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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   32697 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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Nerdy men were the first to get access to internet pornography, and for a while it was associated with them. Now guys in the slums of Nigeria are watching it on smartphones. Nerds were the first to have access to online conspiracy content. Jet Fuel Can't Melt Steel Beams! Muh Magic Bullet! Now the same conspiracy stuff is hitting young women. From an NYT report about a women's conference:

Rhaelynn Zito is one such conservative convert. Ms. Zito is a 25-year-old nurse who lives in Raleigh, N.C. In 2023, she said she had a real belly flop of a year. She went through a breakup, lost a family member and was searching for purpose outside work. Ms. Zito began listening to Ms. Clark, whose Turning Point USA show is often ranked among the top ten of health podcasts on Spotify.

Listening to Ms. Clark, Ms. Zito said, changed her life. She started a Bible study group, cut down her drinking and stopped dating casually as she focused on finding a husband. She stopped using birth control, taking up a natural family planning method recommended on Ms. Clark's show, and became dubious about abortions and vaccines. She no longer identifies as a feminist.

{sinp}

After the 2024 election, when young men swung markedly to Mr. Trump, pundits and political operatives began a frenzied and almost anthropological analysis of the "manosphere," the ecosystem of podcasters, like Joe Rogan and Theo Von, who nudged young men toward the Republican vote. Less in focus were the young women — a demographic that is still reliably left-leaning, but whose support for Mr. Trump also increased, according to post-election polling. Some were also swayed by what has been labeled a "womanosphere" of uber popular podcasters blending lifestyle advice and political polemics.

Many of the young women at the Turning Point conference were drawn to the event because conservative women influencers had helped them remake their lives: start dating seriously and stop eating ultra-processed foods, start taking supplements and stop using birth control. The Young Women's Leadership Summit, which marked its tenth anniversary, drew its largest numbers yet this year: roughly 3,000 women, up from around 2,000 last year and under 500 in 2015, at its inception. The event, some attendees noted, was light on discussions about policy — immigration raids, trade wars — but heavy on dating, parenting and nutrition advice.

Women are more hostile to COVID vaccination, perhaps reflecting a female urge to make politics revolve around their bodies.

Many people here have been asking about my politics: it's actually remarkably simple: I want the old America back where children were born within marriage, didn't try to change their gender, and got all the vaccines their pediatrician recommended.

To Rightists with daughters reading this: are you concerned that they might encounter "natural family planning" on the internet and really f*** up their life?

  • -10

Not a rightist, don't have a daughter. Way more concerned about the British regime fucking up their life with lockdowns 2 when the next spicy cold comes around than anyone not taking birth control or covid vaccines.

Hananiaism will always run aground on the problem that for every low human capital right-wing fad, there's something just as bad on offer from the left, with the added danger that it will also be state-mandated.

NFP is scientifically proven tech. It's even Planned Parenthood tm approved. You can have as much raw seggs as you want during the infertile days without any significant chance of pregnancy. For people ok with using a rubber for the other half of the times, it's actually a quite ideal method.

Women are more hostile to COVID vaccination, perhaps reflecting a female urge to make politics revolve around their bodies.

I don't understand the supposed logic here. Wanting politics to revolve around one's body is orthogonal to one's opinion about COVID vaccination. If you want politics to revolve around your body, that could equally easily make you a fervent COVID vaccination supporter or a fervent COVID vaccination skeptic.

I think anything taken to extremes is bad, no matter what the noble intentions are. Most “failed trads” are the ones who went from 2024 to 1824 with their lifestyle and then get shocked when 1824 lifestyles don’t work well in 2024. The fails that I saw were trying to live a picture perfect version of a 19th century lifestyle in which they dress like they’re Amish, bake their own bread, homeschool the kids, and so on until they burn out. The people who end up rejecting religion tend to be the unbalanced fundamentalist types who want to get everything perfect rather than try to live in the imperfect real world. They’re the ones researching whether potential common things have connections to “witchcraft and pagan or new age ideas” down to whether or not the logo of Starbucks is Satanic. Nobody can live that way because it’s impossible to maintain.

I don’t think that means give up. The traditional lifestyle is better than what we have now where everyone spends more time with strangers than with family and friends and kids are essentially kenneled in schools or daycare for most of their waking hours. But I think there’s a tendency toward treating the project like a game where the goal is to win by being the most traditional person possible, rather than trying to build a real life that works for you.

My kid is an only who started daycare at 3 months old. If she tried to be a trad wife she would be figuring it out from scratch. I bet that's the position a lot of them are in. Toss in a tendency towards perfection or desire to compare your life with someone else's social-media-curated version of their life and you get a mess.

I've seen firsthand that the "trad" lifestyle does not always work out.

I'm always a little arrested by this observation, particularly when it is offered as if in refutation of something. Have you seen a lifestyle that does always work out? If not, then surely this is no objection at all!

The grass is always greener on the other side; as always, the trick is finding the reasonable middle ground.

It seems rather to me that the trick is accepting that whatever your problems are, they are your problems, not someone else's--and are substantially the result of your own actions. Whether your own actions are, in turn, the result of some biological or cultural impetus, is a purely academic question. You can't just opt to take the good parts of trad life while never facing any possible negative results.

(Alain de Botton's Atheism 2.0 TED talk is a benighted classic for this very reason; he thinks we should find a way to incorporate all the good bits of religion into our lives, while keeping all the ridiculous nonsense at bay. It's not a terrible thought, but not only has that not worked out, I would argue that Wokism accomplished exactly the opposite--incorporating some of the worst ridiculousness of religion, without bringing along any of the tangible benefits.)

Have you seen a lifestyle that does always work out

I've never seen someone stop being a carnie.

I'm not sure if that proves or refutes your argument.

Life is absurd, so the base state of humanity is to be a clown.

Maybe it's a dialect difference, but I always thought 'carnie' referred to the people working at the circus, not the performers.

children were born without marraige

Er, you mean "within marraige"?

Yes, fixed.

Listening to Ms. Clark, Ms. Zito said, changed her life. She started a Bible study group, cut down her drinking and stopped dating casually as she focused on finding a husband. She stopped using birth control, taking up a natural family planning method recommended on Ms. Clark's show, and became dubious about abortions and vaccines. She no longer identifies as a feminist.

To Rightists with daughters reading this: are you concerned that they might encounter "natural family planning" on the internet and really f*** up their life?

It's fascinating to me how this line has been misinterpreted throughout this thread.

Ms. Zito started focusing on finding a husband, and at the same time swtiched to natural family planning. This pretty strongly implies, if not outright states, that Ms. Zito is still at least considering making love to somebody, despite the lack of a Mrs. in front of her name. Otherwise, after all, she wouldn't need any plan at all. If she's currently celibate, she didn't "take up" a natural family planning method! You don't need any birth control when you're celibate until marriage! You just...don't fuck, any time, until you get married!

Isn't this a great example of Jugaad Ethics from the Right? Taking the junker of Abstinence Only sexual ethics, and hitching it to the strong horse of woo-woo affirmation feminism? You don't have to not have sex that would be too difficult, just time your cum properly (in ways your male partner will be completely unable to track!) and you're trad enough!

The entire article feels that way. A pastiche of traditional femininity.

This feels much closer to Female Dating Strategy and online Gold Digging subcultures, than it does to any kind of ordered idea of patriarchy. We're getting this weird amalgamation of right wing and left wing ideas, of patriarchy and mid-century modern freedom of choice.

+1

Sometimes I forget how bad some people are at basic reading comprehension.

It's fascinating to me how this line has been misinterpreted throughout this thread.

There's no evidence it's been misinterpreted. She stopped dating casually, and stopped birth control. This means she is open to family formation. Pre-marital sex that leads to a marriage isn't the optimal traditional path -- but it is a realistic one. Where do you think shotgun weddings come from? Plenty of traditional marriages began when a couple got pregnant, and realized "well, guess we best get married now", and then stuck it out.

Yeah...I think planning to fuck without a condom or a ring and baby trap a guy and hope it works out is just about the best example of jugaad ethics imaginable.

I mean, I think it's worth noting that part and parcel of the traditional system is Unsubtle Hints to Put a Ring on it Already from the woman's male relatives before this comes up. Of course people in the past didn't date for years and live together without having sex- because they dated for a couple of months and then got married. Some of them had sex first, of course, but it's a lot easier to wait two months than two years. Shotgun weddings preserved the woman's honor because courtships were just short enough that it came out in the wash anyways.

Sure but that's vastly different.

"We're in a good faith relationship, and a pregnancy results, and we decide to move our timeline forward and get serious."

Has little in common with

"He thinks we're just having fun, I'm hoping to have his baby and force him to get serious."

"He thinks we're just having fun, I'm hoping to have his baby and force him to get serious."

Don't put your dick in anything you wouldn't be able to deal with getting pregnant.

Great advice for a man, doesn't make "being crazy" a dominant female strategy.

I'm not sure that you're hearing what I'm saying. In 1890 it would have been normal to say 'so, you've been seeing my daughter for three months already, do you need her ring size?' The shortness of the courtship and the reminders from dad as to the reason for dating in the first place was a big part of how the whole shotgun wedding mentality worked.

No Hydro, I'm hearing you, but it's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking about Ms. Zito. You can't really choose to live in 1890 in 2025, especially when you're in your mid twenties and your family is liberal and lives in another state. There is no realistic pressure that her family can exert on her erstwhile suitor, nor is she herself obedient to her parents' wishes regarding her dating life to begin with.

In 1890 there was an entire familial, legal, social infrastructure around the shotgun wedding. And all of that is required to produce the shotgun wedding. To start, it requires that your dad and male relatives want that for you and want to threaten force to get it done. It requires that society will look the other way when such violence occurs, and that society will look down on the cad who hits "betray" in such a way that he will have trouble finding life opportunities at all if he doesn't marry her.

Ms. Zito can't just magic all that into existence by wishing it were so. If she gets knocked up her New Jersey parents aren't going to threaten to beat the dude up if he doesn't marry her, and if they did the guy wouldn't take them seriously, and if they tried to beat him up he would call the cops and the cops would take his side, and if everyone at work knew what happened it would impact him minimally in his profession that he "stuck his dick in crazy" and "her parents stalked him" or something like that.

Lol, now I see some of the disconnect. To me and people in my bubble, NFP does not mean, "Having sex now, just without hormonal contraceptives."

Ms. Zito is "taking up a natural family planning method." It takes three months of charting before someone who practices NFP is supposed to have sex. Some rules rely on six months to a year of charting data. Knowing this, many practitioners start charting before they even date. I charted well before I was married.

When I see that someone is learning about fertility-awareness, it isn't necessarily connected to sex. It's simply useful information to have about yourself!

Normal people do not use NFP to refer to anything other than using it as birth control, unfortunately.

I think the article describes that Ms. Zito is not a "Normal person" any longer and has gone "crunchy." Crunchy women get into charting for all sorts of health reasons, including mental health awareness, productivity boosting, meal planning and exercising, etc. There are lots of books out there that recommend women do X task on one part of their cycle, eat a specific way on another part, etc.

To Rightists with daughters reading this: are you concerned that they might encounter "natural family planning" on the internet and really f*** up their life?

No, they are going to learn it as part of the puberty talk and will have a Tempdrop to warn them when their period is about to start.

Per WP, the typical-use Pearl Index of "Symptoms-based fertility awareness ex. symptothermal and calendar-based methods" is 24 (i.e. 24 pregnancies per 100 women per year), which is slightly worse than Coitus interruptus. Contrast this to a good method like IUD (0.8).

Awareness methods are only good enough if getting pregnant is not that big of a deal. For example, if you have access to abortions and no objections to them, or if you plan to have a baby with your husband in a year anyhow and would only be mildly inconvenienced by an earlier pregnancy.

For a teenager who is strongly pro-life, but not sufficiently abstinence-only that one can rely on that (which basically is most teenagers), relying on this method seems like a good way to end up being a single mom at 16.

slightly worse than Coitus interruptus.

Coitus interruptus is pretty good though -- it works pretty much every time, you just need to not fuck it up. That's kind of your point I guess, but the other methods do all have their downsides too. Kind of like the COVID vaccine, one needs to consider one's own risk profile.

Getting pregnant is not that big a deal. While I am glad my daughter did not have a baby at 16, there are so many other things that would have been worse. Her getting sucked into the alcoholic party culture was something I was significantly more concerned about at the time. Given a choice between my kid being an alcoholic or a teenage mom I am choosing the latter. She declined both.

I am not worried about my daughters getting pregnant as teenagers by itself. I would be overjoyed to have grandchildren while I’m still young and energetic. What worries me is them getting pregnant with inappropriate man. But, then again, I think it’s less bad when it happens when they’re teenagers than when they’re 30+. They still have a chance (though, of course, much reduced) to put their life together with someone more appropriate. When it happens to you while you’re middle aged, the pool of appropriate men that are interested in you is really tiny.

Assuming your daughter isn't fraternizing with men into their twenties as a teen, almost definitionally getting pregnant as a teen is with an inappropriate man. Let's face it, teenage boys aren't ready for that.

To add on, neither are teenage girls.

There have been plenty of societies with an average female age of marriage 16 or under. Our society isn’t one of them, and the median teenaged girl probably is not ready to be married off, but it’s not implausible that some might be. Very, very few where guys married under 20, or even 25. Far more implausible for a teenage boy to be ready for marriage, especially considering the man needs to pay the bills.

I was talking about raising kids mostly. Although being an equal contributor in a household in marriage is also something teenage girls won't be prepared for. Older mothers are far more sensible and better at raising children than teenagers. This has always been true, even in historical societies, simply because people are more experienced, worldly and have matured more when they are older.

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Primarily, I would be teaching my daughters their bodies and give them tools/trackers just for the educational value. There is so much more value to being aware of your cycle. It can tell a woman when she will be the most motivated, when she'll be more likely to make bad decisions, etc. Teenagers taught to monitor their bodies have reported things like, "Now I know when I'm angry at a certain time of the month, to just wait it out and not make any big decisions." Teenage girls in correctional facilities were astonished to see that their misbehavior typically fell in the same time of the month. Etc. I don't think I need to defend to this sub the value of self-knowledge.

The ideal would be that they don't have sex. But if they do, they will know exactly when and why they got pregnant.

I have a huge issue with lumping together "Symptoms-based fertility awareness ex. symptothermal and calendar-based methods". There are five different methods I can name off the top of my head that meet that criteria, which vary in effectiveness from 75% to 99.8% with perfect use. Complicating this is that a lot of people use a condom during fertile time instead of abstaining, which just makes the effectiveness on par with a condom.

Calendar-based method: Terrible effectiveness rate. I've heard of one that was just, "Have sex every 10 days" and it had an effectiveness rate of like 90%, which is funny but isn't super in-tune with the body.

Then there's the Marquette Method, which is starting to get into more measurable, technological solutions. You pee on a stick every morning, it gives you a reading you chart, the chart tells you whether or not you should have sex that day if you want to be pregnant or not.

There were forty-two unintended pregnancies which provided a typical use unintended pregnancy rate of 6.7 per 100 women over twelve months of use. Eleven of the forty-two unintended pregnancies were associated with correct use of the method. The total unintended pregnancy rate over twelve months of use was 2.8 per 100 for women with regular cycles, 8.0 per 100 women for the postpartum and breastfeeding women, and 4.3 per 100 for women with irregular menstrual cycles.

Typical use effectiveness of 93.3% is not bad at all - very comparable to the pill.

The version I use and will teach my daughters is the Sympto-Thermal method with a Doeringer rule - like the Sensiplan. I would give them special thermometers to wear at night which only need to be synced about once a week (unless you really want sex, in which case they get synced every morning.) For the Sensiplan Method:

After 13 cycles, 1.8 per 100 women of the cohort experienced an unintended pregnancy; 9.2 per 100 women dropped out because of dissatisfaction with the method; the pregnancy rate was 0.6 per 100 women and per 13 cycles when there was no unprotected intercourse in the fertile time.

This is comparable to an IUD.

Trust me, I have done the research on this. It is literally impossible to get pregnant on phase III (three days after ovulation to the start of menses), if your phase I is longer than 6 days. I've had to rely on this knowledge many a time and it doesn't fail. If I have sex anywhere near a fertile window, I get pregnant immediately (I have learned.)

Edit to add an article on the "teach teenagers to be aware of their cycle" thing: https://naturalwomanhood.org/cycle-mindfulness-what-happens-when-you-teach-fertility-awareness-to-teen-girls/

Here is what she found out: for 90% of the girls in the program who had ended up in jail, it happened during the premenstrual phase of her cycle...

One of the documented outcomes of Teen STAR’s work is the much lower likelihood for these girls to engage in premature sexual activities. The program was evaluated by ChildTrends, a leading U.S. nonprofit research organization, which reported “that this program is effective in reducing the rate of pregnancy, delaying the onset of sexual activity, decreasing sexual activity in sexually-active youth, and improving attitudes towards abstinence, compared with students in the no-treatment groups.”

Why would you use this though? I can understand not wanting to do hormonal birth control, but thats not the only option. Im generally open to natural law argumentation, I just dont see why they would treat cycle timing differently from condoms or especially pulling out. The only relevant distinguishing factor is that, as a certain dissident rightist said, the days you cant are the ones youll want it most. I could see any combination of this being good/bad if it does/doesnt cause people to fail, but its not the argument any exception-makers seem to go with.

For secular people, it is largely driven by a dislike of pharmaceuticals. Hormonal contraception can have wacky side effects physically and mentally. IUDs can really hurt during placement and after. Copper IUDs have side effects too, even thought they're technically not hormonal.

People who fall in this bucket might not mind a condom or other barrier-based birth control from time to time, but people seem to like having the option to go au natural. Fertility awareness gives them this option.

Charting also can help diagnose and treat issues with the female reproductive system, if you can find a doctor who is trained to use it (often has the keyword Napro "natural procreation".) Common issues that can be identified and treated through bio-matching hormones that are administered at key phases of the cycle are polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis, premenstrual syndrome (PMS), premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), and other hormonal issues.

From a Catholic perspective (because let's face it, it's pretty much Catholics who see it this way), they look at it deontologically/virtuously versus consequence. If it's a matter of consequences, and Catholics are children-maximizers, the 100% assured way to avoid having kids (abstinence) would be immoral, but it's actually supererogatory.

So a Catholic looks at the actions themselves involved with Fertilty Awareness methods and doesn't see anything wrong with any of them.

Action 1: Know your cycle and communicate it with your husband - I don't see anything contrary to morals here. Self-knowledge is generally considered good, communicating with spouses is good.

Action 2: Have (married) sex on a day you know you are likely to have a kid - Believe it or not, a lot of people use Fertility awareness to increase the likelihood of children. Nothing immoral with that either.

Action 3: Not have sex on a day you know you are likely to have a kid - While there are some activities that are required or else a sin of omission is committed, it is not expected for a couple to have sex every day. Knowing that it is a fertile day doesn't change that. In fact, if someone is life-or-death-should-not-get-pregnant, then the TradCath (prior to Fertility Awareness) recommendation would be to avoid sex entirely.

Action 4: Have sex on a day you know you are unlikely to make a new life - Seems unlikely this action would be bad too. Otherwise there would also be warnings against having sex while pregnant or post-menupause, and there aren't.

I think it's more difficult to explain why hormonal birth control is immoral than it is to explain why Fertility Awareness is moral. But if I had to try to explain it, I would probably point to the reasons why some secular people avoid hormonal birth control - the action itself is purposely damaging the reproductive system, and Catholics are more strict on how much damage you can do to yourself before it becomes immoral.

As far as why barrier methods or pulling out is immoral, it changes the nature of the act, so that an actual act of sexual intercourse isn't happening - instead it's something like mutual masturbation. In Fertility Awareness, an actual act of sexual intercourse is happening.

Thank you. Most of this seems pretty reasonable, I have some disagreements from action 3 downwards. I think this is a superficial understanding of what an act is, and you would have trouble in other areas of ethics if you set aside background knowledge and intent this much. Consider for example a surgery that ends up lethal: what distinguishes accident from murder, and bad luck from negligence? What is the sin of gluttony, if knowing that youre satiated makes no difference?

You could similarly break the pulling out method down into steps, each of which "surely is allowed": 1) having sex is allowed under the right conditions 2) youre not obligated to keep the penis inside the whole time 3) if you just happen to ejaculate while its outside, thats an involuntary reaction. This assumes you can do it without jerking once outside, but thats possible and I doubt its supposed to make a difference.

From what I remember, the church allows nuns to use the pill in places where theyre at risk of being raped. So its allowed to be used, and even for its contraceptive purpose. Why? Presumably because they dont intend to have sex that way.

Would an intra-vaginal spermicide be allowed? What if its application moves further in time from the intercourse, in the limit to something like a copper IUD without side effects? You cant technology your way out of purposes, and the selling point of natural family planning is that it doesnt feel like technology.

Consider for example a surgery that ends up lethal: what distinguishes accident from murder, and bad luck from negligence? What is the sin of gluttony, if knowing that youre satiated makes no difference?

I think you are saying intent matters. Intent does matter (edit: and i think I made that clear in the above comment when I talked about the subject knowing that they were likely/unlikely to get pregnant that day, and my comparisons were to other situations where it was possible/impossible to be pregnant). Someone having sex when not fertile intends to have sexual intercourse. Someone not having sex while fertile intends to avoid pregnancy by avoiding sex - the most normal way to avoid pregnancy imaginable.

I think there is a conflation between sexual intercourse and the possible results of sexual intercourse - or conception. Sexual intercourse is the ejaculation of a penis in a vagina. A lot of its moral significance comes from what sexual intercourse can do - it can make a new human life. But sexual intercourse is not in itself the making of a new life.

Sexual intercourse between two married people is morally allowed (and considered a fairly good thing) in Catholicism, even if it does not lead to conception. Intending to avoid making a new child is also morally allowed, in the sense that you can choose not to have sex.

You could similarly break the pulling out method down into steps, each of which "surely is allowed": 1) having sex is allowed under the right conditions 2) youre not obligated to keep the penis inside the whole time 3) if you just happen to ejaculate while its outside, thats an involuntary reaction. This assumes you can do it without jerking once outside, but thats possible and I doubt its supposed to make a difference.

  1. Correct
  2. Correct
  3. Correct, if it is truly an accident. I can go further and say that oral sex can accidentally lead to premature ejaculation and that isn't considered a sin if it is truly an accident - but you do have to take it into account the next time you try that kind of foreplay.

(Edit to add: the reason why this would be wrong is not that there is no likelihood of pregnancy, but because it's not sexual intercourse.)

the selling point of natural family planning is that it doesnt feel like technology.

Perhaps to secular people - but then there are so many smart devices now that will do it for you. To Catholics, the selling point is that you are avoiding having a child by avoiding having sex, which is the most normal way to avoid conception imaginable.

and i think I made that clear in the above comment when I talked about the subject knowing

I dont think this is considering intent properly. Theres a difference between doing something despite or because of an effect. I think what Im suggesting here is similar to the doctrine of double effect - and you have been arguing that because the "forseen unintended" case is ok, the "forseen intended" case is too.

I think there is a conflation between sexual intercourse and the possible results of sexual intercourse - or conception. Sexual intercourse is the ejaculation of a penis in a vagina.

How do you think acts and their proper form are determined? I thought that it was to do with purposes. Meanwhile your description taken at face value, without background knowledge of what you want it to mean, sounds like condoms are ok too. I suggest that thats not a coincidence: the principles youre using on this case are much more permissive than those that inform your general view.

More comments

Copper IUDs have side effects too

Can confirm, my wife suffered from terrible unofficial but internet recognized symptoms from Paragard for years. She finally got the damn thing removed after a couple of bouts of intense, labor-like pains that landed her in the ER and surprise, surprise, no more of those or any of her other symptoms.

If they are already married (and you express that as a goal), then in what way are they going to really fuck up their life by using natural family planning?

Our Orthodox parish has a lot of relatively recent young female converts who come out of the New Age scene and apparently converted to Orthodoxy during the Covid era. Some other women in their circles went Pentecostal. This, combined with the more recent wave of young men into Orthodoxy (like in other Western countries), has recently led to some marriages, and more appear to be on the way.

Nerds were the first to have access to online conspiracy content.

Almost tautological because of "online".

Jet Fuel Can't Melt Steel Beams!

The Jet A open air burn temperature is 1,030 °C, considerably less than the melting point of even lower melting point steels. Alas, sneering at the actual TRUE things conspiracy theorists find is pretty typical for deboonkers, and demonstrates they are merely accepting authority rather than thinking.

Muh Magic Bullet!

That's a lot older than online conspiracy theories.

I want the old America back where children were born without marriage, didn't try to change their gender, and got all the vaccines their pediatrician recommended.

There were a lot fewer recommended vaccines.

Alas, sneering at the actual TRUE things conspiracy theorists

It's true but irrelevant.

The air India 787 that crashed into a building two weeks ago didn't manage to flatten the building it crashed into. 787s are almost twice as heavy and carry way more fuel. Yet two 757 manages to take out three gigantic steel buildings in NYC while a 787 couldn't take out an Indian school.

The air india jet was, as the pilot kids say, low energy. And it is easier to topple a tall thin building than a short stocky one.

As a pedantic private pilot, Jet-A burns between 900 and 1500 degrees Celsius depending on the ratio of fuel to oxygen.

As an amateur blacksmith, mild structural steel (ie the sort I-beams are made of) may not be a liquid at 1100 degrees Celsius, but it is very "bendy".

@VoxelVexillologist I suspect the Loose Change video was what conspiracy theorists refer to as “well poisoning”. It only brings up issues that are easily debunked with ten minutes of research, or ones that are absolutely loony like directed energy weapons.

Also unfortunately even the ones investigating in good faith often tend to focus on the flashy improbable things and often miss the more plausible and often quite damning details.

Well I mean what about building 7 though?

It burned down because it was on fire.

It’s the only steel framed skyscraper in history to do that. Grenfell tower was burned to a charred husk and didn’t collapse.

Grenfell tower

A much smaller concrete building.

Yes, but notice that the easily quotable catchphrase that Loose Change coined, “Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steel Beams” works to take your focus off building 7, and put it onto buildings 1 and 2 where there is at least a plausible argument that the building collapses were caused by the plane strikes.

The Jet A open air burn temperature is 1,030 °C, considerably less than the melting point of even lower melting point steels.

I am not an expert on 9/11, but isn't the idea actually that the fire weakened the steel causing it to collapse under the weight of the tower, not that the steel melted?

The NIST-accepted theory is that the fire caused the floor trusses (not beams) to lose stiffness, sag, and pull the outer columns inward, which initiated the collapse. Loss of stiffness and strength due to the fire was a cause, but not the proximate cause, of the collapse -- the buckling of the columns was.

The Jet A open air burn temperature is 1,030 °C, considerably less than the melting point of even lower melting point steels.

True, but the theory isn't that the beams melted, it's that they weakened due to the temperature. Structural steel loses half its room-temperature strength at 500 °C, and the chart I can find doesn't go much past that. Structural factors of safety are high, but not that high, and it's unsurprising IMO that they'd fail at "extended structural fire" temperatures, which is why we mandate automatic sprinklers in such buildings these days.

True, but the theory isn't that the beams melted, it's that they weakened due to the temperature.

That's not quite true either, though. In fact, one of the reasons the conspiracy theory is wrong is there weren't any steel beams to begin with. The NIST theory is the floor trusses on the damaged floors lost stiffness (not strength), sagged, pulled the (remaining) structural columns inward, and the cascade started from that.

Conspiracists who can see past the “controlled demolition” of 1 and 2 to the truth of the floor truss narrative nevertheless tend to get one-shotted by talk of building 7. They don’t know NIST also has a report on why that building collapsed.

https://www.nist.gov/publications/final-report-collapse-world-trade-center-building-7-federal-building-and-fire-safety-0

To Rightists with daughters reading this: are you concerned that they might encounter "natural family planning" on the internet and really f*** up their life?

No. Keeping their legs closed before marriage is entirely possible.

My daughter is more at risk of NEVER having any sex because she is at her tender age already obsessed with degenerate homosexual kpop boylove fics (RIP the Chatgpt server instance tasked to her). Between that and her godsis already being a degenerate goonette whose collection of bad dragons highly upsets even her somewhat liberal mother, the risk is more in the opposite direction. While the risk of infiltrators in good christian churches or feminist groups are both extant, the greater risk of women having impossible standards for men and defaulting to the internet rabbit hole instead is unexplored.

women having impossible standards for men

While there are definitely a minority of women on the internet demanding men be 6'5 self made millionaires who believe every woke shibboleth and yet act like conservatives, it seems like most women have eminently reasonable standards(be stably employed in a good job, not be a porn/substance/gambling addict, not a criminal, taller than her, etc) and simply aren't exposed to men who meet them.

If only those were women's standards. But it's not. Some of those things aren't important at all, in fact - not a criminal? Criminality's huge social proof of studliness to an awful lot of women.

These are the standards for a husband, but they're applied after a bunch of attractiveness filter to get to boyfriend/hookup status so it's 'an 8/10 who's good at dating and also has all of the above'

With all due respect, when's the last time your looked for a partner? This isn't 1999.

My daughters generation expresses interest in sensitive artsy guys with glossy hair and perfect skin who happen to be straight. A particularly gnarly one is "good at talking" which used to be ok but now the boys apparently are using AI to do all their initial flirtations and the girls are copy pasting the messages into chatgpt to figure out if the boy is sincere and get mad at the AI for telling them things they don't want to hear.

The boys I know only have "not annoying' as a criteria. The older guys I know who have more stringent criterias are just avoiding rejection by seeking perfection, and I can't say the same for women. Sorry babe the hybrid of Benedict Cumberbatch and Asa Butterfield who also loves romantasy does not exist in straight versions.

Ah, yes, the ‘combination doesn’t go together’ problem.

Bad dragons?

Creative sex toys, generally dildos designed or themed around fantasy monsters. Some front page examples now include Kragg the Rock Dragon and Reggie the Mothman, along with the more typical werewolf or saytr or minotaur.

Bad Dragon itself is a specific company that pioneered in the field (and has kinda become the Kleenex of sex toys, double entendre not intended) and runs heavily on the furry theme, but there’s a small industry out there. Because of some worker disputes and BD focusing more on male customers, I’d expect most female novelty-seekers to work with a variety of other companies (or chase the zillions of Etsy shops focusing on the field) as well. See The Wandering Bard, or PhoenixFlame Creations, Primal Hardwere, Weredog,co,uk, or Paladin Pleasure for other examples in the business.

Uh, somewhere private, and only if you don’t mind getting blasted with every imaginable fantasy dick (and a handful of vulvas/tongues/butts). All of these are hugely NSFW.

the greater risk of women having impossible standards for men

A lot of women who are heavily invested in gay M/M content report enjoying it because it feels "safer" and "less complicated" than hetero content. They want to enjoy a romantic relationship in a "voyeuristic" way without having the worry about the imbalanced power dynamics that are intrinsically a part of any relationship between men and women. If the characters in the story are both men, then she can enjoy it without having to worry about the possibility of "self-inserting" as the female character and getting too personally enmeshed in the story, which could dredge up uncomfortable hang-ups about her own real life sexuality. It's not so much about running to the image of an idealized man as it is about running away from the dangers that real men present.

Obviously, it's something that she mostly has to work out for herself. I think the best thing you can do is to just set a good example in your relations with your own family, and if it ever seems appropriate to bring up, be open and honest about your own political views, what you perceive as the deleterious effects of modern wokeness, etc (the danger here isn't so much the porn per se, but rather the fact that the communities for this type of content tend to be filled with radfem and woke types who could reinforce negative beliefs).

Eh, asian blove fanfics also have a hanger on female protag who is juggling the affections of the male love interests simultaneously. Its "NOW KISH" spammed 10k times to get the girls motor firing before she gets her own back blown out.

Also, talking to a preteen girl? Can't lead a horse to water. Better the smiles and polite smalltalk rather than the nonstop passive aggressive war she's having with her mother. When puberty fully kicks in I might not even have that. Values can be communicated by proximate osmosis and source trustworthiness but kids trusting their peers over their parents for relatively inconsequential shit is hardwired into human social development. The communities of crazies are naturally repelling to themselves and those witch covens only perpetuate because their own parents never provided the safe space for acceptance and affirmation for the few times the girls did their nonverbal communication of issues. I have to be more than a dingbat doofus dad unfortunately but honestly I don't mind it that much. I survived a dramatic reading of My Immortal and a powerpoint party about head ratios to background scaling, I can survive a teenage girl geeking out about genderbent Arcane yaoi.

As a male who enjoys the fine art of F/F content, I can relate.

Why would natural family planning mess up my daughter's life?

Setting aside the apparent assumption she would be having sex out of wedlock, if she came up accidentally pregnant she would deal. (But if you're having sex pregnancy is a known consequence so it's hard to think it's accidental.) Just like if she lost a leg. Or had some other things happened that threw a spanner in her life plans. She's already dealt with things not going as she might have chosen. Pregnancy and children aren't some uniquely awful thing that destroys your life and it's weird to act like they are.

And I say that as someone who was one-and-done. Had I had subsequent pregnancies/kids I would have dealt. Life happens to us all.

To Rightists with daughters reading this: are you concerned that they might encounter "natural family planning" on the internet and really f*** up their life?

I know this is bait, but the number of childless women I know is so much higher than women who have ruined their lives with natural family planning or children out of wedlock. Childless woman is the scarier outcome for a daughter than even teen pregnancy IMO.

The woman in the article is 25. She's at no risk of imminent infertility. And it's not like she's trying to conceive to avoid being childless, she's trying not to conceive using a less-effective, lower-class method due to conspiratorial ideology.

  • -11

NFP is overwhelmingly a method used by hardcore Catholics and not the underclass; actual lower class people use condoms.

Can somebody classpill me on contraception? Class considerations on this are utterly foreign to me beyond "back street abortions with makeshift implements and voodoo herbs = desperate and/or ignorant" and "rhythm method = Catholic".

That person is not me.

What exactly was the

conspiratorial ideology

that led her to natural family planning and away from hormonal contraceptives?

Yes, but I was answering your question. As a father the question of whether my kids will have kids unnerves me much more than the prospect of natural family planning.

Oh the horror! A twenty-five year old woman who is not a maiden and who is married, having a baby! Why, the entire fabric of society will collapse!

When should she have a child, or at what age? Thirty? Forty? It is entirely possible to get pregnant when you're forty or more, and to have a normal child, but the later you leave it, the higher the risks go. Having your first child at the tender infant age of merely being twenty-five years old is not as horrifying a notion as you seem to think.

The term elderly primagravida refers to "a woman having her first child at the age of thirty-five or older" since waiting till that age to become pregnant was unusual. Now we've made it that waiting till you're sixty to get pregnant will be supported by technology (as long as you can afford to pay for it).

Maria del Carmen Bousada de Lara formerly held the record of being the oldest verified mother; she was aged 66 years 358 days when she gave birth to twins, 130 days older than Adriana Iliescu, who gave birth in 2005 to a baby girl. In both cases, the children were conceived through IVF with donor eggs. The oldest verified mother to conceive naturally (listed currently as of 26 January 2017 in the Guinness Records) is Dawn Brooke (Guernsey); she conceived a son at the age of 59 in 1997.

Erramatti Mangamma, who gave birth at the age of 73 through in-vitro fertilisation via caesarean section in the city of Hyderabad, India, currently holds the record for being the oldest living mother. She delivered twin baby girls, making her also the oldest mother to give birth to twins. The previous record for being the oldest living mother was held by Daljinder Kaur Gill from Amritsar, India, who gave birth to a baby boy at age 72 through in-vitro fertilisation.

using a less-effective, lower-class method

...aaand the penny drops. That's what this is actually about isn't it? Class. You see the sexually liberated, zero responcibilty, girlbosses as exemplified by Gossip Girls and Sex and the City as aspirational and high class, and it's bothering you that others disagree.

I'm much more about Nietzsche than Sex and the City, which I've never seen.

What's your favorite Nietzsche book?

(If you say Zarathustra or WtP you're a poser.)

Not really - the point is that if you don't want to have children, unless you are actually a practicing and believing Catholic (o/e) there is no reason at all to use 'natural' family planning. It is currently low-status, but it's also worse than the alternatives - not that those two are necessarily connected, but they are both true. Using your 'conceptional' decisions as a means of reacting against the aesthetics of the modern world is very silly indeed.

It's a funny barber-pole-of-status-signaling thing. I have never encountered someone on the internet who is actually upper-class for whom "lower-classness" is an object of vitriol rather than of disinterested study (for a motte example, I don't know Cim's background but she's acculturated into a desirable rung of the London class ladder very well).

For another instance, Richard Hanania is from Oak Lawn, a Chicago suburb which would provide plenty of experience in the dysfunction of the underclass (about 2-3 miles from Chicago's PvP zones) but zero opportunity to mingle with the kids of the tony 'burbs up North.

I want the old America back where children were born within marriage, didn't try to change their gender, and got all the vaccines their pediatrician recommended.

The problem you have there is that 90s liberalism is not stable and therefore not something you can aim for except as a transitional state.

Without the incredible institutional legacy that period benefited from and the incredible level of trust that went with it, none of your goals are possible. The richest man in the world has basically the same political program you do (like literally wants everything in your list), and he's powerless to enact it for this specific reason.

The richest man in the world has basically the same political program you do (like literally wants everything in your list), and he's powerless to enact it for this specific reason.

Um, what? Elon Musk is modelling dysfunctional ghetto family norms.

It doesn't seem like what he's doing is anywhere near normal enough to be ghetto family norms. Those are 'high status man behaves promiscuously and there's however many babies that makes'. Not 'recruiting e-thots to have babies via IVF'.

The kid with the e-thot was conceived naturally.

Musk's revealed preferences (ie, actions) strongly indicate otherwise.

Don't get me wrong, if i had a few billion dollars, I would also maximize my number of offspring, but the ideal of the involved father in a typical happy 90s marriage is not something I would suggest musk actually, demonstrably wants for himself.

To Rightists with daughters reading this: are you concerned that they might encounter "natural family planning" on the internet and really f*** up their life?

Funny story: typical use of condoms is about as effective as typical use of natural family planning (which in turn is about as effective as the pull-out method). In general, there's a lot of good arguments against overlapping multiple different methods if you aren't using an IUD, but a lot of the 'herp derp they hate birth control' stuff is a lot more workable than most people expect.

((I don't have a daughter (or son), but especially given the chances my preferences are genetic I'd be more concerned about the other consequences of sex, like bad relationship fallout.))

I have just looked on the list, and I have to say I am a bit perplexed why typical use for condoms is so ineffective (13 out of 100 -- only a bit better than pulling out).

My theory is that there might be confounders, because condoms also protect from STI while most other methods do not, so they would select for a more risky sexual lifestyle in general. Relying on a guy you just met to have a condom and use it correctly is likely riskier than relying on remembering to take a pill a day.

All of the effectiveness stats are 'effectiveness in use' -- so 'using' condoms includes 'yeah I use condoms but sometimes run out or whatever', just as 'using' the pill includes people who forget to take it, 'using' NFP includes 'but baby I need you now', and 'using' withdrawal includes... um, accidents.

Condoms are not used correctly, in practice, is my understanding of their failure rate. Contra @alexander_turok's assertions in the OP, condoms are, actually, the low class birth control option. If you aren't willing to go raw with a man you shouldn't even be pondering sex with them. And condoms are easy to sabotage both intentionally (hole pokes being most common) and inadvertently (heat, cold, old age, abrasion). Also, apparently there are application problems that are common specifically regarding looseness and tightness of fit which are vague memories I have from sophomore age sex ed.

So yeah, its birth control for dumb, untrustworthy, probably intoxicated people. Of course it doesnt work well.

Many people here have been asking about my politics: it's actually remarkably simple: I want the old America back where children were born within marriage, didn't try to change their gender, and got all the vaccines their pediatrician recommended.

This is not politics. This is an arbitrary list of demands.

Your "politics" is the constellation of principles and cognitive patterns that cause you to demand certain things. (Or, alternatively, as a Marxist might say: politics is the analysis of the material and social conditions that give rise to certain principles and cognitive patterns, which in turn give rise to concrete demands.)

The interesting thing isn't that you like vaccines, it's why you like vaccines (and what makes you different from people who don't).

In addition to what others have said, hormonal birth control is, indeed, under explored and under discussed. If you go to a doctor and ask for birth control, she won't necessarily talk about the psychological side affects of it, and it can cause changes in sexual preferences related to hormonal cycles.

My ex-girlfriends have been put on hormonal birth control in their teenage years for acne and period pain. For some doctors, it seems like the default to get every pubescent girl on birth control, without any discussion of the drawbacks.

To Rightists with daughters reading this: are you concerned that they might encounter "natural family planning" on the internet and really f*** up their life?

As Mihow said, she made her life better. Why would any father dread that?

Presumably because she is being "low-class"

Alexander Turok is the Hyacinth Bucket of TheMotte. His dream? To have room for a pony, someday. His greatest fear? To end up amongst people like Rose.

(Me, I'm Daisy and am sufficiently low-class that I don't give a flying damn about trying to shin my way up the greasy pole of social climbing status).

How are Rose and the new boyfriend?

I think the idea of pregnancy "really fucking up" one's life is more for when your daughter is 16-22. Starting a family at 25 sounds like an okay recipe for success, but the person in the article was not pregnant.

Thats more a reflection of only idiots wanting to have sex with 16 year olds (idiot teenagers, perverted men). The most successful girl I know (extreme outlier) got pregnant at 17 to her godly christian boyfriend, popped out 3 more before 25 and is now a happy grandmother at 45 with a home based baking business supplanted by her husband (same dude) being a highly successful investment banker being pressured to take over the family business. This is an extreme outlier and much is contingent on the success network available to the woman, but it goes to show that not being idiots has outsize benefits. That the more common story is the girl getting knocked up and the young man abandoning her early on is reflective of poor mate filtering on the girls part and lack of social censure on the mans part, though being honest the man behind closed doors in high censure environment tend to be abusers so thats the main risk.

I mean, everything tends to work out when you are wealthy!

Your last paragraph completely threw me for a loop … I just didn’t see it coming after reading your post.

The woman in your post did the opposite of fuck her life up - it looks like she made her life better. She stopped drinking as much, found community, stopped hooking up, is looking for a family, etc.

I dislike religion pretty vehemently but I understand the community and sense of peace it can bring.

Did you miss the "natural family planning" in there? Google it if you don't know what it means.

  • -17

It means... oh god... it means she might HAVE A BABY?! AHHHHHH I’M GOING INSAAAAAAANE SAVE ME MARGRET SANGER!

I've been saying it for a while: it's gotten to a point where saying "having a kid out of wedlock is a bad idea" is left-coded.

  • -15

I've been saying it for a while: it's gotten to a point where saying "having a kid out of wedlock is a bad idea" is left-coded.

Only to the extent that its a subset of "having kids is bad" which is a strong left coded meme. I think if you are to have a child the left generally would prefer it being out of wedlock.

I think this is a little far- the median white democrat is some normie teacher who thinks children should be planned and in a stable relationship that they might not be super explicit about needing to be marriage but they would be skeptical about non-marriage relationships filling the same role.

No it’s… not?

There’s pretty strong agreement on that from all sides of the political spectrum.

"having a kid out of wedlock is a bad idea" is left-coded

... when it presupposes one is having lots of sex with lots of men outside of marriage.

I'm going to make the wild suggestion that both sex and children should be within a marriage.

Do you have a poll showing this?

My understanding is that the traditional way is that it's fairly common to just accept that if you get pregnant from pre-maritial sex, you get married and everyone agrees to not do the math on the wedding date compared to your first child's birthday. While there's certainly been a change in the past few decades of whether it's acceptable to not get married in that situation, I'm not sure there's any real reason to believe the prevalence of unmarried people having sex has gone up.

'Past few decades' is more recent than the change really was- when the 'long fifties' as I call them ended(varies a bit by location and background but 1970 at the latest in the US), so did the 'you got her pregnant you have to marry her' mentality.

Eh, I know a number of couples who ended up married because of a surprise pregnancy in the 80s and 90s, some of whom would admit that they probably wouldn’t have stayed together otherwise. Heck, it’s still not completely uncommon where I grew up. Getting pregnant and then not getting married is seen as pretty low-class. Some do it anyway, but they were usually trailer trash to begin with.

This is a meme that goes all the way back to the 17th century.

I think it was Cervantes who quipped about how "In her eagerness, a new wife may accomplish in 6 months what would ordinarily take a woman 9" 😉

it's gotten to a point where saying "having a kid out of wedlock is a bad idea" is left-coded.

You didn't say that. The woman in your example is looking to get married and have kids after having the conventional life of sex outside marriage, drinking, feminist empowerment by sleeping around, etc.

Listening to Ms. Clark, Ms. Zito said, changed her life. She started a Bible study group, cut down her drinking and stopped dating casually as she focused on finding a husband. She stopped using birth control, taking up a natural family planning method recommended on Ms. Clark's show, and became dubious about abortions and vaccines. She no longer identifies as a feminist.

The article is paywalled so I can't read the entirety, but if you can quote me the part where Ms. Zito is single and pregnant, go right ahead and I'll be properly horrified. If not, it just sounds like your usual hobbyhorse of "every woman should be on artificial contraception because having babies is yucky low class behaviour".

The article is paywalled so I can't read the entirety, but if you can quote me the part where Ms. Zito is single and pregnant, go right ahead and I'll be properly horrified.

She isn't. Here are all the paragraphs mentioning Ms. Zito, from the non-paywalled archive:

Rhaelynn Zito is one such conservative convert. Ms. Zito is a 25-year-old nurse who lives in Raleigh, N.C. In 2023, she said she had a real belly flop of a year. She went through a breakup, lost a family member and was searching for purpose outside work. Ms. Zito began listening to Ms. Clark, whose Turning Point USA show is often ranked among the top ten of health podcasts on Spotify.

Listening to Ms. Clark, Ms. Zito said, changed her life. She started a Bible study group, cut down her drinking and stopped dating casually as she focused on finding a husband. She stopped using birth control, taking up a natural family planning method recommended on Ms. Clark’s show, and became dubious about abortions and vaccines. She no longer identifies as a feminist.

“What dipped my toe into all of this was the MAHA movement,” Ms. Zito said, referring to the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, championed by influencers like Ms. Clark and now led in the Trump administration by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “I find myself leaning more conservative than I ever have before.”

...

Right before she flew to Dallas, Ms. Zito realized it was time to tell her close friends and family that she identified as conservative. After all, they might see her post photos from the Turning Point conference on Instagram.

Ms. Zito braced herself and called her grandmother, a liberal Methodist pastor in New Jersey. “I’m moderately conservative!” (She said her grandmother didn’t make a fuss, mostly wanting her to be happy.)

Ms. Zito still encounters political issues that prompt her to lean left. She finds some of the White House’s messaging about ICE raids to be “unchristian.” She believes in access to abortion under some circumstances. She wants a career. But she finds the MAHA of it all compelling. “It’s just like Alex Clark always says,” she explained. “We will not have political fights in 100 years if we’re all sick and don’t have babies.”

Sounds like she turned her life around; good for her. She is still young enough to catch a husband and have children.

If she's trying to find a husband, presumably the baby would be with her husband. That's not out of wedlock; that's in wedlock.

This is nonsense. The expectation is that these women will get married to the men they start families with.

I do not think this level of low-effort sarcasm is conducive to good discussion. This is a warning; please do not post this way in the future.

Not being on drugs that make her a bitch is 'fucking your life up'? Uh, you do know how babies are made, right? A mommy and a daddy have to love each other very much first, there's no stork that shows up when you stop taking birth control.

I didn’t miss it.

And you didn’t miss the rest of my post either: I want to know why you view what you shared in your post about that woman in a negative light?

Again, it just seems like a woman getting her shit together in her mid 20’s. I did that for the most part in my late 20’s … I know dozens of people that did in various ways.

You don’t like that she did it in part through maybe finding god based on a Turning Point USA (yuck) podcast?

What exactly is so dangerous and unwholesome about the Roman Catholic Church's views on sex?

We don't agree with abortion, which means in Alexander's view that we want loads of black and brown babies born to slattern single mothers on welfare, who will all grow up to be drug dealers (if boys) and whores like Momma (if girls). The responsible thing is to teach sex inside marriage (we do) but also use contraception and if you get knocked up and can't afford a baby get an abortion (we don't teach that).

Hence why Catholicism is so evil. Pro-lifers want living babies, not aborted ones, so that means we don't care about slattern whores sleeping around with multiple baby daddies. And that is bad for society and the economy.

Thinking that someone using natural family planning within a Catholic marriage is going to be what ruins their lives is uh, an interesting conclusion

someone using natural family planning within a Catholic marriage

That isn't what the article describes.

I'd be worried about my daughter sleeping around outside of marriage in general

I got in trouble for this before, but my impression of what Alexander thinks is that having kids is fine, sure, but only a few, only when you can afford them, and contraception and abortion are responsible ways of controlling fertility. Just having natural sex and relying on natural methods, which leave you open to pregnancy? That way lies lots of babies, which means kicking you back down into the underclass of trollops and single mothers living off the state! Because lots of babies means less money, and less money means the lack of a successful middle class life!

Now if that's not what he thinks, I'd love if he came out and stated overtly his views. He never does, he just goes "no that's not what I said" in response to everyone, but leaves it in limbo as to what the dickens he does think.

"Dad, I want to get married to a husband who takes marriage seriously and wants to start a family with me."

"Noooooo, my daughter, you need to ride the cock carousel from fifteen to thirty and waste your time with cads and fuckboys! How else are you going to become a bitter wine aunt? The world needs more girlbosses. Focus on your career and I'll pay for your IVF in your late forties with the finest Oxford sperm!"

To Rightists with daughters reading this: are you concerned that they might encounter "natural family planning" on the internet and really f*** up their life?

I only half-scrolled through this new post so I didn't get the name of who posted it. But when I read this bit, I went "I bet this is Alexander!" and scrolled up and yep, there you were.

I don't know what to suggest, except maybe if you have a point to express:

(1) try it being about something other than 'abortion the greatest thing ever'

(2) if you really gotta 'abortion the greatest thing ever' then be upfront about that, don't sneak it in at the end of 'hey, some young women are being influenced to unscrew up their lives'?

Despite rules about writing as if everyone is reading and you want them to be included, I often see posts like these which assume no female readers. That’s one of the many reasons I mostly lurk.

But this:

Women are more hostile to COVID vaccination, perhaps reflecting a female urge to make politics revolve around their bodies.

You could just ask us. This has an answer. Or at least, I have an answer as to why I have mostly soured on the COVID vaccine and I will not be subjecting my children to it. Hint: It’s not because I want politics to revolve around my body. At least no more than men want to make politics revolve around their bodies.

It’s because ever since I “trusted the experts” and eagerly took the vaccine back in 2021, my life has been miserable for a few days out of every month. As an outcry of women rose up, the news happily reported that this was a “rare” side effect and would go away in a couple months. They basically told us to shut up about it and to stop getting in the way of the solution to COVID. It has been more than four years and I am still suffering the same as when I first got the vaccine. And I know of others in the same boat.

I don’t know of any who are speaking out publicly. That “shut up” command got through loud and clear. However, considering what it has done to some of us, I am not surprised that women tend to be more “hostile” to COVID vaccination.

There are other reasons to be skeptical of mRNA vaccines. Reasons that happen to be particularly relevant given the subject of the OP.

That study doesn't even control for basic shit like differences in average education levels between those who get vs don't get vaccines. When you do that I expect all the effect to go away.

Higer education may result in lower rates of cumming inside, but that doesn't matter if what you are measuring is is the rate of conception vs rate of cumming inside when doing so could be expected to result in conception.

Yeah. My wife already had an autoimmune condition which seriously worsened after taking the covid vaccine. We even tried to get an exemption for her since she has had similar issues with other vaccines and we saw the early case reports on young women with autoimmune diseases, to no avail. And we're hardly layman, we're both scientists with relevant expertise. Covid was a major blackpill for us on the topic of trusting scientific consensus. If we get shut out like this for a mildly inconvenient opinion (we're not even fully sceptics for the covid vaccine in particular - I took my doses with no problems nor expectations of such), imagine the pressure for even less popular ones! Of course it did not come as a complete surprise due to earlier experiences, but it really solidified our opinion of academics.

On the first part though I disagree strongly. People frequently write something like "men do/are X" with nobody complaining, and the same goes for plenty of smaller groups. If you disagree, just do so in writing, as you did; It's what everyone else does, and a good reason to stop lurking.

Me I got diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after the vaccines and my wife had blood clots. For both we didn't even bother mentionning or ask doctors if there was any possible links with the vaccines, out of fear of being seen as "those kind of people", and doctors didn't inquire or propose it as possible reasons. Not saying either of us have had vaccine side effects, and there are plausible alternative explanations for both of us, but then again how do we know for sure it's not the vaccine? I wonder how many people have had side effects that were not being properly recorded because they knew that in blue environments it would code them as people to ignore and shun.

I want to talk about genetics. Scott Alexander has a new piece out about Missing Heritability, basically going through the issues with twin studies:

Twin studies suggested that IQ was about 60% genetic, and EA about 40%. This seemed to make sense at the time - how far someone gets in school depends partly on their intelligence, but partly on fuzzier social factors like class / culture / parenting. The first genome-wide studies and polygenic scores found enough genes to explain 2%pp1 of this 40% pie. The remaining 38%, which twin studies deemed genetic but where researchers couldn’t find the genes - became known as “the missing heritability” or “the heritability gap”.

Scientists came up with two hypothesis for the gap, which have been dueling ever since:

Maybe twin studies are wrong.

Maybe there are genes we haven’t found yet

He goes through a TON of research literature, basically describing how the entire scientific apparatus in genetics tried to figure out why twin studies couldn't be confirmed via actual genetics. To me, it sounds like an extremely robust way to prove that the twin studies were wrong. However, his ultimate conclusion appears to be:

So how heritable are complex traits, and why can’t different methods agree on this?

I think the twin / pedigree / adoption estimates are mostly right. They are strong designs, their assumptions are well-validated, and they all converge on similar results. They also pass sanity checks and common sense observation.

Although polygenic scores, GWAS, GREML, RDR, and Sib-Regression are also strong designs, they’re newer, have less agreement among themselves, and have more correlated error modes in their potential to miss rarer variants and interactions. Although it’s hard to figure out a story of exactly what’s going on with these rarer variants and interactions, there seems to be some evidence that they exist (again, see 1, 2, 3)15, and it seems easier to doubt this new and fuzzy area than the strong and simple conclusions from twin / pedigree / adoption work.

So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."

To me, this assertion is evidence of the glaring blindspot which materialist rationalists such as Alexander have - they assume that materialism / genetic determinism is right, and then reason backward in order to make their fundamental assumptions fit the data. While the genetic framework is clearly helpful and has had some limited success in new medical breakthroughs, it's beyond obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense that compared to the hype in the early 2000s, the new branches of genetic science have been a massive let down.

Overall I'm very curious where the life sciences will go. Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary as well as other books, makes some interesting comments in a recent post where he excerpts his own book:

As David Bohm commented in the 1960s, it is an odd fact that, just when physics was moving away from mechanism, biology and psychology were moving closer to it. ‘If the trend continues’, he wrote, ‘scientists will be regarding living and intelligent beings as mechanical, while they suppose that inanimate matter is too complex and subtle to fit into the limited categories of mechanism.’[9] He was not mistaken.

Nonetheless, in the first half of the twentieth century, many philosophically minded biologists, including such eminent British figures as John Scott Haldane and his better-known son, J.B.S. Haldane, as well as Conrad Hal Waddington, moved decisively, like the physicists, away from the machine model. Less renowned, largely by his own choice, but no less distinguished, was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the great Austrian biologist and polymath who originated general system theory. In 1933 he wrote: ‘we cannot speak of a machine “theory” of the organism, but at most of a machine fiction’.[10]

Despite this encouraging development, a more or less abrupt reversion to the seventeenth-century Cartesian model came over the life sciences with the rise of molecular biology, and its language of ‘programmes’, ‘codes’, and so forth, in the twentieth century’s second half. According to Carl Woese, writing in 2004, ‘biology today is little more than an engineering discipline’.[11] And Woese was no embittered outsider. His pioneering work revolutionised mainstream biology; he was one of the most influential and widely honoured microbiologists of all time, described by a colleague as having ‘done more for biology writ large than any biologist in history, including Darwin’.[12] But he was disturbed by what he saw.

We'll have to see if biologists are actually able to move beyond the mechanistic model and into a more complex, realistic view of life. The obvious CW implications here are how the scientific/materialist worldview and the religious worldviews continue to interact. Right now, the Left seems to be mostly materialist, whereas the right is (nominally) religious. If we can work to merge these two views, we may find more political unity or at least a new set of combinations for our political approaches.

So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."

There's two sides to this tango, they've not been proven right, but neither have they been proven wrong. The pathway between genes and outcomes is very complicated. It would have been nice if there ended up being some really simple way to map everything out but we can't even do that for height, let alone something as difficult to nail down as intelligence. The question is nurture vs nature and the twin studies convincingly argue that nature is a very large share. Scott convincingly points out that educational attainment may itself have some problems as a proxy for intelligence.

He goes through a TON of research literature

And is really really really well written! I read last week the easthunter substack about this topic (which is also linked by Scott in his post) and I got totally lost halfway through. But Scotts strength is to communicate complicated topics clearly. And he makes his opinion visible but still gives room for the other side without snark.

Exceptional blog post! Must have been a ton of work and I was not suprised that at the end he thanked a few other (presumably very smart) people who helped.

He must have been working on it a while. Feels like it's been actually over a month since we had an actually good post? Maybe it's just me

I mean IQ itself is a fuzzy concept. We can only really measure it by proxy, which by itself would create some added complexity here. The more precise way to say this would be “twins are 60% likely to score the same IQ on an IQ test.” The test doesn’t directly measure IQ, and depending on which test you take, when you take it, and under what conditions, you might get some different scores just from those things even if the same person is being tested. Then you have environment, one kid is encouraged to read a lot and do math puzzles. The other plays lots of sports. One eats nothing but junk food, the other eats clean. Those differences can affect brain development.

It’s both and, to my mind.

It's another step removed from that, most of these studies are looking at Educational Attainment (e.g. highest degree received) which itself is a (highly) imperfect measure of IQ (which itself is an imperfect measure of General Intelligence 'g' which is the name given to the statistical observation that many different measures of what we consider intelligence correlate pretty tightly). The Genome Association studies are further largely using SNP databases which themselves more often only correlations to whatever loci are actually impacting things rather then directly impactful themselves.

There are at least three pieces at play here: first, the question of deterministic heritability of mental characteristics; second, the question of how genes as we currently understand them map to mental characteristics; and third, the question of what, precisely, IQ is measuring in relation to mental characteristics.

As far as mental characteristics go, I think it’s fair to say that some are pretty clearly innate and inherited and others are not. There are a lot of children out there who pretty obviously derive their mental abilities from whatever their parents have. However, that’s not the whole story. There are habits of thought that can dramatically improve or sabotage a person’s performance. A simple example is just whether someone cares or not. When I play chess, my level of play whiplashes severely based on how focused I am, on the order of a few hundred Elo. When I’m not focused and don’t really care, I just play moves. I believe this replicates across most fields of activity, and that caring has a very strong cultural component. Of course, a few hundred Elo is not multiple standard deviations of performance, but I think it could explain half an SD pretty easily, which is actually quite a lot.

Genes are a stickier question. My rough viewpoint is that our current understanding of genetics is far too coarse to pick up on anything but the simplest behaviors, where a gene encodes a pretty straightforward protein with one real use case. But in real life, all of the body’s systems are expected to interact quite intricately, and we should expect some novel properties to emerge at the intersection of genes. I’m far from an expert here, so this is all I’ll say. I’m not surprised that efforts to reverse engineer the hack job that is evolution are hitting difficulties, but all it proves is the lingering inadequacy of our science.

IQ is the fun part. On the one level, it’s quite simple: IQ is just a measurement of how you do on a specific batch of tests. But those tests claim to be an imperfect measurement of intelligence, and that intelligence is a singular value. This I am not remotely convinced of.

The typical argument is that because different mental functions correlate, there must be some underlying characteristic that powers all of them, and that they’re all secretly linked. But this doesn’t hold much muster with reality. If our various mental abilities were merely outward expressions of a single underlying scalar, we would expect to see people at the far reaches of intelligence be great at everything. In reality, we tend to see them be amazing at one thing, and somewhere between good and terrible at the rest. Another personal example: I am >3SD on the right for analytical intelligence (measured, in this case, by visual puzzle solving) and dead middle on “processing speed”, which means the rate of quickly mapping trivial inputs to trivial outputs, as measured by a professionally administered adult IQ test. This is irreconcilable with the notion that both are just expressions of an underlying “intelligence.” How could that intelligence be both perfectly average and massively out of the ordinary at the same time? It’s nonsensical. What actually makes sense is that these are different capabilities of the mind, and for whatever reason I am much stronger in one than the other. That leaves the question of why these disparate capabilities correlate in most cases, to which I’ll just leave two hypotheses: first, adverse circumstances that lower all abilities, like how being severely obese will undermine pretty much all athletic performance; second, that humans are sorted into classes in a social hierarchy and that these traits are then selected for in groups based on what the class does. Those are explanations that are plausible and do not require a general intelligence.

Anyway, interesting topic, and I do agree that too many of the opinions here come down to faith over examining what’s going on and flexibly adjusting based on new information.

I really like your explanation as to why individual components of IQ correlate so much. It makes a lot of intuitive sense that its partially a selection effect. Surprised ive never IQ seen truthers mention it.

I think its fairly clear that there is a general intelligence, even if there are subfactors. There is some correlation between different abilities even across animal species, where it makes no sense for a whole species to be adversely effected wrt intelligence. You might say this is just parallel selection, but then you have to explain why needing those abilities correlates so broadly.

You're first and last point are strongly related. Back when we were introduced into chess as kids, I was exceptional at it compared to most of the others, because I could use raw logic better than them. But once some started to train and I didn't, I predictably slipped behind. Based on my skill with other games and the fact that I started from a higher floor, I could probably keep being better than them, I just didn't focus on it. I liked other games more. If you investigated skill in different board games that all need broadly similar traits and talents, I'm pretty sure you'd find results akin to our IQ results: There is quite a strong correlation between them, and especially on the >1SD and >2SD level you find a lot of people who are just generally good at everything with mild specialisation. But to reach the >3+ SD and more, you need some serious over-focusing and specialisation to the exclusion of other things in addition to the naturally high general talent. Mind you, you somewhat misrepresent the state of the research AFAIK; Even the people at the top end for one category still tend to be significantly above average in other fields, they just aren't at the top end of everything simultaneously.

That's not to say that there aren't other skills critical for only one subfield, or even other relevant general skills. EQ, for example, really needs good face reading to work. Meaning if you have some degree of prosopagnosia, it will be much harder for you, even if you try to focus your intelligence on it. Likewise, if you think about problems in physical space, then a talent for innate 3d visualisation is extremely useful (something I relied on a lot when studying math; I always prefer to move everything towards geometry, which some other students didn't understand, while others also found it intuitively helpful).

Nevertheless, once I account for these other skills, I still use my general reasoning in everything. I use it to mentally move and manipulate shapes, I use it to understand people, I use it to time-plan.

For another example, memory is also a fairly general skill, though not equally so for everything, and I have always really noticed the impact of focus there. Back when I played Battlefield Bad Company 2, I memorized every single weapons traits: Damage, mag size, recoil, delay between bullets, reloading time, even the exact shape of the damage-distance curve ... Same goes for other games. Meanwhile my social memory used to be awful, to the degree that I once forgot my own name when introducing myself (awkward!). I used to tell myself that these are just totally separate things and that it's not my fault, but now that I'm a dad and office worker, I find myself having much less trouble remembering social details about various people, as long as I think they matter. In the same vein I have less patience to remember all the detailed mechanics of arcane games. It's increasingly clear to me that I'm merely re-directing a general skill towards the things I care about, as opposed to there being different skills.

I like your examples of face-reading and 3D visualization. Doesn’t it sound a lot like these are distinct mental capabilities that certain people have distinct from their other capacities? And the idea of using your visualization skills to understand other mathematical realms suggests that your “general” intelligence in this case is informed by your ability to generally apply a more specific talent - and this works for students in proportion to their capacity with that specific talent. Presumably the students who don’t get it but who are still good at the subject are channeling a different underlying ability.

Flipping it around heavily, the memory example is also great. I’ve seen this as well: pretty much everyone I’ve met who was not heavily brain damaged has had some category of thing which they remember quite a lot about, corresponding tightly to their areas of interest. Presuming that “my results on a test” can be an area of interest, does that mean that the means of measuring abilities can identify divides in capacity when it’s really just a divide in focus?

My biggest sense for IQ and intelligence is that we just don’t really have a good idea of what’s going on. We’ve found certain capabilities which are confusingly harsh yes/no values, like the internal monologue and the ability to envision things, considering that there is no evidence that someone is one or the other without asking them: you would expect the difference to be night and day, like it is for children and adults! But we’ve also found certain capabilities that appear to be a single thing, like memory, but which express themselves in such radically different ways that you’d be forgiven for thinking they were entirely different capabilities, and which differences are immediately obvious upon meeting someone. That is, our intuition struggles to break intelligence down into real atoms, and naive external analysis carves at awkward joints.

To the extent I have a point, it’s that intelligence is way, way more complicated than the IQ test model makes it out to be, that we know effectively nothing about it, and that we should be really, incredibly humble about our proclamations about it. We’re all out here debating the four humors; that’s how bad it is. People back then would talk very confidently about the humors, and now they look ridiculous. They may have been smart, but the reality was that they were fools, and they could have been less foolish by being honest on what they didn’t know.

I think the reality of the situation is that we still do not understand, outside of some special basic cases, in the slightest how genes correspond to phenotypes, beyond a sort of general sense that should make it clear to us that we do not even have the vocabulary and abstractions to describe such an understanding if it were handed down to us by divine inspiration. I'd expect the simplest nontrivial gene-IQ relationships to look something like "the presence of sequence A slightly reduces the frequency sequence B is transcribed into proteins in neurons when they contain between x and y concentration of transcripts of sequence C, so in individuals whose genetic makeup causes the concentration to converge to that band in their frontal lobe, they get slightly thicker myelin sheaths in that part of their brain, which might make you more smart except if it also happens in the temporal lobe in which case you just turn out schizo". Do we have analysis techniques that would pick this sort of thing up? My impression is that expecting our current ones to do so is comparable to trying to debug slowdowns in complex distributed systems by big-data search for correlations between system performance and the frequency (possibly joint) of individual words in source code.

To introduce a juicier culture war angle, the confusion about the discrepancy, i.e. the expectation that techniques like GWAS would pick up the heritability we expect from twin studies, seems to be motivated by the usual prior that surely the top-of-the-line techniques that the community of experts in a given area are excited about must at least be somewhat good (see also expectation that architects have good taste in architecture, artists have good taste in art, or social justice researchers can correctly identify and redress injustice in society). If you expect geneticists to not be meaningfully competent at genetics in absolute terms, then "geneticists could not find the mechanism of heritability that we are fairly certain exists" is an unsurprising outcome.

To introduce a juicier culture war angle, the confusion about the discrepancy, i.e. the expectation that techniques like GWAS would pick up the heritability we expect from twin studies, seems to be motivated by the usual prior that surely the top-of-the-line techniques that the community of experts in a given area are excited about must at least be somewhat good

I believe this is not incorrect take. There are ton of methodological assumptions researcher makes when they run a GWAS study, you could make many of them differently, and it would still be genome-wide. I doubt we have seen the latest and best GWAS yet.

One must hand it out to GWAS that become the hot method of choice because it was impressive how well it appears to predict other stuff (depression, schizophrenia, breast cancer, other disease). I don't know if there ever was twin studies of coronary artery disease, which are not such a hot CW topic as educational attainment, but I have not heard of debates "GWAS doesn't predict coronary artery disease as well as twin studies".

So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."

Because he goes through the potential mistakes twin studies could be making and convincingly dismisses them all. The only likely source of error would be assortive mating, which would be under estimating genetic impact. If you have an alternative explanation of what mistake the twin studies could be making and how they could correct for it, I'd love to hear

Are you suggesting that the gap between inheritability and discovered genes is some kind of psychic connection between twins that other siblings do not have? Or are you making a broader point that genes are not actually connected to our personality and other traits and something else determines our personality (which weirdly chooses to give people similar traits based on degrees of consanguinity?)

The broader points I'm making are:

  1. Modern sciency people tend to have axioms they don't quite realize.
  2. Biology is stuck in a mechanistic model of genetics and life, which holds it back.

...

Very relevant further reading for the interested from Kirkegaard and Seb Jensen.

One thing missing from Scott's review is that Gusev and Turkheimer have publicly stated that they consider the possibility of IQ being substantially genetic abhorrent, especially for racial differences, akin to the dangerousness of the atomic bomb. Neither is a complete hack like say Kevin Bird, thankfully, but their results have to be taken with a great heaping of salt; they are not at all neutral, they don't even claim to be. If you read between the lines for Turkheimer in particular, it becomes clear that he considers hereditarian research very compelling, he just wants the bar for it to be considered true extremely high, and he wants us to by default believe in a mostly-environmental explanation not because it is scientifically compelling, but because it is the theory with more benign implications.

So, the first conclusion is that sibling-based analysis' aren't actually consistently in disagreement with twin experiments; A particular set of sibling-based analysis' chosen by people who have publicly exclaimed how much they hate the results of twin experiments is in disagreement with twin experiments. There are other studies that are in good alignment.

The second, which many here have already mentioned and which Scott also correctly calls out but you seem to have missed, is that both Gusev and Turkheimer willfully misrepresent underpowered GWAS results as disproving heritability in general, which is just silly. We know how complex genetics is, and GWAS is still missing large parts. The tan paper cited, for example, is just using genotyping! For those who don't know, there are three currently available levels of genetic informations: WGS looks - in theory - at the entire genome, but even the best available approaches are still having trouble with larger structural variants and variants in highly repetitive regions. WES looks at only the exome, which is the roughly 1% of the genome that is properly transcribed into RNA (and a subset of which is coding for proteins). Then there is genotyping, which is literally only looking at specific locations. The list is usually extended through imputation, but this has its own issues. This is akin to claiming that cartography got debunked by an approach that can only look at specific houses (not even randomly chosen ones so you could make a map through repeating the experiment - always the same few houses).

Another important part is the connection between materialism and genetic IQ determinism; First, genuine genetic IQ determinism is extremely rare, the common arguments are between people who claim genetics is negligible (excluding rare high-impact variants) on one side, and people who claim genetics is non-negligible. Even Scott AFAIK has the position of IQ being somewhere between 30-70% genetic, which is a far cry from outright determinism, especially once you consider these percentages are for inter-developed-states differences. Among the dominant materialist ideologies, the favored hypothesis is some variant of blank-slatism. It has many desirable qualities, and even I would prefer it were true; For one, it would mean that we can fix all problems just through environmental changes such as social engineering, without ever having to change anything about the fundamental building blocks of our biology. That would be awesome! But it is trivial to show how important genetics is for a long list of traits, and it is usually uncontroversial where it's considered convenient. It's always EA and IQ that get singled out for special treatment because people don't want those to be partially, let alone substantially, genetic.

So twin studies are disproven because scientists have only found 2% of the genes? Don’t you think there might be a bunch of genes they just haven’t found yet?

Basically the whole point of the article is that they have been searching for these genes for 20 years and have only found more and more complexities.

That said, a comment on the article from Scott:

I know of two secret results I'm not supposed to talk about, by people claiming they've found very large amounts of "missing heritability". Not yet peer-reviewed or confirmed by anything except rumor. I expect one to be out within six months, and the other maybe eventually.

Genes are a complex topic, I’d expect complexities to be discovered.

materialism / genetic determinism

What do these have to do with one another? Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia. There is no reason that god could not have created a world in which genetic determinism is true.

It seems like you want to associate these things because you want to strike a blow against materialism, but it’s just unrelated.

What do these have to do with one another? Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia. There is no reason that god could not have created a world in which genetic determinism is true.

Typically the standard materialist/scientific worldview sees most things as genetically determined, as far as I'm aware! That may be changing.

I agree that you can believe in genetics without necessarily adopting a materialist frame.

Perhaps history's most infamous materialists were also dogmatically blank slatists.

I don’t think that’s true at all. There are plenty of materialists who think things are environmentally determined. This is liberal blank slateism in a nutshell. The opposite of genetic determinism is environmentalism in almost all debates on intelligence. This is actually the first time that I’ve encountered someone saying that variations in intelligence originate from something non-physical like the grace of God (this seems like what you are saying, but maybe you mean something else, it does seem like an odd thing for God to do to me).

Okay, mea culpa!

The former is a foundational axiom of the latter. People latch on to genetic determinism as "obvious" and "true" because they reject the validity of non-material/non-quantifiable explanations.

It’s not though. A universe containing non physical things could very easily contain organisms with wholly genetically determined intelligence. They just don’t have anything to do with one another.

Imagine a purely material universe with species A that is intelligent and has its intelligence completely determined by genetics. Now imagine that one day in that universe species B evolves and has souls (just an example of non physical things, it could be anything you like that is non physical). Nothing has changed for species A, they are still genetically determined.

I feel like you are conflating neccesary and sufficient conditions. A non-materialist model of the universe can readily accommodate physical elements. But a materialist model can not readily accommodate the non-physical.

The strong arguments for heritability being purely genetic are premised on the assumption of a deterministic universe. The existence of non-material causes would cast doubt upon this premise, and by extension the conclusion.

This is wrong for two reasons:

  1. Genetic determinism does not require a deterministic universe. At this point, I don't think many people who are aware of quantum mechanics think we live in a deterministic universe, and it is totally reasonable to believe in genetic determinism WRT intelligence anyway. While intelligence can be measured, it can't be measured down to the planck length. There's a level of precision that's just impossible to achieve, and so long as genetics determine intelligence closely enough, it's fine if the biological processes are a little fuzzy because of quantum uncertainty or whatever your preferred source of non-determinism is.
  2. A non-material universe is orthogonal to its materiality. There is no reason that non-material objects need to be non-deterministic. For a great example of this, consider the various "hard magic" systems in fantasy books that have clear and well defined rules for magic, but contain obviously non-material objects like souls.

To be honest, I don't much care for the term "genetic determinism" in this context. I have yet to encounter a serious IQ hereditarian who believes that the environment plays no role. In my experience the debate is between hard core blank slateists, who deny the impact of genetics at all because they understand that it would wreck the foundation of much of their worldview, and hereditarians who think that there is a mix of genetic and environmental factors. "Genetic determinism" is generally leveled as a slur against hereditarians because it's pretty silly to think that genes are the only thing that matters and that your exposure to lots of words and symbols as a kid has zero impact. Can you point to someone making a "strong argument for heritability" that really says things are 100% genetic?

Niether of those manage to refute anything ive said. Again i feel like you are mixing neccesary with sufficient and trying to control the conversation by controlling the null hypothesis. Asserting that because i have not shown x i must accept y but i am under no such obligation.

I have yet to encounter a serious IQ hereditarian who believes that the environment plays no role.

Then you must be new here (that or The Motte doesn't meet your criteria for "serious") because i have had precisely that argument multiple times here in the last 6 months, including with at least one user active in this very thread.

Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia.

Just wanted to drop a quick correction here: “qualia” does not mean “non-physical”. Qualia just means “conscious experience”. The word is entirely neutral regarding the question of what conscious experience actually is or what causes it. It could be physical, or it could be non-physical. But it’s still a qualia all the same.

I say this because the word “qualia” has gotten a reputation in some circles as being a “woo word” which causes people of a more materialist bent to nope out of the conversation whenever it comes up, and I really don’t think that has to be the case. It’s just a convenient word for describing the, well, actual conscious-experience part of conscious experience, as opposed to say its objectively observable behavioral or neurophysiological correlates. It’s just a handy word for talking about a phenomenon we’re all intimately familiar with. That’s all.

Yeah totally agree. Before I believed in god, I was a superveniance functionalist (now I’m confused). I think qualia are just one more superveniant thing in that frame.

A lot of people who are not materialists and also don’t believe in god cite qualia as the reason why, so I was trying to make the case in a way that would appeal to those people. It was sloppy and I regret the error, since I don’t actually think that makes sense.

I'm not sure I understand what would it mean exactly for qualia to be physical. Isn't it like...obviously something fundamentally distinct?
Mainstream secular stance of "conscious states trace material configurations" feels more like soft-dualism where the mind part plays the junior role, but it's still there

Well, the problem is that some people have the exact opposite intuition! They can’t see why qualia should pose a problem for physicalism at all. Thus the debate carries on interminably.

Are you suggesting that this proves souls exist and they are also subject to evolutionary processes?

LOL, not even close. I'm suggesting that biology is stuck in a mechanistic paradigm and needs to move beyond it to make progress. I'm not saying this "proves souls" or anything whacky, though I doubt we would be in the same ballpark of what we think "souls" are.

What could possibly be not "mechanistic paradigm" yet not be souls either?

What makes something mechanistic isn't a label of "mechanistic" slapped on it, it's that you can actually demonstrate the gears by doing gear things with them: turn gear A, which turns gear B, and so C, and so D, and so E. Stop gear A, and gear E also stops. People can and have slapped a "mechanistic" label on the conscious human mind. That doesn't change the fact that they can't actually point to gears or do gear things with them when it comes to those minds. The distinction is crucial, and the blind spot created by ignoring it is considerable.

I recall reading about awake brain surgery experiments where interacting with certain parts of the brain produced phenomena in the consciousness, as reported by the person having their brain prodded with electrodes. That seems like a straightforward case of pointing to gears and doing gear things with them.

Now, there hasn't been to my knowledge any proof of reliably producing very specific effects or decisions. This doesn't look like as knock-down a deboonk of materialism as opponents of materialism seem to think, to me. If you take a soldering iron to your PC's CPU and RAM, you won't be able to do anything useful either, yet we do know PCs are material and, barring the occasional bit-flip by radiation, deterministic/mechanistic.

I recall reading about awake brain surgery experiments where interacting with certain parts of the brain produced phenomena in the consciousness, as reported by the person having their brain prodded with electrodes. That seems like a straightforward case of pointing to gears and doing gear things with them.

We already know that our minds and wills interact with the material world. You can make me experience pain by poking me with a pin, or deaden the pain with morphine. You can make me feel euphoria by putting me on a roller coaster. You can make me stop completely by damaging my brain.

Think about it in computer terms: I/O is not Read/Write; naïvely, mouse and webcam drivers are not alone sufficient to work with CPU and RAM. Empirical demonstration of the brain equivalent of Read/Write would be mind reading or mind control. If this were even weakly possible, the world around us would look very, very different than it does. You can induce subjective experiences by zapping the brain. You cannot predict behavior to any significant degree by reading the brain, and you cannot control behavior to any significant degree by manipulating the brain's matter directly.

If you take a soldering iron to your PC's CPU and RAM, you won't be able to do anything useful either, yet we do know PCs are material and, barring the occasional bit-flip by radiation, deterministic/mechanistic.

We know this because we can, in fact, point to the gears in CPUs and RAM and do gear things with them, and this is in fact the best, most efficient way to manipulate and interact with them. This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed. There is no mind-equivalent of a programming language, a compiler, a BIOS, a chip die, etc. Maybe those things will exist in the future, and alternatively, maybe Jesus Christ will appear in the sky tomorrow to judge the quick and the dead. All we can say, from a strict materialistic perspective, is that all attempts to demonstrate the deterministic nature of the human mind have failed, and history shows a clear pattern of Determinism of the Gaps, where accumulating evidence forces empirical claims to steadily retreat into unfalsifiability.

[EDIT] - It should go without saying that none of the above supports a claim that Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Odinism, the Imperial Cult, Shinto, Buddhism or any other non-materialistic system of belief has a better claim to truth than Materialism. We have no proof that Determinism is true; we also have no proof that it is false. People are free to choose their beliefs accordingly. My disagreement is exclusively with those who insist that their system is empirically supported, when in fact the opposite is true.

Think about it in computer terms: I/O is not Read/Write; naïvely, mouse and webcam drivers are not alone sufficient to work with CPU and RAM. Empirical demonstration of the brain equivalent of Read/Write would be mind reading or mind control. If this were even weakly possible, the world around us would look very, very different than it does. You can induce subjective experiences by zapping the brain. You cannot predict behavior to any significant degree by reading the brain, and you cannot control behavior to any significant degree by manipulating the brain's matter directly.

You are very good at explaining this sort of thing! Do you write anywhere besides here? I'd love to quote you on my Substack hah.

I've thought about starting a substack, just to have a place to collate ten years of writing if nothing else. Sadly, for the moment, no dice. You can always link to comments here if it helps.

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This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed.

I genuinely can't tell what you mean by this, though I'm assuming it's part of your usual pretense that compatibilism doesn't exist and materialists deny the experience of free will. But how can a method of action possibly operate off an untestable assumption?

We have no proof that Determinism is true; we also have no proof that it is false. People are free to choose their beliefs accordingly. My disagreement is exclusively with those who insist that their system is empirically supported, when in fact the opposite is true.

While determinism is currently unfalsifiable, we do fact have a significant amount of empirical evidence that the mind in materially embodied in the brain. But we've been over that before and, no, whatever new evidence has appeared since then will not meet your absurd standards (iirc, literally no connection between biochemical processes in the brain and observed or self-reported mindstates counts as evidence until people have fantasy story mind-control).

I genuinely can't tell what you mean by this, though I'm assuming it's part of your usual pretense that compatibilism doesn't exist and materialists deny the experience of free will.

I have had materialists very directly deny the existence of free will in extended argumentation with me. I have observed other materialists, here and elsewhere, insist that no evidence against Materialism exists, and also that we know free will cannot actually exist because otherwise it would break materialism. Noting these positions is not a "pretense".

But how can a method of action possibly operate off an untestable assumption?

Things can work without us knowing how they work on a mechanistic level. Starting a fire is mechanistic; people worked with fire long, long before they had a mechanistic explanation of how it worked.

We can work mind-to-mind to communicate, teach or persuade. We cannot work mind-to-mind to read or control.

But we've been over that before and, no, whatever new evidence has appeared since then will not meet your absurd standards (iirc, literally no connection between biochemical processes in the brain and observed or self-reported mindstates counts as evidence until people have fantasy story mind-control).

They are not my absurd standards, they were the absurd claims of the scientists and philosophers who built the paradigm of the material mind. These men claimed their axioms were empirical facts for more than a century, and used those claims to wield vast social, economic and political power while steadily retreating from every scrap of empirical evidence available. It is not my fault that much of the modern world was built by lying to people about empirical fact. I will not stop pointing that the lies were in fact lies, nor tracing the social consequences of those lies down to the present day. Nor will I cease to note the evidence of my own self-reported mind-states, and the ways in which simple observation entirely contradicts the materialist narrative.

Nor will I claim that I have knowledge that I do not, in fact, have. Determinism is a perfectly respectable axiom, and utility can be acquired through its use. but it is an axiom, the utility is acquired strictly through its use as an axiom, and it pays no direct rent at all.

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If this were even weakly possible

Mind reading is weakly possible. Elon Musk is doing it right now, amongst others. It's just that it's very difficult to extract useful information against someone's will.

Not to mention that some human actions can be predicted before they're made by reading the brain: https://qz.com/1569158/neuroscientists-read-unconscious-brain-activity-to-predict-decisions

There is no mind-equivalent of a programming language, a compiler, a BIOS, a chip die, etc. Maybe those things will exist in the future, and alternatively, maybe Jesus Christ will appear in the sky tomorrow to judge the quick and the dead.

The chip die for the human mind is encased in a woman's uterus. The BIOS is encased in the human genome. It's just that the production process is insanely complicated.

The resurrection of Christ is a totally different kind of matter.

Mind reading is weakly possible. Elon Musk is doing it right now, amongst others.

I've seen Musk and others doing I/O. I/O is not read/write. The difference is one involves with a widget and your mind that you could otherwise do with your hand and your mind, and the other involves directly reading or changing your mind. When Musk has a working, rigorously accurate lie detector, let me know.

It's just that it's very difficult to extract useful information against someone's will.

If this is true, as opposed to it being strictly impossible, could you give me some examples of mental information being extracted deterministically from a human mind?

The chip die for the human mind is encased in a woman's uterus. The BIOS is encased in the human genome. It's just that the production process is insanely complicated.

A chip die is a tool we use to make a chip the way we want it. A BIOS is a tool we use to make basic adjustments to how a computer functions. We cannot make human minds the way we want them, with a uterus or by any other known means. We cannot make basic adjustments to how they operate, through the genome or by any other known means. It is not that the production process is insanely complicated; that would imply we could have some reasonable certainty that if we buckle down and work at it we should crack it in short order. But in fact, we do not know how to make significant positive changes to the human brain, and we have no idea if significant positive changes to the human mind are possible even in principle. Von Neumann seems to have had a superior human brain. He does not seem to have had a superior human mind; all evidence I've seen indicates that he was quite human in all the usual ways. I do not believe that a civilization of Von Neumanns would achieve Utopia, nor even lack criminals; I do not think you should believe this either.

The resurrection of Christ is a totally different kind of matter.

Why bring it up then? My point was that confident claims about things you believe will happen in the future are not evidence.

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and you cannot control behavior to any significant degree by manipulating the brain's matter directly.

I recall a notorious manipulation of brain matter that had been popular just a century ago and demonstrably controlled behaviour. Destructively so, yes, but, again, not any more a debunkment than medieval amputations were of modern surgery.

As for mind reading, developments appear to be underway on that front.

All we can say, from a strict materialistic perspective, is that all attempts to demonstrate the deterministic nature of the human mind have failed, and history shows a clear pattern of Determinism of the Gaps, where accumulating evidence forces empirical claims to steadily retreat into unfalsifiability.

When I look at the pattern of history it appears exactly the opposite of what you said - it is non-determinism that has steadily retreated, from inscrutable fate woven for each and every object in the world by deities beyond our reach or understanding to sub-atomic processes that light is too big to observe and constructs with states too fluid, ephemeral and non-uniform to categorize. Many aspects of the world that we considered unfathomable and/or random are now predictable. I do not consider myself married to Scary Capital Letter Materialism, but the odds simply appear to be largely in its favor.

Can you give me a quick summary of your understanding of Materialism and Determinism in the scientific era, and also your understanding of when Materialism, Determinism and Atheism began being taken seriously as workable axioms?

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I/O is not Read/Write

You dont really have read/write access to your harddrive either, unless you open it up and look with a microscope. The "direct" access you get as a normal user is just a very reliable introspective report.

we can, in fact, point to the gears in CPUs and RAM and do gear things with them, and this is in fact the best, most efficient way to manipulate and interact with them.

Thats because the computer is designed to be understandable and manipulable. Its not the least bit difficult to write a programm or OS that doesnt have meaningful interactable gears for you, and transistor-level analysis is not the best, most efficient way to interact with computers. I mean, we talk a lot about LLMs here, and I dont think they are the same thing as humans, but it seems like they pass an non-mechanical by your criteria.

You don't really have read/write access to your harddrive either, unless you open it up and look with a microscope.

But you can in fact open it up and look at it with a microscope. Moreover, you can make a new one from scratch with tools, and make it to your exact specifications. You cannot open the mind and look at it with a microscope, and you cannot make a new mind to-spec with tools.

The "direct" access you get as a normal user is just a very reliable introspective report.

And this is distinct from the access you have working in the hard drive factory. But there is no hard drive factory for minds; the normal user access is all the access any of us have ever observed or confirmed empirically.

Thats because the computer is designed to be understandable and manipulable.

The computer is matter. Matter was not "designed" to be understandable and manipulable. It is understandable and manipulable, and so complex arrangements of matter that we intentionally construct with tools generally retain this property. To the extent they lose this property, it is generally because multiplicative complexity accelerates their mechanics from within our grasp to outside it, and we can generally simplify that complexity to make them graspable again. In the same way, we construct LLMs from mechanical components, and to the extent that they lose the predictable and controllable mechanistic nature, it is through the multiplication of complexity to an intractable degree.

We do not construct human minds from mechanical components, and we cannot identify mechanical components within them; we can neither point to nor manipulate the gears themselves. Minds might well may be both mechanical and intractably complex, but the intractable complexity prevents the mechanical nature from being demonstrated or interacted with empirically. Hard Determinism is a viable axiom, but not an empirical fact. The problem is that people do not appear to understand the difference.

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We know this because we can, in fact, point to the gears in CPUs and RAM and do gear things with them, and this is in fact the best, most efficient way to manipulate and interact with them. This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed. There is no mind-equivalent of a programming language, a compiler, a BIOS, a chip die, etc.

The computer analogy is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but it's carrying more weight than it can bear. Yes, if you take a soldering iron to your CPU, you'll break it. But the reason we know computers are deterministic isn't because we can point to individual transistors and say "this one controls the mouse cursor." It's because we built them from the ground up with deterministic principles, and we can trace the logical flow from input to output through layers of abstraction.

Compare that to any more tangled, yet mechanistic naturally occurring phenomena, and you can see that just knowing the fundamental or even statistical laws governing a complex process doesn't give us the ability to make surgical changes. We can predict the weather several days out with significant accuracy, yet our ability to change it to our benefit is limited.

The brain is not a tool we built. The brain is a three-pound lump of evolved, self-organizing, wet, squishy, recursively layered technology that we woke up inside of. We are not engineers with a schematic, I'd say we're closer to archaeologists who have discovered an alien supercomputer of terrifying complexity, with no instruction manual and no "off" switch.

The universe, biology, or natural selection, was under no selection pressure to make the brain legible to itself. You can look at our attempts at making evolutionary algorithms, and see how the outputs often appear chaotic, but still work.

Consider even LLMs. The basic units, neurons? Not a big deal. Simple linear algebra. Even the attention mechanism isn't too complicated. Yet run the whole ensemble through enormous amounts of data, and we find ourselves consistently befuddled by how the fuck the whole thing works. And yet we understand it perfectly fine on a micro level! Or consider the inevitable buildup of spaghetti code, turning something as deterministic (let's not get into race-conditions and all that, but in general) as code into something headache inducing at best.

And LLMs were built by humans. To be legible to humans. Neuroscience has a far more uphill struggle.

And yet we've made considerable progress. We're well past the sheer crudeness of lobotomies or hits on the head.

fMRI studies can predict with reasonable accuracy which of several choices a person will make seconds before they're consciously aware of the decision. We've got functional BCIs. We can interpret dreams, we can take a literal snapshot of your mind's eye. We can use deep brain stimulation or optogentics to flip individual neurons or neural circuits with reproducible and consistent effects.

As for "determinism of the gaps". What?

Two hundred years ago, the "gap" was the entire brain. The mind was a total mystery. Now, we can point to specific neural circuits involved in decision-making, emotion, and perception. We've moved from "an imbalance of humors causes melancholy" to "stimulating the subgenual cingulate can alleviate depressive symptoms." We've gone from believing seizures were demonic possession to understanding them as uncontrolled electrical storms in the cortex. The gaps where a non-material explanation can hide are shrinking daily. The vector of scientific progress seems to be pointing firmly in one direction. At this point, there's little but wishful thinking behind vain hopes that just maybe, mechanistic interpretation might fail on the next rung of the ladder.

I am frankly flabbergasted that anyone could come away with the opposite takeaway. It's akin to claiming that progress from Newton's laws to the Standard Model has somehow left us in more ontological and epistemic confusion. It has the same chutzpah as a homeopath telling me that modern medicine is a failure because we were wrong about the aetiogenesis of gastric ulcers.

This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed.

Citation needed? I mean, what's so non-deterministic about the advances I mentioned? What exactly do you think are the "non-deterministic" techniques that work?

I see that you've been answering like this, but to me this means absolutely nothing. How is moving beyond a "mechanicistic paradigm" going to help us? What are you suggesting in concrete terms?

Read the article I linked by McGhilchrist if you want to understand more of what I'm talking about.

...

Genetics is just really complicated. It is not at all simple like the 'blue eye gene recessive, brown eye gene dominant' charts you might have studied in school. It is not designed to be comprehensible, it's a giant mess that somehow works most of the time.

Why don't everyone's kids look like models? Why are some people born retarded goblin-creatures with gruesome, deformed faces? Why are people dying of old age? Because we don't have a good understanding of genetics, because it's just very difficult. Nobody even knows what 98% of the genome does, it was thought to be 'junk'. We know about as much about genetics as we know about the high-level structure of the universe, nothing of any significance. There too, 95% is 'dark'.

Not to mention that measuring intelligence is complicated, whether it's people or AI. Intelligence is a vibe, a fuzzy, qualitative thing. You can tell the difference between smart and dumb, that is immediately obvious. But quantifying it is very hard.

It is completely understandable for the genetic basis of intelligence to be very murky and unclear. Meanwhile, heritability is possibly the oldest branch of biology. Animals were being bred millennia ago, we know it works, few things have a stronger basis in fact.

Nobody even knows what 98% of the genome does, it was thought to be 'junk'. We know about as much about genetics as we know about the high-level structure of the universe, nothing of any significance. There too, 95% is 'dark'.

See I very much agree with both of these points. What I resent is scienctism salesmen claiming that we have cracked the code and are about to figure out how to print designer babies on command.

...

You can sort of have designer babies

Just pick your mates carefully! Ideally for multiple generations.

At just 2 children per generation, you'd have 32 great-great-great-grandchildren to choose from!

Well we can be pretty sure genetics is the substance behind heredity. I see no reason to give up on mechanistic models when good progress has been made. It's just difficult. Certainly not helped by the amount of fear and politics involved. Gene-editing is functionally illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui

Reading the above wikipedia article is soul-destroying given the context of what we now know about other genetic bioresearch in China in the late 2010s.

To me, this assertion is evidence of the glaring blindspot which materialist rationalists such as Alexander have - they assume that materialism / genetic determinism is right, and then reason backward in order to make their fundamental assumptions fit the data. While the genetic framework is clearly helpful and has had some limited success in new medical breakthroughs, it's beyond obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense that compared to the hype in the early 2000s, the new branches of genetic science have been a massive let down.

Just because the train is late, it doesn't follow that it will never come or that trains don't work at all. There is a lot of trackwork and bad weather plus the conductor has been derailing it!

A first impression: If we take a lot of leftist dogma as being true and discard obvious analogs to reality and claim they might be inaccurate, then we might just be able to explain why our ideology is seemingly not mapping on to the world around us.

Now queue the arguments through analogy, 'what if's' about reality, and a mountain of research motivated entirely by a need to collapse all genetic gravity into a neat environmentalist fold.

Scott Alexander seems to have a good eye for strategy. The article is effectively just an advertisement for a few plucky anti-hereditarian rebels who want to expose the fatal flaw of the hereditarian Death Star. Scott speaks highly of the effort, but obviously signals that he is going to wait until the rebels actually fire a torpedo into the thing. And there in lies the problem for the rebels.

For every alleged fatal flaw exhaust shaft that the hereditarian Death Star has, environmentalism has less than nothing. Every proposed theory has failed to explain the big problems. So... What's the point? What exactly are we doing here?

The fundemental problem the hereditarians face is that thier entire edifice rests on an assumption that biology, psychology, and anthropology are not only rigourous and mechanisistic, but sufficiently understood that outcomes can be manipulated in a near deterministic manner. This is manifestly not the case.

Sure biology may be more rigorous than psychology which is in turn more rigourous than anthropology, but none of them are even in the same zip code (much less the same ballpark) as electrical engineering.

The fundemental problem the hereditarians face is that thier entire edifice rests on an assumption that biology, psychology, and anthropology are not only rigourous and mechanisistic, but sufficiently understood that outcomes can be manipulated in a near deterministic manner. This is manifestly not the case.

It's also not required. No manipulation is necessary to observe heritability.

It is required if there are numerous potential varieties/mechanisms of heritability other than genetic.

And within the context of twin studies, those are?

Any number of things, thats the point. Social status, economic status, family dynamics, cultural affiliation, level of interest, environmental factors (hot/cold, wet/dry, average exposure to sunlight).

The only way any of those would be relevant would be if parents treat fraternal and identical twins very differently, and in the linked article, Scott discusses why that's probably not the case.

Did you read the linked article?

How do you think a twin study works? How would economic status have any effect on a twin study?

Can you be more specific?

How would social status vary more among fraternal twins than identical twins? Are there family dynamics that push fraternal twins apart (on whatever stats you use) while pulling identical twins together? Do fraternal and identical twins live in different climates?

Fraternal twins are slightly more likely to be different sexes than same sex; thats a pretty big confound.

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Why? If IQ is determined through spooky undetectable woo that is inherited rather than genes, it's still heritable.

It matters because if "spooky undetectable woo" or even "ordinary detectable woo" such as cultural affiliation, economics, or social status can be demonstrated to have an effect, it will (at a bare minimum) weaken the genetic hypothesis, and if the effec sizes are large enough wreck it outright.

Adoption studies have already debunked those other explanations. Why are people always forgetting those exist? Environmentalist arguments have been DOA for decades now

Because heritability keeps coming up "missing".

People obeserve the world around them and see fucked up kids coming from successful parents, successful people with fucked up parents, and siblings (even twins) who's attitudes and outcomes diverge wildly from eachother. Observations that would all appear to contradict the strict hereditarian model.

Finally people observe that academia appears to be hopelessly culturally compromised, see the Marxist (and deeply anti-Western) origins of Id-Pol/CRT, and @FCfromSSC's comments on materialism.

The "ordinarily detectable woo" is classified under "shared environment" and has already been examined. Postulating spooky undetectable woo that is heritable doesn't weaken anything.

So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."

This feels like it's setting an incredibly high bar for "proven". If the studies replicate, which is already amazing in our current era, but the specific mechanism can't be isolated, that doesn't mean it's not proven. I mean, famously, a lot of the "why"s of gravity aren't well understood. Notably why it's so weak compared to other forces. But you'd be insane to go full retard and deny the accuracy of the models that match observable gravity.

But you'd be insane to go full retard and deny the accuracy of the models that match observable gravity.

Just watch me.

No, but that's completely fair. I suppose they are proven that they replicate - what isn't proven is that there's a specific genetic mechanism that causes this replication to happen. That being said, I will admit I skimmed most of the sciencey part. I have a pretty strong bias in this area, if it wasn't obvious from the post.

Yeah. Simultaneously it can be hard to exactly explain gravity due to nested complexity in the real world, regardless of improved sensory equipment and yet still practical to assume that we're not gonna wake up tomorrow morning and fall into the sky.

It was a neat article. I do think you’ve kind of missed the point. The twin studies are aren’t “wrong.” They replicate, their math works. But they don’t line up with these other studies which are supposed to measure the same thing. That could mean they’re wrong, or it could mean they aren’t actually measuring that thing.

materialism / genetic determinism

For example, these are not the same. Materialism supports models with irreducible randomness. We do not control enough of the inputs to be sure of every output. For the hard sciences, we’ve gotten reasonably certain in our models, but for genetics, there’s still plenty unexplained. The error bars are large.

beyond the mechanistic model

Into what? How could accepting dualism possibly improve this model?

So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."

Twin studies are robust and reproducible. What can't be "proven" is the particular genes behind the heritability.


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