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				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
From "The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project":




Here’s something interesting: every single person I mentioned above is of Jewish descent. Every single one. This isn’t some clever setup where I only selected Jewish-Hungarians in order to spring this on you later. I selected all the interesting Hungarians I could find, then went back and checked, and every one of them was Jewish.


This puts the excellence of the Hungarian education system in a different light. Hungarian schools totally failed to work their magic on Gentiles. You can talk all you want about “elitism and a spirit of competition” and “striving to encourage creativity”, yet for some reason this worked on exactly one of Hungary’s many ethnic groups.


This reduces the difficult question of Hungarian intellectual achievement to the easier question of Jewish intellectual achievement.


I say “easier question” because I find the solution by Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending really compelling. Their paper is called A Natural History Of Ashkenazi Intelligence (“Ashkenazi” means Eastern European Jew) and they start by expressing the extent of the issue:




Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data. They score 0.75 to 1.0 standard deviations above the general European average, corresponding to an IQ 112 – 115. This fact has social significance because IQ (as measured by IQ tests) is the best predictor we have of success in academic subjects and most jobs. Ashkenazi Jews are just as successful as their tested IQ would predict, and they are hugely overrepresented in occupations and fields with the highest cognitive demands. During the 20th century, they made up about 3% of the US population but won 27% of the US Nobel science prizes and 25% of the Turing Awards [in computer science]. They account for more than half of world chess champions.




This doesn’t seem to be due to any advantage in material privilege; Ashkenazi Jews frequently did well even in countries where they were persecuted. Nor is it obviously linked to Jewish culture; Jews from other regions of the world show no such advantage. So what’s going on?


Doctors have long noted that Ashkenazi Jews are uniquely susceptible to various genetic diseases. For example, they’re about a hundred times more likely to have Gaucher’s Disease, a hundred times more likely to get Tay-Sachs Disease, ten times more likely to have torsion dystonia, et cetera. Genetic diseases are so common in this population that the are official recommendation is that all Ashkenazi Jewish couples get screened for genetic disease before marriage. I’m Ashkenazi Jewish, I got screened, and I turn out to be a carrier for Riley-Day syndrome – three hundred times as common in Ashkenazi Jews as in anyone else.


Evolution usually gets rid of genetic diseases pretty quickly. If they stick around, it’s because they’re doing something to earn their keep. One common pattern is “heterozygote advantage” – two copies of the gene cause a disease, but one copy does something good. For example, people with two copies of the sickle cell gene get sickle cell anaemia, but people with one copy get some protection against malaria. In Africa, where malaria is relatively common, the tradeoff is worth it – so people of African descent have high rates of the sickle cell gene and correspondingly high rates of sickle cell anaemia. In other places, where malaria is relatively uncommon, the tradeoff isn’t worth it and evolution eliminates the sickle cell gene. That’s why sickle cell is about a hundred times more common in US blacks than US whites.


The moral of the story is: populations can have genetic diseases if they also provide a useful advantage to carriers. And if those genetic diseases are limited to a single group, we expect them to provide a useful advantage for that group, but not others. Might the Jewish genetic diseases provide some advantage? And why would that advantage be limited to Jews?


Most of the Jewish genetic diseases cluster into two biological systems – the sphingolipid system and the DNA repair system. This is suspicious. It suggests that they’re not just random. They’re doing something specific. Both of these systems are related to neural growth and neural branching. Might they be doing something to the brain?


Gaucher’s disease, one of the Ashkenazi genetic diseases, appears to increase IQ. CHH obtained a list of all of the Gaucher’s patients in Israel. They were about 15 times more likely than the Israeli average to be in high-IQ occupations like scientist or engineer; CHH calculate the probability that this is a coincidence to be 4×10^-19.


Torsion dystonia, another Ashkenazi genetic disease, shows a similar pattern. CHH find ten reports in the literature where doctors comment on unusual levels of intelligence in their torsion dystonia patients. Eldridge, Harlan, Cooper, and Riklan tested 14 torsion dystonia patients and found an average IQ of 121; another similar study found an average of 117. Torsion dystonia is pretty horrendous, but sufferers will at least get the consolation prize of being really, really smart.


Moving from medicine to history, we find that Ashkenazi Jews were persecuted for the better part of a millennium, and the particular form of this persecution was locking them out of various jobs until the main career opportunities open to them were things like banker, merchant, and doctor. CHH write:




For 800 to 900 years, from roughly 800 AD to 1650 or 1700 AD, the great majority of the Ashkenazi Jews had managerial and financial jobs, jobs of high complexity, and were neither farmers nor craftsmen. In this they differed from all other settled peoples of which we have knowledge.




They continue:




Jews who were particularly good at these jobs enjoyed increased reproductive success. Weinryb (1972, see also Hundert 1992) comments: “More children survived to adulthood in affluent families than in less affluent ones. A number of genealogies of business leaders, prominent rabbis, community leaders, and the like – generally belonging to the more affluent classes – show that such people often had four, six, sometimes even eight or nine children who reached adulthood. On the other hands, there are some indications that poorer families tended to be small ones…as an example, in a census of the town of Brody in 1764 homeowner households had 1.2 children per adult member while tenant households had 0.6.




Now we can start to sketch out the theory in full. Due to persecution, Jews were pushed into cognitively-demanding occupations like banker or merchant and forced to sink or swim. The ones who swam – people who were intellectually up to the challenge – had more kids than the ones who sank, producing an evolutionary pressure in favor of intelligence greater than that in any other ethnic group. Just as Africans experiencing evolutionary pressure for malaria resistance developed the sickle cell gene, so Ashkenazim experiencing evolutionary pressure for intelligence developed a bunch of genes which increased heterozygotes’ IQ but caused serious genetic disease in homozygotes. As a result, Ashkenazi ended up somewhat more intelligent – and somewhat more prone to genetic disease – than the rest of the European population.


If true, this would explain the 27% of Nobel Prizes and 50% of world chess champions thing.




				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The method of execution should be public — I favor hangings, although I’m open to other methods which are similarly visually evocative without being overly torturous.




Hispanic cultures used the garrote, which seems very comparable to the Anglo method of hanging. Firing squads are appropriate for military personnel.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"POSIWID" is the canonical acronym.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I want to do the opposite; go back to the Philadelphia Convention, offer to take a handful of delegates to the future, let them stay for one year, then send them back to tell their fellows about how their ideas play out.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Pyscho-Pass S01E01 - S01E03: The Social Credit System
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Erased (AKA The Town Without Me) is one of the most beautiful stories I have ever had the privilege of experiencing. It's also only one cour long.


The Promised Neverland is borderline. The first season is incredible, and ends at a natural stopping point, but the ending is a little open ended and definitely leaves room to continue the story. The second season is legendary for how bad it was, and most fans pretend that it doesn't exist. If choose to you treat it as a single-cour anime, I think it meets your criteria. I wrote a longer review on /r/rational.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for April 23, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Maybe juice is not the right word... I'm talking about stuff like chicha morada and agua de jamaica, not fruit in a blender.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for April 23, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I gave up real sugar and high-fructose corn syrup years ago in favor of artificial sweeteners like Splenda, aspartame, and stevia. Last week, I decided to also give up zero calorie artificially sweetened drinks on Jim's advice. It's done wonders for controlling my hunger. On the minus side, non-sweet tea and juice taste awful; I would rather just drink cold water at that point. So that's another source of enjoyment gone from my life.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The Purpose Of A System Is To Do What It Does


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Pyscho-Pass S01E01 - S01E03: The Social Credit System
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


My guess is that you quit roughly one episode too early. The series was recommended to me by a friend, I started watching the first episode, and thought, "okay, this is fairly standard magical girl stuff, I'm not even remotely interested", and then shelved it.




Even if you went into it completely blind, the very first scene of Madoka running through an Escher print and emerging into an apocalyptic cityscape where Homura is fighting an eldritch abomination while "Magia" plays in the background should have tipped you off that this wasn't exactly Sailor Moon or Cardcaptor Sakura.


Now that's how you start an anime.




He kept bugging me, so a couple months later I watched the first episode again, okay, nothing too crazy, watched the second episode, sure, whatever, watched the third episode... and I think it's episode three or four where the story is done winding up, and starts throwing punches.




Madoka is largely responsible for establishing the three episode rule (in the old days, fans used the four episode rule instead, but that was a limitation of VHS technology).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
We supported him. We defended him against his critics. We evangelized his articles.


When you catch your buddy fucking your girlfriend, do you feel mollified if he excuses himself by pointing out that, actually, he never promised to not sleep with her?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If you think China is going to destroy the world, the correct solution is not to destroy the world yourself as if RL is a game of DOTA; it's to stop China from destroying the world. Tell them that doing this will end the world. If they keep doing it, tell them that if they don't stop, you'll nuke them, and that their retaliation against this is irrelevant because it can't kill more Americans than the "all of them" that will be killed if they continue. If they don't stop after that, nuke them, and pray that there's some more sanity the next time around.




Just to be clear, since this is a very common misconception, Eliezer advocated conventional airstrikes on GPU clusters, not a nuclear first strike. He brought up nuclear war because you have to be willing to do it even if the rogue datacenter is located inside a nuclear power like Russia or China and military action therefore carries some inherent risk of going nuclear. But most people read that paragraph and rounded it to "Eliezer advocates nuking rogue GPU clusters", because of course they did.


He elaborates on this on the two addenda to that Times piece that he posted on Twitter, as seen on the LessWrong edition of the article.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The idea that you should find a partner by fucking around through your teens and twenties until you find a girl you want to keep is incredibly recent, though. Basically Europe/Anglo only, between 1960s and now.




You are right about the recency, but sadly wrong about the spread. Hollywood and Harvard have exported the sexual revolution around the world, with a little help from the US military. The false life plan is now the standard across much of Latin America and Asia. I think Muslims in the Middle East and Africa are the last line of defense humanity has against this poison.




So you get ‘sex when you’re young is bad’ combined with ‘arranged/facilitated marriages are evil because they prevent twu wuv, as is anything that even slightly impinges on women’s sexual autonomy’. You can have either position but not really both, especially when you cripple your childrens’ game and then throw them into the tinder meat market at 20.




In particular, mainstream conservative boomers have brought into the cult of education and careerism, especially for women, and expect everyone to not even think about marriage until after they graduate college at 22 and spend a few more years getting established in the workforce. In this, they are in complete agreement with the progressives, dissenting only in believing that chastity should be preserved until then.


But, of course, humans are not made to be virgins until 25; we reach sexual maturity in our teens. That is when we are meant to start having sex and becoming independent of our parents. Instead, we rot in classrooms memorizing random trivia and practicing useless skills, enforced by a legal and social regime that views teen marriage and teen labor as barbaric abuse.


The only possible results are stunted or disobedient individuals.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In other words, he betrayed us once it was no longer in his interest to oppose the woke.


He got rich and famous enough that he managed to get married despite being a textbook beta nice guy; what does he care now about the plight of the incel? He makes his money in the normie-ville of substack and his psychiatry clinic; what use does he have now for cultivating a following by spreading heresies? Being controversial now would only threaten all he has.


Telling heterodox truths is a game for anonymous young single men who have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Established men become assimilated into the system.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for April 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Have you ever tried Ground Control? It's a little old, but I really liked it. Very story-heavy. Focus on formations and maneuvers with a small number of pre-deployed units.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
During the Vietnam War, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara developed a strategy based on objective, quantitative measures such as body counts and kill ratios. The infamous Project 100,000 was based on the idea that a soldier was a soldier (compare, a calorie is a calorie) and that the Army could get the warm bodies it needed by recruiting literal retards.


America lost the war.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


We're in the land of, "Well, you want to learn calculus; let's take a look at your grades in algebra and trig. Here's a reasonable estimate of about how much effort you're going to have to put in. It obviously won't be trivial; it'll take some work to learn calculus. But you can do it if you put in approximately this amount of effort. [And oh by the way, here are a bunch of strategies to help.]"




I don't think the average person can pass the AP Calc exam even if you offer them a billion dollar reward and let them take 5 years of full-time prep.




Your expectations would be wrong. Empirically. From personal experience and the experience of many many many other people. I think you just lack the personal experience to be aware of what it's like. Do you actually personally know anyone who has just done it? Just tracked their calories, lost some weight, then proceeded to eat at maintenance after? Have you spoken to them about their experience? Or are you just guessing in your expectation?




When I was in college, I somehow got it into my head that it would be a good idea to do ROTC, so I spent all summer dieting and exercising to lose weight. I never quite reached the army height and weight standards for my age, but I got close, losing a ton of weight. However:


    

  1. I did not do it by calorie counting; I did it by a combination of low-carb, weight lifting, and running.
    2. 

  2. The routine proved impossible to maintain once classes started.
    3. 

  3. The second I stopped, the weight came back.
    4. 



Anyway, I ended up dropping out of ROTC to focus on math, but that didn't work out, either.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If you can borrow enough money against your expected billion to quit your job and literally redesign your life around being thin, and are willing to do so, my best guess is that most people can manage to keep the weight off for 5 years. But I expect the required measures to be extreme; exercising for several hours every other day, chugging water all day to kill hunger, moving to a cold climate to burn more calories maintaining body temperature, eating bland food like Soylent and MealSquares, avoiding social occasions like birthdays and weddings so that you are not tempted to break your diet, etc. In the worst case, they might have to move to an isolated rural area in Alaska to avoid just driving down to the Walmart for a snack raid. It'd be something like a medical residency, where you endure four years of hell in exchange for a greatly improved rest of your life. And, of course, I expect the weight to come roaring back as soon as the 5 years are over and return to a normal life.


In 2025, a normal life makes you fat. It shouldn't take an extraordinary life to avoid being fat. And, for most of human history, it didn't. Sometime in the last few decades, something changed such that ordinary levels of exercise and satiety and willpower simply aren't enough anymore to avoid being fat. Since most people do not have the slack to redesign their entire lives around being thin, a realistic solution to the obesity epidemic needs to involve either identifying and removing the orange soda or inventing some kind of orange soda antidote. Telling people to just consume less calories than they spend is a useless distraction, like telling an adult who counts on his finger to just study harder for the AP Calc exam.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I hate to do it, but I'm going to go back to the math example. Suppose you were wanting to learn math. Perhaps some relatively higher-level math that only a relatively small percentage of people in the population know how to do. Suppose that the second you asked about it online, before anyone even had time to give some advice, folks were swamping the discussion with claims that it's actually impossible for most people to learn said math; after all, we can just look at the low percentage of the population which has currently learned it! Sagan, that would be a trainwreck every single time. I find this example extra funny, because it's not uncommon for math professors to seriously say things like, "You don't so much learn math as you get used to it." Doing math is also uncomfortable for a lot of people; people do get frustrated and upset when trying, and it is even true that a solid number of them just quit trying. But if every online discussion on math was swamped in the same way online weight loss discussions were, I'd probably be stuck just sighing and saying that you're going to have to just find someone offline to help you or put enough shibboleths in your initial inquiry to ward off the throngs of derailers.




Imagine that, for some reason, wanting to learning calculus was as common as wanting to lose weight (perhaps an eccentric billionaire has promised $100,000 to anyone who can pass the AP Calc exam), but that mathematical talent remained as low as it is our world (where, after we spend 13 years force-feeding everyone math in an attempt to get them to at least understand algebra, it turns out most people cannot deal with negative numbers or division, let alone variables, and top out their mastery of mathematics at memorizing multiplication tables; i.e., 3rd grade). However, the masses were not willing to accept this, and flooded message boards asking for advice on learning derivatives, purchased index cards with terms like "critical point" on them, etc., despite conclusive empirical evidence that the vast majority of people who attempted this failed.


It seems like the very first thing that should be said in such discussions is that most people are not capable of learning calculus, and that if you failed geometry in high school you are probably wasting your time. Specially when it became obvious that OP could not tell the difference between 7-3 and 3-7.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
We tried not having commissars. It doesn't work. It's a power vacuum ready and waiting for one side's commissars to move in. And nature abhors a vacuum.


Liberalism is a unstable pipe dream. The side that wants to win always beats the side that wants to be left alone. Someone's ideology is going to rule. All you can do is decide which side you'd rather see in charge and support it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Nobody brings up CICO as merely an underlying physical mechanism. The implication of CICO is always "therefore, the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more, and it's your own fault that you are fat".


People who are against CICO are not denying thermodynamics; we are disputing that this is in any way a practical guide to action. It's like saying "the way to get rich is to earn more and spend less".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Transnational Thursday for April 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Open Sesame


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I talk to quite a few "Daily Kos grandmas," and they're fascinating to listen to. They have no memory of what they used to believe or interest in what they may come to believe, only a sort of endless present of affirmation and social discipline crafted to maximize their donations to radical groups.




Orwell really had the normies pegged. The sheep switching from "Four legs good, two legs bad!" to "Four legs good, two legs better!" in Animal Farm and the party members not noticing the change from Oceania being at war with Eurasia to Oceania being at war with Eastasia in 1984 probably struck a lot of us as an unrealistic caricature, but, no, that is genuinely what normal people are like.


Or, as the Dreaded Jim put it:




Ninety nine percent of the people The Cominator wants to kill change their beliefs when official beliefs change, and never notice that their beliefs have changed. When we are in power, they will believe what we believe, and never remember ever having believed anything different.




				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Tangential: I always been fond of St. John's advertising slogan for its great books curriculum: "The following teachers will return to St. John's next year: Homer, Euclid, Chaucer, Einstein, Du Bois, Virgil, Augustine, Aristotle, Washington, Woolf, Plato, Tocqueville, Austen, Newton, Cervantes, Darwin, Mozart, Galileo, Tolstoy, Descartes, Freud."


I may not agree with the exact selection of names (Freud was wrong about everything, Du Bois is a diversity requirement, etc.), but I really like the notion of just reading the best books written by the greatest thinkers and writers on a given subject instead of using a random textbook and listening to lectures by a random professor.


My list would be a lot more modern (for basically the reasons given by Eliezer in "Guardians of Ayn Rand"), but the basic idea would be that it is better to learn evolutionary biology by reading Dawkins or physics by reading Feynman than by reading an overpriced $100 textbook.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Related: I just watched Interspecies Reviewers (NSFW), which IMDb sums up as "From elves to succubi to fairies and more, Our heroes: Stunk, a human, Zel, an elf and a hermaphrodite angel named Crimvael are here to rate the red-light delights of all manner of monster girls".


It's way, way better than it sounds; a perfect mix of sexy, comedy, and worldbuilding. I have never seen such a cultured anime in my life.


For the fucc, vote Succ!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah, both sides were going to fuck up the economy, so I ended up voting on social issues, where Trump was the clear winner.