@Steve –

I read Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason in 1988, and several times since.

It contains some astute observations about the modern condition; and about Cynicism throughout history.

The perspective is essentially Nietzschian, flavoured with a very theoretical brand of New Left style Marxism.

However, like most modern non-fiction, it is essentially along essay padded-out into a fair sized, illustrated book.

In the early-mid 2000s I read everything else of Sloterdijk's that had been translated, interviews etc; but concluded that he had nothing more to say than was in Cynical Reason – and was reduced to pretentious and deliberately arcane re-presentations of (mostly) Nietzsche and Heidegger.

*

I would recommend the novels of Icelandic Nobellist Halldor Laxness.

Each novel is distinctly different in flavour, so it may be worth trying more than one. They are very 'philosophical' fictions – in the genre of Thomas Mann or Herman Hesse.

The Fish Can Sing is my favourite, probably; *beautifully* translated by Magnus Magnusson – who was (ironically) a household name in the UK for presenting the long-running TV quiz Mastermind.

I really don't know why you give any thought to 'Game' from a evolutionary biological perspective – the ideas of 'Gamers' are so confused they are not-even-wrong, (that is – when they are not just plain evil in their motivation).

Natural selection is about reproductive success – simple as that.

NS is not about being happy, dominant, getting your own way, being respected – none of that. It is not about having sex, it is about making (viable) babies.

Demographic change describes natural selection in humans.

Under modern conditions RS is almost entirely a matter of fertility (since child mortality rates are now so low – everywhere -as to be almost insignificant, biologically).

Therefore the most 'evolutionarily successful' humans are those with the highest fertility. In the modern world these include the poorest (and unhealthiest, and shortest-lived) people in the poorest countries, the least intelligent, the most chaotic and criminal – as well as the most orthodoxly religious.

It is (almost) as simple as that.

(And if maximum volume and variety of sex as such is *really* what is wanted, and fertility does not matter, then for a male there is no point in being heterosexual.)

But really, the whole pseudo-intellectual elaboration of Game is a rationalization for effective exploitative selfishness – and it is this underlying dishonesty which renders the whole exercise incoherent and poisonous.

It's an interestingly pro-Lefist and resentment-fuelled micro-slice of Greg Clark's work; which overall has the opposite implications.

One of his findings from the surname work is that people with poor surnames from about 1800 have more descendants than people with rich surnames – so the poor were out-reproducing the rich even in the era of 'Dickensian' poverty.

In terms of *biology*, the poor have, for 200 plus years (in England) had greater reproductive success than the rich – the poor are 'fitter' and better adapted to the environment.

This marked the point at which demographics became driven by fertility rather than mortality.

Roughly, up to 1800, reproductive success was a matter of having lower mortality (all classes had high fertility but among the poor nearly all children died); since 1800 reproductive success is a matter of having more babies since nearly all children will survive, even among the very poorest.

This topic is tackled in some detail by (the best) Tolkien scholar – Tom Shippey (who is, like Tolkien, a philologist) in "The Problem of the Rings: Tolkien and Wagner", in the superb essay collection Roots and Branches.

But Tolkien was not anti-German – indeed quite the opposite: as a philologist he knew and *loved* the Germanic/ Norse language and culture, and this loves comes through in many of his works – T. was probably the last great scholar of this tradition.

"Does the Gregory Clark effect occur among contemporary Mormons in the US? If I've seen hard evidence of this, I've forgotten about it."

I don't suppose anyone has looked for this directly – indirectly the Momrons have gone from being an artisan class group to a distinctly elite intellectual group in the space of half a dozen generations.

This kind of analysis cannot uncover THE relationship between IQ and fertility, since relationship is variable – relationship is contingent upon the specific cultural conditions.

We know this from the fact that the relationship (not controlling for education) is opposite in historical and modern societies; or in modern societies between Mormons and secular people.

We do know that high IQ people have had lower reproductive success over the past couple of hundred years – e.g.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/convincing-objective-and-direct.html

and the factor of religiousness (with orthodox and traditional monetheistic religions, maybe others) is a major factor in fertility the modern world.

Also, if we are interested in evolution, we probably ought to focus on reproductive success.

RS was determined mostly by differential mortality in the past, but by differential fertility in the present:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/child-death-and-demographic-change-and.html

And IQ is almost certain to affect mortality and fertility by different mechanisms, the direction and strength of which would presumably vary with conditions.

I thought that Tom Hiddleston as Loki was rather special, indeed showed signs of *potential* greatness as an actor – exactly the kind of special quality that Alan Rickman has.

But Hiddleston is only 31 and – as a male actor – still not the finished article.

Rickman is now 66 and therefore considerably too old for Loki – but Rickman hadn't (apparently) made any movies at age 31.

Rickman first became known (in the UK only) for portraying the rabid evangelical Obadiah Slope in a BBC TV production of Trollope's Barchester Chronicles when he was already about 36.

Catherine Fitzpatrick was an Australian women fast bowler in cricket, and was clocked at 74 mph

http://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/
content/records/283875.html

Cricket bowlers have to deliver the ball without straightening their arm more than 15 degrees (i.e. they cannot throw) – but they run up to bowl.

Therefore, their speed is – on average – only about 5 mph less than a baseball pitcher – most men 'fast' bowlers deliver at about 80-85 mph, the fastest in the low nineties.

By this line of reasoning, if a women can bowl in the low-mid seventies, women should be able to pitch in the high seventies, maybe 80. Which would easily be fast enough to have a knuckle ball and a surprise 'fast ball' variation that was about 15 mph quicker.

T20 cricket was invented 9 years ago is already a major international success among some big nations – notably India.

The US should have eaten humble pie and ordered a load of English Electric Lightnings from the UK – a plane which climbed just as fast as a Starfighter but the British pilots loved them (I believe).

The pilots particularly loved near vertical climbing at 50,000 feet per minute with the afterburners on – a very considerable thrill, apparently…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CDLbokf9sg

Statistical assumptions

It is worth noting that frequentist statistics are built on the assumption of no difference between groups (that two groups are assumed to be random samples from a single population).

From this assumption, which has nothing whatsoever to do with reality (and is essentially an historical accident derived from the work of Fisher on crop yields), we tend to assume no difference between groups unless 'proven' otherwise.

Yet, in the case of human groups separated by scores of generations, and when looking at traits (such as 'g' and personality) which 1. substantially affect reproductive success, and 2. are substantially heritable – then this assumption of sameness is irrational.

In other words, it would make more sense, scientifically (as opposed to statistically) to *expect* to find important differences in cognitive abilities and dispositions (including their magnitude and distribution) between separated human populations.

Indeed, that was pretty much always the case in the past – people expected that 'strange' people would be different from themselves – often exaggerating the degree of difference to an absurd extent in travellers tales.

We have gone crazily far in the opposite direction and not only expect, but statistically assume that there are *no* differences in the mean and standard deviation of traits, and that apparent differences are due to sampling biases – except when this probability is very (albeit arbitrarily) low.

In practice, as you know, there is never enough evidence to reject the 'null hypothesis' that all populations everywhere are actually one population varying randomly – the null hypothesis can always be saved by ever more attention on sampling errors – when people really want to save it.

And failing to reject the null hypothesis is falsely assumed to be 'proving' no difference – it is nothing of the sort. It is merely the default assumption of statistics, which is an arbitrary – indeed non-scientific, assumption.

(Bayesian statistics claimes to overcome this problem of frequentist statistics, but I think it leads to other problems and disagreements. In fact, common sense/ built-in human reason is enough to overcome the problem to the extent that it needs ot be overcome. .i.e The common sense that if things *seem* to be different, it is reasonable to proceed on the assumption thay *are* different, until proven otherwise. This assumption of difference should not automatically be inverted, as it is with Leftism)

Lariam/ Mefloquine certainly caused severe and lasting schizophrenia-like psychosis in a very healthy and intelligent individual that I knew of.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Mefloquine#Neuropsychiatric

Maybe that's the drug?

Well, variation is not associated with volume of annual alchohol consumption but is associated with whether cultures are binge drinking cultures or not.

When the volume of annual consumption goes up enormously in a binge drinking culture (as on the UK and Ireland over the past two decades) then the result is a not a more 'Southern European' style of consumption, but just *lot* more binge drinking (especially among women).

The reason for binge drinking is almost certainly genetic, and the product of natural selection – some societies that have had access to alcohol for many generations have bred-out the binge drinkers (they drank themselves to death, reproductive death at any rate).

Societies which are completely alcohol naive, such as recent hunter gatherers, are differentially very very prone to wildly excessive binge drinking – as can be seen from Eskimos in the North to Aborigines in the South.

Within Britain, even within England, there is a North South differential in binge drinking – plausibly due to the different genetic composition of the natives in relation to their generational depth of exposure to alcohol.

So this is yet another case where sterotypical differential cultural beliefs about the effect of alcohol are simply a reflection of realities – alcohol has different stereotypical effects on different populations.

(Because the cause is genetic, you can even see the differences in binge drinking between the US descendants of Southern English who emigrated to New England, and the Northern English/ Lowland Scots who emigrated to the Appalachians.)

So, Obama will NOT be running for a second term.

He has nothing to gain and a lot to lose by a second term – he would earn more and work less and get more adulation as an ex-President.

All he needs is a half-way plausible exit strategy (probably long since in place).

The only reason that Obama would *not* pull out of the next election is if he cares more about the immediate future of the Democrats than about himself…

@Chris – we probably don't disagree that much – but when you say:

"especially when you're dealing with odds rather than certainties."

I think that we get close to the way I think such things must be discussed.

In life we only have odds, and also any policy will be (must be, whatever we may hope) very simple and dichotomous. That is always how it will work out to be in practice.

*

What this means is that all we can do is set up a simple default set of assumptions, knowing that there will be exceptions (because we are dealing with odds) and trying to have feedback loops which detect and respond to these exceptions.

*

I am saying that our current default is the wrong way about, and that the odds are in the opposite direction than is generally perceived.

Unfortunately, by getting this wrong, the outcome has been a very large and exponentially doubling proportion of extremely elderly and utterly dependent people with severe debility (some in extreme pain and distress) – of which the most common form is dementia, which is typically extremely distressing for the patient as well as others – such that there are increasingly strident calls, backed by the most influential of the ruling elites (in the UK and Europe) for official arrangements to encourage both large scale suicides among, and deliberate killings of, such people.

The media are full of this stuff and people talk about it a lot.

*

Opposed to them are misguided religious people who make no ditsinction between natural and unnatural, and apprently want ever more, and ever-more-extreme medical/ technological life support for everybody as a 'right' and without exceptions…

– the end state of which would be something like the majority of the population demented and in a coma living on respirators tended by armies of (what would need to be) conscripted nurses… (I mean, shortly before civilization collapsed).

My suggestions are meant to avert these hideous possibilities before they move even closer than they already are.

The suggestion is simply that the default be that we may choose, as individuals, to allow our lives to end naturally when we reach the natural life span (or what we feel in ourselves is our own personal natural life span – and many people perceive this clearly); and at that point forgore life-extending medical and technological treatments (such as curative surgery, antibiotics, heart meds etc) while continuing to avail ourselves of life-enhancing treatments such as effective pain killers etc.

Taking or imposing life extending medical treatment *after* the natural lifespan must be seen as something artifical and optional which requires specific justification – not as something automatic (and certainly NOT a matter of "rights").

@Chris – well, what you say is precisely the conventional wisdom I am challenging.

There is evidence in the literature, there is evidence in my direct experience – but it is one of those things that people don't want to hear about.

As people get older, more and more cross the threshold to formally diagnosable dementia until about half are there in the nineties – but of course that threshold is arbitrary, and there can be significant impairment short of a formal diagnosis. And even a quantitatively small decrement due to surgery/ general anaesthetic can push people over into dysfunction – the proportion increasing with age.

When you say: "so we can draw a line and say "now, your quality of life is objectively not worth intervening medically"?" it makes me suspect you have completely and utterly misunderstood what I was saying.

That approach about is as far away from what I am arguing as it is possible to go – indeed to be put in the position of asking *that* kind of question is exactly what I think we can and should try to avoid by people giving thought much earlier to these matters.

The main contentious aspect of what I propose is the idea of what is 'natural' – e.g. a natural lifespan, and what constitutes a natural intervention – for example food and drink is natural, feeding tubes and drip-feeds are not; making patients comfortable and treating pain is natural, antibiotics and heart meds are not.

And life-support and resuscitation are un-natural – therefore using them requires specific justification (as contrasted with the current practice that specific justification is required for *omitting* these interventions).

Well yes but…

There is a lot of evidence that major surgery – with general anaesthetics – is bad for elderly people – bad for their brains – and that they never recover mental function after the surgery.

Yes they often remain alive longer after surgery – sometimes much longer (if you call it living), return home… but not to what they were before, not to normal mental functioning, not to independant life.

(Surgeons and anaesthetists have no idea about this – about what happens when patients are discharged from hospital. They are not interested. Success, for them, means 'well enough to leave hospital', or extended 'survival' – not a return to pre-operation levels of functioning.)

Everybody has to die sooner or later – life (or rather a living organism) can be sustained artificially considerably beyond its natural span.

What we have now is often a choice between an earlier, natural and 'good' death; and a later (sometimes much later) death from something horrible, nasty, debilitating, painful or personality-destroying (progressive dementia, chronic delirium etc).

People surely do not *have to* choose prolonged and artifical and horrible living, rather than a 'normal' death at an earlier age – even if prolonged living benefits the medical services…

Why so much pressure to do so? Why is it called 'giving up' when somebody simply allows nature to take its course in the seventies or early eighties?

Why is living on to the nineties to die of cancer (after multiple futile cycles of chemotherapy etc) or dementia regarded as necessarily progress?

Why do we *automatically*, unthinkingly, take antibiotics for everything – when bacterial bronchopneumonia (and other acute infections) were known as 'the old man's friend' exactly because they led to a relatively pleasant death?

We have gotten ourselves into the situation where reflex, unthinking prolongation of living by all-out medical intervention whenever possible has made many intellectuals favour deliberate *killing* of the elderly and debilitated – as the only solution!

The 'solution' should come much earlier – we need to recognize that we have no choice about dying; but we do have some choice about how we die – but how we die is linked to the choice of when we die – i.e. how zealously we try to prolong living beyond the natural human span.

Of course nobody actually *wants* to do "Dirty, Dangerous, and Difficult" jobs – people do such jobs for money; and such jobs attract a wage premium for this reason.

(See Why Men Earn More – by Warren Farrell for numerous examples – e.g. prison guards, lumberjacks, oil rig workers – all paid more than the workers skill level would suggest. Plus jobs with unsocial hours – e.g. people who work eight hours more than the national weekly average earn about double the average salary.)

To say that immigrants do the jobs that natives 'do not want' to do *really* means that immigrants will do the jobs for *less money* than will natives – and that is all that the phrase means.

I think I remember the conventional wisdom 35 years ago was that women (in the UK – this was) were more conservative than men; men more 'progressive'than women.

Maybe this 'fact' was wrong, or maybe women have changed. If it *has* changed this would be consistent with the idea that progressivism has become feminized, and that this is an agent of social destruction.

Any data on this?

The problem for me is that I have a very different evaluation of the relative quality of the movies:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2011/07/harry-potter-movies-reviewed-in-one.html

But I see no reason to accept the initial assumption that (beyond a certain point) there is no reason to assume that extra money and time make for better movies.

Indeed I can think of plausible reasons why more money might be associated with *worse* movies – given what they spend money on (mostly, flashy special effects and set-pieces – which were what spoiled several Harry Potter movies – in my opinion).

The Eskiomos/ Inuit do have the highest IQ among Amerindians, according to this review:

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/02/
world-of-difference-richard-lynn-maps.php

Voting is the problem

The problem of juries (however constituted) is both the origin, and a sub-set of, the major problem of using committee voting as a means of decision making – indeed the ultimate mechanism in The West.

(Juries, democracy, the supreme court, all parliaments, every large organization… all underpinned by a group vote.)

(The Roman Catholic Church is the only significant exception – well done The Pope!)

Where on earth did people get the idea that voting is a good, or even acceptable, method of decision making?

Yet voting is nowadays regarded as the only authoritative basis for societal decisions

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2010/08/evils-of-voting.html

(Except, of course, when it isn't – but the answer then is just to keep trying, keep voting, until it is.)

I made a similar but non-quantitative argument but using the effect of intelligence on child mortality rates.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2011/05/child-death-and-demographic-change-and.html

But both models reach the same conclusion: that modernity is self-destroying, and we are currently en route to a return to zero growth agrarian societies (and the Malthusian trap).

No offense taken (I am English, therefore much thicker-skinned than you Americans!) – I was just puzzled by the word votary.

I think the analysis just shows the limitations of this kind of analysis in a world of rapidly changing fashions in terminology. The thing itself remains popular – indeed usually expanding, but the name keeps changing.

This name changing increases 'deniability' – such as "Oh no, we don't do affirmative action. Haven't done it in years! No we are trying to enhance diversity – a quite different thing…"

In the UK 'equal opportunity' was replaced by 'inclusion' about 15 years ago for a while, then by 'representation' and so on…

One of the many suicidal traits of our society is its reluctance or inability to provide fora for young men and women to meet and get to know each other before dating.

When the standard places for meeting the opposite sex are dances and parties (often noisy, rushed, crowded) then sophisticated, leisurely, repeated and multi-factorial mutual evaluations are almost impossible.

It becomes inevitable that men and women judge each other superficially and in a short-termist fashion – essentially on the basis of looks, tribal markers and obvious (but temporarily fake-able) manner.

The unnaturalness and anxiety-provoking of this situation leads to excessive drinking – which leads to further problems.

Anyone who is serious about the family as a basis for a civilized society cannot be happy that partners are supposed to find each other in these circumstances, for want of alternatives.

I was interested to discover that Mormons, who for theological reasons place the highest importance on marriage, provide a wide variety of civilized ways in which partners can find each other and make suitable marriages: young single adult wards (churches) are the most obvious.

The alpha/ beta distinction of 'Game' is a gross, egregious misuse of terminology from a biological perspective.

Alpha is defined by domination of *reproductive* success – roughly, those having the largest numbers of viable offspring.

So, in biological terms Game-'betas' (especially those in orthodox religions) are the *real* alphas of modern times.

Sterile sex is reproductive suicide – so (in strictly biological terms) most Game-'alphas' are in fact the eunuchs of modern times.

When he became a monk, Eugene Rose took a Saint's name, as is usual – in this case Seraphim of Sarov, one of the great Russian 'Holy Father' monks (or starets) who lived in the 'desert' (i.e. isolated wilderness – in this case a remote forest, as Eugene Rose did).

Votary? I had to look it up (as I did with epigone). Disciple, yes perhaps, in general aspiration; but votary, not really – since I haven't taken any vows.

Real, orthodox Roman Catholics are against cremations:

http://www.sspx.org/against_sound_bites/cremation.htm

My preffered explanation is that a tendency towards Leftism relates to an abstracting intellect; an inbuilt tendency to privilege abstraction over experience.

This compulsive abstraction is mostly found among people of high IQ, but quite a lot of high IQ are not natural abstracters – are more practical, and experientially orientated. Have more 'common sense'.

This is what I once called Clever Sillies.

I am one of them – the above analysis is a classic example of Clever Silly abstraction!

(Which does not mean it is *necessarily* wrong.)

Presumably this implies for the intellectual class that the overwhelmingly Democrat 'representation' in the mass media, education, law, NGOs and public administration is balanced by equally overwhelming Republicanism in other areas where intellectuals work.

Thanks!

I would expect the standard deviation to be greater for Obama than McCain voters – ?

Off topic – is there a handy gadget for converting SAT scores to IQ, so I could look at US colleges interquartile range of IQ for data sets like this one:

http://www.satscores.us/

Greg Clark – in A Farewell to Alms – estimated that the productivity of Indian cotton mill workers in the 19th century was about 12 (twelve) percent that of UK workers.

This comment has been removed by the author.

Aside from 'Game' being essentially evil – or at least highly likely to be corrupting – it is merely tinkering with a 'zero-sum game' (the availability of women for sex being a fixed quantity, and 'Game' an attempt to alter the distribution). 'Game' is therefore a communism of sex.

Except if 'Game' (as a movement) was able to increase the supply of sex by making women offer more sex – e.g. by making promiscuous women beome yet more promiscuous, or by making more women promiscuous –

yet advocates of 'Game' claim that their planned manipulations and seductions are *merely* a response to the corruption of women, not a way of further increasing these corruptions.

But of course 'Game' is a con, and like all cons the first step is for the con-man himself to believe the con.

Gregory Clark (in Farewell to Alms) *did* write of the Chinese selection pressures in *precisely* terms of:

"The orderly, stable, and advanced nature of Chinese society meant that food supply and poverty were usually the limiting factor on population, rather than wars, general violence, or plagues." and the consequences thereof.

So "w/o kids" should really be a single heading applying to both columns?

And the two columns are in reverse chronological order (such that the percentage of women of the age range educated up to bachelor's level without children roughly doubled between the 1970s and the 2000s?)

Is that it?

Thanks very much.

But I am a bit unsure about the population you used – I can't really follow the decription of dates (Sorry!).

Is this a cohort or a cross sectional survey? – presumably the latter, but then why are two sets of dates mentioned?

I am being a bit dense, no doubt; but it might be worth trying to be plainer about the description of the sample.

I wonder whether women embarking on advanced education – if asked at say 16-18 – would be happy to know that have *at least* a 1/3 chance of never having children?

They may believe they have a choice about this, and of course people get lucky; but in fact their choices become de facto so narrowly constrained by the process of long-term education that it does not *feel* like a choice when they arrive at age 35.

I can't find the data (I think it was on one of the official LDS websites), but it seems that devout US Mormon women have an exceptionally high rate of graduating from college (four year degree) but very few go on to graduate work since they aim to marry and start having children in their early 20s.

Mormon women with a four year degree actually have *higher* (and above replacement) fertility than less-educated Mormon women who just graduated high school. Fertility then goes down for Mormon women with graduate school education.

For US Mormon men the fertility just keeps rising as educational level rises.

And of course Mormons are the only economically-successful US group with above-replacement fertility and a pattern of increasing fertility with education and income.

It's not stagnation – it is decline.

And why? Because people *aren't even trying*.

And why? Because they oscillate between amusing themselves to death with short-termist hedonism; and sensible, miserable, grinding, guilt-ridden bureaucratic pseudo-altruism.

And why? Because people believe in nothing. Reality is denied. Truth, beauty and virtue are seen as merely relativistic, underpinned by nothing real.

As the inertia of earlier Christian generations is overcome, we are left living-out Nietzsche's predictions, Dostoevsky's predictions: modernity is underpinned by nothing; by nihilism – by empty assertions and empty distractions.

None of the problems of modernity will be fixed because nobody is even trying to fix them, because nobody believes in anything – amazingly, people don't even believe consistently in the importance of their own comfort and happiness. (They may say they do, but their actions clearly show they don't.)

The troubles are deep: much deeper than economics, politics and science (and art, and law, and so on). The basic secular modern public self-understanding of the human condition is grossly incoherent – which is the reason why the problems exist and the reason why the problems are not acknowledged and the reason why the problems are not being fixed; and (I fear) why the problems will not ever be *fixed* but simply swept-away.

The take home message for readers of this blog is: be a part-time pharmacist and use your leisure to write.

Marty Nemko, who picked out pharmacy as winner, is a good source of hard-nosed career advice:

http://www.martynemko.com/articles/my-ratings-popular-careers_id1299

But due to recently lengthened training Pharmacy drops off his top-rated list:

http://www.martynemko.com/articles/my-seven-favorite-professions_id1534

FP – In two words: Orthodox religion.

http://www.sneps.net/

I would be very interested in the proportion of women of each educational level who never have any children (zero children) – in Europe around 33% of women college graduate have zero children – and about half of women in recent cohorts are college graduates.

Going back to Lewis Terman's longitudinal study of very high IQ Californians from the 1920s – among women with the very highest IQ the average number of children was less than 1 (from memory about 0.7 children – of course the sample was small).

I think Steve Sailer has misunderstood the concept of a Malthusian Trap (either that or I have!).

Of course the pre-contact Africans *were* in a Malthusian Trap!

The MT means that population is kept in check by factors such as starvation, violence and disease.

African population was kept in check by disease (especially Falciparum malaria, but many others) plus violence – the result was that Africans pre-contact used to have plenty of food per person, for less effort.

(According to Greg Clark) the East Asians had low disease (due to excellent hygeine) and low violence (due to strong central government) – hence the population was held in check by starvation (much lower calories per person than Africa).

Europse was somewhere in between.

Technologies and more-intensive food production would delay starvation by a generation or two, but population would expand until starvation (or disease, or violence) kicked in again.

Delaying reproduction only delays the problem, so long as fertility is above replacement level. (Which it always was in pre-industrial societies.)

In the end the East Asians were working very hard in very intensive agriculture to produce very little food per head of population.

It was only after 1800 in the West that the rate of introduction of productivity-enhancing technology began to out-run these Malthusian constraints – economic production and population went up together, and disease and violence also declined.

The West escaped the Trap for a couple of hundred years…

What Stopped Clock said.

Strictly, to control properly, *only* families with a specific number of sibs should be analysed – each analysis being separate (eg look for birth order effects among only families with three sibs, four sibs etc).

One could control for socio-economic effects by using Mormons – which are the only group where the largest families are found among the wealthiest and most highly educated (and presumably highest IQ) sub-groups.

IF one found a birth order effect in all these separate analyses, I think it would be good evidence.

Otherwise an effect size of a couple of IQ points is more likely to be due to residual confounding (e.g. when the confounder, such as socio-economic class, is imprecisely measured, hence only partially-controlled-for), as Stopped Clock implies

I read a lot of Burgess at one time, but he never wrote anything wholly satisfying – no masterpiece; and his past reputation seems more inflated with each passing year.

The problem was that he was pretentious and dishonest – but clever and fluent enough (especially in pastiche) that it took quite a while for this to become apparent.

I thought his best novel was Nothing Like The Sun – about the life of Shakespeare.

His two volume autobiography was very readable – but is highly fictional and subtly self-promoting.

His book on James Joyce – Here Comes Everybody – is very good; but I have come to feel that Joyce was – at root – merely a linguistically supremely-gifted Burgess.

Both were lifelong adolescents: prickly, self-obsessed and self-justifying.

This change is underpinned by demography and political domination – see Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations –

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/books/review/Ajami-t.html

"The West had once been pre-eminent and militarily dominant, and the first generation of third-world nationalists had sought to fashion their world in the image of the West. But Western dominion had cracked, Huntington said. Demography best told the story: where more than 40 percent of the world population was “under the political control” of Western civilization in the year 1900, that share had declined to about 15 percent in 1990, and is set to come down to 10 percent by the year 2025. Conversely, Islam’s share had risen from 4 percent in 1900 to 13 percent in 1990, and could be as high as 19 percent by 2025."

(From memory) In 1900 there were two Muslim-controlled countries – Turkey and Afghanistan – now there are about 8 or 22 depending on how you count:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_world#Countries

In other word's Islam reached the lowest ebb of its history around the beginning of the twentieth century since when there has been exponential growth in numbers and influence.

It is characteristic that exponential trends growth sneak-up on you, and not long after the time they first become visible, they become *very* obvious.

I think that is what has happened here.

Using Nobel prizes and other similar top-level awards, it is clear that Harvard's scientific research performance (which is the only objective international comparator of universities) has declined both relatively and absolutely over the past decade:

http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2007/07/nobel-prize-trends-19472006.html

http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2007/07/nflt-metric-for-revoutionary-science.html

http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2007/07/revolutionary-biomedical-science.html

*

MIT is therefore now, by a large margin, the premier world research institition.

*

While MIT is now mopping-up the big prizes for revolutionary science research, Harvard scientific faculty have been pumping-out an ever-larger volume of highly-cited, but ultimately second rate, science:

(See Table 2) –

http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/sapp.pdf

*

Harvard may be important for the US class system – for what it is; but MIT is important for the world, for what it does.

There is some preliminary evidence that elite US colleges may be choosing a conscientious and empathic personality (female traits) over intelligence.

Certainly, among a random sample of the highest-achievers, the proportion of women would be much lower than 50 percent, yet almost all elite colleges are admitting about half women.

http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/05/do-elite-us-colleges-choose-personality.html

This will have the effect of reducing the concentration of high achievers at all institutions, and spreading them around the university system.

It also implies that the modern elite must either be less smart than 30 years ago, or else they would need to be drawn from a wider range of institutions.

Very good general point here – there are many as-yet-unexplored ramifications to Greg Clark's idea that the modern English (and similar) are mostly descended from the skilled Medieval middle classes, and not from peasants.

Roma/ Gypsy IQ is probably about two standard deviations lower than the usual European IQ

J. Philippe Rushton, Jelena ?vorovi?b and Trudy Ann Bonsa. General mental ability in South Asians: Data from three Roma (Gypsy) communities in Serbia. Intelligence. Volume 35, Issue 1, January-February 2007, Pages 1-12

Abstract

To examine whether the Roma (Gypsy) population of Serbia, like other South Asian population groups, average lower than Europeans on g, the general factor of intelligence, we tested 323 16- to 66-year-olds (111 males; 212 females) in three different communities over a two-year-period on the Raven's Colored and/or Standard Progressive Matrices and four measures of executive function. Out of the total of 60 Matrices, the Roma solved an average of 29, placing them at the 3rd percentile on 1993 U.S. norms, yielding an IQ equivalent of 70. On the executive function tests, the Roma averaged at about the level of Serbian 10-year-olds. The Matrices showed a small mean sex difference favoring males. External validity was demonstrated by correlating the scores on Matrices with measures such as cranial capacity (r = 0.13, P < 0.01), spousal similarity (r = 0.17, P < 0.05), age at birth of first child (r = 0.26, P < 0.01), number of offspring (r = ? 0.20, P < 0.01), and responsible social attitudes (r = 0.10, P < 0.05). Comparisons with extant data showed that items found difficult or easy by the Roma were those found difficult or easy by White, Indian, Colored, and Black South African 14- to 16-year-olds and by Black South African undergraduates (rs = 0.90). There was no evidence of any idiosyncratic cultural effect. Instead, Roma/non-Roma differences were found to be most pronounced on g. This was shown by item-total correlations (estimates of the item's g loading), which predicted the magnitude of Roma/non-Roma differences on those same items, regardless of from which sample the item-total correlations were calculated, and by confirmatory factor analysis. The results indicate the remarkable cross-cultural generalizability of item properties across South Asians, Europeans, and sub-Saharan Africans and that these reflect g more than culturally specific ways of thinking.

Hans J Eysenck – one of the most cited psychologists ever, established a few decades ago that creativity was not correlated with IQ – the results and arguments are summarized in his book Genius (1995).

Creativity is higher in men than women, and it has a moderate inverse correlation with conscientiousness and agreeableness/ empathizing.

Genius requires (among other things) high IQ, high creativity yet sufficient conscientiousness to stick to the job in hand – which is one reason (among many) why genius is so rare.

From a biological perspective, longevity is not what counts but reproductive success (roughly, having as many viable offspring as possible).

Building an organism to last as long as possible must be balanced with that organism succeeding in the competition for mates and matings (i.e. sexual selection). Especially in males, where (in most species) the competition is greater.

If you are not worried about reproductive success, it has been known for many centuries how men can increase their average life expectancy – i.e. become a eunuch before puberty – e.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narses

1. Willetts is a smart libertarian. Sadly, he is also dishonest. I predict that this indicates he wants power more than he wants to implement his principles.

2. Secularism is the key missing factor from this analysis, since secularism ensures low fertility among the ruling classes. The UK is now not merely secular but anti-Christian.

In contrast to Christian America, the notion that the secular English have to limit family size due to house prices is absurd – the English do not want large families in the first place (i.e. desired fertility is only slightly higher than attained fertility).

Aside from devoutly religious minorities (and there are _very_ few of these) pretty much the only native English with large families are those too dumb or feckless to use contraception.

3. With the prevailing national hedonic and this-worldly calculus for morality, the only reason any English person would care about between-generation unfairness is if the idea of it makes him feel miserable.

But when depressed at the thought of inter-generational inequity, if the Englishman can cheer himself up by some kind of distraction (for instance by getting drunk) then the 'problem' disappears from his mind, hence the problem is 'solved'.

Willetts power-seeking secular libertarianism has zero chance of doing England any good whatsoever – since its idea of good is merely utilitarian; and utilitarianism is invariably self-subverting by selfish short-termism.

Jason Malloy could perhaps give an estimate of the IQ of these Amazonian tribes? – such peoples usually come out around 50-60 – or roughly equivalent in general intelligence to an average 8-10 year old European.

IQ therefore should at least be considered as an explanation for much lower complexity of language in such peoples.

Does anyone know whether different average levels of average IQ actually has been considered as a potential factor influencing language complexity, by these authors?

My guess is that what is currently called 'brief psychotic disorder' was responsible for some of these nervous breakdowns

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/294416-overview

This is fairly common – I used to see at least one a month of these in an acute admissions psychiatric ward – sometimes even several per week.

One factor they miss out in the above description is that the psychotic breakdown is often preceded by several days without sleep – common in combat conditions.

Once the person has been sedated and had a few night's sleep, there is typically a complete and usually permanent recovery.

@robertwiblin: "If you can think of a good reason why they are more likely to end up unemployed, I'd love to hear it."

Obviously, the great mass of unemployment IS concentrated among those who are least productive, as a matter of uncontroversial observation.

Reasons why?:

1. Minimum wage legislation is in place such that employers are forced to pay higher than a worker is 'worth' in terms of productivity. So, employers do not want to employ the lowest productivity workers. (Reference – Basic Economics – Thomas Sowell)

2. Welfare benefits are greater than the very low wages which very unproductive people would legitimately attract. So they do not want to work, because working would reduce their standard of living.

3. That the least productive workers cannot find a job that they can safely be trusted to do (without excessively expensive supervision) in modern highly technological societies – which is presumably why the US military will not accept the bottom 30 percent of the US population for intelligence (below approx IQ 92). Very low IQ recruits cannot do a useful job in a modern army, and in fact consume resources, pose a danger and reduce military capability.

Whereas in the past many humans were used simply as machines for repetitive and almost 'mindless' mechanical tasks – mainly in agriculture (and were sometimes needed to be disciplined very harshly even to make them perform these tasks); by contrast the modern economy simply lacks niches for low productivity (i.e. low intelligence, low conscientiousness, violent, untrustworthy, unreliable) workers; and lacks the harsh coercive discipline which might enable (for instance) violent, lazy and unreliable young males to be made to do productive manual work.

These are just a few reasons why in the US today low productivity people are not just likely to be unemployed, but are often permanently unemployable – and these traits will on average be passed onto their descendents genetically and by cultural transmission. So the situation should be regarded as essentially permanent.

This is simply a factual argument, and does not in itself say anything about the desirability of allowing mass immigration of low productivity people into the USA.

But the argument makes clear that mass immigration of low productivity people is overwhelmingly likely to be economically damaging to the US economy since these will likely become chronic dependent – and to increase structural unemployment.

However on the political left, the creation of permanent mass state dependency and unemployment is a feature, not a bug; since it creates a large pool of solid left-voters.

@robertwilbin: "If normal immigrants have a negligible impact on local wages and unemployment, it's not clear why illegals should be any different."

I think this is the root of why economists are typically so very wrong about the effect of immigration – they typically treat 'immigrants' as a homogenous category.

In fact immigrants are vastly heterogeneous at the level of individual persons, as summarized by averages.

In economists language, immigrants to different places at different times have varied extremely widely in 'skills' or 'human capital' – in psychologists language they vary in 'intelligence' and 'personality' (both substantially heritable), in sociological language they vary in 'culture' (also substantially transmitted between generations).

The heritability/ transmission aspect means that the (widely varying) characteristics of immigrants strongly tend to be perpetuated in their descendants.

But the assumption that 'immigrants' makes a meaningful category is either silly (a professional deformation based on a simplification which needs to be dropped) or dishonest (when argued by leftist politicians).

The idea that the ultra-high-intelligence, upper social class Ashkenazi Jewish US immigrants from Central Europe of the late 19th and early 20th Century are economically inter-changeable with current US mass illegal immigration from South America simply because they are all ‘immigrants’ is so absurd that it borders on delusional – yet of course this 'delusion' is precisely contemporary mainstream economic analysis and leftist political analysis!

Looking for correlations between body and mind – fields such as Anthropometry and Somatotyping – is associated with names such as Galton, Kretschmer and Sheldon.

These were given considerable (incl. photographic) attention in my first textbook of Clinical Psychiatry – co-written in the late 1970s by Mayer-Gross, Slater and the premier UK psychiatrist Sir Martin Roth.

This is one of those areas of science which are widely-supposed to have been disproved, but which were in reality dropped for other socio-political reasons.

In Robertson Davies' first rate 'campus novel' – Rebel Angels – he makes good use of Sheldon's categories of mesomorph, ectomorph and endomorph.

Does this answer the question?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/11/1107_TVsheep.html

Title: Sheep Are Highly Adept at Recognizing Faces, Study Shows

The problem with using personality 'tests' is that they are NOT 'TESTS'.

An IQ test is a test; a personality 'test' is a self-rated questionnaire.

It is very easy to fake a personality questionnaire, very easy indeed.

Knowing that Conscientiousness is good/ wanted and Neuroticism is bad/ unwanted – plus half an hour reading Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits – would be enough preparation for anyone with the intelligence to graduate from high school.

Let me explicate further – I am a prime example of a clever silly.

I have at some point in my life held most of the clever silly 'ism' ideas that were in circulation about people and society.

Yet my social intelligence is well above average – for example, I scored near the maximum in Baron Cohen's 'eyes' test. I can read social situations well (although I am not very interested by them.)

The problem was that I routinely over-rode the promptings of my social intelligence, and instead applied abstract analysis to defend or generate an endless parade of cleverly wrong ideas.

Indeed the capacity to perform this over-ride – the generation and defense of counter-intuitive explanations – was a major source of intellectual pride. It seemed to prove I had transcended the commonplace, the unthinkingly spontaneous.

My contention is that this disposition of mine is actually characteristic of intellectuals as a class – although there are, of course, exceptions.

No Jason – read the paper. I am not talking about deficits at all. There is no postulated deficit in social intelligence in high IQ people. The hypothesis is that high IQ people are not _using_ their social inteligence where it would be adaptive. If high IQ people do use and attend to their social intelligence then it works fine. But I am saying that they biased towards reinterpreting psychosocial problems in abstract terms.

First of all thanks very much to the Audacious Epigone for his first shot at testing this idea.

Jason misrepresents my description of Clever Sillies – it has nothing top do with 'autism' (in the loose sense of an inability to feel emotions).

I said: "my suggested explanation for this association between intelligence and personality is that an increasing relative level of IQ brings with it a tendency differentially to over-use general intelligence in problem-solving, and to over-ride those instinctive and spontaneous forms of evolved behaviour which could be termed common sense."

(I use 'common sense' as shorthand for the spontaneous behaviours of evolved social intelligence.)

I think it is the tendency to over-use general intelligence and over-ride common sense specifically in relation to 'social intelligence' (social and psychological interpretations and explanations) which opens some higher IQ people to infinite error.

There is one common sense (i.e. natural, spontaneous) social intelligence explanation, but an infinite number of alternative explanations.

Once turn away from the natural and spontaneous with respect to social and psychological phenomena, and there are an infinite number of ways of being wrong.

PC culture is continually generating alternative non-common sensical explanations for social and psychological phenomena, and this can go on forever.

Has science, has culture, has anybody got the ability or time to test all of the endless stream of alternative psycho-social explanations for their rational consistency and predictive consistency? Of course not! The process can continue forever.

Jason has encountered this is relation to intelligence – the spontaneous common sense view is that people differ in intelligence (and personality) and that people resemble their parents in intelligence and personality (because these are significantly inherited from parents).

(Obviously the common sense, social intelligence view is not expressed so abstractly as this! But it is spontaneous to see behavioural differences between people, and to look at ancestral relatives as sources of these differences.)

Once the decision to reject the common sense has been made, once elites have decided that it is dumb and low status to accept the promptings of common-sensical social intelligence; there can be an unending stream of alternative non-common-sensical 'explanations' for the social phenomena which are straightforwardly explained in terms of hereditary intelligence and personality – none of which are as coherent, consistent or predictive as the common sense view, but none of which hang around for long before being replaced with another alternative non-common-sensical explanation.

It is precisely the fact that they are non-intuitive which gives these ideas their appeal for the elite.

This is nothing to do with autism (so called – and the term 'autism' is being hideously misused at present – have the people using it so widely ever encountered a real autistic person?). For higher IQ people, social intelligence is (or may be) fully retained, but is not being used in specific situations. Instead of using social intelligence on psycho-social phenomena, psycho-social phenomena are treated as abstract problems, to be dealt with using general intelligence.

It is essentially about using one psychological system in preference to another – i.e. about using the mechanism/s 'general intelligence' (abstract – content indifferent, systematic) in preference to the social intelligence mechanisms which evolved to deal with other human beings.

Bruce G Charlton

"For those concerned about the sustainability of white populations, extending female reproductive spans and getting the aging clock to tick in a counterclockwise direction are two of the most potentially fruitful strategies available."

Well, yes, but…

There has been zero progress toward either of these ideals – and looking at the pathetic and declining record of medical innovation over the recent few decades, I would say that there is virtually zero chance of either of these happening before the decline of the West finally glugs science down the plughole of history.

The biggest problem is that the Western liberal elite do not want to be fertile, because they hate their culture and want it to be subordinated.

They hate their culture because they reject original sin in themslelves and other well-meaning individuals and victim groups, and instead project all evil onto their culture.

US libertarians essentially ignore US cultural evil on the basis (correct) that it is not as bad as other places – this gives libertarianism its psychopathic quality. And atheism makes libertarians too selfishly hedonistic to risk having children.

US liberals focus on US cultural evils such that they want unattainable cultural perfection – or else self-destruction. This is why liberals are culturally suicidal.

Arguably, the most hopeful scientific future would probably be if the fertile intelligent Mormons reach a tipping point in the US ruling elite before the country is in too big a mess for them to salvage.

Otherwise, the best hope is the break up of the USA into states or alliances of states – a few of which may be decent places, at least for a while.

A snapshot of the US future can be seen at:

http://sdt.psc.isr.umich.edu/pubs/online/sdt_at_paa2007.pdf

"Burden of boredom – borne by blockheads"

I notice that was a neatly constructed line of Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry (I just added a dash to indicate the space – caesura – between the half-lines). A coincidence? – I think not…

Having read your article on golf architecture, I begin to see why 'the other Bruce Charlton' http://www.rtj2.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=143&Itemid=78 – who is almost exactly my age – gets so much internet coverage (i.e. because he is a senior partner at Robert Trent Jones).

Bruce (G) Charlton

Well made point.

The history of the expansion of the franchise is brilliantly described in The Woman Racket by Steve Moxon – which contains many surprises.

Probably, the root of the problem is democracy itself – and specifically the idea that group decisions were better than individual decisions and that the propoer way of making groups decisions was by majority vote.

Authority was transferred from the decision to the process; a good decision was defined as one which had been through the approved (majority vote) process.

Once this idea had started, it grew, it spread, it became unstoppable.

"Can anyone comment on what exactly the duties and privileges of a "lecturer" at Chicago Law are? TGC seems to assume that it is equivalent to being a full-time tenure-track faculty member who is expected to publish regularly, while Guts Strongman seems to assume that it is basically just a flunky whose exams can and will be proofread by the real faculty. I suspect the truth is in between."

This misses the point. Yes a Chicago lecturer would be expected to publish (Heck! faculty at Community Colleges often publish early in their careers); but the point is not a matter of 'duty' but that for 'a writer' being a lecturer is an _opportunity_ to publish.

Obama did not publish at all. He is not a writer.

There is a difference between people who 'can write' and people who are 'a writer'.

The claim for Obama is that he is 'a writer'.

It is that claim which is false: Obama is clearly not 'a writer' – half the signed comments on this blog show more spontaneous writerly ability than this example from Obama!

Being 'a writer' hasn't much to do with general intelligence, nor has it much to do with how someone comes across verbally – face to face.

Any teacher will know of students who are brilliant face to face but are turgid and constipated writers.

It seems that also describes Obama – people thought he would be a good writer, he himself thought he would be a good writer, but clearly he isn't.

Writers write! If Obama had been 'a writer' he would have published a lot in the HLR, and he would have published _something_ rather than nothing as a Chicago law lecturer.

I really cannot emphasize too strongly how unusual it is for a lecturer at a top notch university to publish… nothing.

Publication is the currency of academic success, Chicago is one of the greatest universities in the world; it is almost literally incredible that a member of faculty for many years would publish… nothing.

It is literally incredible that someone who is 'a writer' would publish nothing for years when a member of faculty at a great university.

Writers write.

When I read The Blind Side, I was astonished to discover – did I get this right? – that to become a professional American Footballer you needed first to get admission to a university!

Is there no way into pro football except via college?

Anyway, the main barrier to the guy getting to play pro Football seemed to be the purely artificial one of passing some academic examinations; for which he required intense and prolonged one-on-one tuition.

But if footballers did not need to pass these artificial exams, then maybe someone like this guy could be picked off the streets by scouts and nurtured by agents from the pro teams; as being one of the handful of people who have the physique (size, strength and acceleration) which means they potentially can play in this specific position.

@Jason Malloy

As you are somebody I respect, I can only say that I am very disappointed at your attitude. I can only urge you to continue thinking about these issues.

(Continued fromabove)

John Ziman mentioned Duesberg in Real Science (2000) in discussing how science did (and ought to) deal with persistent dissent from scientists of proven ability:

page 44:

"Consider, for example, Peter Duesberg's controversial opinion that AIDS is not caused by HIV. An overwhelming majority of the experts on this subject regarded these views as wrong-headed and completely disproved by a vast body of contrary evidence. Nevertheless, Duesberg and his small band of supporters were given journal space for their 'heresies', provided that these were presented impersonally, in a form that referees and editors could accept as contributing in some small manner to scientific understanding."

Page 255:

"…it is no longer thought appropriate to set up an official tribunal – even under the aegis of an august National Academy – to settle a scientific controversy. Good science is not made by majority verdicts. Discredited claims are never _killed_; they simply _fade away_. Although their supporters usually learn to live with the dominant view, they are not expected to recant in public. Indeed, some of the soldier on for decades, refusing to admit defeat. If they are as eminent as Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle or Peter Duesberg they may even continue to be given space for their 'heresies' in the formal literature, despite the fact that nobody seriously believes them. The custom then is for other authors to ignore them completely, or to cite them perfunctorily, without bothering to express negative opinions that would only reignite a fruitless controversy."

Ziman is describing the way in which persistent dissent by highly able scientists was dealt with by the scientific community in the era when science was at its best, he is also endorsing this as the best way to deal with dissent.

Ziman was (until his death) on the editorial advisory board for Medical Hypotheses, and endorsed the journals policy of editorial review and its mission to publish revolutionary science. Popper was also on the editorial advisory board when the journal was set up. David L Hull (author of Science as a process, Chicago UP 1988; and major evolutionary theorist) is another board member.

So your expressed view about the ‘impossibility’ of effective editorial review would be regarded as mistaken by Popper, Hull and Ziman amongst other eminent editorialists such as Nobel Prizewinners Sir James, Black and Arvid Carlsson.

Indeed editorial review demonstrably works: the impact factor of Medical Hypotheses is 1.4 and still rising, and I know from internal data that our download rate of half a million per year matches that of Journal of Theoretical Biology. The journal also makes a profit.

These are the facts about Medical Hypotheses, not my personal opinion.

Medical Hypotheses has nothing to apologize for, and much to be proud of.

@Jason Malloy

I think you are simply mistaken about the nature of the scientific process when it is working properly – perhaps because things have changed so much, and in so much the wrong direction, over the past few decades. Compared with science as practiced in the mid-twentieth century, the way that mainstream science is being conducted at present is corrupt, inefficient and – worst of all – ineffective.

You may already have read (and perhaps been un-persuaded by) my writings on editorial review and the nature of science that can be found at:

http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/

but the arguments are set out there in many pieces published over several years. The arguments are based on a fairly extensive knowledge of the history, philosophy and sociology of science – in particular writers such as Popper, Bronowski, David L Hull, and John Ziman.

I’d like to focus on the work of John Ziman. Ziman's Real Science (Cambridge UP 2000) is just about the only book written so far that documents the profound changes in science during the period since 1945: the shift from academic to 'post academic' science – similar to De Solla Price’s ‘Big Science’. Ziman was in a position to know this – being highly eminent and well-connected, a Fellow of the Royal Society for his work in Physics, and with decades of detailed sociological study over decades published in several books.

Ziman mentioned Duesberg in Real Science in discussing how science did (and ought to) deal with persistent dissent from scientists of proven ability:

(Continued below)

@OneSDTV – answer from Bruce G Charlton (editor of Medical Hypotheses).

The real issue is not whether you or I believe that specific ideas are true or not (as editor I ought properly to be agnostic about the truth of papers – because the validity of science should properly be decided by the scientific community by argument and testing _after_ publication) –

rather, the issue is whether ideas should be coercively excluded from the scientific literature by the pre-publication actions of pressure groups or publishers etc.

I find this watery-defense of science against political correctness to be almost as worrying as an attack – but quite likely the numerous unjustified concessions to leftist nonsense was insisted-upon by Nature editorialists as a condition of publication.

Nature now reads as primarily a journal of elite, mushy-minded leftist politics, with a highly-selected and over-hyped smattering of (mostly) dull science thrown-in from time to time. Nature simply would not allow a truthful and pro-science article – unless they somehow surrounded the argument with metaphorical or actual scare quotes to signal the editors' exquisitely-nuanced sensitivity to the complexities and difficulties of… Bah humbug!

"Proponents of this view seem to hope that, by promoting biological sameness, discrimination against groups or individuals will become groundless. We believe that this position, although well intentioned, is illogical and even dangerous…"

This is the problem. The leftist attitude to science is *not* well intentioned: it is dishonest.

The attitude has been historically motivated by the absolute _electoral_ necessity for the left to argue that economic and social differences are unjust – and thereby to provide the excuse for buy dependency among the poor and invent poverty-industry jobs among the rich. It is simply vote-buying.

A disbelief in HBD is therefore absolutely essential to modern leftism – and has been since the mid 1960s when the left should (if honest) have abolished themselves upon the achievement of de facto equality of opportunity.

Instead of abolishing themselves, the left chose political survival based upon denial of reality. And this root dishonesty applies to class and sex as much as to race.

The left will therefore allow HBD discourse _only_ when HBD can be made to justify the massive and continued operation of the political preferences and spoils system upon which the left absolutely depends for its survival.

@Steve Johnson: "Drunk women are less able to detect asymmetry. … to discern good looking from less good looking". What's left that women really care about? … Yep, dominance."

This is likely in the sense that a drunk woman will only be likely to have sex with a man who approaches her and 'asks' for sex; but she is in no position whatsoever to establish whether this man is truly dominant wrt other men (ie. high in status in a field valued by women and where there is real competition).

So drunk sex is very likely to be a maladaptive choice for women by real life 'sober' criteria – as seems obvious.

'Game' helps diffident men to get more sex by encouraging them to take advantage of drunk women.

Is there any wonder that people with a solid moral sense find Game utterly obnoxious?

@Thursday and TGGP – the adaptations to deal with alcohol, in cultures that have been exposed to it over many generations, are mainly a matter of not binge-drinking oneself to death (because the people who tended to do that didn't leave behind many descendents, and the 'binge susceptibility genes' were thereby greatly reduced in frequency).

The adaptations to alcohol are surely _very_ unlikely to include evolution of the ability of women to make good mating decisions when in a state of significant intoxication.

Anyway, clearly there are no such adaptations, because drunk women _obviously_ don't make good mating decisions!

My point is that it seems that getting drunk on an evening out and picking up men is now part of standard behaviour for more women than before (including attractive young women would could easily afford to be choosy), and this factor is likely to have a significant influence on their choice of sexual partners (and indeed the likelhood of whether or not they have sex).

Women who are stone cold sober are much less likely to behave promiscuously – due to a powerful evolutionary legacy which makes women the 'choosy sex' (ref the classic work of Robert Trivers on parental invenstment).

It seems modern women don't so uniformly behave in such a choosy manner as evolutionary theory would predict (and these short term mating choices may also be made on different grounds from a sober woman's long term mating choices). If so this would, I suggest, partly be due to being their so often being intoxicated.

Of course getting intoxicated is itself a matter of choice.

SO – modern women are often choosing to get intoxicated SO THAT they will therefore be more likely to have sex, and make short termist choices when they do.

The thing that needs understanding is why women would want to do such a foolish thing!

Regarding evolutionary history – my increasing impression is that for humans, differential reproductive success in the past was more a matter of death rates than birth rates.

I began to realize this after reading Greg Clark's Farewell to Alms, and have found it confirmed elsewhere.

Reproductive success is roughly the same as number of offspring surviving to adult life. It seems likely that low status men and women had, on average, no surviving children for much of human history – they will have had children, but none survived to reproduce (and of those that manage to reproduce, their children were likely to fail).

For at least some periods of human history, approximately all the surviving children were offspring of relatively high status men – in Clark's data on the Middle Ages it was the middle class (not upper class) men who were populating the future England.

BTW being a high status man in Clark's terms has nothing to do with game – it is a matter of intelligence and hard work – the ability to be a good provider: otherwise the offspring would die. And – probably – higher intelligence in women enabled them to have a higher chance of raising kids to adulthood.

SO, the take home point is that probably for most of world history (and likely for recent agricultural societies) death rates were more important than birth rates, and survival of offspring more important than sexiness.

What I infer from this, is that humans are not necessarily well adapted to current situations, and there may not be any adaptive reason for current behaviour.

I also would like to bring in the point that a lot of modern day sexual decisions are made under the influence of alcohol, which also wipes-out adaptive behaviour (humans evolved to make adaptive decisions when sober, not when delirious). Perhaps this is yet another explanation why the most reproductively successful US population are Mormons, who don't use alcohol.

The relationship between creativity and psychotic traits was established by Hans J Eysenck – the most cited pyschologist in the world – two or three decades ago. The evidence is summarized in his book Genius, 1995.

Sure I get bored – and it is after these times of boredom I sometimes get (what pass for) my best ideas.  
 
Creativity is linked to getting bored, at least for some people.  
 
e.g. the writer Alasdair Gray – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alasdair_Gray – once told me that he would sometimes find himself utterly bored by every book he tried to read – wandering around libraries or bookshops, picking up and putting down books in a desultory fashion; and they all seemed dull.  
 
That was when he knew he needed to write something for himself.

My guess is that genetic factors will turn-out to explain most of cross-sectional differences within cohorts – but there will be ‘environmental’ (i.e. non-genetic) factors that explain the differences between generations, between cohorts, across time.
So that the level of behaviour for a specific genetic type will be different for different times/ places.

It’s interesting that intellectuals keep ‘discovering’ that aspects of universal historic human behaviour are suddenly outrageously immoral. It happens again and again. Funny that… 
 
My guess is that the decline in ‘corporal punishment’ is mainly related to the fact that children are no longer required to work in the economy – so their behaviour matters less. 
 
My grandmother went into full time employment at age 13 (300 miles away from home, as a servant). Clearly, an education system (both home and school) designed to prepare people for that reality of c 1920 is likely to be much harsher than a modern one which prepares people for launching-out on their own in – what? – their mid-twenties?  
 
According to the anthroplogy of hunter gatherers that I have perused, they have even laxer discipline than moderns – presumably because natural selection has equipped humans with the instincts necessary to develop in an H-G environment without much need for ‘education’ or other types of behavioural shaping.

This makes an interesting suggestion – but I suspect that the effect of religion on health would have been swamped by other factors.  
 
And until not much more than 100-150 years ago (varying widely between countries), medicine did not exist as a unified profession or concept. In the UK Physicians were gentlemen with a university education (or equivalent) (physicians were almost pure theoreticians, who typically did not touch the patient, nor look at their problems – they would not ask people to undress – and would often practice by correspondence); while surgeons and apothecaries were craftsmen trained by apprenticeship; and midwifery (obstetrics) was a semi-skilled and self-certified activity based on local reputation.  
 
The professional status of surgery and obstetrics began to rise with the Hunter brothers John and William who became exceedingly rich and famous as a result of the science-based practice of (respectively) surgery and being a ‘man-midwife’. 
 
Apothecaries mutated into modern style general/ family practitioners during the nineteenth century – and the separate branches were brought together via university and hospital based education – the relic of which can be seen in most UK medical degrees which have separately- named bachelors of medicine and surgery (e.g. BM BS, MB ChB etc – and in Dublin also obstetrics – BAO).  
 
Anyway, my point is that what we consider ‘medicine’ was – even in the past 200 years in the most advanced societies – practiced by an incredible diversity of people from family friends and neighbours through local ‘wise women’ or ‘cunning men’ up to local priests and aristocrats who sometimes used to practice medicine on their tenants as a hobby.  
 
In this sense our modern idea of ‘medicine’ did not exist as a distinct subject, just ‘what people did when other people were sick’ or something equally vague.

Bruce G Charlton (author of the paper) speaking – Thanks for covering this.

@Steve Sailer said: “Yet, it would seem like Conscientiousness is historically alterable — e.g., the Victorian English seem a lot more conscientiousness than their Regency grandparents, while today's English seem like bigger screw-offs than their grandparents.”

This is not a contradiction.

Personality rankings (like IQ rankings) are not much changed by interventions which are applied to a whole group – the most and least conscientious people in a group are still the same after the group intervention.

But the group may (as a whole) become more (or less) conscientious as a result of the environmental incentives and training.

And groups who start-out with the same level of C but experience different incentives and training may end up different in C.

So it is plausible that Victorian Brits had a higher C than modern Brits; but that the most- and least- conscientious people within these whole groups would have been the same in each era (if they could be transplanted from one time to another).

There – clear as mud…

It would be intersting to add a control for IQ – my impression is that the cleverest rock stars live the longest; and vice versa.

@eric johnson
Actually you were correct in thinking that a job is rewarded in two ways: salary and intrinsic rewards of the job.
The intrinsic rewards might be that the jobs is ‘sexy’ or in some way high status. Or it might be that a job is perceived as caring or offers emotional rewards or pleasuable interpersonal interactions.
If the status is high enough the job may have zero salary or actually cost money and be subsidized by the participant eg being a prestigious poet, a ballet dancer or an actor.
In fact, poetry is such a popular ‘job’ that the wages are abolished and in practice there are no poets _at all_ who make a living from writing it! Even the top poets are forced to do teaching or scholarship, or give readings/ lectures in semi-sinecures which are very modestly paid – or else write journalism or novels to make money.
(I say ‘poets’ by convention but in reality there aren’t any actual poets writing in English nowadays.)
If a job has actual negative status (eg a prison guard) then the salary must be higher to compensate.
If a job is necessary and requires doing stuff that most people find unpleasant, like working with numbers, the job attracts a salary (or conditions) premium – so that ‘quant’-type jobs are either well paid or have free-and-easy working conditions (or both, if you want to retain really smart quant workers)
This is well explained in Why Men Earn More by Warren Farrell.
This trade-off also features in David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise, when he describes the ruling class as composed of quite rich creatives, and very rich non-creatives – of approximately equal status.

Nobody really knows how much difference colleges make, whether specific colleges make much difference, or whether middle class connections make a difference – because (so far as I know) there are no studies of these variables controlled for IQ and Personality.
But probably these things make little difference to long term outcomes if IQ and personality are taken into account, and most of the effect of higher education is signalling.
http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/07/replacing-education-with-psychometrics.html

Another explanation – which I think I got from Matt Ridley's The Red Queen – is that the default sex is female, and a female fetus is made into a male by hormones.

Thus being male is an unnatural state of intrinsic tension…

Satoshi Kanazawa has more interesting ideas in a year than most scientists have in their whole lifetime.
Some of his ideas are likely to be useful, others not; some will be vindicated (in whatever modified form) others demolished – but let’s not get up-tight about it.
Modern science is way too dull and timid – we need more people like Kanazawa!

Anon – you might be interested by a piece I wrote on one of Tolkien's little known stories, which was eventually published many years after he died by his son:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2008/09/tolkiens-marring-of-men.html

I called elves 'human' because, although immortal, in a biological sense, elves are actually the same species: they can breed with Men and have fertile young.

AE – there is as much in Tolkien's world as you want to go look for. And don't rush it – follow your nose. I haven't yet read all of it, and I have been reading for a long time; because there is so much to consider, and so much to re-read.

It is the nearest thing to an alternative universe, and as such can become a major tool of thought, or alternative reality – especially for moral issues.

Think about Mencius Moldbug of Unqualified Reservations – probably the most deeply original, comprehensive and hard-nosed blogger I know of (for all his atheistic faults!) – MM has a Tolkien reference in almost all his postings; I recognize him as someone who uses Tolkien's universe as a tool for thought. Or it can be escape, or it can be enjoyment – or all.

Anon said: "The power of the ring is something that is too great for a hobbit to wield, one of the 'great' people of Middle Earth, Galadriel, Saruman, Gandalf, Elrond or Denethor … would have the power to wield power over Saurons slaves, the ringwraiths, orcs and other nasties, …"

True – the ring could only be wielded by one of 'The Wise'; and from this perspective Bormoir probably would _not_ have been able to wield the ring. Among the men who would have been able to wield the ring are indeed Denethor, Bormoir's brother Faramir, Aragorn – of course, and the Gondorian Prince Imrahil of Dol Amroth (a minor Numenorean character with additionally some elvish ancestry – albeit wood elf!).

It seems that only men of Numenorean ancestry have the kind of 'magic' which would enable them to control the ring (the seven Ringwraiths were originally evil Numenoreans).

Numenoreans were men that – at the beginning of the Second Age – were enhanced (by the Gods) with a threefold longer lifespan, greater height and strength and greater 'wisdom'.

Wisdom seems to mean both 'IQ' and a kind of magical strength of mind or the ability to daunt and dominate others. Wisdom doesn't necessarily giving the right answers or being good, since both Sauruman and Celeborn (Galadriel's Grey Elf husband) are described as 'wise' when Sauruman is evil and Celeborn is mistaken or narrow-minded in almost every statement he makes!

The wisest-ever human (albeit an elf human) was Feanor, who was the greatest ever craftsman and intellectual but eventually evil and crazily wrong about almost everything.

AE said: "But as Aragorn watches the life slip away from Gondor's native son, he seems to finally assume the fiery determination required of Middle Earth's savior-king."

That was the movie, not the book – but certainly it was one of the very best bits of a superb movie.

The rather feeble (advisory) efforts of the elves in the War of the Ring (in the book) is one of the unremarked aspects which becomes more understandable as you fill in the back-story.

By this time in the history of middle earth, the immortal elves had become wearily detached from everyday life – living almost entirely in the wistful contemplation of memories (elven memories being much more vivid than human memories).

The elves were torm between a love of decaying middle earth (where they were the highest form of life) and the unchanging perfection of the undying lands (where they were the lowest form of life – coming below the gods (Valar) and angels (maia)).

High elves eventually returned to the undying lands – wood elves (etc) stayed and dwindled into the creatures of folklore.

I've been reading Tolkien for 35 years on and off, and find him inexhaustible. Tolkien was actually a genius (of extremely high intelligence) and he poured most of the efforts of his long life into his fantasy world (significantly neglecting his job as one of the top Professors in Oxford, which at the time was the top university in the world for liberal arts and humanities).

Vast ability and Herculean effort over many decades – plus his great wisdom and humanity – is why Tolkien's is the greatest fantasy by such a large margin. And why it will never be surpassed.

Rowling's implicit politics is actually standard, Old Left equal opportunities meritocratic – pretty much the same as most of the founders of IQ testing – see A. Wooldridge, Measuring the mind: education and psychology in England, c.1860–c.1990, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK (1994).

In other words Rowling's idea seems to be that you should judge people by what they can *do*, not by their 'blood'. (But ability will _not_ be equally distributed through the population.)

The early IQ pioneers devised the test to pick-out bright kids from poor and deprived backgrounds to give them an academic education.

I summarized a couple of early papers here:

http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2008/09/pioneering-studies-of-iq.html

Their new IQ tests did not much depend on 'culture'; and some very high scores were obtained by some children from the poorest families who had only minimal schooling and came from intellectually barren home environments.

The goal of these equal opportunity Old Leftists was equality of opportunity *not* equality of outcome.

The reason that the New Left intellectuals adopted equality of outcome as the goal, was that the smartest ones recognized that equality of opportunity had all-but been achieved by about 1960 – so the left had no further part to play. Their job was done.

However, the left also knew that early IQ research has shown that there was a gradient of IQ across social classes. They knew (by the late 1920s) that the higher social classes were almost entirely composed of high IQ individuals (because the jobs were IQ screened), and that the lower social classes had a lower average IQ but also included a small proportion of high IQ individuals.

The Old Left meritocracts also knew (again by the 1920s) that IQ was hereditary – so that equal opportunity for all classes led to un-equal outcomes for classes. The meritocrats were happy with this because their ideal was an efficient society.

If the left had been honest, they would have wound themselves up by the mid-1960s – instead they dishonestly changed, almost overnight, into a party of equality of outcomes and affirmative action – denying class differences in IQ.

The New Left – the modern, mainstream, post-sixties leftist politics – is therefore built on a lie about IQ, and Always Has Been.

This is why current left parties cannot *ever* accept IQ science, whatever the evidence – it would be political suicide, because it would remove their basic reason for being.

An alternative explanation would be Geoffrey Miller’s idea that IQ is a general ‘genetic fitness’ indicator – so that the higher the IQ the better are a person’s genes (on average); and the less likely more-intelligent people are to get almost any kind of disease (which is what has been found by the same Scottish group who did this work).

Some social conservatives may be more accurately termed religious conservatives – whose differences with the mainstream are mainly apparent in the social domain.

I have been pretty-much persuaded by the negative critiques of blogger Mencius Moldbug that democracy is intrinsically socialist and that the reactionary stance is the only coherent form of conservatism – however (unlike MM) I am convinced that reaction must be based on religion.

To the secular conservative, the transcendental principles of reaction (truth, order, justice – whatever) are merely idiosyncratic personal views, with no deeper rationale. They seem arbitrary.

Whereas these principles (also beauty and virtue) flow naturally and coherently from a traditional Christian basis in divine. revelation.

You will need to be careful about enraged veggies – a friend of mine had some trouble with them:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/12/newcastle_veggie_site/

While clearly the differences between Irish and English average intelligence are not huge – the only study I have been able to find demonstrated that Irish intelligence is indeed the lowest in the British Isles: 
 
*** 
 
The social ecology of intelligence in the British Isles.Lynn, Richard 
British Journal of Social & Clinical Psychology. Vol 18(1), Feb 1979, 1-12. 
 
Data from 4 studies are presented to show that differences in mean population IQ exist in different regions of the British Isles. Mean population IQs are estimated for 13 subpopulations in the British Isles. Results show that mean population IQ was highest in London and southeast England and tended to drop with distance from this region. Mean population IQs were highly correlated with measures of intellectual achievement, per capita income, unemployment, infant mortality, and urbanization. Regional differences in mean population IQ appear to be due to historical differences dating back to 1751 and to selective migration from the provinces into the London area. (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

AE said: "As far as I am able to recall, this is the only variable for which educational attainment and intelligence trend in opposite directions."

I am just starting to play with GSS – but I may have found another…

It looks as if responses to the GSS question WRKMUCH: "Compared to other people who do the same or similar kind of work that you do, how much work would you say you do?"

Looking at the proportion of people who say they work _much_ harder than the other people doing the job, among those with a higher WORDSUM score there is a downward trend, while among those with a higher EDUC score there is an upward trend.

Assuming that WRKMUCH is a measure of the personality trait Conscientiousness, then it looks that *controlling for a specific type of job* higher levels of education years correlate with higher Conscientiousness, while higher Intelligence correlates with lower Conscientiousness.

This would not be surprising. People working at a particular job would be likely to contain various mixtures of Conscientiousness and IQ – the higher IQ people would need to put in less effort to obtain the same result i.e. under-achievers. While the high-C people would be 'overachievers' who compensate for their lower IQ with more effort.

Of course all this assumes I have done the analysis properly, which is a controversial assumption ;+) …

Testing 99 said: "I think White Identity politics is in fact inevitable […] As government runs EVERYTHING, from hiring, firing, GM, Chrysler, banks, corporations and their decisions on promotions, hiring, firing, and every aspect of daily life […] the requirement to embrace identity politics is a matter of survival. Pure and simple."

This is a very interesting point being made. I have often seen it asserted that race and gender preferences did not imact much on non-minority men, because they still had a large and vibrant, meritocratic private sector in which to compete. But as the private sector dwindles to nothing, this escape hatch will also disappear. Men being men, it is plausible that this change would indeed trigger resistance.