domain:parrhesia.co
A moderately interesting interview with Eric Trump just dropped in the FT. (Limited-use gift link - the article is paywalled but may also be accessible on a 5/month basis with free registration)
The headline is "Eric Trump opens door to political dynasty." It isn't explicit, but applying bounded distrust it looks like the FT reporter raised the issue and Eric responded mildly positively. It is consistent with the Trump family's general approach of keeping the idea of an illegal 3rd term and/or a dynastic successor in the public eye while maintaining plausible deniability about actually doing it.
I don't find Eric's denials that the family is making money off the Presidency interesting - the Mandy Rice-Davies principle applies. Eric is lying here and the FT makes this clear to a reader who is paying attention while avoiding words like "lie" and "falsely". It is an interesting example of a political reporter trying to write about a lying politician without engaging in either hostile editorialising or "opinions about shape of earth differ" non-journalism.
If I had to guess, Eric is positioning himself, personally for a future move into politics. Over the last few years Eric has been running the Trump Organisation while Don Jr and Barron support their father's political operation. With Barron taller and more talented, but still a long way off 35, Don Jr is the obvious dynastic successor at the moment. But the bit of the interview about a Trump dynasty is explicitly about the idea of Eric and not Don Jr being the politician.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5hr ago
If you're tired of the unrealistic peace treaties of Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Victoria, and Hearts of Iron, one enterprising company has published a board game about the Paris Peace Conference that ended World War One: Versailles 1919. Here are some of the 52 different "issues" that can be resolved as part of the game. (The players are UK, France, USA, and optionally Italy.)
Kurdistan (Middle East, 3 victory points):
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French mandate: +1 to French empire, −1 to USA happiness, +1 to Middle East unrest, +1 to Balkans unrest
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UK mandate: +1 to UK empire, −1 to US happiness, +2 to Middle East unrest
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Independence: +1 to self-determination, −2 to French happiness, +2 to Middle East unrest
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No Kurdistan: (no effect)
Palestine (Middle East, 4 victory points):
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UK mandate: +1 to UK empire, +1 to Middle East unrest
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French mandate: +1 to French empire, −1 to UK happiness, −1 to US happiness, +1 to Middle East unrest
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Arab state: +1 to self-determination, −2 to UK happiness
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Zionist state (28 years early!): +1 to UK happiness, +3 to Middle East unrest
Prussia (Europe, 5 victory points):
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Germany: +1 to industry, −1 to French happiness, +2 to Europe unrest
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Danzig corridor: +1 to German containment, +1 to Europe unrest
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Poland: +2 to German containment, +2 to Europe unrest, −1 to US happiness
Slovenia and Croatia (Balkans, 5 victory points):
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Both independent: +2 to self-determination, +1 to Italy happiness
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Slovenia independent, Croatia in Yugoslavia: +1 to self-determination, −2 to Italy happiness
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Both in Yugoslavia: +1 to German containment, −4 to Italy happiness
If unrest in a region gets too high (perhaps due to an event card—Eleutherios Venizelos, Ho Chi Minh, Ibn Saud, etc.), an uprising may cause a settled issue to become unsettled, requiring a new resolution to be agreed to. But keeping troops mobilized to quash unrest will make your people unhappy.
The same company has also published board games in the same vein for negotiations during (not after) the War of the Sixth Coalition (UK, Austria, Russia, and France) and World War Two (UK, USA, and USSR). These two games have slightly more military action. (Which is more important—achieving your long-term diplomatic goals, or actually defeating the enemy in the short term?) All three of these games have solitaire/bot rules.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5hr ago
I dunno, the sort of a leftist who would have called, say, Obama a neoliberal would be unlikely to call Trump a neoliberal even though Trump's views on economy were to the right of them (or if they did, it would be specifically as an unexpected term with the intent of highlighting that Trump's economic policies aren't as divergent from the standard post-Cold-War Western economic model as he or his fans might like to claim.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5hr ago
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Keith allegedly sustains injuries from a car crash in which Carlos is at fault. Keith sues Carlos for damages.
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In federal court, Carlos files for bankruptcy. In state court, Carlos moves to stay (pause) Keith's lawsuit, since Keith's claim must be disposed of as part of the bankruptcy case. Keith opposes the motion, arguing that, since Keith is seeking only Carlos's insurance coverage of 200 k$, and nothing from Carlos's actual funds (which now are part of the bankruptcy estate), Carlos's bankruptcy case will not be affected by Keith's lawsuit. The trial judge accepts Keith's explanation and denies the motion for stay. Likewise, the bankruptcy judge lifts the automatic bankruptcy stay that applies to all demands for payment made against Carlos, solely for purposes of Keith's lawsuit, and explicitly up to a limit of 200 k$. So the lawsuit continues in state court.
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At trial in state court, the jury finds that Carlos is liable to Keith, not just for 200 k$, but for 1.6 M$! Carlos moves to limit the damages award to 200 k$, in accordance with the prior agreement. But the trial judge rejects this argument, claiming that any limits on the verdict are the province of the bankruptcy judge, not of the trial judge.
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By this time, Carlos's bankruptcy case has been completed and closed. Keith goes back to the federal bankruptcy judge and moves that Carlos's bankruptcy case be reopened so that the entirety of Carlos's new 1.6-M$ debt to Keith can be ruled nondischargeable. But the bankruptcy judge rejects this argument. Having agreed that he would not seek more than 200 k$, Keith now is estopped from reneging on that agreement.
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With the bankruptcy judge's opinion in front of him, the state trial judge acknowledges that Carlos need not pay more than 200 k$ to Keith, but still refuses to modify the jury's damages award. Rather, the trial judge thinks that the official damages number should remain listed as 1.6 M$, and Carlos should first pay the 200 k$ and then submit a separate application to discharge the extra 1.4 M$. Carlos does so, but still appeals this rigmarole.
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The state appeals panel reverses and remands for the trial judge to reduce the official damages number to 200 k$, since the bankruptcy judge's stay was limited only to damages not exceeding 200 k$. (This is in 2025, regarding damages from a car crash that occurred in 2018.)
The guy gets to "set the timetable" with their "implicit threat of walking away."
This was a long time ago when I was a teenager, and of course Modern Times means attitudes have accelerated considerably since then, but the agony aunt pages of the teen magazines were full of queries about "my boyfriend says if I don't have sex with him he's going to break up with me but I don't feel ready for sex yet" (unlike our happy times when the teen magazine advice is about 'here's how to have anal sex without pain or ripping yourself open, you are having anal sex aren't you, you're not some dumb prude?')
Many people are not sufficiently hard-hearted enough to tell the bastard that there's the door, goodbye, he can go pay a whore if he wants it that badly, if they feel pressured into moving too fast because they do want to stay with the person that they are having feelings for. Who can judge the vagaries of the human heart?
EDIT: To be even-handed, there are also men in the same trap who are emotionally involved with women who jerk them around like this - threaten to break up, do break up and then get back with them, and so on. And they too can't tell the bitch to hit the bricks because feelings are involved.
I can only wonder what sort of writing Scott would be putting out if he'd moved to a small Jewish community in New England and married a sensible reformed girl who wanted lots of kids. I can only wonder how much of his tremendous brainpower is sequestered in its quiet battle against a billion years of evolution screaming NO NO NO NO NO!
He did the Bay Area version of that, which is even more miraculous when you put it in context. He decided to GET MARRIED, like FORMALLY LEGALLY CONTRACTUAL MARRIAGE AND STUFF, CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT??? to a nice girl who CONVERTED TO JUDAISM IN ORDER TO MARRY HIM and they HAD KIDS TOGETHER. Yeah, they went the IVF route, but reading his post on that it seems to be less the "well of course before you even consider reproducing you will plan it out like you're von Clausewitz going up against Napoleon, including - naturally, who would be so irresponsible as to leave this up to nature? - embryonic selection for the bestest of the bunch based on all the shiny metrics these companies promise to deliver on" attitude and more "yeah it wasn't working the old-fashioned way so we needed help". No kids outside of marriage, no "the lesbian throuple wanted to have their own theyby so they asked me to donate sperm on the basis of proven IQ attainment", not even "we decided to live together in a polycule and if we got pregnant then maybe get married on paper for the legal provisions like tax and stuff". Nope, get married first to one woman and have kids after marriage like the most knuckle-dragging unenlightened redneck out there. And the kids are not alone assigned gender at birth but treated like they are on the binary gender spectrum of boy and girl! I am gasping with shock, I tell you!
Maybe they'll have more kids later, who knows. I don't know and don't want to know if either/both are still in the poly lifestyle, but even so - by comparison with the bubble of rationalist attitudes around reproduction and personal romantic life choices, this is damn near the equivalent of moving to New England and marrying a nice traditional girl. I think evolution is doing just fine in the battle there 😀
Corvos
6hr ago
I like that way of looking at it. And your pitch at the end isn’t bad either :P
FtttG
6hr ago
I truly believe boy-obsession fits the bill of a mental illness and not a voluntary vice. I mean, have you been there? Feeling like you can’t even breathe or think or eat or sip water until you get that text back? Women are so desperate for respite from the psychological stress, that we came up with the term ‘distraction showers’ to describe trying to stop fixating on a problem with a guy. This isn’t the sort of behavior people need to do to distract themselves from voluntary vices such as gossiping – you don’t need to hop in the shower to avoid talking badly about someone, but you do perhaps when you’re struggling with addiction.
It was bad enough when people would speak disdainfully of "catching feelings", as if romantic infatuation was a bacterial infection. We have now reached the point at which we're clinically pathologising the experience of falling in love.
FtttG
6hr ago
Having now read the article in full, two points:
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When someone scrupulously provides citations for some of the factual assertions they make, it makes me doubly suspicious when they neglect to provide citations for others, especially when that factual assertion is phrased in a weaselly way (e.g. "how many women compromise their health by letting men use no contraception, to which 1 in 4 women have turned to emergency contraception – women are taxed with pregnancy scares for the premium of male sexual pleasure."; "a significant portion of women who undergo abortions do it as a result of pressure from their male partner")
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If her claims to being a virgin and voluntary female celibate (volfemcel?) are true, I believe that Khalidi's obsessive fixation on the worst exemplars of the male sex are a cope to rationalise her own emotional avoidance. She's not really scared about getting pumped-and-dumped, or being coerced into anal sex, or having her nudes leaked - she's scared of being emotionally vulnerable with someone and getting rejected. But she's too proud to admit that, so instead she insists that the reason she doesn't date men is because they're all pigs. It's a fig leaf.
kky
6hr ago
kky
6hr ago
I like your examples of face-reading and 3D visualization. Doesn’t it sound a lot like these are distinct mental capabilities that certain people have distinct from their other capacities? And the idea of using your visualization skills to understand other mathematical realms suggests that your “general” intelligence in this case is informed by your ability to generally apply a more specific talent - and this works for students in proportion to their capacity with that specific talent. Presumably the students who don’t get it but who are still good at the subject are channeling a different underlying ability.
Flipping it around heavily, the memory example is also great. I’ve seen this as well: pretty much everyone I’ve met who was not heavily brain damaged has had some category of thing which they remember quite a lot about, corresponding tightly to their areas of interest. Presuming that “my results on a test” can be an area of interest, does that mean that the means of measuring abilities can identify divides in capacity when it’s really just a divide in focus?
My biggest sense for IQ and intelligence is that we just don’t really have a good idea of what’s going on. We’ve found certain capabilities which are confusingly harsh yes/no values, like the internal monologue and the ability to envision things, considering that there is no evidence that someone is one or the other without asking them: you would expect the difference to be night and day, like it is for children and adults! But we’ve also found certain capabilities that appear to be a single thing, like memory, but which express themselves in such radically different ways that you’d be forgiven for thinking they were entirely different capabilities, and which differences are immediately obvious upon meeting someone. That is, our intuition struggles to break intelligence down into real atoms, and naive external analysis carves at awkward joints.
To the extent I have a point, it’s that intelligence is way, way more complicated than the IQ test model makes it out to be, that we know effectively nothing about it, and that we should be really, incredibly humble about our proclamations about it. We’re all out here debating the four humors; that’s how bad it is. People back then would talk very confidently about the humors, and now they look ridiculous. They may have been smart, but the reality was that they were fools, and they could have been less foolish by being honest on what they didn’t know.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7hr ago
I've seen Musk and others doing I/O. I/O is not read/write. The difference is one involves with a widget and your mind that you could otherwise do with your hand and your mind, and the other involves directly reading or changing your mind. When Musk has a working, rigorously accurate lie detector, let me know.
That's like saying you need to have admin access to truly read/write. Just because we can't inspect every part of the memory of a computer, doesn't mean we can't read. You can't go from 'show me even weakly possible' to 'show me a rigorously accurate lie detector'. We can't make a rigorously accurate malware detector for a computer even with admin access!
But in fact, we do not know how to make significant positive changes to the human brain, and we have no idea if significant positive changes to the human mind are possible even in principle.
It's obvious that significant positive changes to the human mind are possible, you can prevent down's syndrome for instance. Or you can find genes that induce aggression and remove them. The Mao-a warrior gene for instance could be altered. That's not a silver bullet but it is something. Genes do things!
The simplest way to improve minds is not to be incestuous, that's a good start. If your benchmark for superior minds is 'everyone being supremely good people out of some morality fable' then sure we don't know how to do that, it would require very sophisticated understanding and practice of genetic alteration. But there's no qualitative difference between simple changes like 'make people less retarded' and 'human perfection', only quantitative differences in understanding and sophistication of approach.
Maybe those things will exist in the future, and alternatively, maybe Jesus Christ will appear in the sky tomorrow to judge the quick and the dead.
You shouldn't compare technologies grounded in progressive realized development to 2000-year old Jewish schizobabble. Wait a few centuries and if there's been no progress whatsoever on the interpretability of the brain (as with the return of Christ), then it might be time to reconsider how realistic these predictions are.
RenOS
something is wrong
7hr ago
Very relevant further reading for the interested from Kirkegaard and Seb Jensen.
One thing missing from Scott's review is that Gusev and Turkheimer have publicly stated that they consider the possibility of IQ being substantially genetic abhorrent, especially for racial differences, akin to the dangerousness of the atomic bomb. Neither is a complete hack like say Kevin Bird, thankfully, but their results have to be taken with a great heaping of salt; they are not at all neutral, they don't even claim to be. If you read between the lines for Turkheimer in particular, it becomes clear that he considers hereditarian research very compelling, he just wants the bar for it to be considered true extremely high, and he wants us to by default believe in a mostly-environmental explanation not because it is scientifically compelling, but because it is the theory with more benign implications.
So, the first conclusion is that sibling-based analysis' aren't actually consistently in disagreement with twin experiments; A particular set of sibling-based analysis' chosen by people who have publicly exclaimed how much they hate the results of twin experiments is in disagreement with twin experiments. There are other studies that are in good alignment.
The second, which many here have already mentioned and which Scott also correctly calls out but you seem to have missed, is that both Gusev and Turkheimer willfully misrepresent underpowered GWAS results as disproving heritability in general, which is just silly. We know how complex genetics is, and GWAS is still missing large parts. The tan paper cited, for example, is just using genotyping! For those who don't know, there are three currently available levels of genetic informations: WGS looks - in theory - at the entire genome, but even the best available approaches are still having trouble with larger structural variants and variants in highly repetitive regions. WES looks at only the exome, which is the roughly 1% of the genome that is properly transcribed into RNA (and a subset of which is coding for proteins). Then there is genotyping, which is literally only looking at specific locations. The list is usually extended through imputation, but this has its own issues. This is akin to claiming that cartography got debunked by an approach that can only look at specific houses (not even randomly chosen ones so you could make a map through repeating the experiment - always the same few houses).
Another important part is the connection between materialism and genetic IQ determinism; First, genuine genetic IQ determinism is extremely rare, the common arguments are between people who claim genetics is negligible (excluding rare high-impact variants) on one side, and people who claim genetics is non-negligible. Even Scott AFAIK has the position of IQ being somewhere between 30-70% genetic, which is a far cry from outright determinism, especially once you consider these percentages are for inter-developed-states differences. Among the dominant materialist ideologies, the favored hypothesis is some variant of blank-slatism. It has many desirable qualities, and even I would prefer it were true; For one, it would mean that we can fix all problems just through environmental changes such as social engineering, without ever having to change anything about the fundamental building blocks of our biology. That would be awesome! But it is trivial to show how important genetics is for a long list of traits, and it is usually uncontroversial where it's considered convenient. It's always EA and IQ that get singled out for special treatment because people don't want those to be partially, let alone substantially, genetic.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
7hr ago
logos means 'word'
And "Stimme" means voice, and "Pravda" means truth, and "Rta" mean order, and yet their derived terms overlap strongly with its and each other. In this case the concepts, if not the words, seem to be by shared descent, but I wouldnt be surprised if the chinese have something like it as well.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7hr ago
"Career" would surely be the common English word?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
7hr ago
Tangentially related, but have you or anyone else heard the term "misyar marriage"?
Yeah, with it supposedly being a smokescreen for prostitution.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7hr ago
To give without restraint does not warrant taking without restraint
That isn't what @WhiningCoil and @erwgv3g34 are saying, though. They're saying that a contract which allows one side to take without restraint but does not allow the other to do so is a pure means to extort fools rather than something that is mutually beneficial. The specifics are that one can defect on providing sex within a marriage, due to marital rape, but one can't defect on providing resources, because of alimony/child support and because of divorce splitting assets.
FtttG
8hr ago
"Sapiosexual" must be the single most self-aggrandising adjective in the English language.
FtttG
8hr ago
Anecdotally I know at least one extremely (to me at least) physically attractive girl (a dancer) who has had similar offers (though not from Arabs, or not to my knowledge) but has refused them (so far.)
Is she Japanese?
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
8hr ago
You have to pay for driving lessons too with your own car and instructor and fuel, why should it be any different for guns?
erwgv3g34
8hr ago
People who really don't like conflict subconsciously change their beliefs to match those of the mainstream, so as to minimize the possibility of conflict. To have the beliefs that the average Motteizen does, even in secret, and go through the trouble of registering even a pseudonymous account to post them... does speak to a certain degree of conflict seeking, or at least contrariness.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8hr ago
It is slightly more specific than that. The standard meaning of "neoliberal" is "person with economic views to my right who I dislike" in the same way that the unfortunately now-standard meaning of "fascist" is "person with social views to my right who I dislike."
There is also a rarer reclamatory use of the term found on places like /r/neoliberal - the people using the word this way think the key neoliberal beliefs are free trade, support legal immigration at or above current levels, general scepticism of economic regulation, agnosticism about the ideal size of the welfare state.
RenOS
something is wrong
8hr ago
You're first and last point are strongly related. Back when we were introduced into chess as kids, I was exceptional at it compared to most of the others, because I could use raw logic better than them. But once some started to train and I didn't, I predictably slipped behind. Based on my skill with other games and the fact that I started from a higher floor, I could probably keep being better than them, I just didn't focus on it. I liked other games more. If you investigated skill in different board games that all need broadly similar traits and talents, I'm pretty sure you'd find results akin to our IQ results: There is quite a strong correlation between them, and especially on the >1SD and >2SD level you find a lot of people who are just generally good at everything with mild specialisation. But to reach the >3+ SD and more, you need some serious over-focusing and specialisation to the exclusion of other things in addition to the naturally high general talent. Mind you, you somewhat misrepresent the state of the research AFAIK; Even the people at the top end for one category still tend to be significantly above average in other fields, they just aren't at the top end of everything simultaneously.
That's not to say that there aren't other skills critical for only one subfield, or even other relevant general skills. EQ, for example, really needs good face reading to work. Meaning if you have some degree of prosopagnosia, it will be much harder for you, even if you try to focus your intelligence on it. Likewise, if you think about problems in physical space, then a talent for innate 3d visualisation is extremely useful (something I relied on a lot when studying math; I always prefer to move everything towards geometry, which some other students didn't understand, while others also found it intuitively helpful).
Nevertheless, once I account for these other skills, I still use my general reasoning in everything. I use it to mentally move and manipulate shapes, I use it to understand people, I use it to time-plan.
For another example, memory is also a fairly general skill, though not equally so for everything, and I have always really noticed the impact of focus there. Back when I played Battlefield Bad Company 2, I memorized every single weapons traits: Damage, mag size, recoil, delay between bullets, reloading time, even the exact shape of the damage-distance curve ... Same goes for other games. Meanwhile my social memory used to be awful, to the degree that I once forgot my own name when introducing myself (awkward!). I used to tell myself that these are just totally separate things and that it's not my fault, but now that I'm a dad and office worker, I find myself having much less trouble remembering social details about various people, as long as I think they matter. In the same vein I have less patience to remember all the detailed mechanics of arcane games. It's increasingly clear to me that I'm merely re-directing a general skill towards the things I care about, as opposed to there being different skills.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
9hr ago
People who post on the Motte are probably positively selected for enjoying conflict.
Do we really? It seems that most posting on the motte is either neutral or communal bashing of the outgroup or cooperative exploration of some topic, with very few exchanges being actually adversarial.
I love this, thanks for sharing. Very curious about your work now, if you want to DM.
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