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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1892 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 3, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is there a word for that emotion you feel when you're aware of someone who is naive about a situation and you feel sympathy or concern towards them?

Is anyone looking at making a Chat GPT5 analysis? I don't want to preempt anything, but the results seem underwhelming.

Some people seem to put a premium on its usability though ('it does what you tell it to do').

Edit: All sorts of memes and squabbling going on over at /r/singularity

Did Scott coin the "50 Stalins Protest?" If not, who did? If so, what were the prior descriptions of the notion?

Nope. This is from an old communist joke - I want to criticize comrade stalin. He is working too much, he strains himself too much for the good of the people. He needs to rest more.

A search for all instances of "fifty stalins" prior to year 2014 shows the Slate Star Codex article (archive) as the only result.

Have any other middle-aged dudes grown out their hair? How did you keep from going insane?

I'm over a year into growing it out and it's long enough to pull into a ponytail. However, I don't want traction alopecia, so it can't be in a ponytail all the time, and it drives me crazy when it's loose and I can feel the weight against my neck (I have very coarse hair that is also very thick [such a burden for a man in his 40s, I know]). Taking care of it is one thing, but always feeling it is another. Perhaps I have too much 'tism for long hair.

Princess Leia buns. It’s the only way.

Bro, I've worn my hair in a ponytail nearly every day for the last 20-odd years, and never had an issue with traction alopecia. Just don't pull it super-tight and you'll be fine.

I grew out my hair during COVID when I turned 30. So I wasn't middle-aged, but I wasn't a young college kid either.

There really is no way to keep from going insane. You kind of just have to commit to feeling ugly and unkempt for around 12 months, after which, hopefully, you'll be able to sort of pull your hair back into a ponytail.

It worked out OK for me since I was able to grow my hair out while working from home during COVID, but I recall going on a business trip when my hair was around 5 to 6 inches long and people definitely commented on my "salad bowl" look. Not my favorite work trip.

Additionally, you're right about maintaining long hair being a complete pain in the ass. I still have long hair, but I will likely cut it once I get married. I met my partner after growing my hair out and she has pressured me to keep it long until we tie the knot (wedding photos, I suppose). Considering I haven't even proposed to her yet, I'm likely stuck with my long hair for at least another year.

I haven't had a haircut since October and have had lots of compliments. It looks fine, so I don't get the salad bowl comment. If I've recently showered with shampoo, it gets in my face, but by the end of the day, it accumulates enough grease to stay out of my eyes after repeatedly brushing it back.

Nice.

Is there anything interesting going on artistically lately?

Aside from the obvious, that digital artists are getting supplanted by cheap, fast AI images?

I tried searching a bit, and asking ChatGPT, and mostly people seem to be saying that there are a bunch of different things going on, many of which are identity based and fairly boring as far as I'm concerned. The last large movement I liked was probably Impressionism; Art Deco is also pretty good.

People around here mostly paint the hills and skies, which I think is just kind of a default, I don't know if I'd call it a movement. I guess recently I like the atmospheric, somewhat out of focus landscape artists, like Gareth Edwards or Paula Dunn.

If you like surreal, nightmarish art in the vein of HR Giger or Zdzislaw Beksinski, maybe check out the work of Suguru Tanaka. His stuff is very visually striking and has quite an otherworldly quality to it I quite enjoy.

Not sure if this would be up your alley though. And yes, most of the trends in visual art as of late (I would argue even since the mid-20th) have been lacklustre at best.

Thanks! That is pretty interesting. I did like the few Lovecraft stories I read more than I had expected as well.

As far as I can tell, the major art movements of the past 50ish years are Apple minimalism and anime. I’ll openly confess that it’s not too inspiring, but both have very definite ideas about the form and purpose of art which have insinuated themselves into the overall cultural moment.

Insofar as I don’t recall many people writing on these as art movements I suppose they could be interesting.

Extremely absurdly niche genres/mediums that you can't train an AI on because there's no prior art is my guess of where to look.

Where to look for what? Interesting artists?

On the one hand, that's likely to be true, like the interesting music coming out of various subcultures in the 90s.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how one would go about looking for that. They have an "artist studio tour" in my area, and although there are something like 40 artists, I didn't find anything I felt any energy from. They were mostly boomers painting hills, or sometimes textural abstract sorts of things.

I don’t know where you live, but assuming it’s in the West, I would recommend searching out the more prestigious art colleges/universities in your state/province/region.

If it’s anything like my home then you’ll find that the graduate exhibitions display some pretty out there work, 90% of which is garbage with no value or meaning (you could argue that about the boomer hill paintings too).

Point is: the young are who drives the new directions in the art world. It might be limited to the “underground” world for 10 plus years but eventually someone will come along and commercialise/ruin it. So get in while it’s fresh!

How much detail do you think is in the data that governments and tech companies are keeping about us?

  1. Are they keeping a log of every website you visit?

  2. Are they keeping a log of your phone's 24/7 location data?

  3. Are they keeping transcripts of all of your phone calls?

  4. Are they keeping transcripts of every word you say in the vicinity of a smart device?

  5. etc.?

  1. Depends on what you mean by "tech companies", technically unless you do fulltime VPN at least your ISP has the full list of all websites you visit. Given that we have confirmed report of dragnet surveillance installed at least at some major ISPs, you can assume NSA (and whatever TLAs they share with) has the full log of these (storage paid for with our tax money, thank you very much!) though they probably don't check it unless you become a focus of their attention somehow.

  2. Google/Apple most definitely has these data, and likely they sell some of it, and give some of it on a search warrant. The government can request it, the legality of it is kinda debated but it's legal at least in some cases, so you can assume if the government wants it, it will have it. I don't think we have any info about Feds keeping independent logs, but they wouldn't need to.

  3. Not likely, as it would be a direct violation of wiretapping laws AFAIK. Unless, of course, you got into trouble enough for The Law to be able to get a wiretapping warrant on you. Though really with all the rest of NSA shenanigans I wouldn't be totally surprised if they start doing it, but I haven't heard any indications of that happening yet.

  4. Not likely, since the traffic to record it all would be large enough for people to notice and start talking about it. It is plausible that there could be "keyword triggers" that record specific conversations and clandestinely ship them back to the phone/OS company (where the previous items apply), but for full transcripts of every word it'd be hard to do without people noticing, and since we don't have AFAIK any good evidence of this right now, I'll tend to say no, at least in the form presented. They definitely could listen and update e.g. your advertisement profile - that'd be very hard to catch without having enough access, though the longer we go without somebody Snowden-ing it out, the lesser is the probability that it is actually happens. If NSA couldn't keep their secrets secret, why Google or Apple would be able to?

  5. In general, it all depends on a) what is your threat model and b) how interested the government is in you. For most normal people, the government is not interested in them unless they become a target of the investigation - which means they did something to trigger it, or somebody else pointed at them as somebody to watch. If that happened, pretty much any contact with modern society means you're screwed. Bank account? Forget about it. Driving? You better wear a mask and steal a car from somebody that doesn't mind they car being stolen. Communication? Burner phones probably would get you somewhere but don't stay in the same place too long or use the same burner for too long. It's possible to live under the radar, but it's not convenient and usually people that do that have their own infrastructure (like drug traffickers) and if you're going into it alone, it will be tough for you. OTOH, if you're just a normie feeling icky about your data being stored at the vast data silos, you can use some tools - like VPNs, privacy OS phones, etc. - with relatively minor inconvenience, and avoid being data-harvested. But it wouldn't protect you if The Law becomes seriously interested in you.

I think with 4 and 5 it’s much more likely that they have various companies do that for them, and have arrangements to let them ask to see it. There’s a lot of ways that this could be happening, and since your isp/phone company/social media isn’t literally the government, it’s not really illegal. The arrangement would be something like what happens with pictures. Apple can search your photos (or at least tge ones on their cloud) for child porn. They are also obligated to report any such images they find. But I absolutely believe that if I said something that the government really really doesn’t like that it would be reported to the government fairly quickly. And it’s mostly down to liability laws — if I have a social media account where I talk about doing something illegal and I actually do it, my victims can absolutely go after those media outlets for knowing that I said that and not warning people to stop me.

I actually opt into a service with Google where they track where I am at pretty much all times through my phone. I can go to a dashboard and follow myself through the past going back to when I first opted in. I assume they do this for everyone and I'm only opting into the tools to see the data myself. My wife can also see where I am at any given time, which is also intentional. I have issues with my health and get holes in my memory; I've needed others to be able to locate me before when I'm not well.

#1, #2 and #3 are technically feasible and only require coordinating a small number of companies with server side mechanisms, but it's vulnerable to whistleblowing.

At least until the 2020s the employees at Google would have revolted if they found insidious spyware like that. Not sure how it would go in 2025...

#4 would be challenging to do en masse without the infosec community noticing.

If you're willing to go full tinfoil hat you can greatly increase inconvenience to yourself to mitigate the first 3. Naomi Brockwell's YouTube channel is a fairly high quality resource.

https://youtube.com/@NaomiBrockwellTV

This reminded me of something that is not quite on topic, but close enough.

Towards the end of summer 2018, I broke up with my girlfriend. Given my age and maturity at the time, I, of course, took care of the most important things first; I hid all of our photos that we had posted together on Facebook.

Well, not actually all of them. All of the one's that popped up on my "wall" at the time (I actually deleted Facebook for good about a year later, so my appreciation for both the terminology and function of the site is now out of date. Apologies if what I detail here isn't how it works anymore). These were typical couples photos; lots of couple-selfies of us eating things or being in places or even eating things in places.

As with any millennial breakup, however, I didn't actually unblock or unfriend my ex. No, no. You see, there is etiquette to the Facebook break-up. Although there can be a a period of mutual blocking, you never hard delete one another. But you also never interact with one another. You simply cyber-stalk one another to see who rebounds first.

Being a career technology dude, however, I noticed something interesting. Within just one or two days of my totally-not-crying deletion of the various wall photos, I became aware that my ex and her friends were no longer getting prioritized in my newsfeed. This was a stark contrast to just a month before where every damn day my newsfeed was filled with whatever new photos she had posted that day along, often, with the goings on of her friends (whom I had friended on facebook when we began dating). Quite the abrupt shift! I double checked to see if anyone hand blocked anyone else. Nope. Should I navigate to any of these profiles directly, I could still click on stuff without any new limitations (pro tip: don't get caught liking a photo from six years ago).

The realization didn't take long to formulate in my head. It seems to me that Facebook detected the pattern of "relationship status change followed by rapid hiding / deletion of photos only featuring two people ... those previously in a relationship" and then quickly, and easily, followed the random forest down to "breakup protocol." To help spare my feelings, it began to algorithmic shadow-censor the new things my ex and her friend's were doing (why the friends? Probably just in case my ex popped up in their photos. A likely outcome).

But then I realized something else that really gave me an "oh shit" moment (and, happily enough, made me forget about my ex). Facebook must have hundreds of these kind of behavioral decision trees. Breakups, divorces, graduations, new births, deaths in the family ..... deaths in the family .... wait, what kind of deaths? old age, cancer, car accident .... suicide.

It then became apparent to be that Facebook likely has a fairly reliable (though probabilistic) means of identifying social media posts that evidence suicidal ideation. Then, thinking back on my own situation, I wondered if there was some sort of correlation between breakups and suicidal ideation (it's my understanding that, yes, there generally is. I think job loss is the other big one.)

So, in 2018, instead of doing normal break up related stuff, I'm trying to piece together how accurately fascebook can predict suicide, or drug overdose, or alcoholism, or intent to harm others (I stumbled across a bunch of articles about how cops would try to find ways to infiltrate private instagram feeds because, apparently, gangs would literally announce their intended targets that way).

And this is the bigger conundrum to me than just the collection of data. If the data available to a company could be used to make these reliable behavioral profiles and, in fact, probably is. Then, to what extent do we want them to take preventative measures for all of these potentially horrible outcomes? But think about what that is -- it's corporate sponsored Minority Report. Hell-the-fuck-no! The level of dystopia that comes with "Hi, we're the cops, facebook told us to visit you" is off the charts.

There are basically 3-5 types of players of note. The government, large stack tech providers, and data brokers are the most distinct and relevant ones.

The government is extremely capable but also doesn’t usually bother to assemble its data into a full-you, longitudinal picture unless it’s motivated to do so. Theoretically that requires a warrant or a high degree of suspicion but in practice it just requires a casual interest. I think regular citizens worry far too much about this and powerful citizens worry far too little about it.

There are only about 3 players in tech with large “stacks”. Google, Meta, and Amazon/AWS. Second tier players in terms of exposure or will to track include Apple, ByteDance, and Microsoft. Any other tech company relevant for an American only matters insofar as they integrate their stuff with the final group…

The “data brokers”. These guys assemble pictures of you based on what dregs they can buy from bigger players, smaller but more comprehensive deals with single or more focused services, and occasionally supplement with data leaks even if such is technically illegal I’m pretty sure they still do.

It’s important to keep these 4 groups distinguished (there’s a major gap between the top tier of tech and the second tier). The answers and usage of the data differ a lot. To some extent the top tier hold back from their full theoretical power.

I will add that there is probably a fifth group of relevance: ISPs and cell providers. These groups are theoretically high exposure but held back due to regulation or fear of lawsuits. The government teams up with them again in cases of suspicion but otherwise doesn’t usually bother. (Banks might count as a sixth group but AFAIK they are super regulated about what they do so don’t matter)

I’d say that the exact words and recordings usually aren’t a major worry. It receives too much attention if you ask me. Your location is far from granular but big picture is likely very knowable even by smaller players. The data brokers are a bit inconsistent but potentially the biggest store of info and also the least regulated. However that inconsistency also works somewhat in your “favor” as the knowledge they get is by nature very inconsistent. You’d be surprised at how hoarding some companies are about their own data and how reluctant the biggest players are to share the Crown Jewels even if they only sorta use it themselves. Your web activity is pretty patchy because the tech evolves so fast and there’s a major wax and waning of exposure. Sometimes they can track a ton and sometimes the noise is strong and it’s hard to assemble patches of data with reliability.

And again each of the 4 nongovernmental groups get different slices of the data so unless you’re asking specifically about the top tier it really depends.

To take this on a slight tangent - at least for phone/tech companies, they're not keeping nearly enough data about me.

I bought a new flagship Samsung phone this year, billed as having all the AI bells and whistles. It was supposed to work magic with its cloud access, integration with all the built-in apps, on-device processing, and smart assist / suggestion features.

What Samsung AI actually does is sit around offering an inferior version of my SOTA-subs (Claude,Gemini,ChatGPT) and I basically never touch any of its features. It's the brand-new-but-already-outdated-car-touchscreen of AI tech. Also, a few times a day it annoys me with an unnecessary pop-up saying "Good afternoon! Here's a random news article based on your location. The current weather is overcast. Have a great day!". I hope to god no inference cycles were wasted generating these turds that wouldn't have passed muster as a feature in 2015, let alone 2025.

I want to be able to sell my soul to the machine. I want it to spy on me every second I use it. I want it to already know that I've been pulling up my topo map every time I have a spare minute, see that I've been looking at such and such an area, know that I usually do hikes of this distance and that elevation gain, and go have a think about that in the background and come back to me with something useful that I would actually want to know, and haven't seen yet - that "there's low cloud forecast for that area on Saturday, just FYI", and "trip report from 2 days ago mentioned an active bear in the area".

and to head off objections, Yes I want it reading my texts. Yes, I want it looking at my photos. Yes, I want it to be my Whispering Earring. "Better for you if you don't hit send on that reply. She'll likely think you're being flippant even though you're being sincere".. and so on.

obviously not with that kind of sharing enabled by default, but it should be available!

Have to agree with your conclusions, although I come at it from nearly the opposite valence. I want to own my phone on the hardware level, and NOT have it spying on me unless I choose to transmit certain info out.

I have all the extra Samsung AI features disabled on mine, and have yet to hear a single reason to turn them on.

If it is going to be spying on everything, it damn well better be able to figure out how to be a good little servant and satisfy my actual preferences.

This has been my ongoing annoyance with targeted advertising. I should never, ever be exposed to a digital ad that isn't at least somewhat enticing to me, or at least feels relevant to my interests. Yet 99% of the time, I'm simply nonplussed by the offerings that actual get served. Oh, I can see that they're taking educated guesses, they're not completely winging it, but whatever 'consumer profile' or equivalent they've got of me is laughably off base. I could see a me that was shorter on willpower and maybe 15-20 IQ points lower might be engaged with it.

Full disclosure though, I've also used the Firefox browser the entire time I've been on the internet, and I adblock every website by default, so it is just possible they can't get a good read on me.

After decades of data gathering, they aren't any better at predicting my preferences DESPITE ME BEING VERY CONSCIENTIOUS when feeding my preferences to them!

My end thought is "Look guys, if you want my hard-earned money you have to at least display things that are genuinely appealing at a price point I would be willing to consider. Otherwise, maybe leave me be." I can figure out what I want and how to buy it just fine on my own!

And that's kind of the meta-issue with AI products and their integration. "If you want me to opt-in to your digital surveillance panopticon, SHOW ME HOW IT WILL IMPROVE MY LIFE FROM BASELINE, I don't want parlor tricks and corporate marketing jargon, I want tangible improvements in the metrics that I care about with regards to my life quality. If you can't figure out how to do that, I literally do not trust you to run this system wisely."

EDIT: Although, I am waiting in trepidation/excitement for the day I log into one of my accounts and have a conversation with the AI and it becomes clear that the robot has me 100% pegged, it knows precisely what I want and it can offer a plausible plan on how to get those things/give them to me, and demonstrated capacity to assist in that goal. Then, I like to think that I'll have the willpower to put it down and think things over, and try to maintain enough sense of self that I do not just immediately empty my wallet and tell it to do whatever it takes to make my dreams come true.

Google shows you it's location tracking in Google maps timeline.

Apps that respond to voice commands Hey Alexa, OK Google etc. Must record all sounds to parse the command sound. That doesn't mean they archive it all but it's all getting recorded and processed. They certainly have all your phone call metadata (who you called and for how long). Your browser has site history which is generally sold widely.

I would operate under the expectation that all of those but phone transcripts to be available to anyone who wants to buy them.

How difficult would it be to set up a company that actually buys the data on either a major country, anonymized, or specific smaller groups or individuals, not anonymized? What are the rules for who they are allowed to sell to, and in what form?

If you’re in California or a small handful of other states there are a few rules but otherwise it’s the Wild West. GDPR is the only real game in town in the EU. Your biggest challenges are cost and access (getting someone to sell to you is harder than closing the sale). It also really depends on what you mean by major country.

If you mean like, could China buy data on Americans from sketchy brokers and assemble it themselves? Yes almost certainly and they probably have. There is essentially no mechanism preventing them from doing so either. However, as I noted in my comment above, real-time and granular data from the biggest primary players is usually kept strictly in-house. They are also almost certainly keeping their capabilities in their pocket in case of major conflict.

In fact the CFPB was thinking about putting in nominal sale restrictions (really basic stuff) but the Trump admin tanked those plans. It’s my understanding that there are a few Executive Orders that attempt to fill the gap (eg prevent sale to China or Iran or Russia etc) but it’s unknown how much tooth or enforcement consistency they have (my guess: very little)

I have no idea why I added the word "major" to country. I was just trying to ask about the differences between anonymized large data sets, and smaller but far more specific data sets.

I guess I'm trying to find out... how open to abuse is this system - is it simple for a somewhat resourced person or group to just set up a company and acquire sensitive data on business rivals or personal enemies or whatever else.

What's currently the most cost-effective and practical method of getting ahold of Ozempic/whatever weight-loss drug in the US without a diabetes diagnosis?

Also, is it worth messing with oral delivery, or are they flat-out less effective than the injection method?

I'm tired of people lying to me that I'm not fat when I observe the differences in the way the world treats me vs other people every day.

/u/TrannyPornO has an article about getting cheap Ozempic from the gray market.

What's currently the most cost-effective and practical method of getting ahold of Ozempic/whatever weight-loss drug in the US without a diabetes diagnosis?

You should learn how to buy the freeze-dried peptides directly from gray market sources and constitute them yourself in vials with bacteriostatic water and use an insulin syringe to inject it. There are Telegram groups where people get together and test the gray market sources, usually organized by the gray market source itself.

Most cost-effective: this comes to about $60/month if you buy a one year supply of the drug and related materials.

Most practical: because you can just get everything delivered and don't need to manage a prescription via a doctor, though it takes a bit of research. It's not as idiot-proof though so you could mis-dose yourself, but if you're sane and can do basic math and trust a friend to double-check your work you should be 100% fine.

If you don't have a diabetes diagnosis but can convince your doctor to write you a prescription for it anyway (since it is approved for weight loss as "Wegovy"), you can expect to pay about $350-500/month by buying it ("Zepbound") from Eli Lily direct. You still have to fill and inject yourself with syringes though.

Can you get a medical marijuana doctor to ‘diagnose’ you with diabetes and give a scrip for ozempic?

@Cremieuxrecueil has had this one posted for awhile, I haven’t tried it but it’s the first thing that comes to mind: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/how-to-get-cheap-ozempic

(Essentially you order the peptides yourself and inject them yourself.)

I've been thinking that perhaps the woke/liberal/feminist (there is a lot of overlap between these groups) hatred for intelligence research and FUD-creation around the IQ concept is not merely about the incendiary topic of "race" or ethnicity and IQ that might pop up if society takes IQ seriously, and not just about the basal opposition to anything that goes against "tabula rasa", but perhaps also because men are more extreme in IQ than women. Nature takes more risks with men, while women are somewhat more clustered around the mean. Why does that matter, if the average IQ is almost the same for women and men? Because most of the geniuses are going to be men. Even at 130 IQ there is a major difference. Something like 6/10 of individuals with 130+ IQ are men. If you go up to 145+ IQ, there are fewer and fewer women compared to men. With high intelligence being one of the key ingredients to make for better leadership of groups and societies, this should naturally lead to an overweight of positions in the highest offices being filled by men in a meritocratic society concerned with getting the best results for its future. Feminists may have discerned this IRL and in data, and of course do not want to be ruled over by men. Thus they seek to obfuscate and mislead around the topic. Thoughts?

With high intelligence being one of the key ingredients to make for better leadership of groups and societies

I would like to challenge this. While obviously we don't want the leaders to be idiots, I am not sure I would prefer a 150 IQ psychopath to 120 IQ kind and moral person as a leader. To me, the main role of the leader is to set goals, make choices and keep the group from descending into chaos, and I am not sure sky-high personal IQ is the best way for that. Maybe some other qualities - which I am not ready to define, but could tentatively call as "not being an evil asshole"? - are at least as important? I do not doubt we need to require the leader be smarter than average - but I think there's a point of diminishing returns where pure IQ power stops being the thing that matters. I don't know where this point is, but I think the premise "the more IQ, the better leader, no exceptions" needs at least to be seriously questioned.

This of course is complicated by the fact that a lot of our current leaders are, to be blunt, psychopaths or borderline psychopaths. Some of them aren't that high IQ either, to be honest. So we're not doing great in this area, and we only have ourselves, as a society, to blame for that. I'm not going to name names here because everybody would have their own examples depending on their political and personal proclivities, but there are enough examples for everybody. But if we want to do better, sometime in the future, I am not sure "higher IQ score" is the metric we need to concentrate all our efforts on. I have seen enough high-IQ assholes to make this questionable for me.

So it’s not the philosophical tradition of equality that got us the French and American revolutions, the 14th amendment, and the suffragists, all before IQ was really conceptualized. And it’s not the specter of communism, even though it influenced plenty of other groups to try their own flavors of radical egalitarianism. Nor can it be pure guilt-by-association with the Nazis; progressives certainly wouldn’t jump the gun there. And it’s definitely, certainly nothing to do with battles fought during the Civil Rights movement, such as the only Supreme Court case most people could think of relating to IQ.

No, women hate and fear IQ because they know it proves men are superior.

Seriously?

I think most people who fear IQ as a concept are generally unwilling to live in a world of winners and losers. They don’t want to admit that being born a loser is possible and that no amount of trying hard can overcome it. Women seem especially prone to this because they’ve been socialized to be “nice” and to believe that “if everyone had access to the stuff the rich have, they’d all succeed.” IQ is a monkey wrench in that concept of the world. A hard limit.

Why have you shaped your objection into one reddit-esque snark? The post would be more informative if you elaborated a bit more on each point instead.

I’d say it got the point across.

But sure. I think associations with racism are the key reason progressives are bearish on IQ research. They get their own Wikipedia article with top billing on the IQ page. By the time of Griggs v. Duke, the political valence was firmly settled. It didn’t get any less political by the Charles Murray era, when the criticism again focused on racial differences.

If the question of sex differences has gotten second billing since at least the Civil Rights movement, do you think it’s gotten more important to modern progressives?

I don't necessarily believe this to be the case, but an amusing thought: What if the feminist hoe-maddening over IQ is not because they believe such a concept could be used to incorrectly characterize men as smarter than women, but because they already do (at least subconsciously) believe men are smarter than women. And where IQ research, or the IQ concept, is only further pouring fuel on the fire in legitimizing this belief and spreading awareness of it.

Three potential non-mutually exclusive drivers come to mind that could lead to the female belief that men are smarter than women:

  1. Lived ExperienceTM. Women—with their allegedly greater Empathy, Social Intelligence, and Emotional Intelligence that they love gassing themselves up about—have cultivated a sense of the Hanania-pill (posted below by @FtttG) through their lifetimes of interacting with men and women.
  2. A mild case of the Apex Fallacy. If when considering the distribution of men in some trait, women automatically focus on some top quantile of men. If one only mentally compares some top quantile of men against the same quantile of women in IQ—in the presence of greater male variability—one could conclude that men are smarter than women.
  3. A less mild case of the Apex Fallacy. Similar to 2), but greater male variability is no longer a necessary condition. If one only mentally compares some top quantile of men against a less restrictive quantile of women (such as women as a whole) in IQ, one could conclude that men are smarter than women.

Have to also account for how that brain is wired up and, maybe most critically, how it responds to stressors and setbacks.

Having two people of equal (and relatively high) IQ but with different neurochemistry you can still find one a neurotic wreck who can nonetheless make good contributions to a group, and the other can be calm and decisive and able to actually take responsibility for the group's actions and inspire the group to follow him.

I'm never going to say ONE factor determines all observed differences, but a brain awash in testosterone will produce far more behaviors we expect as 'leaderly' than one awash in estrogen.

And on the other hand, cortisol is the stress hormone, (see the previous links) which can trigger cognitive disruptions... but also lead someone to be decisive out of pure survival instinct.

I can say that my perception is that women that attain leadership position read to me as high-cortisol style leaders. Constantly stressed, constantly making decisions because they have to and are basically in continual fight-or-flight mode. And if they're high-IQ enough, they are able to navigate those decisions well, but they're never emotionally comfortable with it.

If cortisol is too low, of course, then the response to dangers/threats is delayed so even if they make good decisions, they might come too late to make a difference.

If the majority of women at all IQ levels fall into the low-T/High-C quadrant, it would explain why there's just fewer female leaders overall.

"I'm in this photo and I don't like it."

I also think there’s something to be said for how large male-dominated orgs have chosen a decision structure or maybe also a leadership structure that suits their strengths. I don’t think it makes sense to make this out to be more powerful than it is, but I think as you say even if women make equally good or even better (as I think some research suggests) decisions, time is money, faster can be better, and sometimes forcefully imposing decisions on others can also be more effective than we give it credit for. It does make me wonder is sociologists could invent a managerial structure that improves performance across several axes. However I think research on this also attracts hucksters and bad science, so it’s hard to tell a legit management consultant (assuming they exist) from a bad one.

but I think as you say even if women make equally good or even better (as I think some research suggests) decisions, time is money, faster can be better, and sometimes forcefully imposing decisions on others can also be more effective than we give it credit for.

From an evolutionary standpoint, yeah. Men in a hunting band have to respond a lot quicker to a changing environment than women gathering berries, in general. Slow decisionmaking kills, or lets the prey escape, which is also bad.

So women might have a decent structure for reaching consensus on important matters (do these fruits look ripe? Are these berries poisonous? which section of the forest shall we forage in today?) It will necessarily be more slow and 'sensitive' to feedback from the group members, whereas for men, if the guy leading the hunt screams "GRUG! THROW SPEAR NOW!" better to not talk back and just DO IT.

This is the exact observation that, twenty years ago, cost Larry Summers his position as President of Harvard. It is called the "greater male variability hypothesis."

Interestingly, although many of the "greater male variability hypothesis" charts I find online "illustrate" the bell curve differences by showing a flatter but equally-centered curve for men (lower in the middle, higher at the edges), the only clear male-to-female comparison I can find (PDF warning, also cited here) that uses hard numbers shows male curves that are both slightly flatter, and also shifted higher (i.e. centered more to the right).

I wonder what this means for men in their social experiences with other men.

Does it mean that with a flatter curve you don't know what sort of personality you're going to bump into? While women bump into 'another basic bae'?

cost Larry Summers his position as President of Harvard.

It frustrates me that whenever his name is mentioned, I picture Douglas Urbanski.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

I sincerely doubt that the average person, or even well read feminists, are aware of the precise IQ stats here. I didn't know the how the skew worked a mere few years ago, and I've been keyed into the IQ 'debate' for ages.

Men are better leaders than women even when IQ is identical, though.

Yeah I have that impression too, primarily based on the fact that every progressive woman I have talked about it with in person, upon explaining the iq variance situation, immediately scoffed "Oh so men are smarter than women are they?" And when I say "Yes, but it also means men are dumber than women." They usually stopped being so angry. But their anger doesn't go away entirely, and it feels like wounded pride to me.

Yeah I have that impression too, primarily based on the fact that every progressive woman I have talked about it with in person, upon explaining the iq variance situation, immediately scoffed "Oh so men are smarter than women are they?"

Which is actually funnier than it sounds at first. It suggests either A) a conflation of average and variance, even after an explanation of variance or B) the apex fallacy, where in a discussion on the distributions of men and women in some trait, women automatically jump to focusing on the right side of the distribution for men. Or both A and B. Ironically enough, either would provide mild Bayesian evidence for updating one's priors in favor of men being smarter than women.

Richard Hanania certainly agrees with you.

So, what are you reading?

I’m finally on ‘The Far Side of the World’ – perhaps the most famous novel in the Aubrey/Maturin series.

Captain Jack Aubrey, expert sloth debaucher, knowingly recruits enough lunatics and mutineers to fill out the complement of the ‘Joyful’ Surprise, before pursuing an American cough ‘French’ Man of War around Cape Horn and into the Pacific.

And after spending nine novels vociferously proselytizing his hatred of alcohol abuse to anyone who will listen, Dr Stephen Maturin has now chewed, injected, snorted, smoked, enema’d, or otherwise ingested most drugs found anywhere in, on, or adjacent to, the entire Seven Seas.

Aware of his addiction to the laudanum from his own medicine chest (that somehow didn’t make it into the screenplay), junkie Maturin decides that the only sane course of action is to wean himself off with the aid of a new wonder drug; Cocaine.

And that’s before he tries to cover up a fellow officer’s cuckoldry.

Unhappily, Peter Weir somehow felt the need to rewrite the film version to appeal to a broader audience.

For shame.

Decisive Battles of the Twentieth Century. It's written like an encyclopedia, with 23 different chapters/entries which are each about 30 pages deep. The book is pretty light on exposition, the chapter on Kursk for example has about 2 pages detailing the previous 6 months fighting, but to it's credit the book also goes fairly in depth with force composition and the planning/implementation of Zitadelle. Despite this the authors can't resist describing the armor and gun of the "fearsome Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger Ausf. H", which pleased me, but older and more serious historians might take issue with that bit of indulgence.

My other issue with the book is it's title, which seems to hint at setpiece battles resulting in the annihilation of the enemy, yet they include chapters on Verdun and The Marne, neither of which were conclusive. Also the book shoehorns in the Battle of Britain which I'm pretty ambivalent about. The greatest tragedy is that this book was published in 1976, so it doesn't have Desert Storm. Maybe it's because I recently read Robert M. Citino's Blitzkreig to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare but I would really like a re-release which focuses on maneuver warfare.

8/10

Finished The Moveable Feast. I enjoyed it, though I am not sure I could say why or what it was about. Maybe that was the point.

Ian M. Banks Surface Detail.

Any others here read the Culture books? It's interesting to me the way fans of the series read them as so overtly anti-capitalist and generally liberal/progressive works. This is the fourth or fifth I've read and I'm just getting a depiction of a post-scarcity society where market economies don't exist. Maybe I just haven't read the right book yet though or I'm missing it.

I think they're well-written. They're anti-capitalist in the Star Trek sense where they have a set understanding of what the author pretty clearly considers to be a good-if-not-perfect future, that future happens to be extremely left-liberal, and the works are really trying hard to imply that it's so obviously the correct and inevitable answer that Marx would be proud, but they're also not waving Ferengi in your face all the time, and The Culture is at least presented with some level of warts-and-all.

Player of Games is the most (early-TNG-) Ferengi-esque one. The villains are bad in more ways than just being fake meritocratic capitalists, and there's a bit of a twist about how they're bad, but they're the pretty standard grab-bag of sexism and racism and all the other isms that Ian Banks both didn't like and wanted to paint non-leftists as operating under.

Yeah the Culture is definitely a very small-l liberal society. The gender stuff jumps out the most in that sense, but to me it never comes off as making really political points - it just presents a post-scarcity society with super high levels of technology where doing whatever you want all the time is accepted.

To some extent I guess I'm just shoehorning my own beliefs into the books. It never struck me reading Player of Games that the market economy was the fundamentally bad thing about that society. The greed, hate, warlike nature, and as you point out, all the other - isms. But to read that as fundamentally leftist seems to need to to either connect these things to an anti-capitalist message (which I see the fans do a lot) or I guess just have knowledge of Banks intent - otherwise to me it just comes off as a crooked-timber-of-humanity sort of thing. That scene in Player of Games where they go through the slums of the city could just as easily have been some kind of failed socialist nightmare.

I'm guessing Banks was pretty vocal about his liberalism tho. I get annoyed by that stuff sometimes. People were talking about Watchmen here recently - to me Moore has such a silly take on his own character Rorschach!

Most of Azad's slums wouldn't be out of place in an Ayn Rand novel, but the treatment of medical care is one of the big tells, especially for when and where Player of Games was written, as is the drone informing Gurgeh that "it all boils down to ownership, possession; about taking and having." That's not fundamentally leftist, but it's still also not how the red tribe equivalent would put things, or even universal among the left side of the branch (contrast, for example, Pratchett's "Evil starts when you begin to treat people as things").

Agreed that it's still pretty subtle and a fairly reasonable extrapolation of the technical assumptions Banks is making for the world he wants to build.

And oh, boy, do I have a take on Moore.

It's been a few years since I read Player of Games - that's a good point out, good quote, more overtly leftist than I remember it being.

Just read my first Pratchett last month. Look forward to reading more of his stuff totally blind to his political or philosophical views - Small Gods was... interesting, but also a really entertaining read, somewhat reminiscent of Culture novels to me.

Anyway thanks for the responses!

Patchett's an absolute blast. Hope you enjoy his books.

I was kinda put off by the villainy in Player of Games. It would be nicer if their "extreme meritocracy through McGuffin" concept have been addressed on merits, instead Banks just goes for "but akshually they are all liars and don't do what they profess at all, and instead just do evil things and hypocritically hide it". This is easy - of course people that use plausible sounding concepts to hide being bad are actually bad, especially if the author demonstrates to us that they are bad and then asks "aren't the people I just showed you being bad actually bad?!" Of course they are, you wrote them this way, what do you expect! This just feels lazy to me. I like my villains to be a bit more chewy, to require at least some work to figure out why their position - in which they see themselves as righteous - is untenable, or at least unacceptable to me. Even Ferengi have been given more fair treatment than that (remember, they reached pretty high level of developed society without any wars or atrocities like slavery. For an obvious caricature, it's pretty decent achievement).

As always, The Worm Ourobouros.

Also, The Sea-Wolf.

And I notice some parallels between the two. An effortpost - as effortful as I can make it, anyways - is in the works.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. I really enjoyed Demon Copperhead and I'm quiet enjoying Poisonwood as well.

Recently finished Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte after seeing it mentioned here. Good fun, entertaining.

Now reading Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. So far it's stuck to interesting reportage and avoided the Road To Wigan Pier trap of segueing into lengthy political rhetoric.

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, by Rashid Khalidi.

Unapologetic Palestinian perspective. Khalidi is highly educated and Westernized, so occasionally makes some obligatory noises about how terrorism is bad and it's unfortunate that Israeli civilians have been killed, but this is pretty clearly performative throat-clearing before getting into how everything is always Israel's fault (or the US's). That said, makes a good case for where Israel has gone wrong (and admits some of the areas where the Palestinians have). It won't change any minds but if you want the best-articulated Palestinian perspective you can get without academic faffing about "subaltern identities" and "Zionist colonial-settler projects" (e.g., Nur Masalha and Edward Said) this is probably it.

makes a good case for where Israel has gone wrong

Could you quickly summarize that part? There's no way I am going to read this book, but I am curious enough to hear the summary.

They have frequently not engaged in good faith any more than the Palestinians, especially under PMs who really didn't want to make any kind of a deal and made noises about it only under US pressure. They have manipulated Palestinian leadership for political convenience and not to actually effect change in Palestine. And the West Bank settlers are particularly egregious. A lot of it boils down to fairly predictable radicalization (or at least lack of sympathy) after years of conflict. The Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon, for example, were preventable had the Israelis given a fuck, but the Israeli military basically cheered it on because they were past giving a fuck.

Pretty predictable overall, but it's fascinating how things like Palestinians having shitty leadership and Lebanese killing Palestinians is still Israel's fault because what isn't? It looks like Israel is by default expected to have such sky-high moral standards that it would feel obligated to protect the very organization that declared itself their mortal enemy and is conducting the active warfare against them, or to conduct a policy beneficial for the leadership of the enemy. It's a bit like somebody would declare Hitler's suicide a war crime from the Allied side because they didn't work hard enough to prevent it.

I’m finally on ‘The Far Side of the World’

Give you joy on reaching the antipodal point on your circumnavigation of the series. I think The Far Side of the World is where O'Brian was at the height of his powers. The five novel sequence from The Thirteen-Gun Salute through the The Commodore is where I most like to get lost in though. One just flows into the the next.

junkie Maturin

To be fair to Maturin its clear he deals with chronic pain from his physical torture in HMS Surprise and the physiological torture by Diana.

It's quite clear his physical recovery was very slow from the bowling-green scene in The Commodore.

Even though the film could never live up to the novels, I have mixed feelings about a sequel. I think they still did a beautiful job, especially with the sound stage. I wish we could have had more of at least the same quality, but I'm afraid that any sequel moves would be a shameless cash grab at far lower quality.

The five novel sequence from The Thirteen-Gun Salute through the The Commodore is where I most like to get lost in though. One just flows into the the next.

The sequences are one off my favourite thing about the series. I really enjoyed The Mauritius Command > Desolation Island > Fortune of War > The Surgeon's Mate where it takes 4 novels for the protagonists to finally return to England for a debrief. I also like how where the novels begin and end is fairly inconsequential as the series covers most of a career over the Napoleonic wars and the War of 1812.

Even though the film could never live up to the novels, I have mixed feelings about a sequel. I think they still did a beautiful job, especially with the sound stage. I wish we could have had more of at least the same quality, but I'm afraid that any sequel moves would be a shameless cash grab at far lower quality.

I'd hope instead that as AI improves, film production costs will drop and it would become viable to make a film or tv series that can adequately portray naval life in the Age of Sail. It's historically been notoriously expensive to film things like this and I think it led to the end of the Hornblower TV Film series. (Which btw is up on YouTube)

My dream is to either have an updated streaming TV/Film series with a new cast, or complete AI generation with digital likenesses of Crowe and Bettany (which someone else wished for on The Motte a few weeks ago). There's so much material to mine in a 20 novel series, but I can see how it might not have mass appeal.

Edit:

To be fair to Maturin its clear he deals with chronic pain

I know. Others have said that Maturin has the most character development in the series and is perhaps the real lead character. His fallibility is why I like him. He is a leading physician and naturalist, invited to lecture at the Royal Society and salons in France. Perhaps the greatest intelligence agent of his Age.

And he is a simp for a very very particular type of woman, physically uncoordinated to the point where he would be drowned (or worse) many times over if he wasn't beloved by the crew and a drug addict. An idealist and despairing cynic with a deep deep hatred of authoritarianism. He is naive and ruthless all at once. Great character, and I have to sadly say that Paul Bettany didn't do him justice (probably for screenplay reasons).

The Skin by Malaparte. Not as good as Kaputt so far, but it has been worth it if only for the chapter about how the young male survivors of WW2 became communists because they were homosexuals and wanted political justification for their pederasty.

Black Magic Sanction (The Hollows Book 8) by Kim Harrison.

The other day I started reading Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. Only about twenty pages in but I'm liking it so far.

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