quiet_NaN
3hr ago
The Rightful Caliph has blogged over at ACX that The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs.
He is arguing that while tariffs are an "idiosyncratic obsession of Trump’s" which are not a load-bearing part of the MAGA platform, the fact that he can push through them is a consequence of his cult of personality and him being surrounded by yes-men who will not risk his anger by telling him an idea of his is terrible. So the tariffs in particular point to a broader failure mode of right-wing populism, which he contrasts with the ideological capture of institutions by the left.
Which side’s vices are worse? That’s an empirical question, and the past ten years of national politics have been one long IRB-less experiment. The Democrats made a compelling case for their own inferiority during Biden-Harris, but the Republicans are lapping them pretty hard right now, and I’m prepared to declare statistical significance.
I’m not a fan of either the ideological cults of the left or the personality cults of the right. In the absence of an obvious third alternative, I don’t think there’s a better option than taking either the left or the right as a starting point, identifying them as the lesser evil, and trying to fix their failure modes along the way.
He is then saying that he prefers to salvage institutions captured by the left to Trump's approach of starting without institutional knowledge and just see how things go.
As usually, this is compellingly written. It did not make me update a lot on Scott's politics -- he had explicitly endorsed anyone-but-Trump for the presidential election, and extrapolating that he would not be a fan of the tariffs was not exactly hard. I like how Scott took this issue which has been discussed to the death on the object level, then took a step back and asked "but what is the deeper truth about that political system beyond the object level stupidity?"
As usual for Scott blogs about CW-adjacent topic, there is a lot of discussion going on at ACX.
quiet_NaN
3hr ago
To reply to both you and @RandomRanger, I concede that CW about power. What I was arguing was that it is not primarily about the allocation of resources, money.
I would still argue that the term zero-sum has all the wrong connotations. It vaguely implies rational actors competing over finite resources to maximize some utility function, like me bidding on a coconut you are selling.
In most cases, CW is not like this. The energy spent on fighting the bathroom wars is wildly out of proportion of the actual importance of that issue over the natural state of affairs (if you can somewhat pass and behave normally, you are fine, if you can't pass and/or spy on people, you get treated as a sex pest). The point of fighting the CW is not to achieve a grand strategic victory for your side, but to be seen by your peers fighting the CW. It is mostly performative.
Often, the behavior displayed is not about scoring a win for your side at the expense of the other side (zero sum), but purely on punishing the other side (negative sum). Getting someone for some tweet by doxxing them is a classic CW past-time, after all.
Consider abortion. Depending on whose side holds the majority, some states might allow all abortions up to birth, and some might ban all abortions. I propose that this is a lot worse in satisfying the aggregate preference of the Americans than a compromise solution based on a term limit.
Israel/Palestine is theoretically zero sum (only one side can control a given square meter of land, after all), but in practice it is vastly negative for both sides.
If the point of the CW was to achieve strategic victories for your side, e.g. a power struggle, then one would expect that it would be mostly fought over stuff which actually mattered, and money would be a central angle. People would try to build broad coalitions which would gain them small policy victories. This is not what we are seeing. Instead, we see an outsized focus on small but very emotionally charged theaters, and a trend to prefer the humiliation of members of the other side to actual policy victories.
quiet_NaN
4hr ago
This simply isn't how taxes work. The burden is split between buyers and sellers according to the relative elasticity of supply and demand.
While this is technically true, I think that it is directionally false. Some products are very cheap to produce and have a high profit margin. If Trump is adding tariffs to ransomware payments, then I would expect competent ransomware gangs to keep the price after tariffs the same, because that is based on what their victims are estimated to be willing to pay, not what what it costs to infect their system. (It you tax it at 10000%, it might no longer be profitable, though.)
But most products do not have a very high profit margin. Take non-brand electronics, such as a digital thermometer. The manufacturer of the cheapest acceptable thermometers typically has the ability to scale their production up, so through competition, the market drives the profit margin down. To absorb a 100% tariff, a manufacturer would have to cut their profit margin from 50% to zero. But if they had such a high profit margin, they would probably have long been out-competed.
Now, most non-brand digital electronic toys have a high elasticity of demand, customers might buy all sorts of things just in case because they are cheap, and would be much more reluctant to buy them at 10x the price. So in many cases, what the tariffs would do is simply to prevent a sale.
Trump's world model seems to be that sellers are generally ripping buyers off by taking dollars for what costs pennies to produce, and if he forces them to hand half of their profits to the US government, they will gladly do so because ripping of Americans will still be insanely profitable. I just don't think that he is right.
quiet_NaN
7hr ago
I think that the main difference between a Mars base and AGI is that we have quite a good understanding of the physical constraints of a Mars base.
While SpaceX might have changed the economics of rockets by recycling them, the underlying physics and engineering constraints have been known since ca. 1950. We know what exhaust velocities we can reach, what the delta-v requirements for travelling to Mars are and so on. Absent black swans such as "someone invents a portal gun", we know that the way our constraints work out is very unfavorable, with rather small error bars.
For artificial intelligence, we very much have no underlying theory. We are Daedalus in a world where it turns out that you can craft wings from feathers and beewax which enable a human to fly. While some have been warning that we might get the Bad Ending if we soar to high, the truth in that analogy is that we have no comprehensive theory of heavier than air flight, aerodynamics, composition of the atmosphere and all that. In that world, asking if a man with wings can reach the moon is a question whose answer is purely an error bar, we just don't know. We notice the skulls of the Naysayers before us who had declared that feathers will not stop a man from falling, then that people can only glide downwards, then that sure, by flapping their wings a lot, they can gain a few meters, but surely not more than 50m, and are reasonably reluctant that to declare that the Moon is forever out of reach. On the other hand, in the real world, most straight lines can not be extrapolated indefinitely. So we just throw our hands up in the air and confess we don't know.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
My own view is that of the much more cynical Rand and early Marx: property is what you can defend by force.
That is certainly a pragmatic definition. (I would amend it that getting others -- e.g. a state -- to defend your property on your behalf should also qualify.)
See, for example, Wikipedia on territorial waters:
From the eighteenth century until the mid twentieth century, the territorial waters of the British Empire, the United States, France and many other nations were three nautical miles (5.6 km) wide. Originally, this was the distance of a cannon shot, hence the portion of an ocean that a sovereign state could defend from shore.
The island of the Whisky War would not be considered property because none of the belligerents was willing to station a defensive force on it. And you can put all the flags you want on the Moon, or sell its surface by the square meter, but unless someone breaks the Outer Space Treaty by placing a gun there to defend their claimed property, none of that will matter.
The problem with that definition (which I will call ownership-A) is that it clashes with how the term "ownership" is used in societies where laws regulate such thinks, and where that term generally carries prescriptivist connotations (think "the rightful owner", I will call that ownership-B). The ownership-B relationship is of course contingent on a particular society and even individual.
Examples:
- A person who is keeping a sex slave owns-A their body, but of course nobody can own-B the body of another person in any non-terrible polity.
- Russia owns-A Crimea, but it will be a long time (at best) before most Ukrainians agree that it owns-B it.
- If someone steals a car and gets away with the theft, at the moment of the theft that car was un-owned-A, but certainly owned-B.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Seconded. On most topics, I (grey tribe, generally mistrustful of both government and big business) find my point of view represented by some poster. Sure, we have a lot of fringe people who probably have had few other places to voice their opinion before Musk took over Twitter, and there are few wokes who are willing to engage with what they see as a cesspool of racists.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Nah, that kind of bickering about how big each slice of cake should be is policy discussions, and mostly boring, not ugly. Most of the "good" culture war topics (Dobbs, immigrants, LGBT, gun rights, free speech issues, climate change, Gaza) which are really toxic are not about "how should we divide money between interest groups?" It is always that there are conflicting underlying principles by the different participants.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Ukraine joining NATO would have meant that a major military alliance would sit directly on its border
That was already true before the war (Poland, Baltic states), and even more so after Finland and Sweden joined up.
Russia, like most countries, does not consider every square foot of their country equally important.
Remember of how in the first days of his special military operation, Putin tried to take Kiev? This was not a random whim, but made perfect strategic sense given his objectives. Taking the capital of a country will both disrupt that countries efforts to defend itself and send a clear message to its troops that the war is not going well and it might be better to stop resisting.
If you want to conquer France, a key objective is Paris. If you want to conquer England, you go for London. If you want to conquer Russia, taking Moscow early would be very helpful.
Look at a map. Anyone mad enough to start an invasion of Russia would want to start in Ukraine (or Belarus), and then strike straight for Moscow. It is just about 400km of steppe without big natural impediments. Starting from Finland, you would need to besiege St. Petersburg, and then advance through 500km of heavily forested area before you could invest Moscow.
Now, as I have argued above, even with Ukraine in NATO, Russia would be one of the countries which is least likely to get invaded, but it makes sense that Putin cares a lot more about Ukraine than he cares about Finland or Sweden.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Russia is sitting on the world's second most largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, and they remain a pretty significant deterrent against any nation state which might consider an invasion.
Sure, there is only 400km or so separating Ukraine from Moscow (which is the kind of strategic depth most countries could only dream they had), but they can fortify that at their leisure. Historic precedent is also rather in their favor.
For China, there is no significant military threat from Taiwan. The PRC doing an amphibious assault on Taiwan is plausible, Taiwan being the staging ground for an US-led amphibious assault on mainland China is utterly ridiculous. D-Day succeeded because the Allies were able to field three ground troops for every German. No plausible attacker of China is going to have that kind of advantage.
The three countries least likely to be successfully conquered in the world, by my reckoning, are the US, China and Russia. All three have large standing armies which will enjoy a significant home advantage in any war, and all three have enough nukes to go out with a bang.
Nor is there much political will from anyone to pay the blood price required to conquer them. The Nazis were great at convincing the other superpowers that they were a disease which needed to be burned out to the root. While there certainly is much mutual dislike between the US and the other two, there is just not that deep belief that spending the lives of a generation on defeating the other side is anything remotely assembling a good trade. Russia might care a lot about NATO, but (especially pre-2022, and especially European) NATO countries did not care a lot about either NATO or Russia. If anything, NATO resembled the Wall in ASOIAF -- a militant order whose purpose was widely believed obsolete, an anachronism, a relic.
If the fear of conquest is not the reason for the animosity towards Ukraine and Taiwan, then what is?
I think that there are two reasons. One is cultural dominance. Both China and Russia are somewhat totalitarian. Both would like to claim the set bonuses which come from controlling virtually all people of a certain culture (sans some inevitable diaspora). I will not delve in the question if Russian and Ukrainian are two cultures or two branches of one culture, but simply note that they seem mutually understandable to a degree that Russian and Polish are not, for example. Without Taiwan, the CCP would have control over most of the Chinese cultural output. Sure, some expats would still to run counter-newspapers from the US, but these might lack the critical mass to keep a flame alive which might at some point ignite mass protests within China (not that I am holding my breath, there). Taiwan is the living proof that Chinese culture without communism is viable, and as such is likely seen as a much greater threat than South Korea or Japan.
The other reason, especially for Russia, is force projection. Crimea with its ice-free harbors is not crucial for Russia the country, but it is crucial for Russia the superpower (or major regional power, if you prefer).
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I'm sure the public would be perfectly fine believing that nothing untoward is happening if the media was on the side of the ruling administration and either not talking about it or dutifully framing it and reminding normies that these are people who broke the law and are getting their comeuppance (however fitting that is to the facts).
Kind of tangential, but whenever I hear people complaining that the media is reporting unfairly on Trump (which, to be fair, you are not saying), I want to play a very sad song for that guy on the world's tiniest violin. Trump made his first baby steps into politics by condemning the Central Park Five, and not surprising to anyone with the benefit of hindsight, he was full of shit when he did so. Decades later, he elected the fringe conspiracy theory of birtherism to make a foray into politics in earnest, followed notably by the denial of the 2020 election result. Even his White House press releases look like the ramblings of someone who has long lost contact with anything resembling objective truth. So if his political demise comes at a totally fabricated yellow press story of him fucking a male underage porcupine, I would call that poetic justice.
Now, I am a lot more sympathetic to both deontological and consequentialist arguments against twisting the truth to foil him. The deontological argument is basically that by adopting a Trumpian nihilist irreverence for what is true, the press is basically throwing overboard the most important quality which separated them from him. (Or at least part of it -- see SA on Bounded Distrust.) The consequentialist argument is that you can not out-bullshit the master bullshitter, and that the way to prevail against him is not to get dragged down to his level. (Not that I would call the spinning the MSM did on this story Trump level dishonesty, sure, they did spin it and selectively reported the facts to suit their agenda, but if this was instead a WH press release I would be fully prepared to later learn that Honduras is not a country and people do not have mothers because humans multiply through fission.)
And sure, from some cosmic perspective, Trump probably does not deserve to have lies told about him, in the same way that Billy the fucking Kid did not deserve to have his life snuffed out by a piece of lead.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Presumably, to stay in the US as a minor, you require both (1) being allowed to stay in the US by the US gov (e.g. having asylum, citizenship or being tolerated) and (2) your legal custodian living in the US. In both of these cases, the subject of the custody battle was not a US citizen, so the federal administration had a lot more discretion. WP is not clear on how the custodial case for Walter Polovchak turned out and how federal courts became involved. The general vibe I get from both of these cases was that there was a lot more judicial oversight than in the present case.
Irreparable harm is unavoidable in custodial battles, sure, but I would argue that the proper place to decide how to minimize that harm is family court (which is supposed to take the child's best interests into account), not the whim of some ICE bigwig who is likely happy to fill another seat in the plane, citizen or not.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Ouch, that is fucked up.
Presumably, this means that that the father also does not owe any alimony, since giving someone the duties of parenthood without the rights of parenthood would be plainly absurd?
I jest.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
The fact that a kid has US citizenship does not mean that the the legal system of Honduras will refer to the US courts in any custody decision. So of the parents can not agree on what should happen with the child, the child will be deprived of the right of an US custody court deciding its fate. That would be irreparable harm -- unless Trump is willing to send SEAL team to repatriate the child.
Now, it could well be that the custody battle between father and mother is just a charade meant to delay the deportation of the mother. But presumably the Federal government can expedite that custody process. Unless the mother is due to have another baby (which Trump would prefer not to be a US citizen), I don't exactly see the urgency.
Also, no matter how you spin it, deporting two kids aged 2 and 11 along with their mother is terrible optics. The executive has some leeway in whom to deport, so Trump can not hide behind "just following the law" here. Presumably, Trump has already gotten rid of all the gang members, and the men with random tattoos and the people accused of a crime and "mothers of US citizens who went to their ICE check-ins" are the only ones left?
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think the word privilege is mostly used by wokes. For them, recognized sources of privilege are ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and being able-bodied1. Social class is not part of it.2 Fighting for the rights of some straight white cis-men would be giving aid and comfort to the enemy, after all. Also, this makes determining the privilege level of random strangers so much more convenient -- just check their skin color and their gender, and if the person is openly LGBT or in a wheelchair. No need to delve to deep into their childhood or finances. The good news is that a poor white guy can still be an Ally, just as a rich white guy. But for cultural and economic reasons most Allies end up being well-off whites (it is much easier to support BLM when you live in a gated community and are a lawyer than when you live in a flat downtown and are a small time store owner). And the label the SJ left uses for (mostly poor, mostly white) folks who are not on board with their platform is, or course, "deplorables".
Personally, I think that economic inequality is likely the most significant inequality within Western societies, and most of the difficulties certain ethnicities encounter are downstream of them being economically disadvantaged. But I also believe that there are a lot of other inequalities, and that crucially that it is not useful to simply sum them up -- that there is no single scalar score which describes privilege in a useful way. Being white is advantageous in some ways. Being male can be an advantage in some situations. Being female can also be an advantage. Being beautiful, young, or hot can be an advantage or disadvantage depending on the situation. It very much depends on individual situations, specific cultural contexts (being gay is orders of magnitude less of a deal if you are living in a student dorm in a coastal city than if you are living in a rural house with your religious parents, for example).
Regarding Vance, part of the process of swearing fealty to Trump is that you deny that he lost the 2020 election, and in my mind, this is a severe moral failing which can not be excused by having had a difficult path in life -- not unless your defense is "I would literally starve unless I took a job in the White House".3
1 Terms and conditions apply. Being on the spectrum might gain you a iota of sympathy, but will not protect you from accusations of toxic masculinity, for example.
2 Yes, the pdf you linked uses economic observables. So technically poor white people get awarded points. I am just arguing that this is not how people actually move up on the totem pole of victimhood in the real world.
3 I suppose that SJ also has plenty of shibboleths, but mostly they require people not to voice certain ideas (e.g. HBD), and don't require them to loudly proclaim that the sky is green like Trump does.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think that half of the effect of alcohol is entirely placebo. Legally and socially, we give a lot of slack to any behavior displayed while inebriated. So being drunk gives you plausible deniability to act on your desires (within reason) without being judged by society or yourself.
For example, consider sexual promiscuity1 in women. Some women are not interested in causal sex, and some are openly promiscuous -- which is typically seen as defection by some other women and invites some social censure. But another strategy for women who are into causal sex is to only display promiscuous behavior when drunk2. Something like "sure, I made out with a stranger in that club, but I was drunk, so it does not count". I might be talking out of my backside here3 but I think it is likely that for a given sex act with a stranger, the fraction of women who would be willing to engage in it while inebriated is 2--3 times the fraction which would engage in it while totally sober.
1 Not that I find anything wrong with that, if there was an endless supply of strangers who mutually wanted to have sex with me, I would probably be rather promiscuous.
2 Of course, this is complicated by the fact that inebriation is also frequently desired for non-instrumental reasons. Which is what makes the plausible deniability work in the first place.
3 The only thing which would qualify me less would be an ordination into the RCC.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I am not sure that I see the similarity between "the people on the top got lucky" and QAnon.
Mostly everybody has a story which explains why they are not on the top, and "the people at the top just got lucky" is one such story, while "the people at the top are all lizardmen, and they won't allow humans to join" is another.
The other thing to consider in "hard work" vs "getting lucky" is that being a hard worker is not 100% a choice, but also subject to genetics and nurture, e.g. governed by luck at least in part.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I have to think that very much feels like a Disney fairy tale ending. The good girl (here: the US) did her work (here: solved alignment) and gets rewarded (by the trivial reward of gaining global dominance), while the bad girl (here: the CCP) did not do her work and get's punished.
It seems to be targeting the median six-year-old, but perhaps there is some overlap with US policy wonks.
The way this story is going to turn out is that China, by not caring about alignment is the first to summon ASI. Then the ASI is either aligned-by-default (in which case we will have more red and fewer stars on the flags when we settle the galaxy), or it is unaligned and will decide that it requires the atoms which build our world for something else. There is no moral except "coordination failure is bad", but that is something you need a median ten-year-old to understand.
The ASI's engineer China to adopt democracy, but what does that even mean? The centralized AI's have already shown that they can manipulate the public in whatever way they want, does anyone expect them to stop their manipulations at that point? (Nor are these manipulations necessarily evil, but just come from the fact that if you have a lot of policy power and a lot of foresight, you can't help but notice the electoral consequences of your choices. Any decision branch which ends with "and then The People will vote an anti-AI party into power, and will proceed to settle policy the 19th century way" will not be considered by even the most aligned AI. A fig leaf of voting (for what? A figurehead politician? A utility function?) does not change that such a system would be much closer to China's vision of the state than the vision of the founders.)
But if the best way to get the US to care about alignment is "unaligned AI is a national security risk", then whatever.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Eating shit has a comparable health effect to living in the sewers.
This is more like "if you sleep on the ground in the woods, it is probably not worthwhile to spend a lot on makeup".
quiet_NaN
4d ago
We do not know that this public library is woke.
Two kinds of libraries might carry offensive queer books:
(1) woke
(2) free speech
You can tell them apart by looking at how they treat books that the wokes hate. Did they get rid of Harry Potter because JK Rowling is a vile TERF? Did they get rid of Twilight because it perpetuates heteronormative and sex-negative stereotypes? If so, that is bad and they should just carry material which offends nobody, which will make them terrible libraries.
If not, then I think in a world where virtually every teen owns a smartphone and finding any act of bestiality just by entering it in a search engine prompt, the shock value of that crudely drawn BJ is minimal. Just write your own book in which two straight cis-gender characters do some chaste dating, marry in a church ceremony and then engage in unprotected PIV sex in their wedding night, and you get to draw a crude picture of that process as well if you like.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
From their links which do not go to youtube or what I presume are amazon pages of sex toys, it seems like the gist of the complaint is that some high school refused to remove two books from their library.
Sure, having a school which allows a book in their library which contains a crude comic of some guy (?) giving another guy (?) a BJ is exactly like the teacher of your daughter and 70% of your school board being fucking machines who are presumably going to rape her or something.
I mean, we had that story with a school district and some ruling wrt religious objections, but that sounded much more serious that this "random school has slightly naughty queer book, and even after possibly someone unsympathetic to these books being elected to some position, they still did not remove them. The soap box, the ballot box have failed, the jury box is just a waste of time so now it is time for the cartridge box!!!11"
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Six members of the Milwaukee ICE ERO Task Force planned to take part in the arrest of Flores-Ruiz on April 18, 2025. This included ICE ERO Deportation Officer A, Customs and Border Protection Officer A, FBI Special Agents A and B, and Drug Enforcement Administration (“DEA”) Special Agents A and B. The agents were generally dressed in plain clothes and intended to effectuate the arrest in as low-key and safe of a manner as possible.
No ATF? No FEMA? Not even the Coast Guard or the Marshall service? How could a mere six agents from only four federal agencies possibly hope to prevail against an unarmed immigrant?
And no, I checked, the badge of the "ERO Task Force" features a DHS seal with an eagle, not a scantly clad manga girl. Missed opportunity there. Sad!
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I just abbreviated them:
Blablabla Antitrust Civil Process Act blablabla or [....]
Let me try to parse this.
-
[subject] Whoever,
- [intent] with intent to avoid, evade, prevent, or obstruct compliance, in whole or in part, with any civil investigative demand duly and properly made under the Antitrust Civil Process Act,
-
[act] willfully
-
withholds,
-
misrepresents,
-
removes from any place,
-
conceals,
-
covers up,
-
destroys,
-
mutilates,
-
alters,
-
or by other means falsifies
-
-
[object of act]
-
any documentary material,
-
answers to written interrogatories,
-
or oral testimony,
-
-
[required attribute of object] which is the subject of such demand [e.g. of the ACPA];
-
[alternative act] or attempts to do so
-
[alternative act] or solicits another to do so
So, for that paragraph to apply, we require
a) a civil investigative demand duly and properly made under the Antitrust Civil Process Act
b) someone acting with intent to avoid, evade, prevent, or obstruct compliance to that demand
c) that someone doing bad things to materials, interrogatories or testimony related to that demand (or incites others or attempts that).
To my knowledge, there was no ACPA demand, the judge did not act to obstruct compliance with such a demand, and a person is not a valid object to act on to fulfill the act being criminalized by that paragraph.
It looks to me that this is meant to criminalize "oh shit, we are under anti-trust investigation. Let us quickly shred all the documents, or cook our books". In one dimension it is extremely broad (anyone can commit it), but it requires intent (which is often hard to prove) and pertains only to something very specific (demands under the ACPA).
I have no clue why the hell Congress would put that specific case of destruction of evidence (of which there are certainly more, my guess is that you will also go to jail for shredding evidence you are required to surrender in labor, racketeering, or environmental investigations -- just not under that statue) with obstruction of justice.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Around me free public institutions are risking it all, to make sure kids can keep viewing cock sucking.
By internet standards, this feels like extremely tame. In fact, it is tame enough that the very article which is whining about it felt safe enough to include it in the very post without any pixelation on their presumably otherwise SFW website.
From the link:
Left-wing activists have sought to ban Lee's “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Salinger's “A Catcher in the Rye” and Twain's “Huckleberry Finn” for using language they say is "offensive" to Blacks and women. None of the three books includes any pornographic cartoon illustrations depicting gay sex.
Now, if the Genoa City Public Library has pulled these other books because some wokes were whining about it, then by all means call them hypocrites. But if they have not, I don't see the fucking problem of having a book with that picture in a library.
If it was required reading, then that would be bad, sure. If it was required reading for six-year-olds, very bad, even. But if it is just sitting in the youth or YA section of a public library, I am okay with it. The odd 8yo who will pick it up looking for more brutal comics will just go "eeew, gross!", not be traumatized for life. From the text, it does not even try to be jerk-off material. Not that there is not a lot of stuff which is borderline pornographic in literature, either.
A good library has someone to offend everyone. I think trying to get people to question their gender identity is generally bad, but I also think trying to push for "abstinence until marriage" is bad. So if that library also carries Twilight, that is already two ideas on offer which I don't agree with -- which is of course the purpose of a marketplace of ideas.
To be fair, (decimal) zero was an important mathematical concept invented in IndiaTo be fair, from what I could parse from the comments on that reddit link, it seems possible that they are using some scoring system where the mean is zero, e.g. you can score negative, so minimum score of zero would imply "at least average".
Given only this information, I don't think we can conclude how much India is putting their hand on the scales here.
It could be that this entrance exam is taken by people with a wide variety of degrees which do not enable them to complete a math PhD, that the standard deviation of the scores is 20, and the interview process is basically just approving them.
It could also be that the people sitting the Entrance exam all hold a Master's degree in math, that the standard deviation is 200 and that the interview process is weeding out a lot of people.
I am slightly against attributing too much of the difference between castes to HBD based on priors. My baseline for the HBD hypothesis are the Ashkenazi. The idea is that if you were a Jew in medieval Eastern Europe, intelligence lead to reproductive success -- if you were smart enough to become a Rabbi, you would probably increase the frequency of your genes in the population. By contrast, a very smart Christian probably became a priest, a profession associated (at least in the RCC) with below-average long term reproductive success.
By contrast, I do not believe that European aristocracy was likewise selected for intelligence. A cunning baron who schemed his way into becoming a count probably did less for the frequency of his genes than one who just fucked his servants, though I admit that this changes a bit if one only considers the gene pool of nobility.
Like the Ashkenazi and European Nobility (to some degree), and unlike most of the rest of society in medieval Europe, the caste system of India was strongly endogamous. This is a very double-edged sword, on the one hand, it prevents the selection effects from diluting, but on the other hand, it removes the possibility of getting advantageous genes from selected outsiders.
For HBD in the caste system, there would have to be different selection mechanisms in place in different castes. For the priesthood caste, it seems vaguely plausible that it at least selected against crass stupidity. For the warrior caste, my prior would be that the selection pressure was similar to European nobility, more brawns than brains. For traders, such an effect seems most plausible -- cunning might make the difference between just making ends meet and leaving a fortune to your descendants which will increase their reproductive success. For farmers, I don't exactly see anything which will select for them being stupid. If anything, a very smart European farmer might try his luck in a city (and thus cease to be a farmer, depriving that subpopulation of his genes) while a very smart Indian farmer was stuck being a farmer due to the caste system.
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