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Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 21, 2025

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

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

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

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My load bearing beliefs are

  • Humans are mostly good.
  • Conspiracies are very hard to pull off, and
  • bad outcomes are almost always better explained by incompetence.
  • Intelligence is increasing and peace and good behavior emerge from intelligent actors even if they only want to selfishly maximize their own utils

Come at me bro

Intelligence is increasing

If you look at buildings from 200 years ago, the door frames are much lower, because people were much shorter back then. All of those short people passed on their genes to descendants who were much taller than they were. The genes themselves didn't change, but because their descendants grew up in a caloric- and nutrient-rich environment, they were better equipped to fulfil their maximum height potential as encoded in their genes than their ancestors were.

Conceivably the Flynn effect could be partly explicable by a similar dynamic, as modern people have a much better understanding of the importance of early childhood nutrition and so on than our ancestors did. But other than that, I'm sceptical of the idea that intelligence is increasing over time. In point of fact our society seems profoundly dysgenic in numerous ways. Fertility rates are in freefall across much of the West, and the only solution suggested by elites is to import millions of people from cultures in which intergenerational cousin marriage is the rule rather than the exception.