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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5357 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

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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Does anyone else feel like there is some indulgent aspect to posting? The whole reason I began posting on the motte was that "iron sharpens iron", but talking about the same CW issue for the 100th time isn't helping much more in that regard. I realized that as of late, I have been putting comments out there just for the sake of it, even when I don't have anything meaningful to add to the discussion; With the faint rationalization that "I can be someone else's iron".

I am not making some grand announcement to the world, but rather want to hear if anyone felt as such as well. I am going to reduce commenting for a while. Instead, I'll go back to reading more. I'm going to finally address my growing backlog of books and papers to go through. I will still participate in the motte once in a while, but only if I deem it to be meaningful participation and not just pseudo-socialization. For the near future, the motte is going to be partially read-only for me.

Partially related to this, I have had some severe panic attacks and anxiety about the way I am living my life (details not necessary right now). I realized that I am not "happy" , and that around 90% of the world has a life much worse than mine. The weight of this realization is heavily weighing down on my conscience, Just the sheer volume of suffering. I don't understand the psychology behind this, but my gut tells me that living a simplistic austere life more in service of others than hedonism (even small ones such as spending too much time scrolling Instagram or ordering takeout too frequently) is the remedy.

Does anyone else feel like there is some indulgent aspect to posting? The whole reason I began posting on the motte was that "iron sharpens iron", but talking about the same CW issue for the 100th time isn't helping much more in that regard. I realized that as of late, I have been putting comments out there just for the sake of it, even when I don't have anything meaningful to add to the discussion; With the faint rationalization that "I can be someone else's iron".

I think that environments where iron actually sharpens iron and undeniable progress is made over time – big boy science, competitive sports and games – are very different from The Motte (except in the narrow sense of rhetorical finesse and ability to abide by arbitrary rules of polite discussion). As Daddy Peterson puts it, they constitute hierarchies of competence. I've typed a paragraph on leagues segregated by ability, on legible scoring, on frivolous weirdness getting weeded out and robust, boring paradigms rising to the top (think Sambo/Kickboxing/Wrestling vs Karate or Kung Fu in MMA), but erased it. We produce enough smartassing routinely.

The point is, a hierarchy of competence is an environment where you can undeniably lose and your entire approach can lose, deemed pointless and discarded. In this capacity, The Motte is broken by design. Not everyone gets an AAQC but everyone is welcome to participate, over and over, so long as they play nice; and they can bring their toys too. We don't even have a shared epistemology. We can't have one, because Building Consensus is actually proscribed by the rules. This prevents us from becoming a total echo chamber, but doesn't allow to build on our not-inconsiderable output and move beyond circular hobbyhorsing. As a generalist forum for discussions of social issues pertaining to the Culture War through rational lens (arguably a restrictive definition but one I'm happy with), it's an Epistemic Minor League in an environment where Major Leagues have been carpet-bombed and made unavailable; and it can't grow into a Major League.

You're one of the best new contributors, so it'd suck seeing you leave. But I wish you well on your journey of self-actualization.

Epistemic Minor League

I was never under the illusion that the motte is anything but a productivity sinkhole, albeit there was a disconnect between the visceral and the intellectual realization of that. The point of not being able to iterate on past work and just having output disappear into the aether (in a loose sense), whatsoever the mechanism is only further worsens that.

But yeah I needed a long-awaited recalibration of how (WHY) to spend time here (and elsewhere) and am working towards that one grain of sand at a time.

You're one of the best new contributors, so it'd suck seeing you leave. But I wish you well on your journey to self-actualization.

I consider that high praise coming from you, so Thanks for that. I'm not going to leave the motte, but rate limit all my online activity because in the simplest of words, there are better and more important things to spend precious time on. (I'm thinking 10-15 minutes a day total on the motte should be enough)

Most of what I said really isn't about the motte, it's about me. Did a bad job at putting it into words.

I realized that as of late, I have been putting comments out there just for the sake of it, even when I don't have anything meaningful to add to the discussion; With the faint rationalization that "I can be someone else's iron".

That's been my approach for approximately a year now. Rather than getting into randomish arguments for the sake of practicing argumentation I'll try to focus in on topics I actually have insights on by dint of my career or location or experience.

Lately that's had to do with Ron Desantis and Florida politics in general, it's actually amazing to see so many people who don't seem to get what people who live in the state are experiencing and the political shenanigans that were occurring in the leadup to his first election. But that's presumably near-mode vs. far-mode issues.

I'm happy to try to clear things up if I can.

Since he's a likely presidential candidate I expect this will remain relevant and keep me posting around here for the next couple years.

Of course I still fall to the temptation of "SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET, THIS MUST NOT STAND" urges.

realized that I am not "happy" , and that around 90% of the world has a life much worse than mine. The weight of this realization is heavily weighing down on my conscience, Just the sheer volume of suffering. I don't understand the psychology behind this, but my gut tells me that living a simplistic austere life more in service of others than hedonism (even small ones such as spending too much time scrolling Instagram or ordering takeout too frequently) is the remedy.

I went through this a while back. Based on my experience you're on the right track in reasoning. I've never had an instagram account and plan to never get one. You also have to scale back on almost all social media use. And phone apps in general.

What you are likely experiencing is basically the realization that you're not 'doing' anything with the blessed life you've been given by dint of being born in a first-world country. So many aspects of your life are likely based on interacting with the world in a 'superficial' way, likely mediated by an app that makes you feel like you're doing something meaningful but leaving you with nothing to show for it. Many apps are literally designed to get you 'addicted' to making a digitally displayed number go up, and once you leave the app... the number means nothing. You're tricking your own brain into feeling a sense of achievement without any notable personal development or tangible result. You're running up the hedonic treadmill without actually increasing the amount of joy you experienced. You fall into a routine that reinforces patterns of behavior without moving towards a particular goal or endowing you with a purpose for it all.

A few thoughts on how to improve (all things I have done myself):

A) Find and cultivate meaningful and lasting friendships. The one MAJOR benefit of social media and information tech is that if you form a strong bond with someone, you can keep in touch with them anywhere on the globe. Instead of forming dozens or hundreds of weak and ephemeral connections, work on finding some people whose lives can intertwine with yours without making either of you worse off. And avoid forming parasocial relationships with streamers or other influencer personality types.

(Easier said than done, locating 'quality' people is the hard part)

B) Engage in tasks, projects, endeavors that leave you with something tangible or some notable improvement in your quality of life once completed. Exercise is the obvious example, but it could be as basic as building something that you will use regularly from your own two hands, from scratch or close to it. This develops skills, gives you a goal/purpose in the short term, and leaves you with a meaningful/tangible result.

C) Try to minimize consumerist clutter in your local environment. You can probably, with some effort, figure out what 'objects' you own are actually contributing to your mental wellbeing and which are just taking up space and you bought on a whim but had no actual use for. Donate, sell, or throw away the stuff you own that is not contributing to your wellbeing, is not serving a useful function, or you don't have a genuine emotional/sentimental connection with.

This is HARD in practice, I have a decent urge to hoard things. And on the front end, you must work on resisting the urge to buy useless shit in the first place.

Small point about your local environment: lighting and scents are often overlooked (especially by males) for their emotional regulation effects. A space that has pleasant lighting and smells 'nice' tend to make you feel much more comfortable.

D) Spend more time in natural spaces. Maybe it's just me, but being surrounded by greenery and wildlife (even the more boring types) and 'authentic' natural spaces (vs. curated gardens, for instance) is inherently relaxing to me. If you have no access to such spaces within an easy walk/bike/drive... move.

E) A pet, if you can manage it. Constant companionship, a modicum of responsibility and purpose in ensuring another creature's wellbeing, and they can just be damned fun.

There's a meme about the modern male turning into a "bugman/soyboy" who has few useful skills, defines himself via consumption, and is thus entirely reliant on the 'hive' (i.e. mainstream culture) to tell him how to behave, what to think, believe, and what to buy. I think there's some truth to it. If you're heavily plugged in to mainstream culture, and mainstream culture isn't healthy... it will negatively impact your health. I think this is self-evident.

I think mainstream culture is not healthy along virtually any axis that actually correlates with human happiness/flourishing.

Cutting out most of said culture and limiting your exposure to it (not cutting it out entirely!) seems a necessary precondition to achieving your personal happiness.

Just some thoughts.

What you are likely experiencing is basically the realization that you're not 'doing' anything with the blessed life you've been given by dint of being born in a first-world country.

That is some of it. But the entire feeling is hard to describe, It feels like a guilt response. I have a tendency to complain about things a whole lot. And it feels like I used up the limited amount of complaining allowed in the universe when there are so many people who deserve to use that specific resource more. As you can tell, it's not exactly a rational thought process.

In the lowest resolution view, it's the stereotypical first-worlder realizing that his phone had child labor embedded in it. But it's not exactly that, I know being in a mining camp is preferable to that kid than starving. My dread feels more abstract, that kids have to be in mining camps at all. Of course, I know there is no quick fix to this. The problems of the world are far too large for one man to bear, regardless of how arrogant he is. I just had that realization at a very visceral level, which is a trip regardless of how you try to rationalize it.

Since we are talking about feelings. It feels disrespectful to all the suffering souls, if I just sit on my ass and eat takeout, scroll videos for hours, argue with strangers online, or just drink and render myself retarded for significant portions of the day. I should be at the front lines fighting to reduce that suffering. Who else is better equipped to do it? I understand this is supremely naive and arrogant.

I appreciate your advice. Making my immediate surroundings better is the correction to my internal miscalibration/confusion as opposed to becoming a fulltime volunteer monk.

I don't understand the psychology behind this, but my gut tells me that living a simplistic austere life more in service of others than hedonism (even small ones such as spending too much time scrolling Instagram or ordering takeout too frequently) is the remedy.

You probably don't need a massive lifestyle change. Odds are that putting some time into helping people you care about will make you feel better.

Try something small. Help a friend or relative with some yard work or clean up their house.

I definitely feel this. There was a comment from a few years back about how early in The Motte's life there was more genuine curiosity and good faith engagement because many users were embarking for the first time (in their own experience) on a grand adventure to try to understand the Outgroup. Some were repelled and went away confirmed in their belief that the Outgroup were irredeemable scum, many others gained newfound respect and empathy for the Outgroup, and a small group actually converted to Outgroupism. Those who remain here years later are jaded culture warriors in it for the intellectual stimulation (and/or the perverse pleasure) of litigating with rhetorical flourish the minute details of our 99th abortion/HBD/transgender/holocaust/woke-takeover/AGI-apocalypse debate. Every now and then a newbie stumbles in wide-eyed and innocent and asks a question that triggers another beating of one of our old dead horses, and he usually gets snapped at for being a troll because the userbase here is just tired (and perhaps justifiably so).

If I'm being completely honest with myself, I probably come here more for entertainment than to have my mind changed. I could blame this on the decline in quality posts, but that's only part of it. I think that I too am tired, I've seen the elephant, I've read what the other side has to say and I was unimpressed, though it was very interesting to learn where our root differences lie. That said, I still believe in treating my Outgroup with charity and I still enjoy reading their posts. I do sometimes end up having my stances softened or my eyes opened to additional nuance in spite of my disposition.

I will still participate in the motte once in a while, but only if I deem it to be meaningful participation and not just pseudo-socialization. For the near future, the motte is going to be partially read-only for me.

Is the motte perfect? No, but what community is? I will probably not stop posting. The motte is the only community that actually is truly committed to debate and the expression of ideas, especially non-mainstream ones, which is becoming increasingly hard. I have been banned from many reddit subs (usually when disagreeing with the sole moderator, which almost never ends well), but in 5+ years on SSC and The Motte , only got maybe 3 temp bans total. Admittedly, as a mod of some subs ,I have issued bans, but they are always well-earned (spam or insulting yours truly), not out of disagreement. Same for Scott's blog (the comments). If anything, I am not using this site to its fullest potential.

, but talking about the same CW issue for the 100th time isn't helping much more in that regard. I realized that as of late, I have been putting comments out there just for the sake of it, even when I don't have anything meaningful to add to the discussion

Find new things to discuss?

The whole reason I began posting on the motte was that "iron sharpens iron", but talking about the same CW issue for the 100th time isn't helping much more in that regard. I realized that as of late, I have been putting comments out there just for the sake of it, even when I don't have anything meaningful to add to the discussion; With the faint rationalization that "I can be someone else's iron".

I'm not sure I really understand the difference. When I see something I disagree with I register the disagreement with whatever, sometimes feeble, justification I can muster on the grounds that people here who disagree with me likely have some reason for doing so. Then if I'm engaged with we sharpen eachother. If I don't that's unfortunate but this is the benefit of the CW issue coming back another 100 times, either I changed their mind such that they didn't need to engage, I understand this is not frequently the case, or I did not make my point well enough and will wait until the opportunity comes again.

Now if you're engaging with things you agree on I can see how that would quickly lose it's interest but I don't often do that, even people I mostly agree with I can find some dissonance worth addressing.

Partially related to this, I have had some severe panic attacks and anxiety about the way I am living my life (details not necessary right now). I realized that I am not "happy" , and that around 90% of the world has a life much worse than mine. The weight of this realization is heavily weighing down on my conscience, Just the sheer volume of suffering. I don't understand the psychology behind this, but my gut tells me that living a simplistic austere life more in service of others than hedonism (even small ones such as spending too much time scrolling Instagram or ordering takeout too frequently) is the remedy.

You have my condolences, we cannot help how we feel nearly as much as we wish. I won't give unrequested advice but you are not alone in this feeling and others have overcome it.

Yeah. To reply to the first part, my answer to that is to realize that knowledge is valuable insofar as it changes decisions, and to try to generate knowledge that changes decisions that are important. YMMV.

It's entertainment so of course it's indulgent. I post here occasionally because I like talking about these things and I especially like talking about these things with the kind of people who can make coherent arguments. I also enjoy reading other people's posts. But that's about it. I don't think that posting here is improving my real life arguing skills or having any other effect on my real-world self, and if it is than it's only incidental. If you want to post half-baked comments for the sake of argument, then go for it. There's no higher purpose that you're going to be disturbing by doing this. Obviously keep things within the usual standards of discourse, but keep in mind that the vast majority of people on here have no specialized knowledge about the vast majority of things that they post about. And by "specialized knowledge" I mean "do this for a living" or at the very minimum have a degree in the field because otherwise it's just a contest of "I read something" propositions, and anyone can become an expert by dint of having read more articles. We're just a bunch of lay people arguing about stuff that we're never going to have any real influence over, and that's perfectly fine.

If anything, the motte has a deficit in comments, most especially a deficit in comments answering a parent comment.

See my post history for yourself, I write well argumented, semantically very rich content/micro-essays especially but not only on (ineptly) polarizing topics and to me it is clear the semantic value I add to the motte is unparalleled, yet the level of engagement I receive, be it intellectually curious questions or constructive additional facts or argumentations, is very low, low in quality but most importantly low in numbers. Most of my comments are IMO remarkably interesting and information rich for the internet and yet people don't seem to react to that nor seem to appreciate that unique proposition value in the semantic space. So feel free to indulge some comments on mines.

see e.g. https://www.themotte.org/post/317/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/56897?context=8#context

I found this archive of Scott's LiveJournal, but I'm wondering of there's a list somewhere picking out the most interesting articles to read. https://archive.fo/fCFQx

He had this absolutely mind-blowing ten-post sequence on gender, sex, etc. It was his best work until "Meditations on Moloch".

@Lepidus already mentioned Scott's redpilling stint in Haiti.

A few more, from #ThingsIWillRegretWriting: "Stuff", "Libya", and "I believe the correct term is 'straw individual'".

Finally, a personal favorite on school and teacher incentives.

Ten Short Scenes from India

Top tier comedy. Love watching "white privilege" go the other way. 23 years in India, and have never had any of these happen to me. (except crying beggars, that's a daily exercise)

Varanasi is a headscratcher. Indians have millennia long memories tied to the once great place, and visit it begrudgingly. But, it makes no sense for a white person to go to Varanasi. Set on the border of Bihar and UP, you are looking at the most underdeveloped parts of the world. By the point the Ganga reaches Varanasi, it's turned into a filthy gutter. Varanasi is far from any other tourist spot, the architecture is sub-par, the important buildings have all been rebuilt recently & the large swaths of domestic tourists make it intolerably claustrophobic.

Indians have sentimental reasons to go to Varanasi, so it makes sense. Others, less so. Imagine if Indians started visiting the Memphis Bass-pro Pyramid one because it has importance to people in American South. I mean, if you find yourself in Memphis for some reason, go ahead. But, why would you go to Memphis for any reason ?

Comments like this are how you end up sprawled atop the Memphis Bass-Pro Pyramid, bleeding out, an Elvis impersonator in his ceremonial garb standing over your body with a wicked obsidian knife in his left hand and your still-beating heart in his right as throngs of intoxicated middle aged Kid Rock fans cheer and scream for more, more blood!

Do not mock the Memphis Bass-Pro Pyramid.

Do not mock the Memphis Bass-Pro Pyramid.

I was in Memphis for a weekend (my wife and I had combined a holiday hiking in the Mountain West with a trip to LibertyCon in Chattanooga, and needed to spend a weekend somewhere within a day's drive of Chattanooga to make flights work) and visited the Memphis Bass-Pro Pyramid. As an outdoorsy Brit who was completely unfamiliar with US Red Tribe outdoor culture, I was erm... enlightened

Do not mock the Memphis Bass-Pro Pyramid.

Thanks, I appreciate this list!

Ever wonder how the world's bluest person starts engaging with reactionary thought and HBD honestly? It's the power of (strike)rationality(strike) volunteering in Haiti and seeing every western institution replicated in cargo cult form.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150407223525/http://squid314.livejournal.com/297579.html

Excerpt:

"It has proven hard for me to appreciate exactly how confused the Haitians are about some things. Gail, our program director, explained that she has a lot of trouble with her Haitian office staff because they don't understand the concept of sorting numerically. Not just "they don't want to do it" or "it never occurred to them", but after months and months of attempted explanation they don't understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing. Not only has this messed up her office work, but it makes dealing with the Haitian bureaucracy - harrowing at the best of times - positively unbearable."

Chicken or egg? The converse is that after spending a few years in east Africa you realize that the dude living in a dirt-floor hut who speaks multiple languages fluently and could run circles around the median ivy-league grad student is the norm rather than the exception because anyone who isn't speaking at least two languages and working three side hustles either emigrated or starved to death decades ago.

I don't think the "dirt-floor hut" part is very applicable to Haiti, and in fact is sort of racist. And as for Africa – at this point, hundreds of millions of Africans are, despite all their problems, not literally premodern tribal savages (who might know languages and stuff). They have nations, schools, institutions, and their urbanization rate is closing in on 50%. These mid-20th century excuses about cultural bias of Western metrics ring hollow when they are increasingly raised in the same universal West-derived culture.

Yeah, we may underestimate two tendencies:

  1. People who are truly uneducated in basic concepts may appear much "dumber" than an educated person would think. I've seen this with coding: I once eavesdropped on an older person being taught coding and things I thought were intuitive like program flow seemed to take too long. Of course, I can't remember how intuitive it was for me in the early days either, because I overlearned it so long ago.

  2. People who are working in impersonal institutions where direct consequences for inefficiency can be deferred or it is hard to identify in the first place can appear very "lazy" and irrational (in terms of just not caring about maximizing their productivity or effort, even if there's low-hanging fruit) to people who've actually been disciplined by the modern workplace with its focus on efficiency and time. This is probably worse in corrupt countries.

I've heard Western-educated Africans complain especially about #2, talking about their own people, in ways that might cause trouble for a white man in a progressive space.

That said...if a person legitimately can't sort things numerically (as opposed to not giving a shit and stonewalling gringos)...I'm inclined to believe that they're actually facing an intelligence deficit.

#2 is absolutely something I've encountered numerous times in the wild and one of the major reasons I think that "culture" is way more important than most commenters here seem to treat it. A somewhat related phenomena I've seen both in countries with major unrest (EG Sudan, the Middle east etc...) and poorer neighborhoods in the states is almost an antipathy towards savings and capital accumulation based on a (largely justified) assumption that if someone does start to pull ahead, someone else will just come a long and steal it from them. A sort of preemptive "crab bucket" effect where instead of being torn down they avoid climbing in the first place lest they make themselves a target. Another one you see in a lot of is the old "honesty is for suckers" trope. IE "Why should I 'cooperate' when I know the game is rigged?". After all being the one honest cop in a otherwise corrupt department, or the one guy in the neighborhood who isn't in on the local organized crime racket generally isn't conducive to one's long term survival.

Local minima and a "defect-defect" equilibrium are a hell of a drug.

Is this a fictional hypothetical or do you seriously believe this?

It's not a fictional hypothetical.

Is this a fictional hypothetical or do you seriously believe this? I've read anecdotes from people who have visited the underdeveloped parts of Africa and they don't square with your comment. And then there's IQ results.

The norm? There are ofc plenty of africans who could succeed in academia, but in a country where average iq is optimistically, ~ 82 (2010) and gdp/capita is 1k - 10k ... how can they compare to a median iq of (from harvard undergrads in 2002, but should ballpark grad students) 128? You aren't just saying 'africans are as smart as random americans', you're comparing africans to americans who are heavily selected for test scores and academic achievement (even the AA-admitted blacks or hispanics are still the best available). (Even if the average white/black iq difference is entirely environmental, that still applies - starving, parasites, malaria, etc as a child does make one dumber).

Yes, "the norm" because mental plasticity, resilience, and ability to recognize and intergrate new information is only tangentially (if at all) related how high one scores on an IQ test. Ditto "academic achievement".

and ability to recognize and intergrate new information is only tangentially (if at all) related how high one scores on an IQ test. Ditto "academic achievement"

Attempts to study this empirically get results more like this,

The correlation between a latent intelligence trait (Spearman's g from CAT2E) and a latent trait of educational achievement (GCSE scores) was 0.81

rather than no relation.

What is "educational achievement" supposed to be a proxy for in this context?

Do you think IQ measures anything of meaning?

Africa has ~1.4B people. If at least 500M of those are as able to recognize and integrate new information as the median ivy-league grad - does that mean, e.g., most of them could learn to code and be productive software engineers? Or be productive research scientists?

If that was true ... bryan caplan guessed open borders would double world GDP. But unlocking the potential of 500M people, who can do complex technical work only done by a few % of the american population would quadruple it, at least. We must abolish borders, and teach all the refugees javascript.

... unless your point was merely a dig at ivy league grads, implying they're just as capable as the average american and african. But that's just facially untrue, observing the technical accomplishments of (some) ivy league grads, even in areas totally unrelated to prestige like 'anonymous internet software development', many of them are much smarter than the average. yud post Competent Elites

(he's generally right, although lmao at "smart enough for your cognitive mechanisms to reliably decide to sign up for cryonics" as a measure of intelligence as an example for "astronomically high threshold of intelligence + experience + rationality before a screwup becomes surprising" - looks like not making mistakes is quite hard)

The use of 'ivy league grads' in that statement just makes it confusing - yeah, it insults the lib elites, but I now have no idea how smart you're implying the african actually is!

Do you think IQ measures anything of meaning?

I think it's positively correlated with things like conscientiousness and academic inclination, but I don't think it actually measures the thing that IQ fetishists like to believe that it measures, IE genuine intelligence or competency. It's Ironic that you should bring up Bryan Caplan because in my view he is perhaps one of the quintessential examples of someone who is academically accomplished, and clearly has a very high IQ, while simultaneously being a fucking moron.

As for how smart I think the average African is, I'd say they're on par with the average used car salesman here in the states and while some might see that as a "diss" that's whole lot smarter than a lot of folks here, especially the gay autistic Bay Area crowd, give them credit for. Fact is that I've met more idiots with prestigious degrees, than I've met idiots in living Africa or working in sales. My theory regarding the mechanism is that societies and trades with less wealth and narrower margins don't have the luxury of tolerating incompetence and/or free riders to the degree that academia does.

Your average car salesman can sort alphabetically.

It appears you use 'intelligence' is sense 'personality which I like'. This is not a useful meaning.

So can the average African, and I could just easily accuse you and the rest of the rat-sphere pf doing the same. Equating Intelligence with nueroticism and holding blue-tribe values rather than ability to think

More comments

Self-deleted original response which expressed the view that cartoonish red tribe's mockery of blue tribe intelligence is seriously challenged by the reality of blue tribe's basically unchallenged rule over red tribe. I apologize for it's boo ?ingroup but not really ingroup...? nature.

It's a common theme with both tribes. My enemy is both incredibly stupid but also somehow also a giant threat. The cognitive dissonance never seems to register.

But only one accused the other of being the only one to think in such a manner. Eco claimed of facists in his 8th out of 14 points:

Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak". On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

TBH Eco can go fuck himself with his uncharitable bullshit. One can be both in a position of political and economic power and still be a spineless coward (in a personal way), with weak morals and not enough "will to power".

Reading Eco is good mental exercise. He is quite smart, capable and well-read, not without fault, but still well-read and smart. I think The Prague Cemetery could be something that wold interest many Motte users just for peeking at the sheer amount Eco has read about the 19th century politics to write it. (Never mind the plot.)

Concerning Eco's definition of fascism. If you read the original, it appears that Eco gets that because something fits his definition is not eternally always equal to Mussolini's fascism. Truncated quotes (apologies, but Eco does not write succinctly)

If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. If Mussolini’s fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and certainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement.

Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world)?

Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian fascism was the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be. ...

Nevertheless, historical priority does not seem to me a sufficient reason to explain why the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements. This is not because fascism contained in itself, so to speak in their quintessential state, all the elements of any later form of totalitarianism. On the contrary, fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions. Can one conceive of a truly totalitarian movement that was able to combine monarchy with revolution, the Royal Army with Mussolini’s personal milizia, the grant of privileges to the Church with state education extolling violence, absolute state control with a free market? ... [W]hen the King fired Mussolini in 1943, the party reappeared two months later, with German support, under the standard of a “social” republic, recycling its old revolutionary script, now enriched with almost Jacobin overtones. ...

So we come to my second point. There was only one Nazism. We cannot label Franco’s hyper-Catholic Falangism as Nazism, since Nazism is fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian. But the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change. The notion of fascism is not unlike Wittgenstein’s notion of a game. A game can be either competitive or not, it can require some special skill or none, it can or cannot involve money. Games are different activities that display only some “family resemblance,” as Wittgenstein put it. ...

But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

... (insert the list with explanations) ...

We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.” Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

More briefly, I don't think Eco would have had any problem acknowledging that his list does not overdetermine "fascism". He says he is trying to gesture at a syncretic fuzzy ball of ideas but want to argues the fuzzy ball "ur-Fascism" can meaningfully still be called "fascism" in post-Mussolini era. He quite clearly gestures that many of his points are generally unpleasant types of political thought that the free world would be better without and people wearing black shirts do not have a monopoly over them. And what would be "the most innocent of disguises" if not a political ideologue who argues to be antifascist yet deploys the same tactics and ideas?

The uncharitability is more on the people who take a distilled list of his in Wikipedia and choose to apply it like Der Hexenhammer to identify witches they want to identify as witches.

edit. this was intended as a reply to @FistfullOfCrows here edit2 @ not /u/

Define "rule" because if anything the 30 last years have seen a precipitous decline in both the prestige and de-facto power of blue tribe "experts".

By what metric?

You might have to hunt down archives of some broken links, but:

The Library of Scott Alexandria

A while back on 4chan, I saw an interesting quote from a book that said something along the lines of:

The larger a system is, the less diversity it can support. Something something, the galapagos islands have vastly more biodiversity than north America despite being much smaller

Now, I didn't save the picture, and it was photograph of a page of a book. I tried searching for "larger" "system" "less diversity" "support", but you know how terrible google is about finding anything that isn't an "approved" mainstream news article nowdays. I ended up finding a paper called Why do several small patches hold more species than few large patches? that was tangentially related, but it seems to be more focused on conservation. Any idea what I could search for to find more information about this as a general topic? I feel like this could "The larger a system is, the less diversity it can support" is a very interesting premise that could describe a lot of topics, especially sociological and economic topics.

The larger a system is, the less diversity it can support. Something something, the galapagos islands have vastly more biodiversity than north America despite being much smaller

As has been mentioned below, it depends what you mean by "more biodiversity". I seriously doubt this is true in an absolute sense - North America covers a much larger range of biomes than the Galapagos and therefore likely has a higher total number of species. On the other hand, the Galapagos might win out if you're measuring biodiversity by species per square inch, but that's to be expected given that the Galapagos is situated in a warm equatorial environment whereas North America is a much larger landmass that includes extremely cold northerly environments and contains biomes like taiga where biodiversity is generally low, so that drags down the average.

I ended up finding a paper called Why do several small patches hold more species than few large patches? that was tangentially related, but it seems to be more focused on conservation.

It makes sense that this would be the case. The geographical isolation of populations from each other allows for allopatric speciation, where two populations of the same species diverge because they get to develop in isolation without gene flow between the groups (example: the Abert and Kaibab squirrels). Populations being dispersed into several small patches of habitat as opposed to a few larger ones clearly helps enable this process.

the galapagos islands have vastly more biodiversity than north America

Is that actually true? And in which terms "more biodiversity" - more species in general, starting from Archaea and viruses up to primates? More species per square inch? Did somebody really conduct such a research? How did they count the species and what was the result?

This is a wild guess. But my intuition is that:

Let's model a system as follows.

  • There exists a space where multiple agents have to compete for some finite and some infinite resources.

  • Some of these agents spawn stochastically.

  • Agents can grow and die. (Assume some randomness here too)

  • Agents can destroy other agents and absorb them.

  • Agents have some kind of gravitational field, where a larger size is a competitive advantage.

  • The above feature ensures power law distributed size.

Leading to; In a large system, given enough time; Certain agents can gather such 'mass' that they just immediately kill or absorb any new agents that pop up. And they are disproportionately harder to fight against as time goes on.

Think monopolies, think mainstream culture, think religions. The system I intuited above can describe memetic systems at a certain level of abstraction.

I think a large area allows for generalist - specialist creatures. That's not a great term, but animals that evolve that can counter common survival strategies.

It's probably more clear if I give some examples.

Giant bugs are common on islands. At least until humans accidentally introduce rats. Then suddenly all the giants bugs are gone.

House cats are amazing at wiping out unique bird species.

Australia is famous for its large number of venomous species. It also doesn't have any mustelidae. Honey badgers would be very successsful.

Australia is famous for its large number of venomous species. It also doesn't have any mustelidae. Honey badgers would be very successsful.

I really don't think honey badgers will be able to evolve resistance to the entire palette of Australians venomous critters, much less come pre-equipped.

House cats are amazing at wiping out unique bird species.

House cats are really good at destroying wildlife overall. very efficient killers

Feral house cats, the ones who were born on the streets and raised by nature, are terrific at killing. Those raised in houses by humans are quite inefficient. especially those who know they have a home to return to, and food to eat.

Take care to spay or neuter your captive fluffy descendants of the beasts who hunted your ancestors. Those who can spawn will inevitably screw.

I suspect the disparity between island bird species vs continental bird species capacity to protect are much greater than between-cats attack capacity disparity.

If you know the thread title, or any sequence of words in the thread, you can search on the 4plebs archive website to try to find it.

So, what are you reading? (Also, see another good book thread here in the Fun Thread)

I'm picking up Alan Watts' The Way of Zen. Watts has often been in the back of my mind, but I never read him deeply. Extremely vague links to Korzybski has stirred my interest.

Finished Anathem by Neal Stephenson, my first Stephenson read since dropping out halfway through the Baroque cycle. Set in another world suspiciously analogous to our own except that most intellectuals live in cloistered atheist monasteries, with a gimmick where different subgroups only communicate with the outside world every 1/10/100/1000 years. Conceptually it's basically (concept spoilers) Asimov's Foundation meets Egan's Quarantine, but with actual character development.

The book combines fun world-building at the start with gripping thriller action towards the end, enough that I got through the 900+ pages in a week despite a sagging middle devoted to lectures on a tired mix of real and fake/pop science (quantum computers don't work like that!).

Published in 2008 it already feels a bit dated, especially the parts expressing a Bush-era fear and disdain of ~Protestant fundamentalists. Still I really enjoyed it overall and unlike Stephenson's earlier works it even features a proper denouement.

The Three Musketeers in spurts. Right now I’m reading as much as I can to my baby at bedtime before they get fussy. I don’t read it every day, and the average is less than a chapter at once, so it’s slow going. On good nights my baby is cooing and laughing at me the whole time, and I get to teach them that French is a nonsense language I have no idea how to pronounce. On bad nights I get a couple of paragraphs in before I have to put the baby to sleep. It’s a fun read. I was worried it might be one of those older books that feels old, but once it got going it’s been pretty easy. Many chuckles to be had.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by HP Lovecraft. About halfway through it, and so far it seems like one of his better stories.

Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success - by a couple of economists who assembled data on hundreds of thousands of immigrants and traced them through census and tax records to examine social mobility of immigrants and their children over the past 100 years or so.

Back with Albion's Seed, and it's really just making me want to dive deep into every aspect of American history. I'd love any book recommendations!

I just finished Moonfleet by J. Meade Falkner.

I was randomly downloading books that I thought were from the golden age of sci-fi off the gutenburg project, and accidentally downloaded a Treasure Island contemporary.

It was pretty good. Young adult caught up with smugglers, pirate treasure, the law, jail, and final return to his home after completing his Hero's Journey. Not bad. I like this sort of escapism when I'm dealing with the stress of the modern world.

Watts is great! I love that book.

The Zombie Knight, a fun web serial that picked up again recently after a 2 year hiatus. About a guy who gets revived by a grim reaper and given super powers, and is thrust into the world of fight/politics between all the super powered factions. It's pretty obvious at times the author changed his mind or didn't properly plan out certain world building aspects, which is natural in a serial running 10 years, but it's still really funny and exciting.

I remember reading the first chunk of that. I can definitely see the appeal, though in the end I didn't find the power theming to be right enough. My impression was its built-in zenkai boost mechanic was a way for the author to add new toys regularly, and coming off Worm, it wasn't what I was looking for.

What did you think of some other serials from that era? Like that one with the narrative powers in an evil empire. Can't remember the name.

What did you think of some other serials from that era? Like that one with the narrative powers in an evil empire. Can't remember the name.

That is probably The Practical Guide to Evil, which is fantastic, finished, and really stuck the landing. Unfortunately, the author signed a publishing deal with some asinine company called Yonder that has an absurd microtransaction business plan. I believe it is still available for free on the WordPress site, but that will be ending at some point.

My impression was its built-in zenkai boost mechanic was a way for the author to add new toys regularly

It's definitely a bit of a cheap narrative device, but personally the excitement it adds outweighs its cheapness for me. And it's still better imo than series that in practice do basically the same thing of characters inventing new powers on the fly but just asspulling an idea or using the "I need to win for me friends!" boost.

What did you think of some other serials from that era? Like that one with the narrative powers in an evil empire. Can't remember the name.

You're thinking of A Practical Guide to Evil. I've dropped it then gone back to it a few times, usually just not bothering to keep up with the updates when I drop it, but most recently I got a good chunk through to the Dead Kingdom arc when I gave up on it. To me it just had the MC whining too much about morality. Imo she should've either decided morals matter and just become a hero, because she was basically a hero in all but name, or if the author had the balls to really make a villain protagonist, decide to screw morals and work cold heartedly towards her goals. The in between state where she'd spend half of any given arc feeling guilty about tough but necessary decisions, and Heroes who wanted to kill her solely because she was nominally but not really aligned with evil, annoyed me.

I read a number of other serials from that era too but didn't finish any of them I think. The Gods are Bastards made some world building choices I found dissatisfying. Twisted Cogs I never picked up again after one of its hiatus' but I might get around to it, I remember liking it a lot.

Can anyone recommend any good books about the 20th century overpopulation scare / population control movement?

I've been reading some books that touch on the topic (mostly in terms of its overlap with the eugenics movement), and a thought I can't get out of my head (which maybe I'll turn into a top-level CWR post sometime) is how similar it feels to the climate change movement today. It's largely forgotten today, but from what I can tell, it really penetrated the public consciousness in the 60's and 70's, and it was really treated as a crisis and an imminent existential threat. e.g. Paul Ehrlich predicted in 1970: "In the next 15 years the end will come, and by the end I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity."

One aspect of the comparison I'm interested in teasing out some more is how the movement's opponents were treated. It seems critics of the climate change movement ("denialists") are shunned by the scientific community and vilified in mainstream media. Was it a similar case with overpopulation skeptics during the height of the movement, or was there more space for robust debate? I'd be interested in pointers to any prominent contemporary critics of the movement.

I believe some prominent contemporary critics of overpopulation as a crisis would include Malcolm muggeridge and the Roman Catholic Church.

I read Merchants of Despair by Robert Zubrin a few years ago and while the crux of the book is an examination of what he calls "anti-humanism", the first several chapters discuss the population control movement in about as much detail as you could want without reading some ponderous academic work. It should be noted, though, that Zubrin's areas of expertise are aerospace and nuclear engineering, not history, and he's best known as an advocate for Mars colonization, so take that for what it's worth. The book is pretty good, though, and he does talk about climate change a great deal as being similar to the overpopulation scare. In other words, it seems to be exactly what you're looking for.

What's the best way to copy long passages from a physical book?

Typing takes forever, so that's out. I've tried Googling a digital copy of the book, but a lot of times the books I read aren't scanned or are in the form of PDFs without copiable text. I usually usethe Google Lens function of my Camera app to grab text using OCR, but it's only about 95% accurate, meaning I often have to go back through and correct a lot of erroneous letters and punctuation. Is there a smarter way to do this?

Good OCR (something like recent versions of Tesseract, see here for a good frontend, though using the cli on PDF files works great) and going through the output to find the inevitable mistakes is the fastest method in my experience. Typing it all yourself is less annoying but takes more time and isn't any less error prone.

You can also pay someone to do it if your time is worth too much.

using the CLI on PDF files

That might actually help quite a bit. Thanks, I'll check this out.

Depends on why you are doing it. If it is for reference and retention, you'd probably be best off taking a picture and then writing your own summary and thoughts than just typing it all out.

You might be interested in the approach described in this blog post. TL;DR take a first pass with OCR and then pass it through GPT-3 with a prompt like "The following text contains typos; please fix them." The author claims it's very accurate (enough so to support a paid product), and I thought it was a pretty clever trick when I read about it.

This is awesome, thank you!

Type faster.

Been trying since middle school, I'm just a shitty typist.

When should we privilege the phenomenological over the pharmacological?

There are herbal remedies that people swear induce some certain desired state. Scientists attempt to discover the underlying chemical structures that induce the state, but they don’t always get it right. I’ve come across some interesting cases of this. There’s valerian root, which only recently was found to interact with adenosine (having previously been discarded as an insomnia treatment). There’s California Poppy, which was only recently discovered to contain Reticuline, which in turn was only recently discovered to induce an opioid response in the brain. There are all sorts of things going on with cannabis which are not related to THC but instead implicate a THC/CBD synergy and plausibly the addition of chemical structures known as terpenes. There are the essential oil studies that clearly indicate certain odors induce alertness (bitter lemon) or relaxation (lavender). Then there’s the science of things like serotonin which are hardly understood at all — only recently did we learn that tryptophan will selectively unbind with albumin at the blood brain barrier, and only recently has the consensus shifted to serotonin deficiency lacking a role in depression (although I have my own views on this).

Essentially, if a person asserts “the aerial parts of the Phenomena Logicila plant make me happy”, and a scientist looking at a paper finds no clear mechanism for this to occur… what do we say? The science is never conclusive or half-finished, and maybe the person has a unique physiological or genetic profile that corresponds to the feeling. What should a reasonable person do?

Empirical results > logic and theoretical mechanisms. The most clear demonstration of this is general anaesthesia, which continues to lack an agreed-upon theoretical mechanism, makes no logical sense, and yet very clearly works. Anything less than taking empirical results above neat theories ceases to be science.

Is there a relatively simple explanation somewhere about why anesthesia makes no sense? I keep hearing this without anyone ever going into details, and it sounds like exactly the kind of thing I would find very amusing.

So there's this way to get a human, and knock them out, that's safe! And not only that, but while they've lost consciousness, they have no memory of this happening. And they don't feel pain. And then, once the anaesthesia wears off, they wake up, almost entirely side-effect free! When the closest alternative is to whack someone in the head hard enough that they fall unconscious, which is significant more dangerous, it sure awfully convenient. The sum effects are equivalent to a coma or severe brain damage, but entirely reversible! Like it is some specific procedure that exists purely for the purpose of enabling surgery. How nonsensical it is for the body to have the ability to do this, given there would be no possible use for this back when we wandered the savanna 100,000 years ago? And yet, we do have this ability. A hidden off switch that can be controllably flicked with a few relatively easy to acquire gases.

Aliens?

More seriously, is it that we don't understand how it works, or why it evolved?

There are competing hypotheses for how it works, but nothing conclusive.

What should a reasonable person do?

Try to confirm that the risks of harm are low and then continue to use them?

My general impression is that part of the reason people like "herbal" and "natural" remedies is due to fear of outsized side-effects from pharmaceuticals and the perception that herbal remedies are less dangerous. I have an aunt who would rather drink chamomile and valerian and tough out insomnia than get hooked on sleeping pills.

If the risk is low and the subjective experience is better...track it and continue?

phytochemicals are extremely interesting actually and a surprisingly high number of synthetic drugs are derivatives or imitations of phytos or endogenous molecules.

People use to joke/ridiculize them but there is nothing more ridicule than a human that ridiculize billion of years parallel bidirectional (both the molecule and the body adapt) optimization of phamacological pathways towards maximizing host or symbionts survival or other advantageous metrics.

The issue with phyto (some can be toxic btw) is that many have bad bioavailability and sometimes suboptimal pharmacokinetics or half-lives.

Both of those problems can be trivially solved, either by bypassing first pass metabolism via vitamin C and or increasing lipophilia absorption via co-administration of omega-3 and or via inhibiting the CYP 450 enzymes via e.g. piperine or grappefruit juice (beware can be dangerous with many synthetic drugs as it potentiate wildly their metabolism hence dose potency, profile and half lives)

I'm not certain to understand what your goal is with that question,

a pharmacological causative model is heuristically useful to make predictions, about effectiveness for condition X and to establish a safety, tolerance, toxicity and interaction profile.

All those things are useful but mostly unecessary for the layman.

If there is a non-negligible community that takes plant X since years in quantity Y and that doesn't report huge terrifying side effects and that they report potent effectiveness then its probably worth a try for acute use although for long term use there will always be a toxicity/accelerated ageing question but in many cases we never know for certain however in most cases we do know reasonably somewhat the safety profiles.

It has actually become very rare to find phytochemicals that have not been extensively studied regarding their pharmacology and hence the causative model is often well established assuming you take time to research the research.

But beyond annecdtotal evidence, doing a blind test scientific trial about wether X is effective for Y, e.g. depression is very cheap and therefore even without said causative model we often know wether X has elicited a potent response for Y in N people empirically following precise protocol.

Empiricisms as always trumps a priori reasoning regarding effort efficiency and indeed people should considering the mostly safe profile of phytochemicals (generalization see e.g. cyclopamide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclopamine#/media/File:Cyclopelamb2.jpg) play much more the lab rats, this would drive very significantly the speed of empirical scientific research and therefore discovery of treatments for ineptly considered incurable diseases.

edit:

only recently did we learn that tryptophan will selectively unbind with albumin at the blood brain barrier

What does that imply? We already knew tryptophan cross the BBB. You mean the competition with tyrosine?

only recently has the consensus shifted to serotonin deficiency lacking a role in depression (although I have my own views on this).

What?

Serotonergics are euphorisant see e.g. MDMA, MDAI, 5MAPB, shrooms, etc

The effect of SSRIs is less intuitive (reduction of sert receptors density) but still sert driven.

No, the original thought on how tryptophan crosses BBB was extremely murky, because it a lesser competitor to other LNAAs. So we knew that we could toggle greater crossing by reducing the competitors (see wurtman lab) by flushing LNAA to to muscle via pure carbohydrate insulin spike (tryptophan stays bound to albumin). We also knew exercise increases serotonin synthesis, and tryptophan depletion decreases this. What was relatively new, I believe from 2015-2018, was that tryptophan selectively unbinds with albumin at the BBB, so the albumin-bound tryptophan will release uniquely there. It’s an example of how we know little about the mechanisms of serotonin. There’s also controversy about whether how important T:LNAA ratio is to sum total T, the mice studies are not clear. Maybe I’ll dig up the metastudy I read a bit ago

Re: serotonin, I don’t actually disagree, but the consensus I read was that “more serotonin” does not decrease depression.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0

The distinction I would make is that these studies are flawed and there is actually very limited ways to organically increase serotonin production in the brain: increasing dietary T:LNAA ratio (also found to be widely healthful per a large Japanese population cohort study, on things like sleep); using fruit to flush LNAA muscle tissue; or exercise (somehow; possibly by using up LNAAs).

There are some other interesting things about this: certain human domesticated crops have higher tryptophan than wild-type; there’s a possibility fruit consumption in humans is kind of evolved to increase serotonin, and certain fruit actually have serotonin itself, like kiwi and strawberry, which is fascinating

Thanks Cafe, that is a great comment, exactly the kind of informatively rich comments the motte desperately lacks.

I will give you a proper answer tomorrow but when I said that tryptophan cross the BBB, I actually meant about 5 hydroxy tryptophan (5htp), which has good bioavailability, cross the BBB and bypass the rate limiting enzyme conversion of L-tryptophan to 5htp (which itself downstream will again be converted to serotonin in a rate limited manner)

1998:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9727088/

How does substack moderate itself?

They seem able to walk the fine line where it's a mostly respected outlet yet allowing heterodox views, and while I've heard the occasional handwringer complain, I've not noticed any serious smear campaigns against it, or it having the 10000 witch issues.

Are any writers being cancelled or quietly deboosted?

There were plenty of smear campaigns against it, they just braved them.

The "7 zillion witches issue" was always mostly fiction, there aren't that many witches. If you can get a reasonable amount of normal people to hang out somewhere, they will be the ones eclipsing the witches, not the other way around. This was (and maybe still is being) done by sponsorship deals for authors with pretty big following (Greenwald, Taibi, deBoer, and lots of others that I don't follow).

Moderation is done on a per-author basis. It's like running your Youtube channel, or subreddit. The only thing I can think of that could have a moderating effect, is that there's something clunky about the website, that discourages high-frequency low-effort posting.

The witch issue is really easy to avoid, too, if you have a credible reason for your platform to be attractive to non-witches. Reddit could have ignored the moderation issue and not had a witch problem, voat couldn’t avoid the witch problem no matter how closely it’s moderated. You see a similar dynamic with twitter- it’s not a witch hive even after moderation was loosened, but mastodon and gab both are, albeit practicing very different kinds of witchcraft.

There were plenty of smear campaigns against it, they just braved them.

Yeah, I think OP may just not remember because it was ineffective but they did the usual "start a drumbeat about how 'concerning' this is". It just didn't work.

Probably because there really wasn't a hook for the average person to get up in arms about; people can pay or not for commentary from people they like. So what?

It came across as jealousy/turf-protection on the part of the mainstream media and Substack obviously had very little incentive to fold to claims that Matthew Yglesias was a witch.

Isn't deBoer a pro-HBD leftist? Closer to witch than "normal people".

DeBoer elliptically acknowledges the HBD-IQ aspect of reality and then doubles down from a materialist-socialist (real Marxist, not trendy 'Marxist') perspective that he wants from each according to his abilities (HBD-IQ is here) to each according to his needs (not here).

He wrote a book called The Cult of Smart. This book has valuable insights about how charter schools can IQ poach out of normal public schools to make themselves look very impressive.

Does he also propose soon abolishing of capitalism (like classical Marxists do)?

He accepts that IQ is heritable, he also accepts that average IQ differs between self-identified racial groups, but not that the latter is explained by the former.

WTF you mean? It looks like you're describing mainstream academic anti-HBD where phenotypic IQ differs between racial groups but genotypic IQ is same.

Your point is unclear.

When people talk about witches, I tend to picture people who are single-mindedly obsessed with discussing issues that would get them booted from polite society, which is why they scare away the normies, which is why they are supposedly a problem for the formation of non-witchy pro free speech communities. De Boer mostly posts short stories, comments on media, and only every once in while talks about politics. I think I literally never read anything from him about HBD.

It certainly isn't his main topic, but he has posts like this or this that basically say the same thing in slightly different terms. In the first one he is quite clear that he thinks that the inability of education to close achievement gaps is due in large part due to genetics, but he also wishes for that aspect to be worked around and deemphasized.

I know they exist, the entire reason I'm following him is that he's a canceled lefty, so he had to be canceled for something.

My point is that he's not a witch, for that he would have to be obsessed with the subject, to the point he's turning everyone off except for people with similar obsessions.

They have a "pass the buck" moderation system.

Substack's monetization is done using Square or Stripe. I don't recall which. I'll say Stripe for the rest of this post for simplicity.

But the important thing is Substack never holds the money. The readers pay the author using Stripe. Stripe takes the money and gives Substack its cut.

If an author ever says anything really bad then Stripe will kill their merchant account. Substack doesn't need to get involved.

As a result Substack doesn't need to hire a bunch of people in SF to police the tone of articles. That means that there's no one to push for quiet moderation like deboosting.

If a bunch of angry activists come at them on Twitter they can just point at Stripe.

It's at core not a social media platform. This makes comparisons to Twitter/Reddit and their clones/subgroups somewhat tendentious. There is no really convenient way for a substack post or comment to "go viral" on the platform in the way a tweet or Reddit post will. As of yet, we also haven't seen substacks/comment sections that will rally the troops for raids on other substacks, which is generally the dynamic that leads to witch-covens becoming an issue.

It's just a different animal.

In the last week I saw two instances of reddit comments that were unique in phrasing and almost identical. The first was in the same thread shilling some video game streamer, so that's not surprising, but the second was copying a comment from a three year old thread found via other discussions tab in /r/documentaries. Someone brought up a similar situation in a CW thread a few months ago but I don't remember it well. Anyways both comments were later deleted, and I only saved the second account name, a one year old account with only comments in the last week that just did the same^1 thing^2 today and most of its comments are copied from crossposts. Any guesses on the purpose of this?

Garden variety karma farming? Generating pre-good standing and aged accounts for later sale?

Wait everyone is saying karma farming but why? There is no value to high karma accounts. Once you get above a low minimum threshold to post in a sub, there is no further value to more karma. It doesn't make one's content more discoverable.

There is value if you resell them. Some subs have high but hidden thresholds, especially for comment scores.

How much can you sell them for? What's the threshold? I feel like the threshold is low as is the resale value. It's pretty trivial to get big karma by just posting "orange man bad" level takes on a popular sub.

reposting old memes, reposting old links

It's so inefficient at increasing karma I had ruled out that possibility.

I suspect the goal isn't to maximise karma, but generate a reasonable amount to make the account look as if it's owned by a real person.

Copying top comments is obvious and easy to see. Copying mid comments attracts less attention.

Posting only a handful of comments in the last week and taking so long to get to double digit karma is unbelievable too. Unless its behavior changes drastically I don't see how it can be worth selling or scalable as that would definitely attract notice.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are farming bots designed to look as human as possible, including posting at the average rate of a reasonable human. It may not be quite as fast, but it's easy enough to automate, and no reason you couldn't have a single bot run tens of thousands of accounts like this, so you might still get a reasonable number of decent karma accounts after a month or so.

It is just karma farming by copying old comments. It's inefficient on a per-comment basis, but it can be automated and done on many accounts at the same time, so it works. It's a very common strategy that's been used by reddit bots for years. Another user noticed something similar a while ago.

Might be a more complex karma farming dynamic? Like most big subs require a minimum karma to post, so getting started might go that way?

Bots that copy old Reddit posts or old comments on the same submission have been around for years. There are ones that copy Youtube comments on a video into Reddit submissions of that video too, I remember a /r/videos thread where one of those attracted attention because the Youtube comment mentioned the current year and the Reddit comment copying it was in a different year. The goal is presumably to automatically create large numbers of spam accounts with a human-like history of upvoted comments to get past Reddit's anti-spam measures. The only new thing I'm seeing here is that it looks like they've worked in some program to rephrase the comment, maybe Reddit implemented some measure to detect the direct copies.

My parents have a wireless phone charger. Problem is that it basically doesn't work when they have a case on their phones. Is there a solution to this (other than removing their phone case)?

Other than getting another kind of charger no. Those chargers are horrendously innefective, what little they can charge with all the losses is a miracle.

Googling, there are wireless charging compatible phone cases.

Maybe it's just the extra distance caused by the thickness of the case. Does charging work if you take off the case and put a piece of cardboard between the phone and the charger? The inductive coupling only works real close.

I find the health aspects of radiations through induction charging worrying in principle, I have no idea how the potency compare to WIFI/5G radiation though but I would'nt risk it without studying the topic, it is absolutely not reasonable to trust our broken civilization on health topics, especially hypothetical oxidative and mutagenic long term only observable accelerated ageing.

radiations through induction

They basically do not radiate*. It is a near-field system, not an efficient antenna. Being near-field only means that the field strength drops off powerfully with distance. Sitting at your desk with a wireless charger on it has virtually no H-fields from the charger getting into your body. And those aren't dangerous anyways. There's absolutely no concern here.

*I mean, not more than all other electronics. Every conductor is a weak antenna and the FCC limits farfield emissions of all electronics so they don't cause interference.

Physically, it works the same way a transformer works -- induction. When you plug your phone (or computer, etc) into the wall, there is a transformer in the circuit stepping down the voltage. There is no basis to be worried about risks from inductive chargers any more than you worry about risks from transformers. Also this isn't some "new untested science" this is Maxwell's Equations, stuff we've understood since the 1860s.

Good for you man!

Thanks, man, Posted it on a month-old thread thought, don't even know how that happened, I reposted it in the current FFthread.

I don't know a HBD forum where to ask.

How strong are various MAOA alleles associated with criminal offending (chiefly, homicide and violent assault)?

Difference between 3R and 4R seems relatively minor and smaller than IQ~crime association. And there's 2R.

It also appears that a 1.5 repeat allele was discovered in Middle East countries.

Somewhat unrelated notice, the rare good faith answer to mentioning 2R allele I saw on reddit was like that:

"Yes, it's true that %X% are likely to have 2R allele, which increases offending probability, but then %Y% are more likely to have "crime alleles" in other genes, but they don't talk about it as much". I say it because some people think that it's in current environment that alleles "cause crime", but environemnt should be changed. And in a communist utopia prorper environment alleles don't have any effect on crime.

Dumb question: the absorption of a water soluble vitamin is not affected if it’s taken with fat, right?

Unless you're chugging it with a liter of olive oil, I wouldn't expect it to make a difference myself.

Does anyone know of a good overview of the Race and IQ debate for someone who's completely ducked the topic until now and is basically ignorant?

EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone!

I'm arguably biased but I think debate overviews are unrealistic. This debate is too vast. At this point, collected rebuttals and pointed papers are the best way to appreciate the state of discourse, as if seeing ocean in a drop of water. So, on top of what you've been already given, a few high-profile samples:

Some anti-HBD:

And some responses:

Collections:

Additionally:

Now that I think about it, not much has changed since 1988 and The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy. Well, we've got confirmations of genetic differences, and there's more censorship, and most of the big guys in the debate died. The scientific question received a political answer.

Europeans and recent cognitive evolution + references

I am unconvinced this should be a source. It seems to need more evidence for it's claims.

Until the eleventh century, mean IQ was relatively low throughout Europe, perhaps hovering in the low 90s.

this is a seemingly baseless claim without use of the Flynn effect. And if it is using the Flynn effect it is using it to undermine the authors own argument as he is saying that people in eleventh century western countries had higher IQ's than the 20th century? I would like to know how this number came to be the low 90's as I haven't yet found it in the sources for the article, nor does it seem to be directly sourced. According to the authors own first source (Oesterdiekhoff 2012) used in the authors next paragraph, "In 1900, no pre-modern or early modern population had a mean IQ above 75," (Oesterdiekhoff 2012, Section 2).

Anyway the authors main idea seems to be that the farmers that took roles as artisans, craftsmen, business men etcetera were higher IQ and would have higher fertility rates and thus their higher IQ offspring would have higher IQ's. There kids would be more numerus and thus outbreed all the poor lower IQ people, a neat and tidy theory.

If this was accurate, why would northern Europe have such high IQ's, people who had been near barbarians for several millennia while say Egyptian artisans were being selected for IQ? I would like to know why he only chooses eleventh century Europe as the starting point, as opposed to any other economy in any other region. Did these jobs not exist in the middle east?

That evolution was driven by the high fertility of those people who knew how to exploit the opportunities of an expanding market economy. Their population growth was so great that they overwhelmed the niches available to them. Many had to find niches farther down the social ladder, with the eventual result that their lineages became predominant even within the lower class (Clark 2009a).

The author begins speaking about the eleventh century but cites Clark to make his argument, who only covers between 1600 to 1850 England and makes no mention of IQ but does mention genes. I think using genes is a dubious reason to explain why in a class based society, the rich upper class were able to be better off or more numerous in future generations then the poor generations. While Clarks claim that rich surnames disappeared at a lower rate than poorer surnames, I think it is important to actually add some numbers to that. From 1600 to 1850, the Poorest had 15% of names extinct, the richest had 8% of names extinct. An interesting read, though I do not like that the author does not address other reasons for poorer people not keeping their last names at the same rich people, however I will not get into that here. Clark does make some good argument that England had more social mobility than given credit for but hurts his argument elsewhere and I don't want this to turn into a review of Clark, just the article.

the very next quote is that of (Seccombe 1992, p. 182). The quote is rather unimportant however the source is as it's review seemingly conflicts with the above Clark quote.

The complex text ranges broadly over a vast stretch of historical change from the Middle Ages to the brink of the Industrial Revolution

When speaking about the transition from feudalism to capitalism

Finally, a vital revolution in family size took place, in which the poor came to have larger families than the rich, and in which patterns of intergenerational mobility reversed

so since the industrial revolution ~1750-1840 IQs have been going down? 1600 to 1750 they go up, 1750 to 2000 they go down? So is the message of the article that we are equivalent to our 1600's selves? I get this is a book synopsis so I don't want to be too harsh as perhaps something is missing, but this seems like picking and choosing when to believe an authors claims and forgetting when they would contradict one another.

This is all pretty fair. I've included it on a whim but looking again it's weak, despite citing interesting literature. Retracted, thanks.

We don't have a solid way to talk about anything like Flynn effect in pre-modernity and pre-testing periods; and how 1900's Europeans would've scored on modern tests is not interesting. Personally I'm on the fence regarding the timeline of the current ranking emerging: there probably has «never» been parity between Europeans and Sub-Saharan Africans, but it is plausible that Europeans have been gaining in their advantage in historical time, and so this gap is not explained solely by cold winters or some other factor present for many millenia. On the other hand, cold winters theory seems to explain the pattern of the center of civilization moving up latitudes historically: it's as if building a complex society in the South is playing on easy mode, but then the society hits a limit, and novel technologies flow northward, enabling another round. Today, the most advanced nations in the East and West are indeed populated by people who have passed through the cold winter filter.

My reason for including it was: Breeder's equation, IQ heritability and net fertility differentials allow for meaningful (~0,5 SD) eugenic and dysgenic shifts on the scale of a few centuries, so arguments along the lines of "there wasn't enough time for X" are invalid. It's all speculative until we get good decent IQ PGS for different populations and test that ancient DNA, but I think it's likely that many civilizations have gone through a eugenic phase and subsequent dysgenic collapse, and as you say, Egyptian artisans may have been selected for IQ just like Europeans. This is bog standard cyclical history theory.

I think using genes is a dubious reason to explain why in a class based society, the rich upper class were able to be better off or more numerous in future generations then the poor generations.

Clark, in his oeuvre, demonstrates fertility more directly than by rates of family names going extinct, and his evidence from modern era Japan, China etc. does corroborate that upper classes have innate quality separate from class advantage.

If true this probably imply that concerned ethnic minorities are more likely to responds more potently to nootropics such as e.g. cholinergics. A result I have not yet found through serendipity search, IMO I can't even answer wether women benefit more from nootropics (except for testosterone) but at least it is vastly known people with lower IQ in general, (even more so if specific condition such as fragile X syndrome) and non-young people are much higher responders.

Very interesting list. But isn't it depressing if not much has changed? Shouldn't GWAS studies shown something which can't be handwaved away?

If there's something in the academic debate that can't be handwaved away, that's probably termination of your tenure. I recommend reading this and this.

I apologize for misleading phrasing. People seem to be under the impression that there is some ongoing «debate». No, the debate had been decisively won by the HBD side decades ago, on account of the opposition failing to propose any more parsimonious explanation, even one model of environmental effect that'd be up to snuff and robust to social changes or controls (that wouldn't inherently reduce the genetic component wherever it is present). The best they can do is nitpick here and there and laughably misinterpret some facts, including new facts (my favorite recent example). Admixture studies, GWAS – very cool, but for purposes of the race-IQ controversy, all these fancy new data merely confirm what was known in the 60s.

The political contest has gone the opposite way, however. Now there's an escalating mop-up and gaslighting operation. Scientists know more than ever, but do not care to integrate their knowledge into anything more than affirmation of the prestigious consensus, whereas commoners know less than their grandfathers, and care less about knowing, and flaunt their ignorance and stupidity. In the process of this mental liberation, we are dismantling the vestiges of Enlightenment ideology. Children born today will learn from show trials and grow up to inherit the world where appealing to "facts" or "fairness" or some objective "truth" will be considered inherently cringe, and only the self-affirming tyranny is a legitimate source of knowledge, for it is Based. If you think I'm exaggerating or sound like a crank, you're free to wait and see this hypothesis tested.

People who are see-no-evil-pilled typically need a quick introduction of why anyone would even think races might have varied intelligence. A quick (outdated by now) copypasta that used to get posted:

The average African-American IQ is 85, compared to the average White IQ of 100. (popocateptl note: one more recent large study in the 00s puts it at 90, but this was contested by another study that showed no change. As far as I know, no large scales studies on this have been done since.)

http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstream.pdf

Human intelligence is highly heritable.

http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v16/n10/abs/mp201185a.html

Scientific consensus is that IQ tests are not racially biased.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289608000305

Very poor Whites are comparably intelligent to very wealthy blacks.

http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

Privately, intelligence experts hold more hereditarian views than they express in public. (popocateptl note: An anonymous survey from the mid 10s, which I'll see if I can find, polled experts and had on average them privately thinking about 50% of the achievement gap is genetic.)

http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1994egalitarianfiction.pdf

Black children raised in White households have similar IQs to black children in black households.

http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1977-07996-001

The average African IQ is estimated at 79.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912003741

The white-black gap in SAT scores, a proxy for IQ, is increasing. (popocateptl note: the gap is actually narrowing now, but slowly.)

http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

Genes for large brains, linked to high IQ, are common everywhere except Africa.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB115040765329081636

Intelligence has a 40-50% genetic basis.

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/10/news/la-heb-genetic-study-intelligence-20110809

IQ scores are the best predictor of success in Western society.

http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

IQ is 75% heritable among Whites.

http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

And now for refutations. The most common response to the above syllogism is that whites in America have a shared environment. As such, things like twin studies and adoption studies which purport to show IQ as genetic, actually only show that a smart white child adopted by dumb white parents still benefits from a community and culture that cultivates their intelligence. (Systemic Racism).

For the most interesting refutation of a black-white intelligence gap, read the series of articles Chisala Chanda wrote for the Unz Review. A large part of his argument is that modern transplant populations from Africa to the UK and USA, as opposed to the descendants of slaves, do not show an achievement gap with the native populations.

EDIT: I should clarify that I'm not versed in the latest state of the art in this debate -- I made my conclusions about ten years ago now and don't find the topic that interesting, except as an example of ideological constraints causing otherwise rational societies to act in incredibly stupid ways.

There's an old meme that the best way to get help for Linux is not to ask for help on X, but to publish an overly-confident flawed diatribe about how Linux sucks because it can't do X. I suspect Race IQ debates work the same way.

For the most interesting refutation of a black-white intelligence gap, read the series of articles Chisala Chanda wrote for the Unz Review. A large part of his argument is that modern transplant populations from Africa to the UK and USA, as opposed to the descendants of slaves, do not show an achievement gap with the native populations.

The most obvious refutation of that refutation would be that those populations are highly selected for intelligence. I am sure if someone like me who knows next to nothing about the topic can thing of this caveat, Chanda can think of it too. Does he address it?

The most obvious refutation of that refutation would be that those populations are highly selected for intelligence. I am sure if someone like me who knows next to nothing about the topic can thing of this caveat, Chanda can think of it too. Does he address it?

I thought the same thing. Half-way through the series, I recall Chisala citing a black refugee population that settled in California (rather than skllled educated immigrants) where their children achieved average results in school. My assumption is that this example was cherry picked from many hundreds of refugee communities that did poorly, but there it is.

Where in California? East LA or the Central Valley, or someplace where average results aren’t ‘shows up about half the time and can spell own name, with assistance’?

Sorry, it was Seattle rather than California. He was writing about refugees from the Horn of Africa (ethiopians, somalians, oromo), whose children performed above the domestic black average test scores depite not speaking English at home. The results weren't collected for intelligence research but as part of the city government's report on refugee education. Here is the exact part

So, how does one of the lowest IQ scoring groups in Africa, emigrating with the lowest evidence of any selection whatsoever (economically or academically), have their children score above black Americans in one of the highest scoring states for native black Americans, (some) even outscoring Hispanics who are assimilated, before they are even assimilated themselves? How do even the Somalian refugees brought in from a total failed state catastrophe outscore black Americans as soon as they just learn to read some English?

It can certainly not be explained by any of the recent HBD answers, individually or in combination

Thank you! I am very happy to finally see someone earnestly attempting to refute HBD arguments. For completeness' sake, here is an archive of the blog post, the source article and the presentation Chisala got his numbers from.

I remain unconvinced. There is no indication that the Somali sample is in any way representative of the source population. Here is Chisala's argument:

Their performance above American blacks (labeled as “English-speaking” blacks) defies the common sociologist explanation that higher achieving black immigrants are simply the most driven members of their source populations (some were just in refugee camps), and it equally defies the modern hereditarian argument that they are just the most self-selected in intelligence relative to their source populations, unless we now start extending this cognitive self-selectivity and “assortative mating” quality to people who run to United Nations refugee camps for protection. (It is not necessarily all who were from these camps, but that doesn’t matter since even those who were from there are performing above native black Americans).

Chisala seems to assume that most of the Somali sample comes from refugee camps. But the source article only mentions that "[The Somali children's] families came to the U.S. to escape their war-torn country, many by way of refugee camps.". Chisala puts this aside by saying that "It is not necessarily all who were from these camps, but that doesn’t matter since even those who were from there are performing above native black Americans". But I didn't get that from a cursory glance of the data, which only seems to report aggregate data. Even so, there are a whole host of different selection effects with those coming from refugee camps. As one commenter puts it:

In a country like Somalia, getting into a refugee camp may be more desirable than not being in one. And from there to be selected for relocation to America may also be more desirable than not.

As with most desirable things in life, those with a higher IQ or socioeconomic status may be better at working the system to their benefit to get them.

Chisala did, as far as I can see, not respond to this concern.

I have not yet looked at the UK data Chisala mentions.

Yes, he (why did I think Chisala Chanda was a woman?) does. @popocatepetl elaborates further in a sibling comment.

To tldr Chanda's hypothesis: non-African people (especially Europeans and Asians) have a more restricted (canalized) phenotype, as do women. American Blacks are stupider than African Blacks because they have genetic admixture from low-class Whites. The genes that make Seamus a bit stupid and aggressive make Tyrone very stupid and very aggressive, while Shaneequa won't be affected as much, but her sons will.

There are some studies I can think of that should be able to support or weaken this claim, like:

  • middle-class children of ADOS fathers and White mothers should be smarter and less aggressive than middle-class children of White fathers and ADOS mothers

It seems like the obvious issue with that is that African Americans mostly have white admixture that comes from the upper classes(mostly the sons of plantation owners), not the lower classes.

The plantation owners in question were presumably violent rapists, which is how much of the admixture happened in the first place.

Having a mistress literally owned by a close relative looks distinctly non consensual today, but that doesn’t mean that’s how it would have been understood as taboo in societies which accepted owning slaves, at least not in a way which was legibly close to rape.

My understanding is that there was a lot of straight-up rape, i.e., the man physically forcing himself on the woman, who of course couldn't resist because of her status. But admittedly I have no idea how much of the admixture is due to violent rape, how much was "borderline" as you described, and how much was consensual.

The best documented example of miscegenation in the antebellum south was plaçage, which featured very little violent rape but lots of elite males, but 1) slavery in French Louisiana was different and 2) that’s just the best documented example, presumably slave owners who raped their slaves didn’t write it down. So it’s up in the air how much white admixture was due to outright coercion and how much of it was the predictable result of high status males and low status females.

It’s also complicated by the fact that very few writers about slavery in the antebellum south were neutral on the practice- they were either abolitionists who generally picked the worst examples to write about, or apologists who were almost certainly lying.

(why did I think Chisala Chanda was a woman?)

Probably because the suffix -a marks something as feminine in romance languages, and, stop me if I'm wrong, russian.

middle-class children of ADOS fathers and White mothers should be smarter and less aggressive than middle-class children of White fathers and ADOS mothers

I don't see how that follows. Shouldn't our prima facie assumption be that the genetic information that contributes to [aggression and stupidity] is passed on patrilineally as well as matrilineally?

Since females are more canalized and we assume that ADOS genomes are saddled with Borderer alleles, an ADOS male of with a substantial IQ is more likely to have fewer of these alleles than an ADOS female with a similar IQ, since her phenotype is more restricted.

Since we are not restricting the selection to specific low-class groups, a White male and a White female with an equally substantial IQ are much less likely to bear a significant load of the alleles we're trying to avoid, so they should be coming from the ADOS parent if they appear in their offspring.

than an ADOS female with a similar IQ

Why are we comparing similar IQs? If the axiom you mention were true, we would expect to see lower IQ in ADOS men on the left tail of the distribution than in ADOS women on the left tail of the distribution, beyond what would be expected from the Greater Male Variability hypothesis. Is this the case?

Because I'm using different sexes having the same IQ as a proxy for having different genetic load: IQ 100 ADOS men probably have "cleaner" genes than IQ 100 ADOS women. If the children of ADOS women slip further left on the tail, then it's probably true. If the children inherit the same IQ, then it's probably false.

Ah, gotcha. Thanks.

An anonymous survey from the mid 10s, which I'll see if I can find, polled experts and had on average them privately thinking about 50% of the achievement gap is genetic.

You are thinking of the Rindermann survey from 2014, which was the basis for these publications:

Survey of expert opinion on intelligence: Intelligence research, experts' background, controversial issues, and the media

Survey of Expert Opinion on Intelligence: Causes of International Differences in Cognitive Ability Tests

Prior to that there was the Snyderman survey from 1984:

Survey of Expert Opinion on Intelligence and Aptitude Testing

Thanks! You've found it.

I am skeptical of the race and IQ narrative mostly because Africa has an average IQ so much lower than everyone else. It's fairly easy to come up with just-so stories about Europe and East Asia. But nearly the entire world, including the pure indigenous populations of the Americas, scores notably higher than pure blacks do, on average.

It seems like the answer is as much about "the places where blacks with no European ancestry are to be found are extremely badly run societies with very high rates of child malnutrition and a high parasite load, and this depresses IQ scores. This problem is shared with a few other areas that are not majority black, but purely black populations probably have an average IQ similar to the averages in southeast asia and among native americans, while east asians and most whites underwent selection effects for higher IQ" as it is about genetics. Unless there's some selection effect for all nonafrican populations but not subsaharan africans that I've missed(and before "Ice age", humans were already pretty widely dispersed by then).

To put it another way, it doesn't pass my smell test that every population not considered black scores higher than every population considered black with no white admixture, when neither are monogenetic groups in ways that the entire human race is monogenetic.

Your premise is not sound. Australasian aboriginals are worse off. Poorest Central Asians like the Kyrghizstani are around black level, judging by PISA results. Ditto, it seems, for lower-caste Indians, which is a group bigger than any majority-black nation. Some purely black populations score higher than some non-blacks; Igbos are stereotyped as crafty and big-brained by Africans and they do comprise a big part of those high-performing Nigerians in the Anglosphere. I suspect that Tutsi are smarter than Hutu and indeed pretty smart in general, which is why they eventually suffered a genocide, as it happens. And the lowest results for specific African nations are suspect. Anyway, someone is bound to end up at the bottom of the totem pole.

On the level of rhetoric, it can be said everyone else are overwhelmingly descendants of a single out-of-Africa migration event (hence the popular factoid that there's more "genetic diversity" in Africa than elsewhere). It stands to reason that everyone else might also be close – and different from the left-behind African population – in some important phenotypic traits. Though of course in actuality Africans we talk about are almost 100% Bantu, and thus fairly homogenous.

But yeah, even hardcore hereditarians allow that with continued successes to eliminate causes of deprivation and sickness, along the lines of GiveWell/Gates Foundation, populations that currently report those absurd scores will almost converge with African Americans. E.g. here's Emil Kirkegaard, who himself believes the B-W gap in the US to be 100% genetic, citing the oft-demonized Lynn:

This estimate of the genotypic African IQ as 80 means that the average IQ that Africans would obtain if the environments in which they were raised were the same as those of Europeans would be 80. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa the mean IQ of Africans is approximately 71, so it can be inferred that adverse environmental conditions in sub-Saharan Africa impair the sub-Saharan African IQ by around nine IQ points.

And Emil himself:

As such, we should expect African national IQs to converge to about 80 in the coming decades everything else equal. Ironically, the main factor that could prevent this is the mass emigration of high intelligence Africans into western countries, thus depriving their countries of their elites. This is what we are currently seeing from countries like Nigeria (Igbo elites).

The problem is that the gap may be more than 100% genetic, so to speak. That is, with deliberate interventions to close the gap we can raise individuals from the lower-IQ group above the performance they'd have had, given equal treatment; and on a population level, with humanitarian efforts, we may improve environments of African societies beyond the level they'd be able to sustain on their own, so new South Asian-like averages won't hold if aid program is terminated on account of its success. Still, maintaining optimal African performance would probably be a net moral (and economic) win for humanity.

the popular factoid that there's more "genetic diversity" in Africa than elsewhere

Is that not true?

It's true inasmuch as we literally talk about "genetic diversity" in the context of anthropological research, but implications that people try to smuggle in with these words are false. I'll just quote Cochran again.

On African genetic variation:

Occasionally I hear people talk about Africa’s great genetic variety. It exists: the genetic difference between Bushmen and Bantu is bigger than the difference between Bantu and Finns. A couple of thousand years ago, before the Bantu had arrived in South Africa & mixed with the Bushmen, it was even bigger: looking at ancient DNA from those unmixed Bushmen, looks as if they split off from the rest of the human race at least a quarter of a million years ago. Well before anything that looks like behavioral modernity, by any definition. Half as divergent as Neanderthals.

But the most divergent populations are small. There are fewer than 100,000 Bushmen, on the order of a million Pygmies, around 1000 Hadza. Most people in Africa are Bantu or related populations: next after that are Nilotic peoples.

And the venomously sarcastic Economists and biology:

Naturally, economists know a lot about human biology and evolution, just as civil engineers have to know about the properties of timber, concrete and steel. They have a good grounding in psychometrics, behavioral genetics, and quantitative genetics – how else could they do their job? Populations vary in traits that play key roles in economic activity and growth – in intelligence, asabiya, savings propensity, etc – you have to be aware of that variation, else whole continents would be economic mysteries. In the same way they know that those observed differences are a product of selection – which means economic historians think seriously about psychometric changes over time and their consequences, such as the Industrial Revolution. That kind of analysis helps predict where modern economic institutions can be successfully introduced, and where they cannot. [...]

Deirdre McCloskey has a new book out: Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. I’m sure that there are many good things in it. But McCloskey makes a significant error in talking about genetics.

“Know also a remarkable likelihood in our future. Begin with the sober scientific fact that sub-Saharan Africa has great genetic diversity, at any rate by the standard of the narrow genetic endowment of the ancestors of the rest of us, the small part of of the race of Homo sapiens that left Mother Africa in dribs and drabs after about 70,000 BCE…. Any gene-influenced activity is therefore going to have more African extremes. The naturally tallest people and the naturally shortest people, for example, are in sub-Saharan Africa. The naturally quickest long-distance runners are in East Africa. The best basketball players descend from West Africans. In other words, below the Sahara the top end of the distribution of human abilities – physical and intellectual and artistic – is unusually thick. …

The upshot? Genetic diversity in a rich Africa will yield a crop of geniuses unprecedented in world history. In a century or so the leading scientists and artists in the world will be black – at any rate if the diversity is as large in gene expression and social relevance as it is in, say, height or running ability. ”

So by this argument that the most cold-tolerant Africans must be more cold-tolerant than Eskimos: but they’re not. The most altitude-tolerant Africans must be more altitude-tolerant than Tibetans – but they’re not. McCloskey is thinking that a turn to free markets will make Africa rich, and that will give educational opportunities to Africans now denied them – but a fair-sized mostly-African population already lives in the United States, a population that is already much more prosperous than sub-Saharan Africans. How are they doing? How many geniuses are they producing?

The whole argument is flawed. Overall genetic variation is mostly in neutral loci. By itself it tells you nothing about any particular trait. Europeans do have less overall genetic variation than sub-Saharan Africans (~20% less), but they show more variation in hair color and eye color than Africans.

Essentially every domesticated species has less genetic variation than its wild progenitor. Dogs have less genetic variation than wolves. So, does this mean that the tallest wolf is taller than any dog? No – the tallest Great Danes are taller than any wolf. The heaviest mastiffs are heavier than any wolf. Chihuahua are the smallest. Greyhounds are faster than wolves (by a little). [...]

What matters is the frequency of alleles that influence a trait, not overall genetic diversity. If, for example, the variants that tend to boost educational achievement (some of which were found in the just-released Nature study) were on average less common in sub-Saharan Africans than in Europeans – says 5% less common – Africans would tend to do less well in school. Like they actually do. Now Africa is a big place, and some groups are genetically quite distinct from others. Bushmen are genetically more distant from the Bantu than the Bantu are from Chinese. Some African populations might have experienced selective pressures that were more (or less) favorable for intelligence than others. Is there evidence, either in test scores or cultural accomplishment (better than any test), that some African populations may have smarts comparable with, or better than, people in Switzerland or Holland or Scotland?

TL;DR: Africans do have greater genetic diversity, but "genetic variation is mostly in neutral loci", i.e., greater genetic diversity does not imply greater phenotypic diversity, and even if there is greater variation in one phenotypic trait (e.g. height), this does not imply that there is greater variation in all traits. Correct?

Pretty much. Actually it's four points.

  1. Most of the asserted "genetic diversity" of Africa as a whole is due to peoples from ancient population clusters, which make up less than 1% of African population and are not associated with colloquial "black people". They are anthropological marvels, but frankly they're not the guys anyone is talking about. Related Razib Khan post.

  2. "Genetic diversity" for a given population is overwhelmingly a measure of ancestral population size and diversity of interchangeable variants that have spread by genetic drift. Out-of-Africa populations have passed through a series of severe bottlenecks, so they've shed some genetic markers we can find in African Bantus. Doesn't have much to do with anything consequential. It's like a JPG that's gone through lossy compression: there are color bands now, and less diversity of color patches or raw pixel values, but it doesn't mean the semantics of the image is altered, or that the range of any color channel is diminished, in fact the opposite can be true.

  3. Local adaptation can very quickly act on non-neutral loci, a few thousand years are more than enough to change a typical polygenic trait by 1 SD. We have no grounds to presume that ancestral (>50KYA) diversity explains modern diversity for groups that have evolved in different environments.

  4. By the same logic, yes, traits are independent products of selection. Just like all Sub-Saharan Africans are pretty dark relative to other races, they can be pretty ... fast runners, putting aside their internal ranking and their variation in toxin resistance or deep-diving talents or cricket skills.

Thank you, that was the TDLR of an effortpost I was looking for.

Could you rephrase this? It sounds interesting but reads to me like "I'm skeptical of HBD because every single black country has a low IQ, and every black minority population in other countries also has a low IQ." To me this sounds like pretty good first-glance evidence that the HBD story makes sense, even before you look at the genes themselves. Forgive me if I'm tired and completely misreading you.

[The poorly run dysfunction country] problem is shared with a few other areas that are not majority black

Could you give a few examples? I'm under the impression that the IQ in say, Afghanistan, is quite high despite the institutions in those areas being incredibly dysfunctional forever. (EDIT: Woah, dead wrong alert. Afghanistan looks to be in the mid eighties. This table looks to be sourced to Richard Lynn's work.)

But nearly the entire world, including the pure indigenous populations of the Americas, scores notably higher than pure blacks do, on average. [...] Unless there's some selection effect for all nonafrican populations but not subsaharan africans that I've missed(and before "Ice age", humans were already pretty widely dispersed by then).

I left this out because it's pure speculation, but the "Cold Winter" hypothesis is the one you run into the most. Populations incapabale of planning many months into the future died off any time their migration crossed a temperate climate. For example, this also explains why Mesoamerican civilizations which were also tropical or subtropical have such a high IQ and had sophisticated premodern science and maths. (Their ancestors had to pass through Siberia and over the Bering Strait.)

Populations incapabale of planning many months into the future died off any time their migration crossed a temperate climate.

Did the path taken from africa to europe really pass into 'cold winter' areas? Africa -> the Levant -> Turkey -> Greece ends in europe without passing through any places that even really receive snow. Plus there are temperate climates in Africa. Are there really any climates on the way to Europe from Africa that you couldn't find i.e. in the temperate regions of south africa? If so, why aren't i.e. Zulus as high average IQ as white europeans, considering their ancestors would have had to make similar migrations? And furthermore, 'cold winters' aren't the only source of long famines. Couldn't there be plenty of (and different types of) causes of famines in the tropical parts of africa to encourage selection toward individuals capable of long-term planning?

Did the path taken from africa to europe really pass into 'cold winter' areas? Africa -> the Levant -> Turkey -> Greece ends in europe without passing through any places that even really receive snow.

Europe itself was the cold winter area, leading to a population bottleneck. Pop-sci link.

The more dubious and interesting question would the Middle East and India. It's worth noting though that populations do not move in a linear direction, and those regions have at various points gotten heavy admixture and even outright population replacement from the north -- especially after 3500 BC or so.

If so, why aren't i.e. Zulus as high average IQ as white europeans, considering their ancestors would have had to make similar migrations?

I'm completely ignorant of Zulu history, but I'm not really seeing devastating unsurvivable winters anywhere along the migration path. As for the temperature on the highlands and mountains I'm assuming they would descend for winters like foragers, nomadic farmers, and pastoralists have throughout history. Are there any mountain ranges that would take multiple years to cross to South Africa? How was the ice age in middle Africa, I thought pretty mild?

And furthermore, 'cold winters' aren't the only source of long famines. Couldn't there be plenty of (and different types of) causes of famines in the tropical parts of africa to encourage selection toward individuals capable of long-term planning?

Maybe. I'd be interested in seeing if there was a population bottleneck akin to what happened in Europe above.

Nepal, Guatemala, and Nicaragua are the three non-black countries in the bottom ten in the world by IQ score. All three are desperately poor, badly run countries that plausibly have environmental factors causing loss of IQ points in kids that grow up there. And really 7/10 countries being African sounds not too far off from a sample of 3rd world countries.

The main thrust of my argument is that since non-black is not a monogenetic group, and black isn't either, the pattern of every non-black group outperforming every black group demands an explanation. I'm aware of the cold winter hypothesis, and that's why I included southeast asia- why does the dumbest country in SE Asia(Indonesia) have an average IQ roughly on par with the smartest country in subsaharan Africa(Sudan)? Since we know that childhood malnutrition and parasite burden and all sorts of other things black countries usually do badly on lower IQ, it accords with available evidence to suggest that the average IQ of blacks would be in the eighties if they lived in countries that were as nice as Thailand or the Philippines. To my knowledge, it doesn't require a cold winter to reach either of these countries from Africa, and neither of them has undergone some kind of selection effect for high IQ, and if anything biased sampling probably makes Africa look relatively better than more urbanized SE Asian populations rather than explaining the gap.

To my knowledge, it doesn't require a cold winter to reach either of these countries from Africa

All of these countries had quite dark-skinned populations several thousand of years ago. Then, populations originating from territory of modern China came and largely displaced them, sometimes without a trace of preceeding population. A large fraction of area of modern China was permafrost or under glaciers at some point.

Why do you think Indonesians literally living at equator have such light skin?

A diet based almost entirely on rice would tend to lighten the skin over generations, but the Chinese replacement also makes sense.

In general, it almost never occurs that some recent non-African population had its ancestors follow shortest path from Africa.

The Indigenous populations of the Americans came primarily from Asian populations around 18K years ago who underwent one hell of a trek. Funnily enough, 2 day old Navajo and Japanese babies show similar responses on the cloth over nose cognitive test (near complete docility) which would be extremely abnormal in caucasians. The separation between Africans and every other group is over 50K years. Given the standard theory that we all came out of Africa, it makes intuitive sense for the least cognitively capable members of our species to be the ones that didn't make it elsewhere. The Saharan desert is not exactly tolerant of the unintelligent.

Evidence for the horribly run nature of African societies, or malnutritution and parasite load doesn't exactly counter the validity of the genetic hypothesis. All of these are highly indiscriminate, killing the smart at similar rates to the stupid. You need particular conditions for selection pressures to favour intelligence over the simpler traits they might favour (speed, muscle, and high testosterone for example). Note that these are all areas where Africans excel, with African infants showing greater muscle control at birth than caucasians or asians (but not aboriginals).

That hypothesis, to be clear, was that high malnutrition rates and poor general sanitation leading to high parasite load take IQ points off of Africans. It's a competing explanation for African underperformance relative to other parts of the world which also produce few nobel prize winners. The explanation isn't evidence against competing hypotheses; I don't think that South Sudan with the social conditions of Holland or Japan would have an IQ of 100, I think it would have an IQ similar to blacks in rich countries(which is itself similar to southeast Asian and native American IQ).

The argument is more "there's probably a world baseline somewhere in the 80's, and black countries limbo under it by being in youtube ads asking for money to save the children rather than for genetic reasons". I'm open to the alternative that blacks just have genetically low IQ's, but I want to see the explanation for a common selection pressure on Indonesians and Irishmen but not Bantus.

And I believe the sahara was not a desert when early man crossed it.

I think the second half of your first paragraph has a bunch of issues.

I don't think it logically follows that the smartest would be the ones to leave first, especially in the context of simple, pre-agrarian hunter-gatherer societies. It could very easily be that the ones who left first were the least aggressive, and thus least likely to defend their territory. Inuit folklore mention the Dorset and state that their response to outsiders was simply to flee. I don't see why that wouldn't have been the case during the first human migration from Africa. I'd judge the argument that leaving Africa in the first place is a sign of intelligence to be false. Indeed, I think the low aggression hypothesis is actually more likely, given that there are experts who argue that drought in Africa is what first spurred the out-of-Africa migrations. That's a point in favour of aggressiveness/docility being the distinction between stayers and leavers, as conflict over increasingly scarce resources would have been inevitable.

Also, the first migrations out of Africa were fundamentally different than any that came after, as the original out of Africa population was traveling through areas where there were no Sapiens Sapiens, only Denisovans and Neanderthal. Once the first group leaves and is in the way, it becomes significantly less simple to push them out and then migrate, as you have to go through potentially(probably) hostile societies to do so. The first group to leave was incredibly lucky, and if they had been the second group due to minor changes in inter-tribe politics or random chance, they might never have made it out.

Finally, some parts of Africa are close to the Middle East and some are not. Any group that ended up in Southern Africa simply wasn't going to leave, and that is entirely circumstance and has nothing to do with any of their group characteristics. There's no reason the smartest humans 70,000 years ago couldn't have been denied the opportunity to colonize the world due to their location.

The Sahara was unlikely to have been a barrier to the first humans leaving, either. It has cyclical wet/dry periods, and it seems that a wet period ended ~70,000 years ago, which is right in line with the out-of-Africa migration that led humans into Eurasia and beyond. I find it more intuitive, given this fact, to suggest that the drought and desertification of the Sahara region was the impetus, and that it only became a hurdle for migration after the humans had already left Africa. On top of that, the Sans of Southern Africa have been successfully living in the Kalahari desert for 20,000+ years, despite scoring even lower on IQ tests(55 on average!) than other African groups.

With all that in mind, I find it very unlikely(I'd posit 95% confidence that this is the case) that the intellectual differences between Sub-Saharan Africans and non-African populations are the result of genetic differences that existed before humans migrated out of Africa. Any such differences are probably the result of selection pressures after the fact.

The facts that need to be explained is a 2012 blog post compiling some of the arguments in favor of gap being at least partially genetic. Of course it is now outdated, I don't follow the subject closely but I know that for instance there are now better admixture studies like this one. But some of the arguments gave me a better sense of why so many researchers in the field consider genetic causes the most parsimonious explanation.

Goodness. I know you're a regular, but this phrasing reads like stereotypical bait.

Anyway, I don't have a good answer for you. It strikes me as a topic with little debate: two groups of partisans, neither particularly on the fence. There's not really an avenue to a general audience, either, since the mere mention is so radioactive.

Oh, the original draft was worse :P. I had a bit about looking for something that simultaneously doesn't shy away from uncomfortable facts but also wasn't overreaching the data. Experience online taught me that...that sort of phrasing leads some people to react badly.

I figured themotte could parse "good".

It strikes me as a topic with little debate

There paradoxically seems to be too much debate - i.e. people getting deep in the weeds in niche spaces in a way that is just daunting to enter for all sorts of reasons - but also not enough debate - i.e. enough that some authority has a good, clear overview I can quickly find on popular spaces that broadly covers the state of play without trying to recruit or manage me.

I figured themotte could parse "good".

If there is one word that I would never in a million years trust anyone in (or adjacent to) the rationalist community to parse, it would be "good"

Goodness. I know you're a regular, but this phrasing reads like stereotypical bait.

Because it is.

Do you believe people here pretend to be smarter than they are?

I've seen many people in The Motte claim something along the lines of "that's basic" as if only high-brow discussions were interesting, or as if they were the arbiters of what's "basic" and what's "advanced", or even as if they completely understood the "basic" notion.

It's almost as if the opposite of bike-shedding was sought: everyone claims they want to discuss about the plans for a nuclear power plant (very complex), not the bicycle shed materials which are way too simple.

So everyone who aims to discuss about the nuclear power plant plans is rewarded (even if nobody really understands them), and everyone who wants to talk about something everyone can understand is punished (nobody wants to talk about what they can easily understand).

So everyone who aims to discuss about the nuclear power plant plans is rewarded (even if nobody really understands them), and everyone who wants to talk about something everyone can understand is punished (nobody wants to talk about what they can easily understand).

There's a higher bar for talking about something everyone can understand given the fact that there are far more people able to spot errors. If I wanted to write a post on economic theory I'd expect every mistake I made to be exposed pretty quickly. With more complex or niche stuff the errors are harder to spot, there are fewer people who feel confident enough to call them out, and readers will feel like they're learning something even if they are unable to judge its quality.

Although to defend this place a bit, for people who want to discuss complex issues this place might be one of the few open forums on the internet where they can do so productively.

There's a higher bar for talking about something everyone can understand given the fact that there are far more people able to spot errors. If I wanted to write a post on economic theory I'd expect every mistake I made to be exposed pretty quickly. With more complex or niche stuff the errors are harder to spot, there are fewer people who feel confident enough to call them out, and readers will feel like they're learning something even if they are unable to judge its quality.

errors tend to be be spotted quickly here. There are enough experts of various subjects that the accuracy here is probably better than on reddit.

There is a very basic (heh) solution to this: just ask. Usually people here are very accommodating and are happy to provide simple explanations.

This presumes the people are actually more knowledgeable. If people are generally more knowledgeable than you, then simplifying a complex concept for you is desirable, but what if in a certain case you are more knowledgeable? In those cases simplifying complex concepts is just condescending.

Haven't you encountered one of those cases when you are in fact the one more knowledgeable and people here still act as if they know more than you?

Haven't you encountered one of those cases when you are in fact the one more knowledgeable and people here still act as if they know more than you?

No. As a general rule, people on the motte are more knowledgeable than me on any subject they choose to write about at length. That includes my own area of expertise. It's one of the reasons I come here.

I understand that, but generally implies that there has to be some exceptions.

If someone wanted to discuss the inns and outs of basic high-school algebra here I imagine they wouldn't get a great deal of buy-in. There are certain topics (usually around formal logic, math and computer science) that the Motte is drastically overrepresented in demographically. You can probably discuss a lot of very low-level things on a number of different issues that aren't well-known and get more interest.

Essentially quality posts on non-contentious trivial topics are going to be ignored by the community, the same posts on contentious trivial ones (trivial in the sense the majority of people believe they have an answer, largely culture war issues) will be feted, and quality posts on non-contentious topics that the community doesn't understand but has explained to them will likely be considered a standard for a quality contribution.

The world's best explanation on logical equivalencies and truth tables would be almost entirely ignored here, for example. It's a useful topic to understand but the number of people here who don't grok basic formal logic is probably very small.

Essentially quality posts on non-contentious trivial topics are going to be ignored by the community, the same posts on contentious trivial ones (trivial in the sense the majority of people believe they have an answer, largely culture war issues) will be feted

But that hasn't been my experience. The contentious trivial topics I've tried to talk about gather a lot of feedback, they are not ignored at all: they are lambasted.

The world's best explanation on logical equivalencies and truth tables would be almost entirely ignored here, for example. It's a useful topic to understand but the number of people here who don't grok basic formal logic is probably very small.

Yes, but this presumes that there is a formal logic, when in fact there's many formal logics. One user might say question X is trivial, but that's only in classical first-order logic, in other logics it might not be so trivial. See for example this entry in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Classical Logic, I would say it's anything but simple. And of course it has an entire section explaining this isn't the "one right logic", there's many critics and alternatives:

However, as noted, the main meta-theoretic properties of classical, first-order logic lead to expressive limitations of the formal languages and model-theoretic semantics. Key notions, like finitude, countability, minimal closure, natural number, and the like cannot be expressed.

I think it's clearly a fallacy to think that X is trivial because under a particular view (classical first-order logic) it is trivial. Just because something appears trivial doesn't mean that it is.

But that hasn't been my experience. The contentious trivial topics I've tried to talk about gather a lot of feedback, they are not ignored at all: they are lambasted.

Out of curiosity, what are your explanations (I presume you've thought about more than one) for the reception you tend to get in your posts?

I'm sure you've heard the idea that the LessWrong movement is a cult. I'm not going to claim that because I don't know enough about it yet, but it does have a certain feeling of that. I see a lot of self-referencing: many terms are used only within the movement, and many articles refer to other articles within, which in turn refer to other articles. Too many inside jokes.

So for an article to gain top-shelf status it seems it has to use so many inside terms--and preferably inside terms that in turn require inside terms to understand--that only people on the inside could get, not the "normies".

So a "normie" article would just not cut it, regardless of useful the insight, especially if the insight is accesible by anyone (the plebs). I guess elitist is the word.

There's also an element of converse error fallacy (I've seen that a lot): "this seems trivial to me (and I'm rather intelligent), therefore it has to be trivial". But simple does not necessarily mean trivial.

I want to write a whole article about this, but take for example Karl Popper's falsifiability principle: it's exceedingly simple and yet it's anything but inconsequential. I'm pretty sure if the principle hadn't already been laid out, it would have been dismissed in this forum because "it's trivial".

So for an article to gain top-shelf status it seems it has to use so many inside terms--and preferably inside terms that in turn require inside terms to understand--that only people on the inside could get, not the "normies".

So a "normie" article would just not cut it, regardless of useful the insight, especially if the insight is accesible by anyone (the plebs). I guess elitist is the word.

Can this be simply the case that what you're encountering is the intersection between novelty and community preferences?

For example:

  • blog post that satisfies the community's preferences and offers novel insights = much liked.

  • blog post that satisfies the community's preferences but offers no novel insights = mostly ignored.

  • blog post that does not satsify the community's preferences but offers novel insights = sometimes ignored, some times disliked.

  • blog post that does not satisfy the community's preferences and does not offer novel insights = disliked.

Let's take your idea about Karl Popper's falsifiability principle:

  • if you post a description about it on LW, I would imagine it would mostly be ignored. It does not seem to satisfy LW preferences nor is it novel.

  • if you post a description about it on themotte, I would imagine it would be read, but would garner few replies/upvotes. It falls into themotte preferences, but is not novel.

  • if you post an interesting, novel take about it on LW, I would imagine it would mostly be ignored, although you have a chance to hook someone interested in this type of stuff.

  • if you post an interesting, novel take about it on themotte, I would imagine you might get many replies and many upvotes.

  • blog post that does not satisfy the community's preferences and does not offer novel insights = disliked.

There's a difference between not offering novel insight, and not offering novel insight according to the person downvoting.

That's my whole contention.

Let's take your idea about Karl Popper's falsifiability principle:

I said "if the principle hadn't already been laid out", that means it would be novel today. If it were novel today, plenty of people would think that it wasn't novel. People make the assumption that simple concepts cannot be novel, because somebody intelligent surely must have already thought about it. Right?

Do you believe people here pretend to be smarter than they are?

no, people here are as smart or smarter than everywhere else, even comparable to physics/math subs . Even smarter than comments on astralcodexten . It's not hyperbole.

no, people here are as smart or smarter than everywhere else

That doesn't prevent one from pretending. A person can be 130 which is way smarter than most people, and yet pretend to be 145.

maybe a little bit . It's hard to tell if someone is pretending to be smart or if they actually write/think a certain way as a natural disposition. With physics/math you cannot really fake it, but with writing the classic method is obfuscation and big words, but plenty of truly smart people write that way too .

In my opinion a good writer is able to explain complex concepts with simple words. Obfuscation is a sign that the person is signaling intelligence rather than truly displaying it--or that he/she is a bad writer.

It sounds like you have a couple questions rolled into one.

Do mottizens want to look smart? Sure, perhaps even more than the average person.

Do mottizens take deceptive actions to achieve this? Probably. I think that's pretty common in general, and status games apply here, too.

Do those actions include dismissing topics which are too low-status? Ohhhh yeah. I can't say how we do compared to the base rate, but it's certainly an appealing choice sometimes.

Now, for the kicker: how often is a dismissal based on complexity? I'm going to argue...not that often. There are a lot of competing reasons to dismiss a topic. It's simple, it's complicated, it's common knowledge, it's not widely known but should stay that way. Status games, strategic reasons, personal distaste--all bubbling under the surface. I don't think perceived complexity takes priority all that often.

I don't think perceived complexity takes priority all that often.

Which article would you bet receives more upvotes? 1) An article which is easily accessible by the general public, treats a simple common topic in a novel way, and has zero references to lesswrong-specific terms. 2) An article which is completely inaccessible to the general public, analyzes a complex topic, has a dozen lesswrong-specific terms, and references 4 lesswrong-like articles.

Genuinely hard to say. I’ve seen both do well and both do poorly.

That’s also not a very controlled comparison. What you need are two articles almost identical but for the lesswrong-bait. I’m not even sure it’s possible to keep two articles similar except have one completely inaccessible.

here is the most highly voted article in themotte.com's short history: https://www.themotte.org/post/335/six-months-in-the-life-of

What can we make of it? It's authentic, personal, and it shows effort and subject matter expertise. Text posts almost always do better compared to links, too. I think this matters more than smart/dumb, complex/simple, lesswrong references or lack thereof, left/right, etc. Theory-of-the-world articles tend to do way worse, maybe because they come off as pretentious or out of touch. Lesswrong is not as popular as often assumed.

Fair enough. I think article 1 would be trashed and article 2 praised, but that might be just my experience.

an article is trashed if the author comes off as arrogant and is wrong. The worst combination. It has nothing to do with the simplicity or complexity of the topic.

Which has nothing to do with what we are talking about. And the article being "wrong" is a subjective opinion which might itself be wrong.


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