hard to point to a successful new Google endeavor or product. This contrasts with Satya, who meets with perhaps too many people. If Sundar is known for anything, it is being indecisive and failing to make decisions. On the other hand, not making any decisions turned out quite well for Google for at least the first five years of his tenure. We will see if Sundar's unwillingness to act resolutely is Google's undoing.
Esperanza
1yr ago
I know quite a few (often rowers etc recruited for sports).
St Paul's or Eton, is the question I suppose, as there are seven of one and five of the other. Heavyweight men's crew is the only sport like that, however. It has 27 white foreigners, which is probably more than all the other sports put together. The other sports with substantial numbers of white Europeans is women's Field Hockey, with 13, and Men's soccer with 11.
The rest of the sports have a few sprinkled here and there, such as the three Israeli women in Track and Field, Eden Finkelstein, Shaked Leibovitz, and Estel Valeanu. Skiing has 2 Scandanavians, both male. Women's soccer has 5 Europeans, but one is Black. As I mentioned, Men's soccer has 11, (Iceland, England, Germany, Serbia, Monoca, Slovakia (2), Finland, Norway, New Zealand, and Sweden). Men's heavyweight crew is the big outlier. The other three crew teams have 4 (+ 7 antipodeans) combined (including another boy from St. Pauls).
My guess is 7% are Jewish, and perhaps a fifth or sixth of that is non-white (ie. half-Asian or half-black) Jews, meaning only 5-6% of the ‘white’ bucket is Jewish.
Stanford has 550 Jewish undergraduates, down from 600. This is about 8%, and indeed, about 1 in three white kids are Jewish in my experience. When I was there last, Harvard seemed significantly more Jewish than that. If Harvard really is less Jewish than Stanford, that would be a very big turnaround.
It is also, for example, extremely unlikely that almost 1% of Harvard admits are fully or even half native, or that 3% are half or more native Hawaiian or Mormon Samoans. Most likely both groups, especially the latter, are predominantly white.
I would guess the Hawaiians are mostly Asian, as that is the plurality there. Native Americans are mostly white, but what matters is tribal affiliation, not blood quantum.
The Crimson’s stats also separate ‘mixed race’, which will largely be half-white, half-Asian
I agree but would guess that almost all are half white half Asian, as all other mixes choose the better choices for college admission (Hispanic, Black, Native, or Pacific Islander). 3% of 20-24 year olds are mixed race in the US, so this group is hugely over-represented.
Esperanza
1yr ago
I suppose it depends on whether you think the Ivy League serves just the North East, or all of America, but the Ivy's ranged from 13% to 40% Jewish. Jewish people are about 2% of the US, (or 2.5% if you include people of other religions with Jewish affinity.) Jewish people were over-represented by a factor of five to twenty, with 12x being the norm for Harvard and Yale. This is not three times over-representation.
Fifty years ago, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published a celebratory article with the title: “Doors of Ivy League Colleges Reported Wide Open for Jewish Students.” Reporting that in 1967, “40 percent of the students at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania are now Jewish. At Yale, Harvard and Cornell, the Jewish student number between 20 and 25 percent, while between 13 and 20 percent of the students at Dartmouth, Princeton and Brown are believed to be Jewish.”
In comparison, Asian students outnumbered whites at Berkeley for the first time in 1991. At the time, California was 69% white and 9.6% Asian, so Asian kids were over-represented by a factor of 7. Until 1991, Asian kids had lower SAT scores on average, but this did not count back then, it seems. White/Asian scores tracked together until they changed the SAT in 2005 to make it less g-loaded. For all this time, Asian over-performance in the math section was balanced by under-performance in the language side, driven mainly by the heavily g-loaded analogies and vocabulary. There was a big Asian jump in 2002, which I don't understand.
From 1990:
The 1990 SAT averages of major ethnic groups nationally were:
Anglos. 442 in verbal, down 4 points from 1989 and down 9 since 1976, when test scores by ethnic groups were first available; 491 in math, unchanged from 1989 and down 2 since 1976.
...
Asian-Americans. 410 verbal, up 1 from 1989, down 4 since 1976; 528 math, up 3 from 1989, up 10 since 1976.
Esperanza
1yr ago
The part that I don't quite understand is why Phoebe Waller-Bridge, an English feminist? comedian, is being asked to star in and produce action shows. She was asked to star "with Donald Glover on a Mr. and Mrs. Smith series, based on the 2005 film." That failed due to "creative differences" and now "Waller-Bridge would write (but not star in) a Tomb Raider series." Both of these were roles that Angelina Jolie had, and she is among the handful of women who can carry an action movie.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge's standout hit is Fleabag. I have seen (part of) the first episode. I find it hard to describe the genre, but it is British scatological humor. Think French and Saunders or a "Carry On" movie but with more toilet humor. It is about as far from action movies as it is possible to get. Perhaps the show is good, as "In 2022, Rolling Stone ranked Fleabag as the fifth-greatest TV show of all time" (beaten by the Wire, Breaking Bad, the Simpsons, and The Sopranos, beating the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mad Men, Seinfeld, and Cheers) but it is not anything to do with action. The other English shows on the list are Monty Python at 33, The Office at 53, Fawlty Towers at 68, and I’m Alan Partridge at 83.
Rolling Stone writes:
Sure, it’s rewarding when a TV show can provide dozens of hours of mirth across many seasons. Sometimes, though, the most satisfying experience comes from series that have a few things to say, say them perfectly, and then shake their heads and walk away before you can follow them into less-interesting story arcs. Never has that short-and-sweet approach been more impeccably executed than with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s tragicomic tour de force, where she played a self-destructive woman so lonely that her healthiest relationships were with her unseen television audience, and with the Hot Priest (Andrew Scott) with whom she fell madly in lust in the second season. And whether she was talking directly to us or not (in TV’s best-ever use of breaking the fourth wall), Waller-Bridge held the audience in the palm of her hand throughout. She made Fleabag as raunchy, as funny, and as sad — sometimes more than one of those at the same time — as she wanted it to be. And then she said goodbye.
Perhaps they intend to make a raunchy, funny, sad, Tomb Raider movie. Maybe it will be great.
Esperanza
1yr ago
I am guessing you are quite tall and like bicycling and ice skating on canals. In many parts of the world, the expectation is that one party pays for entertainment. Only in the Netherlands, and among horrible people elsewhere, is there an expectation that a bill will be split. This seems weird, but it possibly dates back to gift culture. I know that staying for dinner is a horrible faux pas in the Netherlands while it is utterly expected in other places. Many cultures make a huge effort to be hospitable to others, with crazy gift cultures, always bringing food to an event, always buying rounds of drinks, and other patterns like this. The Dutch really are out of step with most places, especially outside Hajnal line North Western Europe.
Esperanza
1yr ago
suggests a level of implicit trust
People with non-zero levels of trust don't carry a gun with them to answer the door. If you go armed to your front door, you are expecting trouble.
Esperanza
1yr ago
At the moment I’m more concerned about the mass assault on innocents in Chicago,
That was yesterday. Today is mass looting in Compton.
Esperanza
1yr ago
About 50% of people sometimes have the urge to jump when on a cliff edge. I agree that you would expect more people to actually jump.
Many people are familiar with the experience of a sudden urge to jump when in a high place, that is, when standing on a bridge or a viewing platform. On the Internet this experience is described and discussed under the term call of the void, while Hames and colleagues [1] have coined the term high place phenomenon. Although it is an experience known to many people, the phenomenon has rarely been studied.
In the only study published on the phenomenon by now, Hames et al. [1] investigated a sample of 432 undergraduate college students. They could show that over 50% of participants who have never suffered from suicide ideation in their lifetime, reported to have experienced the phenomenon at least once in their lives.
Esperanza
11mo ago
I am old enough to remember why suburbia was built, as I grew up in a country where it happened later than in the US. People used to live in tenements - entire families in single rooms in large buildings that were either fancy family homes or industrial buildings. These were hideous places to live. The new estates were built, with modest, by American standards, semi-detached (which means two houses share a wall) homes with small gardens. People did hot have cars, of course, but needing to walk a mile to get to things was far better than living in decaying 18th-century buildings (for strange reasons, all buildings stopped in 1800, so almost all the built environment dated from then).
The new estates were great but would tend to go through a rough patch 14 years after they were first built when the children of the first inhabitants became teens (and were bad). Once this patch ended, they turned into lovely places. The houses were built by the corporation, so people got them at a very large discount. The system broke down later, as the number of decent people declined, and the later estates never became acceptable places to live. A bad element arose that made the estates unlivable, drugs were commonplace, and no one in their right mind would want to live there. Strangely, the newer estates have better quality houses than the old ones. As far as I can tell, the corporation gave decent people houses first.
I had held out hope that these estates would turn around, but that is not going to happen unless the new immigrants do it. It may have been the 70s, or it may be that the later residents were worse, or it may be something else, but the glory that was public housing ended and can not return because enough of the people who are being housed are too antisocial to allow the estates to thrive.
Esperanza
11mo ago
One problem with suburbs is that they don't generate that much economic/tax revenue to support their infrastructure
That can be solved by raising property taxes. In California, prop 13 makes this difficult, as the old rich people are grandfathered in (or whatever the new term is supposed to be).
Esperanza
11mo ago
Beer has been a symbol for guys as to what kind of person you are. If you drink plain American beer, it is mainly to show that you are a regular American guy. Buying Bud Light is now a symbol that you might consider wearing a dress. Some of the people drank Bud Light to show they are just plain normal, not fancy nor nothin, American guys do not want to signal this. People are not boycotting the beer to punish Anheuser Busch. They are trying to avoid being mocked for the next 50 years or so. Scott had a story about how Eskimos brutally teased people for things that happened decades earlier. Rural folk are like that. Someone who accidentally drank Bud Lite risks being asked about his dresses for the foreseeable future. That kind of joke never grows old if you live somewhere backward enough.
Esperanza
11mo ago
Perhaps they did not want you to notice that Megan Markle, Pamela Anderson, and Sofia Vergara were in the ads. These women still have quite a bit of cachet, so it is embarrassing to be pulping their images. For example, here is a post from one day ago of bikini pictures of Ms. Vergara. The people in the ads are still mainstream stars. Selling products is how stars make their money.
Esperanza
11mo ago
The groups you refer to split in a natural way into: Irish, Italian, French, Polish (Catholic) and German, English, Scottish, Scots-Irish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish (Protestant). Russians confuse me. There might be some Catholic Germans, but if there are, they know who they are.
A split by ethnic religion would capture the main division, which is between those groups that arrived before the Civil War, and those that arrived after. The latter were poorer and might still be. Hispanic people would join the newcomers if they still are nominally Catholic.
Esperanza
11mo ago
The entire premise of the book is an attempt to explain why people in Papua New Guinea have so little while white people have so much. Do you recall him addressing the argument that you would get if you posed that question here?
Jared Diamond’s journey of discovery began on the island of Papua New Guinea. There, in 1974, a local named Yali asked Diamond a deceptively simple question:
“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”
Diamond realized that Yali’s question penetrated the heart of a great mystery of human history -- the roots of global inequality.
Diamond knew that the answer had little to do with ingenuity or individual skill. From his own experience in the jungles of New Guinea, he had observed that native hunter-gatherers were just as intelligent as people of European descent -- and far more resourceful.
Diamond just knew that it had nothing to do with "ingenuity or individual skill." He did not have to prove that; he just knew it.
His answer is fabulous, as it presumes that animals and plants can be radically different depending on the continent they are in (hence zebras and horses) but denies that any such difference could exist between people from different continents. A zebra is from Africa, and we can presume that it cannot be domesticated because of its genetics, but genetics only work for plants and animals. We could never countenance such a claim about an African person.
He completely fails to engage with the other side and refuses to even consider the possibility that some countries did well because of individual decisions. It has to be geography that matters, not decisions made by people. Even on this point which he believes because of Marxism, he can not be consistent, as he blames China not dominating the seas on the decision of a single emperor. Basically, he is a hack that refuses to argue.
Esperanza
11mo ago
did someone try breeding taller zebras, and failed even at that?
You can buy zebra semen, and the seller suggests that the stallion has qualities that are worth passing on:
Rarity is my 2004 Grant Zebra Stallion. Rarity has perfect big bold striping and very correct conformation. Rarity has a very rare temperament for a zebra stallion and is quiet with a sweet disposition. These are great qualities to pass onto his foals, making him the perfect stud for hybrid crossing.
They also control who gets to be bred:
Anyone who is interested in breeding both owner and mare must be approved first. I do NOT let just anyone breed to him.
They claim the stallion is particularly tame and that his temperament is hereditary.
This is the reason why we decided to breed with him, to create foals that also have his outstanding temperament. All our mares/jennies that we use for breeding to him have all been carefully chosen. They all have good temperaments and trainable minds.
All the people involved in horses are amazingly focused on the lineage of horses. This passes to zebra breeding, and people really care about which animal breeds with which, as they all believe fervently in selecting for traits.
Esperanza
11mo ago
Aside from your complaint about immigration amnesty, how was Reagan not a right-winger?
Reagan's domestic policies were, courtesy of wikiepdia:
Reduce marginal tax rates on income from labor and capital.
Reduce regulation.
Tighten the money supply to reduce inflation.
Reduce the growth of government spending.
These need to be measured from where the US was in 1980. Marginal tax rates in 1980 were 43% on income over $40k. That could be about $120k now. I would guess that there are people who want to raise taxes that high, but they are no centrists. Income over $20k ($60k) in modern dollars was taxed at 24%.
I don't think tightening the money supply when inflation is at 13% is a right wing idea.
Federal spending under Reagan was about 22% of GDP. This is more then then pre-COVID rate under Trump, but 2.5% less than Biden. In contrast, Obama spent just over 20%.
It is hard to measure regulations.
On foreign policy, Reagan does not seem that right wing, compared to Biden, unless you count being against communism as "right wing."
In hindsight, Reagan looks very centrist. What about him makes you think him more right-wing than Obama? He might have been more right-wing than Nixon (SSI. affirmative action, EPA, clean water act), I suppose. Overall, Nixon looks to the left of Obama on that measure. Obama was very centrist.
Esperanza
10mo ago
Jill Biden has a Ed.D which is a doctorate in education, and enables you to make more money if you are a teacher. It is not a Ph.D. A Ed.D is a practical degree, for people who plan to teach. Most schools pay you more the more education you have, so it makes sense to get the qualification. At Delaware, where she got her degree, you need a portfolio rather than a dissertation, and and Ed.D is part-time for 3-4 years as opposed to a Ph.D. which is full-time for 5 to 6 years.
Esperanza
10mo ago
The oppression was done by loyalists, but the specific atrocities, Balymurphy and Bloody Sunday, were done by the British Army and the Parachute Regiment in particular. Operation Demetrius, when 2000 men were interned, was a British Army operation, so is definitely the fault of Westminster.
Esperanza
10mo ago
Charles C. Tansill
is a revisionist historian, for what it is worth.
In the 1930s, Tansill was a staunch isolationist, arguing that the United States should not participate in World War II.[1] At the same time, he was an advisor to the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.[2] In 1952, Tansill published Back Door to War, a book about the war.[1][6] According to A. S. Winston, Tansill, "blamed Franklin Roosevelt for forcing a peace-minded Hitler into war and used the standard Rudolph Hess line that Hitler wanted only a free hand to deal with Bolshevism in the East."[1] Tansill went on to argue that it was Roosevelt who persuaded Neville Chamberlain to assure Poland that it would be defended by Britain if it was attacked by Germany, which happened in 1939 during the German invasion of Poland.[2] Winston goes on to suggest, "The book became a foundation for revisionist history of World War II."[1]
Barnes is similar, if a little kookier.
In his 1947 pamphlet, "The Struggle Against The Historical Blackout", Barnes claimed that "court historians" suppressed that Hitler was the most "reasonable" leader in the world in 1939, and that France's Premier Édouard Daladier wanted to commit aggression against Germany, aided and abetted by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Edward Raczyński
was later President of Poland in exile and is a reputable figure. "he provided the Allies with one of the earliest and most accurate accounts of the ongoing Holocaust". A statement by him should be believed in this matter.
Łukasiewicz
was a marginal figure who committed suicide in 1951. I find him credible, but much less so than Raczyński. However, Wacław Jędrzejewicz is a completely solid figure, awarded many honors and was a professor at Wellesley.
Tyler Kent, a fascist (in the sense he was a member of a fascist organization, the Right Club), was convicted of spying as he leaked documents to the Germans.
At his trial, Kent also admitted he had taken documents from the US Embassy in Moscow, with the vague notion of someday showing them to US senators who shared his isolationist, antisemitic views.
Wikipedia says:
Isolationist groups in the United States claimed he had been framed and that the trial was an attempted cover-up of an attempt to get the US to join the war. The documents, finally released in 1972, did not support this claim. The papers that Kent had purloined indicated British-American naval co-operation, but they also showed that Roosevelt was not prepared to go further without support from the US Congress or the public.
but this ends with "citation needed" so it is unsourced.
Overall, if the source that says Raczyński vouched for them is accurate, then I believe the documents are accurate. I find the claims of Kent, Tansill, and Barnes unconvincing, as I would expect them to make those claims. I would also place significant weight on Jędrzejewicz, but he was reporting on someone else's beliefs as I read it.
I hate when people mix reliable figures with others that are completely partisan.
Esperanza
10mo ago
any correlation between IQ and life outcomes exists it is mostly due to modern secular society using academics as a means of sorting "winners" from "losers"
Do you think tests like reaction time, or reverse digit span fall into this category? Reaction time is correlated with IQ:
Correlations of simple RT means with AH4 scores were − 0.27, − 0.30 and − 0.32, for age 30, 50 and 69, respectively; and − 0.44, − 0.47 and − 0.53 for 4-choice RT.
0.53 is quite high as these things go.
Reverse Digit Span is 0.45 correlated with WISC-R IQs, according to Jensen.
I agree that tests like WORDSUM (whose correlation with IQ is 0.71) are very culturally loaded and surely are mediated by academics, but I can't see how reaction time, or the backward digit span are similarly affected.
Esperanza
10mo ago
There are other relevant factors in life success, of course.
What would you say are the genetic factors that are relevant? I can think of a bunch of social factors, like being wise enough to choose parents who are rich and live in a free society. The ones that come to my mind are being good-looking, being musical, and being tall. For women, being blonde is a huge win, as are the other obvious things, so long as you don't approximate the Willendorf Venus (and even then?).
There have been great efforts to find other factors that are independent of g, but it seems quite hard to isolate any. Even being good-looking is correlated with having less genetic mutations, and this also weakly correlates with g. In the US:
It shows that physical attractiveness is significantly correlated with general intelligence (r = .126),
Musicality correlates as well.
A remarkable direct correlation between IQ and musical scores in both the control (r≥0.38) and experimental (r≥0.37) groups was observed.
Alas, among non-Hispanic whites, even being blonde correlates with IQ. Brown haired men (104.4) and blonde women (103.2) are on the top of the heap, though blonde women have the smallest standard deviation (12.2) and black haired men (mean IQ 100.1) the largest (15.2).
The conclusions come from a survey of 10,878 white Americans asked about their natural hair colour (Hispanics and African Americans were excluded to eliminate bias). The results showed the average IQ of blonde-haired women was 103.2, 102.7 for brown hair, 101.2 for red hair and 100.5 for black hair.
Esperanza
10mo ago
Some environments reward g a lot more than others. For example, in a food-scarce environment, it might be beneficial to be really small, and people with bigger brains might actually be hurt by the extra caloric needs. This happens in isolated communities, supposedly, and is why Homo floresiensis became small and dumb. In other environments, perhaps size and martial vigor are more useful, harkening back to the old debate between Odyseus and Ajax.
It is only in environments where there are options that intelligence becomes important. If all you can do is scratch a living out of the ground, perhaps g does not matter so much. In contrast, perhaps it matters a lot more for hunters.
Esperanza
10mo ago
they had rich rulers
There is no question, that Mansa Musa, King of Mali, was immensely rich.
impressive art
This is more questionable. Here are some highlights from Met. Which do you consider impressive?
What many African countries have now--a strong man extracting wealth from an oppressed populace
The model African model of a strong man extracting wealth is only possible because of Western (or recently Chinese) trade. The ruler can now exchange what he takes from his people for useful things. Prior to being able to trade with the developed world, there was little reason to oppress the populace as they had nothing (save some daughters) that was particularly worth much to the ruler. It takes a lot of organization and manpower to extract rents from the poor.
Is there an archive of themotte from Reddit around anywhere? It would be nice to train an LLM to generate the response a given redditor would give to a post. I could probably make a model learn that if I could find 50k or so posts. Having a digital Deiseach around might fill the void her absence created, not to mention the other dearly departed.
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