domain:mgautreau.substack.com
hanikrummihundursvin
13m ago
A first impression: If we take a lot of leftist dogma as being true and discard obvious analogs to reality and claim they might be inaccurate, then we might just be able to explain why our ideology is seemingly not mapping on to the world around us.
Now queue the arguments through analogy, 'what if's' about reality, and a mountain of research motivated entirely by a need to collapse all genetic gravity into a neat environmentalist fold.
Scott Alexanders seems to have a good eye for strategy. The article is effectively just an advertisement for a few plucky anti-hereditarian rebels who want to expose the fatal flaw of the hereditarian Death Star. Scott speaks highly of the effort, but obviously signals that he is going to wait until the rebels actually fire a torpedo into the thing. And there in lies the problem for the rebels.
For every alleged fatal flaw exhaust shaft that the hereditarian Death Star has, environmentalism has less than nothing. Every proposed theory has failed to explain the big problems. So... What's the point? What exactly are we doing here?
Crowstep
14m ago
I'm your man!
So I've turned my phone into a pseudo-dumb phone. I've replaced the stock launcher with a minimalist black and white one, deleted any fun or distracting apps and installed an app which blocks the browser (but which allows me to access it for 30 seconds every five minutes for logins etc).
If you want to lock down your phone even more (assuming it's an Android), the Universal Android Debloater lets you uninstall anything, even stock apps like the browser or the app store. ChatGPT helped me set this up despite my lack of technical ability.
All my browsers on my personal and work PCs have site-blockers, blocking mostly news sites. The best ones let you set a password which you can make as a string of numbers which you save somewhere else. Typically you can also add sites without entering the password, but you need the password to remove sites.
My tablet has a whitelist of sites I'm allowed on, with the parental control PIN set to the aforementioned password. Previously I let my wife set the PIN number which also worked.
Finally, if I want a complete digital break (say, to read a book), I'll activate SelfControl which completely disables the browser on my laptop.
Now of course, all of these things can be reversed if I want to (except SelfControl while a block is active). What seems to work for me is that the pain of setting everything up makes me less willing to e.g. simply uninstall the browser extension.
I still slack off at work more than I should, but this makes it much easier to get back to what I should be doing. Also having books easily accessible for when I want to proactively rest is helpful.
kky
20m ago
There are at least three pieces at play here: first, the question of deterministic heritability of mental characteristics; second, the question of how genes as we currently understand them map to mental characteristics; and third, the question of what, precisely, IQ is measuring in relation to mental characteristics.
As far as mental characteristics go, I think it’s fair to say that some are pretty clearly innate and inherited and others are not. There are a lot of children out there who pretty obviously derive their mental abilities from whatever their parents have. However, that’s not the whole story. There are habits of thought that can dramatically improve or sabotage a person’s performance. A simple example is just whether someone cares or not. When I play chess, my level of play whiplashes severely based on how focused I am, on the order of a few hundred Elo. When I’m not focused and don’t really care, I just play moves. I believe this replicates across most fields of activity, and that caring has a very strong cultural component. Of course, a few hundred Elo is not multiple standard deviations of performance, but I think it could explain half an SD pretty easily, which is actually quite a lot.
Genes are a stickier question. My rough viewpoint is that our current understanding of genetics is far too coarse to pick up on anything but the simplest behaviors, where a gene encodes a pretty straightforward protein with one real use case. But in real life, all of the body’s systems are expected to interact quite intricately, and we should expect some novel properties to emerge at the intersection of genes. I’m far from an expert here, so this is all I’ll say. I’m not surprised that efforts to reverse engineer the hack job that is evolution are hitting difficulties, but all it proves is the lingering inadequacy of our science.
IQ is the fun part. On the one level, it’s quite simple: IQ is just a measurement of how you do on a specific batch of tests. But those tests claim to be an imperfect measurement of intelligence, and that intelligence is a singular value. This I am not remotely convinced of.
The typical argument is that because different mental functions correlate, there must be some underlying characteristic that powers all of them, and that they’re all secretly linked. But this doesn’t hold much muster with reality. If our various mental abilities were merely outward expressions of a single underlying scalar, we would expect to see people at the far reaches of intelligence be great at everything. In reality, we tend to see them be amazing at one thing, and somewhere between good and terrible at the rest. Another personal example: I am >3SD on the right for analytical intelligence (measured, in this case, by visual puzzle solving) and dead middle on “processing speed”, which means the rate of quickly mapping trivial inputs to trivial outputs, as measured by a professionally administered adult IQ test. This is irreconcilable with the notion that both are just expressions of an underlying “intelligence.” How could that intelligence be both perfectly average and massively out of the ordinary at the same time? It’s nonsensical. What actually makes sense is that these are different capabilities of the mind, and for whatever reason I am much stronger in one than the other. That leaves the question of why these disparate capabilities correlate in most cases, to which I’ll just leave two hypotheses: first, adverse circumstances that lower all abilities, like how being severely obese will undermine pretty much all athletic performance; second, that humans are sorted into classes in a social hierarchy and that these traits are then selected for in groups based on what the class does. Those are explanations that are plausible and do not require a general intelligence.
Anyway, interesting topic, and I do agree that too many of the opinions here come down to faith over examining what’s going on and flexibly adjusting based on new information.
Sloot
26m ago
I'm always looking for the hack supplement that will improve my athletic performance, the one blog post that will turn my opinion of the world on its head, the one connection on social media that will become my best friend or romantic partner, the one big experiment that I can do that will get me my PhD.
A hack some academics—such as a recently departed female Harvard professor—have stumbled upon is just making up the data, because p-… hacking… is too much work.
Broke: Carefully planning, preregistering, and performing meticulously designed experiments
Woke: p-hacking and garden-of-forking-pathsing
Bespoke: Just making up the data
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
27m ago
The broader points I'm making are:
- Modern sciency people tend to have axioms they don't quite realize.
- Biology is stuck in a mechanistic model of genetics and life, which holds it back.
FtttG
37m ago
I would resent being called a fuckboy (under the definition we're discussing here), as I don't like the implication that the only way I can get women into bed is by lying to them or deceiving them.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
39m ago
So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."
Twin studies are robust and reproducible. What can't be "proven" is the particular genes behind the heritability.
Sloot
42m ago
One could argue that, if anything, men perform more emotional labor than women, since putting up and dealing with women’s shit-tests and coffee moments is a price men pay for being in heterosexual relationships.
There could be epic_handshake.jpg potential here between boomers and zoomers—boomers with “does this dress make me look fat?” and zoomers with “would you still love me if I were a worm?”
Crowstep
43m ago
That said, a comment on the article from Scott:
I know of two secret results I'm not supposed to talk about, by people claiming they've found very large amounts of "missing heritability". Not yet peer-reviewed or confirmed by anything except rumor. I expect one to be out within six months, and the other maybe eventually.
I've seen it used to refer to both a hot Chad whose romantic interest in women extends no further than the tip of his dick and to a pretty boy that a woman keeps hooked on simping for her by using him for her sexual gratification (the female equivalent of a slampig - I haven't watched it but I think the toyboy fantasy film Babygirl with Nicole Kidman probably depicts something like this model), and also to any unappealing men who are more motivated to pursue sex than sitting at home watching porn and complaining online about Stacies.
Is he a boy and is fucking any significant part of the motivation for his actions? He's a fuckboy.
Reading that article though it reads like an attempt to build a stick for hitting men... but I don't see many men who would be particularly offended by the label. Low stakes defensive maybe, but not sincerely offended. What I can see being offensive is calling another woman's boyfriend a fuckboy. In that sense perhaps the fuckboy label is a tool for women to reassert the sort of social policing they're so adept at and that some here in this forum say could alleviate the ills of current day dating culture. Can you imagine if someone told a woman that the new guy she's excited to be dating is a fuckboy? It's a hit at her value - she's giving him her value and not getting compensated (she does it free!). Call a man a fuckboy and internally he'll probably shrug and think DM;HS. It's labelling him as someone who got what he wanted. Beats being an incel or a simp. Tell a woman her bf is a fuckboy and in short order he'll be put on notice that it's time to man up or he won't be getting what he wants any more. You don't need to tell her directly, posting it to the audience of young women reading a fashion blog will probably suffice to start the thought process.
nomenym
49m ago
Perhaps history's most infamous materialists were also dogmatically blank slatists.
In my Lived Experience from years of performing the Emotional Labor of mostly-consensually consuming content such as online discussions and mainstream media publications, my Emotional Intelligence has led me to conclude that replacing the adjective in female- and left-coded “adjective + noun” buzzphrases with “imaginary” usually leads to the phrases making more sense in the contexts in which they’re found. For example, mentally substituting in “imaginary” for the first word in the following phrases:
- emotional labor
- emotional intelligence
- emotional truth
- emotional abuse
- financial abuse
- lived experience
- socioeconomic factors
- systemic racism
- institutional racism
- internalized misogyny
- implicit bias
- stereotype threat
- social contract
- food deserts
- food insecurity
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
54m ago
Are you suggesting that the gap between inheritability and discovered genes is some kind of psychic connection between twins that other siblings do not have? Or are you making a broader point that genes are not actually connected to our personality and other traits and something else determines our personality (which weirdly chooses to give people similar traits based on degrees of consanguinity?)
thejdizzler
55m ago
Probably the wrong place to ask this, as this is an Internet forum, but have any of you implemented any kind of Cal Newport style Digital Minimalism? I just reread his book and am finding it frustratingly vague.
thejdizzler
56m ago
I'm hoping I have the same change in attitude as you. I know that there's a correlation between time and effort put in and performance. If I run more (and recover) I perform better. If I read more my focus improves and I grow in knowledge. If I regularly show up to the same social events I'll make friends. If I do more experiments, I will get more data. If I spend more time on my blog I will get more readers. Yet the actions that I take somehow don't reflect this. I'm always looking for the hack supplement that will improve my athletic performance, the one blog post that will turn my opinion of the world on its head, the one connection on social media that will become my best friend or romantic partner, the one big experiment that I can do that will get me my PhD. I know this is al la bunch of bullshit. The way to improve is to consistently show up and do what the best in the world did to get where they are, which is on paper pretty straightforward for the things I care about.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
The concept was originally applied to job, if I remember correctly. Ex: the flight attendant whose father passed away yesterday but still serves snacks and drinks on the flight with a smile and pleasantries is performing emotional labor.
Remember the name of this forum. That's the motte. The common meaning is the bailey.
kky
1hr ago
Apologies, friend - I switched out the pronoun for a noun. Does that read better?
Thanks for the reminder to not let these posts get too stream-of-consciousness.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
1hr ago
Basically the whole point of the article is that they have been searching for these genes for 20 years and have only found more and more complexities.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I mean IQ itself is a fuzzy concept. We can only really measure it by proxy, which by itself would create some added complexity here. The more precise way to say this would be “twins are 60% likely to score the same IQ on an IQ test.” The test doesn’t directly measure IQ, and depending on which test you take, when you take it, and under what conditions, you might get some different scores just from those things even if the same person is being tested. Then you have environment, one kid is encouraged to read a lot and do math puzzles. The other plays lots of sports. One eats nothing but junk food, the other eats clean. Those differences can affect brain development.
It’s both and, to my mind.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1hr ago
This has always fascinated me when I read accounts by trans men. Their description of what testosterone does to their mental processes sounds completely alien to me. I cannot relate to it whatsoever.
I've found at least some of their accounts to be startlingly accurate, and quite revealing.
I was once reading a book -- can't at all remember the name now -- written by an FTM transsexual describing her experience with testosterone. She was older and she would have been going through this before the internet (and before free 24/7 porn, keep that in mind).
One of the effects she described was how her visual perception seemed to become "more 3D" (lines up with how men tend to do better on spatial rotation tasks), especially whenever she looked at women or images of women. A billboard showing a sexy woman suddenly "popped" for her in a way that it never had before which consequently made it much more attention-grabbing, despite the fact that she had always been a lesbian even prior to starting testosterone. She was still subjectively viewing women in a new way, which is exactly the sort of effect I would expect testosterone to induce.
She described an episode where she went with some female friends (all of them lesbian or bisexual) to watch a series of film screenings at an indie theater. One of them was a short reel that showed various women in bikinis and underwear doing things like dancing, striking sexy poses, maybe a bit of a striptease, things like that. And all of her friends were laughing at it: like, oh look at these girls being so silly, haha. But she couldn't help but be struck by how serious the images seemed to her. She looked at her friends laughing and thought, "why are you laughing? This isn't a joke. Stop laughing." And I just thought... yes, this is it! This is the difference between male and female sexuality! You couldn't ask for a more perfect illustration, it's amazing.
Kind of frightening to think that one little chemical can unlock such complex emotional states. But, there you have it.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
1hr ago
What do these have to do with one another? Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia. There is no reason that god could not have created a world in which genetic determinism is true.
Typically the standard materialist/scientific worldview sees most things as genetically determined, as far as I'm aware! That may be changing.
I agree that you can believe in genetics without necessarily adopting a materialist frame.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Have you considered that ‘there’s a woman just like me, but a girl’ is a very common male fantasy? See tomboys as well.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
The people who treat romantic relationships as jobs are just generally insane.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Can you elaborate on someone who resents men embracing sex work? I don’t know any sex workers and assume the vast majority of them are simply unfortunates, whoring because they don’t have other options.
I'm an apple chud unfortunately. I have cold turkey on my computer which works great, but phone is another issue. I seem to always be able to get around the controls.
More options
Context Copy link