Yeah, Ed’s comment is not true but in defense of what he said he probably heard it somewhere in the context of one state. Consider a state with a low black population that takes a lot of college students from out of state, including affirmative actions students. Something like New Hampshire. As a broader point this is part of why affirmative action debates in California are so heated, being a huge state with a lot of national attention on it, it nonetheless has a relatively low black population. So the larger Asian and Hispanic populations in the actual state of California have to deal with demands that blacks get a much larger “share” of everything than their population in the state.

It’s so completely wrong the only question is how they got it wrong.

It’s possible that bad survey data with a huge skew created this result; interpreting a survey clearly wrong with an upwards bias would do that. For instance, if you asked people whether they had an income of (1) $50-100k, (2) $100-250k, (3) $250k+ as just a self-reported survey, you could get this huge bias. A person who actually honestly answers the survey but has income of $101,000 could be counted a s $175,000 (the midpoint) or something; how to exactly calculate a median from such a survey is already questionable.

Of course they could have just completely filtered their data in the wrong way to count married households vs single households wrong too. Not to mention it’s unclear how some married households should count: do you only count a household with both people exactly 30-39 years of age? Exclude only 40+ but not <30? If they somehow only calculated this number for white married households with BOTH partners college educated but missed that for blacks or something the numbers would be wrong.

Then there is sheer idiocy; they calcuated the mean instead of the median or something. Or at least, a reporter read the wrong number from a data table where maybe the study was correct but the reporter did that.

I really would guess the second option, but considering it's the wsj don't rule out the third.

$114k does look like a really close guess for median income of 30-39 white married couples where both people are college educated. Not what is claimed, but who knows. If I had to estimate myself, and I have a good nose for this kind of data, I'd think the median individual income for college educated whites in their thirties is $55-60k so maybe 80k for households. It's really hard to guess how "households" skew depending on the rules for including data; there are an awful lot of golddiggery women married to 40+ men, for instance, Whiskey's Law.

Another thing to keep in mind is that statistics around household income, wealth, etc in general are constantly used for damned lies in the proverb. People don't realize how absolutely massive the age dependence is, so every "proof of racist whites hoarding things" falls back to the same claims. The white population of the US is a lot older as a whole than Hispanic illegal immigrants or something. This situation raises an interesting point on marriage though, which is also a cultural phenomenon, and marriage isn't exogenous to jobs and income in general. If every black person and white person in the set (say age 30s) made the exact same amount of money, but blacks and whites had different marriage rates, there could be a huge gap in median household income. So really social and cultural trends that have little to do with "racism" let alone pure economics can be a huge factor.

Yeah, on this one there’s a correct answer and other people are objectively wrong. There are two different questions you want to ask and aren’t realizing it.

To the question of whether CRT activists all believe what they say, the answer is an obvious no.

However, to the question of what people, including non-CRT activists, really actually believe, the answer is that almost nobody actually understands Darwinian evolution and genetics.

I’d be sure that less than 5% of American adults in general truly believe in Darwinian evolution instead of some horrible mismash of Lamarckianism, creationism, etc… So even CRT activists who might deep down know that “the black people in this neighborhood have problems or something” don’t actually believe in Darwinian genetics over Lamarckianism because they don’t even understand it.

Despite the rhetoric that everyone did Punnett squares in some high school biology class, with US education being wildly inconsistent and all the people who lack even that background notwithstanding, very few people still remember what they were supposed to learn. The audience here is highly skewed by “Internet autistic” expectations.

A good example is the coronavirus pandemic, where it could be clearly seen that enormous numbers of people, even medical doctors, university professors and so forth, clearly don’t really get evolution by natural selection as opposed to again some horrible Lamarckian, non-materialist, Pokemon, voodoo myths. All the wrong statements about how the “virus is supposed to evolve” by people in relevant, expert career fields let alone average laypeople.

So when it comes to CRT and related sociology, you’d have to give people too much credit to secretly believe something they don’t understand – I don’t know why, say, Lamarckianism seems so “intuitive” to average nobodies but even with non-human evolution, dogs and birds and stuff almost nobody gets it.

Biden wins but narrowly in the EC, in the 270 to 300 range. Trump wins no new states, Biden doesn’t take new Romney 2012/solid red states, it’s just Biden flipping a few from 2016, including the Rust Belt.

Democrats hold the House and Republicans hold the Senate, which is part of the recipe for a very ineffective next few years of federal government.

The polling industry and related media will be insufferable, and will experience no consequences for being wrong, even though they are already wrong about various numbers and there certainly will not be a Biden landslide. For instance, Trump won’t even do as well with nonwhite voters as the average poll, let alone what Trump diehards have tricked themselves into thinking. Same with all the similar nonsense about “noncollege” voters and suburbs and so forth although potentially in the other way for partisans, they set themselves up to get those numbers even more wrong than 2016, but again the media won’t care and will just brag about the overall Biden win.

The Biden administration will oversee America experiencing economic malaise, political distrust, no revolutionary decrease in crime, no peace in the Middle East or anything like that. Republicans probably win 2024 after all that. The Covid pandemic also doesn’t get better for a year or more, it will continue killing elderly/infirm people just like 2020. Whatever nonsense the Biden administration pushes about a mask policy (except BLM protesters/rioters don’t have to wear masks) will be ineffective, same with any other policy. If we are unlucky, and honestly it’s a scientific possibility, even the potential vaccines out there won’t be very effective and countries like the US/Europe will just see Covid killing thousands of elderly people for years, as it could take decades for covid prevalence around the world to go down. The virus could mutate too much or the most vulnerable Covid cohorts (the sick elderly) won’t gain immunity from the vaccine anyway, and the US lacks the political will to cut off foreign travel and immigration from third worlders and so forth that would keep bringing the extremely contagious disease back. Of course in an economic or political sense society will give up and just let the virus kill those it’s going to kill if this is the case in the long run, more than the next year or two.

Sorry in advance for the reader who finds the tone too pessimistic, I’m not even that pessimistic about the future overall right now just these two subjects line up this way.

Well I have a prediction for the whole 2020s decade. Sailer might branch out from quoting Lenin all the time and sometimes Chomsky to discovering more of Eugene Debs. He even has that old-timey red-blooded American nationalist appeal 😉

In fact one of Sailer’s own aphorisms already sounds very much like Debs. To paraphrase, have you ever noticed all the popular trends and fads serve the rich and powerful, celebrities and adventuresses etc

The expected result, giving the evidence overwhelmingly showed Harvard treated whites and Asians as equally as possible and the entirety of legal precedent being against the plaintiffs.

It remains surprising how few discrepancies there were to see at all in the data, especially since there was no attempt by anyone in the courtroom to even remotely understand the level of discrimination by gender, sexuality and more; probably, plenty of other factors like Harvard’s discrimination against public school students and in favor of private school students weren’t’ fully accounted for.

Still, Blum appealing to the Supreme Court to try to abolish all affirmative action for blacks is also likely, the only purpose of his Trojan horse all along, but I don’t think that will pan out.

It was impressive to see the judge tear into the more deranged lies and direct contradictions of prior case law from Blum/Arcidiacono. Not that it wasn’t obvious, I just wasn’t sure the judge would care. The plaintiffs’ case in this particular courtroom was patently insane when after submitting all sorts of written documents about African Americans they turned around and argued orally that the case should have nothing to do with blacks.

Of course Harvard does have lots of discrimination in favor of blacks, and females, but there is really no moral, logical, or legal foot to stand on for the weird argument that all of that is fine but for disparate impact on Asian Americans.

Felt like commenting on one thread for predictions. Sanders is going to be elected President, Biden second place odds, in large part because it’s not clear he will even run, and he at least has some chance of beating Sanders in the primary. Trump has little chance of reelection, that much is clear.

Harris would be lucky to finish in the top 5 in the Dem primary. People saying otherwise have at best no understanding of how American voters and the electorate behave or even exist (black women will be around 8-9% of the electorate, fwiw) let alone the media’s actions. Usual explanations for shortsightedness (pure racism/sexism etc) apply too of course. It would be hilarious to mock people for being wrong about her support just a few months from now should the media move on to supporting some other candidate, and there’s a very good chance that alone happens, but it’s not necessary. That’s because the US political class and more prominent people will also be as mistaken as the subset of alt-right bloggers and misinformed foreigners here and it will be more fun to mock them.

Not sure about who is in the cryptocurrency market, but otherwise, in the 4chan terms, every site/market/averager there that isn’t PredictIt is fake and gay. Only PI has real users/real volume/counts for anything, I wouldn’t count the rest of the prediction markets or groups for anything. That said on this particular call they all have similar numbers.

PredictIt’s major flaws are the cap on individual user $, which leads to wild longshots (often the stuff that is truly <1%) being overestimated and because of the same factor but somewhat less so tendency towards 50/50 on the most partisan, active topics. (It would take 20 people or more betting against a wild longshot, assume they are even willing to tie up money with money being capped per market, to counteract the one whacko gambler on the longshot, so categories often get pushed up to 5% or more when they shouldn't.) The other major flaw is the arbitrage between it and foreign but local bettors, eg PredictIt constantly has different odds across a whole swath of things than UK bookies (so someone living in London with legitimate access to both can make thousands of $ hand over fist on the arbitrage on major elections, that will probably still be true through 2020 since PI hasn't grown big enough and there apparently aren't enough arbitrage agents).

Otherwise it's been pretty accurate on US-based stuff (the disproportionately US userbase being wholly ignorant of other countries/world affairs is to be expected). Outside the above issues, if anything there is a constant establishment/msm bias, though PI has been closer to the truth than those sources still, so I have to disagree with some other commenters.

Here's an actual curiosity, and since this readership has a lot of Eastern Europeans/people for whom nominal gdp disparities make a big difference it might be worth some checking out:

You can actually make a lot of risk-free money within PI itself, not just on sensible prediction (two different markets implying contradictions) but literally, risk-free, within a market itself.

On any PredictIt market with a lot of mutually exclusive options and high volume, a user can make free money and end up at "negative risk" by taking NO on everything, especially if you're just a bit patient for the right prices, but sometimes in high volume timeframes it'll literally be possible all at once. If you have $1000 dollars around, enough to hit the maximum, you should be able to make 10% returns on anything, sometimes more, so several hundred dollars per election cycle across several markets. The principle applies regardless of the number of shares, of course, works just as well at $10 at a time but that's unnecessary except for testing it out. Some small number of PI users are aware of this negative risk from what I've seen, but for someone where a few hundred dollars per year is worth more, compared to the average salary of your country or whatever, it could be worth more of your time. For best results a little patience and taking about a month to hit buying swings is probably necessary, though in a sense double digit returns for a few minutes of checking up each day for a month is not bad.

(I don't actually know how easy it is to get on PI for non-Americans in general, but anyway, this is a PSA, the relatively high IQ readers of this blog – even Karlin underestimates that I think – being the audience who deserves a shortcut if anything)

Typical markets would be the range of numbers for something like House/Senate seats, but also where there's a wide selection of candidates, on something mutually exclusive, so the mass Pres, VP markets.

It's surprising, and surprisingly honest I think, that PI never automated anything like this for market making and liquidity purposes, and running sockpuppets etc is not what I'm encouraging, but this is still around and might be thru 2020. I wouldn't recommend trying it on the House market tomorrow right away, without experience, and even then the timeframe is short, but it really does work – if you can get NO on everything with enough margin against the constant profit tax you'll get your input money and free profit back right away.

An actual example of something that could be done near term with the currently existing markets would be something like the DEM nom – start buying up NO on everything available, although maybe waiting into the spring for official campaign announcements to boost those who are actually running, and you'd eventually be clearly into negative risk. The typical gamblers never take into account markets that are eventually going to add options and so forth for scenarios like this. The same initial capital can constantly be reused across all markets for anyone who does this process, once you get going.

Anyway, as an academic interest prediction markets still have these laughable problems with liquidity, arbitrage and the like (the crytocurrencies speculating with the non-constant price of crypto itself is hilarious, at least USD is still USD) but for any based Eastern Europeans or anyone who could use the money, nothing shady, one account per person the actual money is there.

Yeah, a couple-ish Senate seats sounds about right, there’s almost zero chance the Dems outright win the Senate, and those are the closest (Montana and Indiana I’d say are straight tossups), but I think the msm is way overestimating the “blue wave” in the midwest/”flyover country.” I’d put the R’s narrowly holding on, it’ll be close either way, but the path for the dems if they do win would actually be large gains in CA/NY/NJ, not the seats in Iowa/Minnesota/Kansas etc that the pundits favor.

The GOP though is going to lose some in 2020, both the House and Senate, relative to whatever they get in 2018.

No, moron, the plaintiffs do exclude early-action/admission/whatever it’s called at various points in many parts of their statistical analysis. (It’s actually a bit funny because Harvard had literally abolished the process for a few years and then reestablished it, though I’m not sure certain analyses have all the data going that far back in years considered.) This clearly abuses the data and allows additional morons like the “Pnin” account to cherrypick weird numbers.

Early action alone is not at all the same as athletic/legacy/etc factors except to the most batshit sjw, so it’s unscrupulous to lump them together.

CalTech somewhat substantially discriminates in favor of students from California (went to high school there that is) and the demographics of California do not match the rest of the country; the numbers are rapidly shifting at “population of 17-year olds” more than the total population of that state, even.

It’s gotten worse over the years, but most of the other people you see talking about this are the rare exceptions that prove the rule to Hanlon’s Razor. At least, even CalTech doesn’t have sufficient nlp bots to be responsible for this itself and they probably aren’t just paying thousands of shills 🙂

IIRC almost all the things in that Arciadiacono document and especially the “shocking assertions” are tainted by the nonsensical exclusion of about 40% of the dataset because of his gut feelings or whatever the hell reason he went with. (Despite being a huge proportion of admitted students, even non-hooked students, in many years of the underlying dataset the various categories of early-admitted students are excluded for no good reason at all, except of course that it dishonestly makes a certain case look better. Really, excluding up to 40% of the data should just invalidate the whole approach.) That’s of course not the only problem and I didn’t track this down specifically but I looked through it before. Other examples of ridiculously bad omissions in data analysis which even Harvard’s side has noted include disaggregating by state and high school type.

The glut of recent years of students and especially Asian students over-applying to too many colleges also explains part of what is a broader true picture though. The Orwellian problem of courts not allowing the selective private colleges to “collude” (there’s that word again :D) while med schools doing it are constantly praised by the press and so forth is just one of those unfortunate things. Even if they’re not doing it anyway they’d be better off doing so, and it would put an end to a lot of the gross stories also commonly seen in the press about admission.

Nobody else directly actually answered your question so I will quickly; I had some other things to say on this (very good, though admittedly it fits my “priors” too) study.

One explanation is merely correlational, that age at first birth is correlated with any number of cultural factors or socioeconomic status and so in effect mostly just capturing other unobserved exogenous characteristics.

The other is the effect of mutational load, not just on specific disorders like Down Syndrome but in the genome overall; older parents will have more mutations in their germ cells and most random mutations will be on net harmful. (And a mother being older correlates with an older father of course, if that observation is unavailable)

Nobody is quite sure of the total effect of these, (mutation rate alone is also controversial) there will be some studies with different estimates, that’s where a lot of debate occurs.

As usual there are two incomplete answers and one correct answer from me here.

Rei Ayanami can be seen to spin both ways in silhouette. The original ballerina guy must have sort of plagiarized the illusion concept from there (perhaps subconsciously) since I have never seen any credit given to it before but the parallel is too strong for it not to be a reference. To be fair if the artist did give credit somewhere (not in English…) someone could dig that up.

Though I suppose seeing it clockwise is incidentally a bit easier for me in either case.

As for arbitrary preferences, right arm on top and right thumb on top. (and right handed)

Abiogenesis is hard. The universe is young. I would hate spoiling Karlin’s sincere take on anything but there’s that regardless; of course correct anthropic reasoning has been around at the fringes for decades and humans don’t live on Krikkit.

The meta-issue of human status is almost more interesting for the Fermi paradox topic these days, just like everything else where for decades nothing happens to people for being wrong, or for being right. Grumpy old academics 50 years ago would make terrible arguments based on nothing (“there probably aren’t that many planets” – this is what older literature sometimes is mocking after all) while the biochemists would shout at deaf ears. All the nonsense theories being proven wrong didn’t do any good for the reasonable people (some of whom are dead of old age I’m sure anyway) and because to some extent that wasn’t the point of the popular discussion of the topic new nonsense keeps sprouting up in place of the old.

My latest and more timely example, a bit of a pet peeve maybe, is everybody who said “computers”/ML/AI would easily beat humans at Starcraft but definitely not Go anytime soon, despite the extremely solid game theoretic reasons discussed for a couple decades for that take being wrong…but there are no consequences for being wrong on topics like this. I personally give enormous credit to people who were right about this, the moreso the more they stick their necks out.

It’s interesting and understudied what sort of academic or science-adjacent topics and careers allow people to be constantly wrong and still sneer at the people who are right; I think there are patterns there rather than it being all chaotic or random. Of course the popularly debated but incorrect views that do receive pushback, like “vaccines cause autism” are obvious.

Incidentally I had wanted for a while, so an open thread’s a good time, to sorta congratulate AK for stating a while back the broadly correct views on risks of nuclear war; the Earth is big, it can’t exactly be destroyed, nor do fallout videogame mutants exist and all that. Especially with all the ricidulous criticism on basic misunderstandings that I think he received, and he deserves defending for thought experiments and hypotheticals far more than the blowhards who get it. It’s always been interesting to me how people (not just normies either, since 90 IQ normies don’t have opinions on anything) who are constantly wrong about one thing (say nuclear war) will be constantly wrong about others (AI, asteroids etc). In turn AK is astonishingly one of those people who has a lot of correct views on unrelated topics all his own (I’ll throw in a broadly correct materialistic – not religious culty- understanding of hypergamy as another present day example); it’s almost disturbing how much in agreement people who are like that are.

To take a swing at part of the case, I think a fair estimate would have to be that there are hundreds of thousands of violent rapists not in prison in the US. Not counting people temporarily in jail, the so-called drunk tanks, it would amount to about a good 50% increase compared to the current number of prisoners, for all crimes, for the less numerate. Rape kits go untested. People who impregnate really young (to pre-teen) girls are almost always never investigated nor arrested. Even compared to other countries, such criminals get out often enough; it’s probably true that ridiculously short prison sentences as seen in the news are more common in Europe but it’s not like every rapist is even in prison for the rest of his (or zher!) life or close to it. That may be more true of other nations, whether non-Western (Asian) or not first world, for the actual criminals they do imprison.

To some extent one could say that “Oh, well, 100 years ago lots of people beat their wives and it was just part of the culture, nobody would go to prison for that. Isn’t this all just the same thing?” By modern standards that doesn’t fly, and then while even more potential criminals could still be found in the present day among the first category, the above paragraph isn’t about the same population at all.

The problem is, sure, there are some thousands of random drug users in US prisons at any given time who arguably shouldn’t be there, and the random cases of the wrong person being convicted for any crime, but that doesn’t statistically reflect the criminal population, even when plea bargins and other distortions of what one sees in the criminal statistics are rampant. The US doesn’t really put to death that many criminals (or exile or whatever as other commenters mention) and so between the serious crimes that go unsolved and criminals getting released from prison the number that could be in prison in a parallel reality is quite high.

The fact that the US has more prisoners than other countries (without constantly enacting the death penalty) is meaningless; it just means other countries are hellholes in that regard who aren’t solving their crime problems. India could have millions and millions of people in prison for violent crimes including rape; it’s just a third world country.

Note that nothing of the above will end up corresponding to any politically correct views or even acceptable views in both US political parties since Rs will complain they aren’t politically correct but establishment R views are still wrong. The feminists, for once, ever, are actually right that a lot of women experience assaults, crime from men etc that go unaddressed in the court system. Of course the sjws and Democratic party will not accept differing rates of criminality among, say, different racial or religious groups nor that their favorite ‘solutions’ just don’t work either. Any religious views on morality (“The rapists and murderers will reform if they accept Jesus!”) are naturally also wrong.

I was going to write this in a different context sometime, but what the heck, is does apply to crime too: what we’re really looking at is “Into each generation some percentage of criminal or suicidal psychopaths is born.” On the margins there may be social reforms that discourage crime and people becoming criminals from a young age but the typical violent, psychopathic criminal is really something different from the average normie in modern society and not Jean Valjean.

Thanks, honestly. I’ll check in for the courtesy for what I could provide, sometime anyway as it’s Memorial Day weekend. Kirkegaard might be overestimating what I have to say. :p

More generally I’m not half-assed stream of consciousness posting under a pseudonym on alt-right blogs because I’m looking for collaboration in other contexts though.

All of the aggregate SAT statistics for Asians are distorted by non-citizen foreigners, to an unknown extent, and a bit by multiple test sitting, competition with other tests and other factors with the end result of those being that it “looks like” there are more high scoring Asians on the SAT.

Besides the non-citizen foreigners, where eg it’s common enough for a Chinese student to score 800 SAT Math and 450 Verbal/Reading or something (not necessarily through cheating either, though there are some cases of that) what has to be understood is examples like this:

Student McStudentface takes the SAT as a high school underclassman, gets a mediocre score (1000), then decides they like the ACT better, a year or two later taking the ACT n times and submitting some score(s) from that to colleges (it all works out well for them the colleges won’t see McStudentface’s SAT score) and never bothering with the SAT again. Yet the SAT score will be recorded and averaged into random statistics by the CollegeBoard.

There are reasonably large discrepancies between races and the two genders on things like this, just as there obviously are with number of times sitting a test. Ironically it’s the sort of thing that could support SJW-like arguments about black, Hispanic, etc performance and various policies and attitudes but they are all too stupid to ever realize such factors even exist. At the very least they could autistically screech about more research and transparency being needed (CollegeBoard does hate transparency) and actually justify that case. (analogous example: it’s trivally easy to show Hispanics are in fact extremely disadvantaged by the lack of affirmative action in California public universities compared to other affirmative action policies existing across the US, but there aren’t any actual Hispanic activists or allies effectively doing so, because they were never diligent or creative enough to look at the right data and statistics)

LOL, firewater.

The weed reparations idea just isn’t workable though. The whole point of weed which many generic hippies could tell you is it’s extraordinarily easy for any rando to grow and likewise use anywhere, anytime. It’s the Stallmanesque software dream version of psychoactive drugs. That also contributes of course to prohibition being ridiculously ineffective and destructive.

Idle question, canarying this one out:

Has there ever been a single example of a gene variant and distribution which everyone thought was obviously sexual selection which somehow turned out not to be sexual selection? Even in animals?

Sailer makes some questionable assertions and many above commenters as usual are even more wacko, but anyway the core big points are ok. HS GPA systems can stay as they are and not matter, but better use of AP test scores has always been an excellent idea, credit to Sailer for emphasizing that. Colleges clearly still don’t want a higher level of academic/merit-based selectivity.

Other ideas which are right:

1) Abolish superscoring. It has no benefits except zero sum USNWR gaming and classism. This requires reform from various groups, the universities/College Board/govt bureaucracies plus random media like the former.

2) The selective colleges if they are not otherwise changing from how they exist now should probably all have a binding “early decision” among their group of a couple dozen or so- not just the Ivies but equivalent tier schools like Stanford, MIT etc. Complaints about cost and all don’t apply to these schools (state schools and everything else, yes, but when an Ivy promises to make everything free for students from families under $150k or w/e ED logically isn’t a problem.) The reason this is hated is all the metrics, USNWR, affirmative action gaming etc, but it would greatly help students, shy of doing the full med school matching algorithm systems, and cut down on nonsense like students applying to 30 schools.

3) Flagship state schools should be more “fair” to their own state students, and funding etc should apply this way as well. Some states have laws/regulations on this but it’s a patchwork. In other words, the following scenario is a problem for college affordability and outcomes for otherwise qualified but middle to lower class students:

Michigan public/state unis should not admit too few students from Michigan so that Michigan kids have to go out of state to Ohio and get gouged in price, while at the same time too few Ohio students are admitted to Ohio unis and go to Michigan schools and get gouged in price. (just an example, don’t know how the picture really looks for these states; foreign etc admissions are a bit of the picture here too)

Slightly separate discussion, but Caltech does some things (and this goes for other schools doing similar things too) basically because they’re autistic, same as when MIT was using their own toy programming language. It’s true Caltech does aim to get students all in roughly the top 1%, which is not true anywhere else in the US and hasn’t been for a long time, as affirmative action students far below that are everywhere, though they don’t get all the best students at a higher level of selection. (Possibly WWII to post WWII/1950s era MIT was the best institution at any point in US history for these purposes, though things could be done better in modern times if there was a will. I don’t know enough about every foreign country but I would agree many countries have setups at least comparable to present day Caltech, and many of those better in terms of scale to their respective populations, eg Todai which incidentally is 80% male or greater in the past)

Altogether I recognize of course that there is a good argument to be made that all US education really needs is a Caltech like 10x its size (or ten more seperate schools) with the same broad mission.

You’re missing the impact of differential voter turnout (admittedly, every mainstream publication gets this wrong all the time)

Not to say these other commenters are exactly right, but anyway, lower IQ white voters rarely turn out to vote for either party. Since 2016 Trump voters were basically the same people who voted for Romney in 2012, notwithstanding far-right propaganda, and R voters are overwhelmingly white, it’s the same calculations for the same demographics as always.

Ignoring what “the base” means, and just going with the full 2016 general election results (primaries were a little different, split of dumb rednecks between Rep candidates would be statistically significant and notable, with few dumb rednecks voting for say Rubio) Trump voters might be around 100 IQ, or 105 IQ as a lifetime peak or for a snapshot of age cohorts given how hard the Flynn effect is to untangle, and of course there’s literal age-related cognitive decline.

Everyone massively underestimates how many 80, 90-year olds (disproportionately women) are voting, and how to account for age-related cognitive decline in estimating the IQ of the electorate is tricky, but then one could just imagine what the group was like when younger or only look at the voters who voted the same way but are in fact younger. So some fair choice like 40-year old Trump voters might have averaged a litte above a normed 100 IQ white average, with every factor appropriately taken into account, but this result isn’t notable for any reason; it’s not that different from past elections. I guess one could say the MSM needs to shut up about all Trump voters being redneck coal miners but there are thousands of other factually wrong things they could shut up about too.

Incidentally 2016 Hillary voters might have been the lowest IQ average voter population for a major party candidate in a long long time (>100 years) or ever. A large part of this is third party crossover of course, in addition to racial/ethnic/etc demographics which few here would have overlooked. If 3 million 130+ IQ voters had ever voted for Obama, maybe 0.1 million voted Hillary in 2016.

Hating podcasts has always been a surprisingly good predictor of sanity and it’s nice to see that view somewhat popular in a community.

It’s astonishing how much difference there is between “good” Youtube and “bad” Youtube though, or related streaming services. Of course there’s simply pirated media which is just about accessibility, but for original content, things like videogame streaming are pretty solid nowadays whereas all homeless-street-corner-man monologuing is terrible.

Ok, upon review: this is the usual mostly GIGO. Test of grammar by self-volunteers on the net, that’ll be hopelessly confounded.

Except for accent (random normies constantly conflate accent with language proficiency) grammar is one of the worst measures around (might not even be monotonic/bounded correctly for natives/nonnatives, for some languages and some student populations) and certainly a problem with pedagogy. This appears to be a low-ceiling test too for what it could be. (Compare what was the SAT Writing test, where even native speakers did not have such low variance on pure grammar questions; lot of topics missing here.) None of the data really supports any major point, certainly not their autistically precise age estimates (don’t want to read 17.4 again anytime soon) .

Everyone else’s versions (no way I’m tracking this down in dead-tree if it exists) have the same problem with the time-traveling composer? Quite ironic.

I suppose the dataset could prove useful as a placebo or control group for other stuff in the future, just a reminder to myself if no one else to extract things if desired. For instance, the rate at which survey volunteers lie about things (such as age>100) which could be useful in comparison to many other works in the social sciences. The dissing of MTurk is actually funny (given it is completely trash) but that’s more coincidental than anything since the authors probably don’t appreciate that reality. Presumably there are not so many confounds for placebo/control purposes in a boring test of English grammar as there are in say political science, who people vote for in elections.

There’s not really any conclusive evidence children learn languages better than adults, in general. For this paper to assume that from the outset is already questionable.

Particularly young children (ie. it doens’t scale linearly or something through teenage years) are more capable of learning phonemes.

Then children are good at learning accents; rather, it might be that they have less to unlearn.

I might take a more in depth look at this data but there will probably be the various confound problems (IQ, demographics) that likely exist. There’s also the problem that for bizarre, insane reasons, the unbreakable consensus that English is one of the hardest natural languages to learn cannot die, and infects everything like an alien cancer.

For all the complaints about education and schooling wasting time and money, foreign language learning along with like gym class is actually easy to pinpoint as being relatively worthless; huge opportunity cost for sure.

Ironically foreign language teaching is one thing (along with sports, though not in say gym class specifically) that teachers/coaches etc are “allowed to try” at in the United States, since the amount of explicit tracking, “discrimination,” harsh grading and whatever is much higher than in other subjects like math and science.

I still think the most interesting name data related discussion in a long time, might have been linked somewhere here back in 2016, was the exploration of donors to the presidential candidates by name. The names that, at least to a certain point in time, were most disproportionately associated with the various candidates were highlighted, and I think most overlooked it but one part of that data was really amazing.

It’s surreal that so many names that most disproportionately supported John Kasich (again, in donating money) such as “Rodney” and “Martin” somehow fit so well, psychologically, as the people who would be Kasich supporters. It’s not that those names were just the most very common names for white males either, not even in some sense of being Southern vs Northern names or something like that. (Names for Trump/other Republicans just seemed like generic white males, Hillary donors were obvious ethnic names or boring middle-aged to older white female names, Bernie supporters younger males etc. Really the Kasich data stood out, at an intuitive level)

You’ve been interviewed by Maureen Dowd specifically?

Garbage methodology. So many glaring flaws, many very obvious, eg that many journalists are much, much older than the cohorts represented in the USNWR source they lift from. It’s true as I might expand on sometime that 100-110 IQ people thinking 120 IQ demagogues are brilliant could be one of the world’s biggest consistent problems, but not all prominent journalists are even that smart. For another time.

Today’s topics:

First is more of a reminder: test superscoring destroys the ignorant IQologist calculations for elite universities, and has for at least the past 20 years or so.

Secondly, ACT concordance has probably always been wrong at the tails too. Always been everyone’s impression really.

Yeah not letting Baby Boomers off the hook that easily just to blame it on Jews, who are low single digit % of the population. Cold War propaganda really messed people up.

It will be funny in 2020 if the nomination is remotely contested, to see a lot of establishment/neoliberal Democrats fiercely criticize the left wing candidate(s) for not being pro-war enough while at the same time having to pretend they’re upset with Trump, still in office, for whatever foreign affairs stuff he is actually doing. (If someone like Bernie/Biden is running and is going to cruise to the nomination in a few weeks we won’t see as much of that, but even so)

I haven’t been getting many early or low-numbered comments lately. Let’s see who this beats.

Anyway, did you know that in lots of species, ducks violently gang-rape other ducks?

Animal kingdom fact of the day for yall. Also the weird mix of hippies and religious people who point to something being “natural” to discuss morality is toxic.

Yes, cuckservatives are often huge white knights.

However, enough of them are right on this issue in that it’s completely impractical and politically impossible to make work. Since of course it could never be a winning position that raped women can’t get abortions, only the most extreme religious cultists ever support that, and SJWs are hilariously wrong about the scenario – women will just lie about being raped or whatever.

So somewhat logically thinking things through it’s a losing position with no political merit, while at least political lobbies can pretend the abortion providing doctors are a good scapegoat; of course completely logically thinking things through results in nobody having cuckservative positions on abortion at all and a fringe minority much smaller than the whole Republican party still caring about the abortion issue but they don’t go that far.

If this crowd was broadly interested in evolution and human sociology and all (kek) then they could maybe have some culture war cases about affecting abortion rates not through the law but through socioeconomic behavior and moral values and so on but they aren’t. Pro-life only up to the birth canal is a thing.

This comment is wrong, especially compared to your last.

Your points that noncitizens of various ethnicities might in many circumstances have an easier time than comparable US citizen students are true, also that among “Asians” some immigrants to the US from Myanmar or something have discrimination in their favor compared to groups like Chinese, though few talk about that.

Almost the entirety of the burden of affirmative action falls on white males, some even on Jewish males with a little on the same groups females in the current day (especially in the sense that there is a lot of evidence the best students in a meritocratic sense are not admitted; many of the white or Jewish males being admitted are not the best students but Jared Kushner types who bribed their way in even if they had SAT scores hundreds of points lower. For the females, maybe 20-30 years ago things worked out slightly in their favor but now slightly against)

So the following things are true, quick summary for all commenters around:

1) Obviously, if you simply kicked out (/didn’t admit in the future) blacks and Hispanics, you could have more slots for Asian or white students, or citizens replacing non-citizens. Not going to happen and not specifically the desired evidence of racial discrimination against Asians specifically.

2) There is massive gender discrimination and a credible case can be made that colleges like Harvard should be 80% or 90% male or somewhere around there. Instead, the quotas are obvious; if there are 100 Asian males in a class, there must be 100 Asian females, 200 white males, 200 white females, and so on. This and (1) are actually the only things that matter, everthing else is rounding error. One key point here is this skews arbitrary statistics that weird race activists point to and complain about racial discrimination. Depends how one sets things up, but it can be a simple matter of high school level algebra: it’s mathematically impossible to take the groups, white males, white females, Asian males, Asian females, and the desired random statistic (“application rate”, or “yield rate,” or of course “SAT Math scores” something) and have it be the same given the requirement to have 50/50 males/females and exogenous differences in the groups. This is trivially not “racial” discrimination by any common sense but rather it’s gender discrimination. Harvard can’t go to the Collegeboard and change the SAT scores these groups of students get.
2b) The current court case doesn’t and won’t challenge this; moreover, courts basically explicitly approve of this already, even outside of the narrow sense of Title IX for athletics and so on. (Of course there are plenty of institutions, a bit less so the elite schools, that are a good deal over 50% female already)

3) There are a host of remaining factors that people get wrong, stupidly or dishonestly, some that make the bloviator not worth respecting and some that are simple failures of normies to understand predicate logic and common concepts like Simpson’s paradox. One can’t lump noncitizen and citizen students together given all common sense that of course they will not be processed the same way in admissions. Likewise, public colleges in states with different Asian population proportions will look different given public colleges are usually compelled to admit students from their own state. This isn’t about the commenter I replied to but in general it’s sickeningly stupid to see constant whingeing like “why isn’t the Asian percentage at the University of Nebraska the same as some public college in California”

As for the article, it’s a gross distortion and really a bizarre presentation by the reporter of a claim about a claim etc… Imagine if the NYT reported “a lawyer for a Trump lawyer claimed Trump never knew this Stormy woman, nothing to see here, the NYT can report” and that’s what this article is like. The actual plaintiff side appears to have a completely garbage, just pathetic angle, in fact from a court case standpoint a lot of their actions are truly laughable even if they have some press writers sympathetic to them (I think it’s explicitly confirmed the Espenshade data includes zero data from Harvard, if they plan to bring that to court against Harvard, lol)

Harvard is obviously going to win this, I’d say it’s 98% a crushing victory, no weird settlement or anything even. What’s true is

4) There is obviously a lot of data Harvard doesn’t want to get out, but it has nothing to do with racial discrimination against Asians, and they will also win anything court related here. Harvard doesn’t want to reveal the hundreds/thousands of Jared Kushners with lower SAT scores than thousands of other white males, so completely ignoring race/sex/etc there, who effectively bribed their way in, but they will win on obvious privacy grounds that they don’t have to specifically reveal Jared Kushner etc’s data. Of course it will take 5 minutes for Harvard to produce a spreadsheet table with just a non-personal data leaking count of numbers showing better admissions odds ratios for some set (years, test scores, whatever) of Asian females compared to white males or anything similar to prove their case; I’d bet anything like (1) and (2) above still avoids seeing publicity in court.

National Merit finalists have around 130 median IQ.

It’s always fascinating how completely, glaringly wrong the weird Internet autists are about this topic and how they don’t recognize discrepancies.

Why do girls who had 160 IQ at age 13 perform worse at age 17 than other girls who only had 120 IQ? Why do so many girls who have 160 IQ perform worse on math exams than boys with maybe 115 IQ? If these things were remotely true, it would be the among the most valuable human scientific data at all time; it would provide more evidence than everything else in the entirety of human history for broad controversies.

But of course in all these cases (rich private school events and stuff too) you’re simply getting a random assortment of ~130 IQ people, just like how all people who can dunk a basketball are 8 feet tall and not 6 feet tall.

The idea that working in software or hardware requires some grand math/verbal split is more mentally ill than everything Ezra Klein has ever written, and I say this as a huge Ezra Klein critic.

If Bernie runs, and the only questions there are personal reasons (health, family, etc), he is already the next President.

Even if Bernie doesn’t run, what’s essentially the “Bernie wing” of the Dem party has a very strong chance of winning the primary. The 2020 general election is winnable by various legitimate Dem candidates, true, for instance as often talked about Biden would actually win the general election too, but he probably won’t get near it, good odds he doesn’t even run.

It can be hilarious to see foaming-at-the-mouth alt-right Baby Boomers complain about how they think the Democratic Party works (Zuckerberg or Oprah could be the next President!!11) but it also grows old. The establishment right now is desperate to try to promote some candidate against the grassroots/progressive/Bernie wing if they have a chance to make it work in 2020, but that’s all there is to that; no other grand schemes.

Sailer among many others has far too much of a tendency to think Obama is a secret 4D chess mastermind working to destroy America.

Obama is really a wishy-washy, almost hippie, traditional religious believer, though instantiated as an African American churchian. Shift strict adherence to more old-fashioned theology to New Age optimism and “woo” and there are millions of Obamas out there. Pointing out that his strong oratory was really always just veneer is valid (he had little military/diplomatic/etc experience all things told, nor great policy expertise) but that doesn’t excuse the other conspiratoralizing.

The only question is ultimately whether the things Obama did poorly were random chaotic happenstances due to laziness or due to malice on the part of others around (other politicians, deep state) but not much by Obama himself, and certainly not much beyond the public eye.

Assuming Obama is orchestrating things behind the scenes doesn’t add up; almost whatever you think he is or was doing, honestly, still results in the conclusion that he’s not actually competent at doing it. Secretly working for the neocons? Iraq/Syria still disasters. Trying to make the Dems a one party state? It’s extremely obvious the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party is ascendent and even if one thought Obama was a full gung ho revolutionary that just makes him an idiot who helped mess up his own party for no gains. So Occam’s Razor – just laziness, he never actually had any grand schemes.

You’re a commenter who is worth responding to a good deal of the time and I’ve seen a lot of discussion like this lately, but it’s worth pointing out:

American jingoism, for a huge proportion of the population, and especially the normies, maybe like 2/3 of them is as strong as some science fiction story – the Tyranids or Orks or whatever analogy is appropriate. American normies don’t just view their side and the military as always being the good guys; everyone else might as well not be human, not just the bad guys. The rest of the justification for diplomacy or economics or realpolitik is just post-hoc tacked onto that underlying scaffold.

It’s not only the alt-right espousing these views at all, nor the neo-cons, nor anything like that. It’s really not, and non-Americans often just don’t understand. Everyone should have learned this from Vietnam, then especially the Iraq War granting the age of individuals, but I don’t think non-US citizens are learning it from media/books etc because it doesn’t quite grok the vivid reality.

Besides religion or race or other identity like that, though those things can contribute, the jingoist deeply ingrained into the American psyche, really fascinating topic to explore and certainly not fully understood. It’s why one can sometimes still tell or respect the “non-normies” with weird contrarian urges even when they are hugely wrong about stuff as at least they are sometimes not part of the groupthink.

While I think Christian values are a part of it it’s not just that, it’s not just propaganda either despite how Hollywood/comic book movies etc work. It’s also raw ignorance and lived experience for the typical American, who is monolingual, doesn’t travel, etc.

On the theme of Americans always assuming their military is 100% the shining knight good guys, many Americans have litearlly barely ever heard of only World War II, the Civil War, and American Revolution, (seriously, American school history classes often have situations where “we don’t teach the Vietnam War or anything more modern than that” And of course actual survey data shows just how little groups like urban African Americans know). No nuance in anything.

As for on topicness: The alt-right isn’t dead so much as it didn’t exist in any numbers in the first place.

Karlin I’ve found often has a blinkered view of the USA, being familiar with what, a couple coastal enclaves, and not informed about US political science realities. For instance, still very unlikely the Dems take the Senate again this year, keep in mind the neoliberal MSM of course says things in its own agenda’s interests.

So the problem is mistaking Internet trolling for the real world. The modal Trump voter was a “cuckservative” elderly creationist; same as Republican voters for decades, really. That a few hundred neoNazi marchers had one march, for all the noise the MSM makes, is not actually representative of the country.

Just how not even 1% of the population are serious libertarians and only that because of drug addicts who want more legal drugs, likewise the weird mish-mash of neoNazis and whoever claimed to be alt-right simply didn’t have any numbers, never even 1% of voters. It’s a mistake, though somewhat forgiveable, and the mirror image of neoliberals who think there are 50 million coal miners coming out of the woodwork, to believe that what you read on the Internet or saw at one coastal city think tank conference represents American politics or the electorate or whatever.

The alt-right never was anything more than some Internet weirdos and Nazis, ironically a huge proportion of supposedly “English speaking US alt-right folks” were various Euros and foreigners in the first place, and remember, Hillary lost the 2016 election rather than anybody doing anything to win it. The Republican party itself has the same constituencies as always and that does mean it’s in for a slow decline (except if there’s a sudden collapse) over time as they are not going to win over changing US demographics.

There are exactly zero pundits, academics, etc who have ever commented on education that I’ve heard of who actually have a correct model here, is the thing. Because of their age (and it’s not just Boomers, general olds) they are stuck believing the world is the same as a past era; for instance white males are only comprise about a quarter of US college enrollments these days.

In reality the situation is that something like 30% of white males “should” go to college, on criteria of learning specifically valuable things in certain real fields, 10% of white females, and for blacks etc, a depressingly small number, single digit percent. Of course the general population demographics of the US are changing over the generations too, regardless of college admission/enrollment selective filters, so this doesn’t translate always into the same numbers in college. (Also I’m very aware of the case that in a societal sense only a few thousand students really need to go to college ever and the rest is all sleight of hand etc, but the economies of scale picture and general effectiveness of education is still sound for many typical professions)

No only ever owns up to the correct views, because of political correctness. Worse, their proposed ideas and policies to go from the current real world to where they think they want to be almost always would make things much much worse.

Also, most critics of education in the US, statistically speaking (in terms of volume, reach, voter participation etc) are still mentally ill creationists and similar types, which is hard to overlook. There’s a reason non-Americans who noticed all the people talking about the latest bomber being a homeschooler noticed that.

Yes, this is the same reason Lionel Messi is over 9 feet tall, after all, sportsball players in general are taller than average men, there’s some correlation there, and so Messi must be like +8-9SD above the mean in height. (Some people will never ever understand this concept if explained to them a thousand times, apparently)

The real lesson to be taken from the Chetty data blather about women is just how little many women contribute to the economy (after all, something like 98% of highly cited papers in the field of economics are written by male authors! :p) and instead their status is based on their marriages/families/household.

Also, that the very wealthy in general have a lot of intergenerational inheritance has nothing to do with any other form of merit, including IQ, as I suppose the autistic libertarians might even argue that at least a hard knock background golddigger who only married into a family as an adult proved her merit at golddigging.

No matter how it looks on paper, a lot of wealthy women have jobs/income/etc they only got because of their husbands or family. If Chelsea Clinton earns millions of dollars in personal income from some “job’ related to the Clinton Foundation, or some other random sinecure, it’s not because of individual merit.

The idea that a lot of laypeople have, and the media reinforces of course, that the very wealthy are statistically speaking all athletes/entertainers except for the rare tech entrepreneur, is completely false. Ironically again reading a little more old Krugman gets this message across too.

Put succinctly, the purpose of Chetty’s work is to provide cover for the 1%. There are hundreds of interesting things that could be looked at with Chetty’s data that will never see the light of day, but ironically as Krugman was prone to describe, a lot of arguments and political correctness are about the 1%ish waging war on the next 10-20% (ie rich inheritors attacking upper middle class dentists for their political values)

Even ignoring actually tracking down rich people’s Panama asset stashes and whatever, in a statistical sense, there is a lot of sociological work that is not being done. As one of many examples, it would surely be possible to take Chetty’s data as we’ve seen with papers from his group and publish some things like average returns to marriage for women: “How much money do women who went to Princeton make for marrying rich husbands compared to Yale? And then compared to Michigan State?” That will never happen, but “poor black people are poor” even though everybody knows it suits the 1%er propaganda.

Why are so many interesting posts written by random anons, trend really has been going up recently…anyway:

It’s quoted by Jewish racists, and other racists whose only real point was to attack blacks or something and they just said it in passing.

Obviously 115 is nowhere close to true, in fact there is strong evidence there is not any racial group higher than about 105 IQ and even then that’s iffy, mostly a lack of non-corrupt data on some East Asian populations and unexplained gender gaps. 100-105 overall IQ for Ashkenazi Jews, where the white European mean is 100 (and some white European groups might differ a few points from that), if not due to environmental effects then possibly thanks to some genetic drift, possibly gender or ability component skewed, seems the most supported by evidence. (It really is like various old jokes: “Did you hear Jews have a verbal IQ of 107? No, I didn’t know Jews have a verbal IQ of 112. Why, it’s a shame nobody talks more about Jews having an overall IQ of 116”)

Very ironically, given other discussions here, though I don’t think I personally commented on it here and it’s worth a full article sometime: one reason why it’s clear no racial group has particularly high mean IQs is relatively high IQ women (even 130-140) don’t exist in the appropriate numbers. As with “general population students” in Shanghai it’s bizarre to have a “race” of 115 IQ people where say 130 IQ women nevertheless barely exist; we know the latter case is selection bias in measurement, partly fraud of course. With this and other topics I call it being so racist you forget to be sexist. No existing evidence supports that the women just have something analogous to Down’s Syndrome to account for it. Life is not a videogame and one can’t just overwise change the variance either; you can’t have a race of people with 115 mean IQ and sd 5. (more specifically this is clearly evolutionarily impossible as it contradicts all the scientifically known evidence of the highly polygenic nature of the trait. You’d have to be dealing with lizard people)

Sampling errors abound of course though, and I’ve always maintained childhood IQ testing is often terrible. So it’s easy to find measurements, not the latent truth, that look weird among groups of immigrants or something. For the same reason non-Jewish non-Hispanic white immigrants from the USA to Japan might have an IQ average of 120, or more clearly, middle class suburban girls who got exactly 3.0 grades during a school year have an IQ of 103 with a SD of 5, results like that can obtain with other races (even blacks, being careful).

Probably the most hilarious thing from the racist crowd is the constant insistence of bizarre explanations to somehow mathematically cancel out educational/testing results they don’t like from Israel. Like “Israel must secretly have a population of Sephardic Jews with a mean IQ of maybe 75 to ‘balance things’ out.”

Regardless of what some bloviators may or may have once written, by the way, by my count Jews are about 4% of white European historical intellectual figures (scientists etc), which is a bit higher than their share of the population, but then one has to see that many other groups are also skewed. Incidentally the production of highly accomplished individuals is an important topic with some other important explanations but for this subject it’s almost irrelevant; parisomoniously, the best results for the Jews is to just count “one Einstein” as putting Einstein in a very small list of very select figures produces the highest ratio. The Swedish, for instance, are way overrepresented among historical intellectual figures compared to the Irish, but nobody accepts that as evidence the Swedish population or race is 20 points higher than the Irish in the present day.

Just a bunch of disjointed thoughts, but to start: how has David Grusky never even heard of the famous “wage gender gap”?

Chetty could eventually go down as the next Elizabeth Holmes, given the wild impropriety of what he’s doing with personal data of millions of Americans. In poetic justice terms, someone in the computer security field should be given access to Chetty’s systems and metadata, to publish an academic paper on the actual security and anonymity and so forth around Chetty’s operation. (which will be disastrously bad. All sorts of ML research lately shows that a lot of basic laypeople assumptions about securing privacy, anonymizing information and so on are woefully inadequate. Even without a boogeyman like Russian hackers the trickle-down picture of opsec for Chetty et al is probably terrible).

In a big picture sense, Chetty’s data is still woefully inadequate to address really important socioeconomic factors like lifecycle effects let alone interpersonal interactions. Not that he’d ever publish a politically incorrect paper about, say, marriage, even if could do a lot on that topic with the data available. However, one can’t get the full picture of something like rich people’s inheritances (which really really matters to social mobility etc) with a limited snapshot of humans in a certain age range.

Also, I hate graphs that aren’t log-scaled when they should be. One of the many trends of the last decade or so’s fake news push for flashiness.

Jackson Pollock was an eccentric artist, Jonathan Pollard a traitorous spy.

Most interesting duckposting of the day though, how that came to be.

Facebook and Twitter both have about 10% the number of real, human users that they claim to have, the rest being bots, sockpuppets etc. That’s in some ways the most funny thing to come out of the whole botgate hysteria, that normies will catch on to that.

Would be great if “peer reviewed social science” types ever took on something like that though.

Setting aside the apples and oranges comparison of prize pools and monetary awards vs some alleged elo-like scores (except for chess and possibly some Asian games I wouldn’t trust the sources on that, or even more inherent issues with elo systems themselves in terms of sample size) there are a couple other recommendations to examine in good faith:

Someone (not me, find a better translator) could easily get you a list of thousands of shogi professionals or tournament successful individuals over the years and some inkling of prizes won or skill ranks.

With some effort, information for some other card games that neither you or the other commenters have brought up yet (thousands of players, millions of dollars in tournaments etc) can be found, some going back decades, though the issues of inflation, lack of cross-temporal skill ranking comparisons and whatnot might arise.

That’s all in addition to the videogames, many listed on the website which is a pretty comprehensive source, that were just excluded from the paper.

I don’t think this changes the big picture – if you only read this comment I had another comment – especially the interest/cultural factor of wealthier countries (and some outliers like North Korea are actually legititmate) but it’s still a lot more polished.

The methodology is questionable in some ways. I’d owe Kirkegaard a better review and this is like the most Kirkegaard-esque paper possible, as just an observation, but my shorter thoughts on just the above:

It was really a drunk-looking-under-lamppost attempt since no possible independent analysis would include this group of competitions/sports together without the preexisting bias. Looks bad in a cherry-picking sense. Chisala aside, nothing in terms of say prize pools would justify inclusion of Scrabble and simultaneous exclusion of others. Excluding shogi might have helped Japan look like an outlier O.o In fact the criteria to cut dozens or more potentially relevant videogames (and there are huge headscratchers, like SCBW to SCII) would in fact have cut off Go (<1000 players in the data source!) if it was actually applied.

I don't think that really changes any of the picture, if one understands few weird sweeping conclusions can be made. As an exploratory analysis this is reasonable, and including a bunch of other games wouldn't necessarily change the qualitative appeal of the major graphs.

Also seriously, including team sports alongside individual sports clearly really skews what you're looking at; it would be almost like concluding Usain Bolt isn't that great of a athlete on some "general athletics factor we just derived" because the German soccer teams over the years as a whole had more players than Jamaica. Definitely a lot of the result in a principal components sense is that wealthier first world and higher population countries are able to put together teams more easily. (Since common frictions like language barriers affect team formation)

None of this is exactly my first interest anyway, at least not compared to discussing say AI performance vs game theoretic properties of these games, (which I would maintain does crucially impact understanding of human skill and correlation with IQ) but that's for elsewhere. I again truly don't care much whether average Scrabble tournament participates have 115 IQ and some videogame players have 110 IQ or 120 IQ or vice versa; I don't even know enough about all of the videogame scenes. Still to be clear it's a decent writeup by Kirkegaard in general though.

Non-Jewish white males appear to comprise less than half of all male mass shooters/school shooters/etc in the United States, but newspaper writers, talking heads, and politicians disproportionately blame them in advocating for a host of security and surveillance measures.

Not the thing to comment on all the time, but what the heck: if Cruz is actually genetically at least part Jewish, that adds onto a now pretty shockingly high proportion of 10+ incident kills school shooters (at least 3 since the 90s) in the US being so.

The general picture must go back for a good 50 years and the best available data.

To be fair, people are just really really bad at grokking anything about crime; it’s the one normie thing “law and order Republicans” actually understand. The general non-criminal public of course does truly fear crime. First normies are super innumerate, such that they wouldn’t get the difference between a hundred and a million deaths, then they refuse to be impartial when some racial, religious, or whatever bias strikes them as at stake.

I’ve said somewhere before I’m probably one of the few people in America who correctly thinks that George Zimmerman should have been tried and convicted for manslaughter, and Officer Wilson was innocent of wrongdoing, acting in line with his duties. There are many other famous cases (again, OJ as an example) groups of people are crazy on while I, I guess unintuitively to observers, have little sympathy for violent criminals. The US justice system is still horrible not for racial bias these days as the random journo claims here but for its inconsistency and stupidity. To all the commenters not from the US you really have to understand just how poorly the system handles things like drunk driving homicides where justice varies tremendously from state to state and on deranged whims, and the public understands nothing but outrage (even in the investigation stage, a la Ted Kennedy. I suppose in the interest of communicating to the unfamiliar: the Kennedy incident certainly should have been investigated rather than hushed up, and present day random citizens get more severe manslaughter or homicide convictions on less “impaired driving”, but that’s “justice”)

Eh another post because I wanted a dig at a particular line: it was literally an accident that Obama was elected when he was. Hillary Clinton should have beaten Obama in 2008, it generally took until 2016 for outsiders to really fully see just how terrible her campaign and all her people were. She beat Obama in the popular vote but lost because all of her people were retarded and couldn’t organize for the big picture.

It’s almost like Hillary had in fact made a deal with Satan, where Satan would promise she would win the popular vote in every primary season and general election when she was the candidate for President, which she naively went along with. So she did, winning the popular vote each time, but didn’t win the Presidency, and Satan got the best out of the twisted deal as in all the stories.

Not much to comment on except typical innumeracy. Funny sometimes when partisans confuse partisanship for ideology, but mostly annoying. The way to put it is people are sheeple, but not always in the way propagandists assume. Observations along the lines of Lee Kuan Yew are mostly correct but most other platitudes are not.

Progressive whites make up about 10% of voters, tops. Progressive people of color basically don’t exist in statistical terms, there are maybe a few hundred thousand. Nonwhite voters might be highly partisan but don’t expect them to have the ideologies of today 20 years from now.

To be clear, there are vastly fewer hardcore right-wing “nationalists” or neo-Nazis, or libertarians or whatever than those groups people self-delude themselves about. They are also in the low single digit % of constituencies. Elderly creationists and poorly informed normies and the like are the core voting blocks of the Republican party.

Assortative mating for intelligence is not nearly that strong. Class is a poor proxy, so even if one parent is genetically far away from the median on intelligence it’s not a guarantee the other is.

Worth longer discussion elsewhere sometime, but assortative mating for intelligence within racial groups might even have been going down in prevalence in recent decades compared to earlier in the 20th century. (Overall assortative mating has, but that’s trivial. Useful to gram stain people who are constantly wrong about things. Also trends at the tiny population tails are more irrelevant than weird dysgenics obsessers and others think)

The Asian Americans mostly don’t cheat that way either though. Yes there are some differences in interest levels of various things but those are mostly benign.

As with all the complaints about Boomers and older being out of touch, there’s a lot of just not understanding numbers; in a lot of places in the US there simply aren’t that many white children anymore, that certainly applies to New York City. There’s a lot of conflating the effects of that with harmless K-12 school structures.

Often instead of worries about cheating or rigged systems, utterly retarded morons (random alt-rightists, Asian activists, others) have just made stupid mistakes like counting non-citizen foreigners grouped in with the American citizen numbers when they look at Asians who “applied to college” or any statistic they are complaining about. (As with SAT scores to a large extent because you can’t even get data from the testing service on citizen vs non-citizen score histograms, and there are lots of non-citizen Asians.) Many of the morons cannot actually understand the difference between the 17 year old population of the state of California and the rest of the United States, since those have different proportions of Asians.

The primary effect of Asian culture/parenting/etc seems to be slightly different gaps between males and females at the high school level, as I’ve pointed out before. The ratio of Asian females to Asian males in STEM or whatever is not the same as from white females to white males; maybe white females could try harder or just have different interests.

These things are easily seen in the data sources that are available, as with AP scores, where for instance there are several times more whites than Asians getting the highest scores on say, English exams (and male-female gaps in obvious subjects like calculus are trivial).

The mix of pointless bashing of Asians, ignoring relevant sex differences, and general corruption solves nothing and makes all sorts of other issues overlooked. None of that even addresses the actual process of brining in foreign students at say the university level, at least if one is concerned about anything from budgets to racism as Asian are represented there more than much of the rest of the world. Both athletics and the class/monetary bribery issue (a la Jared Kushner) are huge unusual quirks of the US school system for high schools/colleges, and more generally identitarianist/race politics has nothing positive to bring to the table with broad issues and politics in education pedagogy/epistemology. (eg the war between creationists who want to abolish public schools vs everyone sane)

As for “famous” US high schools, that’s boring, you’re right private schools have more prestige though. Also these high schools are still a great deal less selective than MIT, Caltech etc (and in fact someplace like Yale is also much more selective it’s just that besides academics they are selective on athletics, political connections and other such traits too)

Long been an observation but as a rough estimate I think that on US broadcast television shows in the present day heterosexual non-Jewish white males are something like 10-15% of major characters.

It’s not clear Hollywood movies are much different. And that…doesn’t reflect the demographics of the country either.

Would have to go through and count, choose a network like ABC or NBC or whatever and examine each show, which I wouldn’t bother to do, maybe it can be crowdsourced and people would disagree on what major characters even are; anyway for the past decade or so there haven’t been too many changes from what one can gather.

Live sporting events skew heavily male but astonishingly the sjw crowd is far more pro-sport than would be naively expected of them; other than that there are few notable exceptions. (Well, few major TV broadcasts have actors playing cross-gendered characters or anything like blackface or whatever where the character is different from the actor but for those cases either a generous or exclusive count can be made)

For that matter even videogames etc with non-white or female characters are extremely common. The sort of paranoid schizophrenia-like behavior that leads people to think they never see characters who look a certain way or something is insane. (Of course I personally am a fan of a wide variety 0f genres and outright non-human science fiction characters and whatnot are perfectly sound, compared to the hyperventilating of the average normie in that sense, but still the above is an objective assessment of what the average normie sees. Also, as an aside, the observation that Hispanic Americans are relatively underrepresented among all the “of color” groups is somewhat true)

Imho I’m not sure there actually are that many great layperson level popular books, but I am never the best judge about this; there would be tons of accessible more academic works, ie papers or texts. There are also tons of Malcolm Gladwell-drivel books but that’s not what you’ll want. I know others would jump in and recommend their favorite hugely politically motivated sources too (even I agree you can’t just tell someone to start reading Chomsky for a general, fair picture of game theory and related topics alone). Likewise you could read popular psychology/human behavior but might as well skim Wikipedia for that; confirmation bias, conjunction bias, whatever all are common and easy topics but reading a popular book that just loads that up with political rants isn’t necessary, furthermore that doesn’t really give a complete picture at all of the field of game theory, only the popular psych/behavior.

If you don’t need any updated stuff or specific topics in computer science (online textbooks or just papers/lessons are readable though) I’d think John Maynard Smith’s Evolution and the Theory of Games is a good recommendation, definitely around and in libraries etc too.

my footnote: I can guarantee for a fact there are not any great “popular books” in more of a combination of game theory/information theory/chaos theory that get across key points, again as one would recommend for computer science, it’s one of thousands of things I know someone could work on; there aren’t even great broad but introductory textbooks since that’s not the typical course sequence or the way academics proceed through teaching topics. But if you’re looking for a much more general picture and philosophy/history/general layperson stuff etc things can be put together.

Effectively 100% of reddit’s large news, politics, whatever commentary are bots/shills etc, except for the genuine hillbilly Trump supporters who show up to troll and argue pointlessly; most of them by now even realized they are dealing with astroturf. (who might still have spammers/botnets of their own, but anyway) It’s a terrible platform, maybe not as much for videogames, but for the former topics.

Given your knowledge of general Internet happenings, memes, even specific smallers groups like /r/acisthalflings I thought you’d grok this.

This needs to be mentioned to a broader audience sometime, but really, for foreigners looking for an accurate representation of political groups and their news sources:

Alt-right – doesn’t need to be explained in comment sections here.
USA Religious Right grassroots – they actually probably have terrible online footprints and aren’t very readable/intellectual in general (the literal creationists and whatnot) but you can find their views from various religious activists groups. As with the of course small number of “billionaire Republicans” and current Rep officeholders their views are often enough directly represented by the Republican Party organs anyway.
Neoliberal/Neoconservatives – barely any difference in positions per se these days, (huge divide in partisanship/ethnic grievances/whatever) they really have no grassroots too but the MSM media from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times heavily represent these groups.
Establishment Democrats grassroots – read, for instance, DailyKos. The perfect example because the whole Kos ecosystem specifically set out to ban Bernie Sanders supporters from the website in 2016 so unless you’re super worried about occasional bot/spam accounts you can guarantee almost everyone else remaining is a genuine Hillary Clinton-esque establishment Democrat
Left-Wing Democrats (and non-Dems) grassroots – spread across all the place, smaller groups really, but I can tell you a good representative example would be Jacobin magazine.

Relevant and coincidentally actually quite recent work that people here should read, not just about a single local crime story, they wrote a good summary but you download the report too from right there:

https://peoplespolicyproject.org/2018/01/30/mass-incarceration-new-jim-crow-class-war-or-both/

The MSM is of course atrocious with its coverage of crime, they’ll inflame whatever crazy angle they can take, but the USA has tons of crime problems both as a society and with the criminal justice system (eg trivial gender bias). With the case here there is no mystery, generic assault, not a sensational celebrity crime story or something, and I’m wont to complain about things like drunk driving disparities in both the event and justice end but I’ll leave that aside for now. More generally I agree normies have a terrible time being informed about crime. There’s innumeracy, political bias, and “damn lies and statistics” in the media they read applies heavily to liberals and cuckservatives both.

Though that’s not to unilaterally praise the alt-right, it’s hard to find anybody without outrageous views on crime at all; and I’m more cynical and law-and-order supporting than most. There are practically Mexican cartel apologists on this website: “Mexican crime is hitting some all time highs but it’s not that bad, for real just blame the blacks in America guise” or at least one of the blogs may be retired but still.

Well as a random open thread thing I’ve been meaning to say this somewhere while not taking the time to argue over tons of other topics for the year. Regardless of petty bickering and immediate events (the public forgets everything by months later, moreover Trump and the current Congress simply can’t *do* anything) the media narrative on the 2018 midterms is wrong.

The R’s probably have a 90% chance of holding the Senate (at least counting 50+VP) and same for the House. These are not perfectly correlated but no “blue wave” or anything. That doesn’t mean 2020 won’t be a massive shakeup, just a combination of gerrymandering will make for only moderate losses and not a loss of majority in the House and the favorable Senate map means it’s far too likely the Dems lose at least one individual seat so can’t net a majority. (I actually think it’s more likely the Republicans outright gain net Senate seats that lose)

The media/poll outfits (and crazy alt-right Internent sources, which share some delusions or have invented delusions of their own) are now wrong on just about every level. The white middle class is far more Republican than commonly believed, not just the overexaggerated lower class coal miners; Hispanics/blacks are more Dem than in faulty survey data but don’t matter in most relevant races, the age gaps are larger than reported, and the way the shill/chattering class believes public opinion works remains wrong. Advertising etc doesn’t influence votes much at all.

What’s more interesting is what it would take for people to understand the US MSM doesn’t actually employ” lefitsts” and in fact their overwhelming mission is to attack the left. They have only neoliberals and general insane people (conservatives or at least token conservatives are employed too), or at least that’s where views range when these organization aren’t just acting CIA propaganda rags.

The one way a person could almost guarantee they would be fired or never hired from the WaPo/NYT etc, would not even be by being a Hannibal Lecter sort of cannibal, but by having opposed the Iraq War from a left-wing point of view.

It’s actually extraordinarily easy to tell who is real and fake, or to put it better extraordinarily hard to create a fake troll that looks real and has any complexity. For instance most sufficiently competent native English speakers can tell almost everyone who is not a native English speaker really accurately without much training or practice at all. It’s common enough to be able to tell if a writer is actually American or British/Australian or whatever even if all native speakers; the amount of clues in spelling, idiom usage etc would take a lot of very specialized AI/nlp work to mask that essentially nobody does. The only people capable of doing such things are small in number wouldn’t bother.

Disguising one’s language to be invisible to n-gram style analysis at a personal level is super hard, and of course there’s no substitute for content; simply having a few correct or specific views on a few things will of course out someone as being 1/100 million humans on Earth.

It’s the usual 4D chess doesn’t exist meme, people are what they appear to be on the surface in these contexts.

Obviously anonymous short comments are irrelevant or anyone can create an extremely primitive troll anywhere on the Internet with something like “Durka durr deaths to jews” or pwn all of sjwism Sokal-style, but again it’s hard to impersonate anything more sophisticated.

All that said the right (and the alt-right are as bad as stupid creationists etc too) is usually really, really terrible at understanding or impersonating the left, far worse than the other way around, but it’s extremely rare that a leftist would accurately troll libertarians/neo-Nazis whatever anyway.

Know the rest of this might annoy some people but the neo-Nazi racists are exactly what they seem, the Zionists exactly what the seem, the Asian racists exactly what they seem. Often individual people really do have bizarre “triggers” that really do set them off as well, which is relevant not to mass botting/shilling or something but sockpuppeting and more localized community issues and the like. For the local ecosystem TinyDuck is not a Woke African American or whatever he’s supposed to be but a right wing troll larping at his profile. EducationRealist is a batshit cat lady/Dolores Umbridge type. ArtDeco is actually interesting, in that if he was a troll he’d be one of the most sophisticated ones I’ve ever seen, but he’s really just authentic. He manages to opine on every subject as if you surveyed every single lawyer/lobbyist in the Washington DC/VA/MD area and combined them together; maybe you take the median to get the most establishment opinion possible. Of course he’s just a moron who legitimately holds those opinions, whatever his personal/professional life is.

Huge percentage increases in bicyclist, motorcyclist deaths have happened in recent years in addition to pedestrians.

One thing that well, everyone doesn’t get, also the self-driving car hysteria crowd and all that, is that motor vehicle deaths are hugely, disproportionately found in a few categories – drunks, truck drivers, both types of cyclists, non-seat belt wearers (including overlap with the above categories). The public can be simultaneously very fearful (usual layperson inability to understand large numbers and orders of magnitude) of things in general while enormously lackadaisical about true risks. Wear your seatbelt and/or don’t be a suicidal maniac motorcyclist weaving in and out of traffic 30mph above the speed limit.

Some of the whole picture is probably your typical population age structure changes and the like, though for the above cases those are also cultural shifts or at least cyclical patterns (compared to economic recessions and all).

Again, there’s the old story that unrelated estimates from different sources of things like population can be wrong; the old debate over how many illegal immigrants there actually are and how correct the Census population count is. If estimates of the population are off by 10-20 million, then “expected” number of deaths will be off too. Put an extra 10-20M people anywhere that weren’t accounted for and some of them will randomly die in vehicle accidents; dead bodies are one of the harder things to statistically hide or overlook.

The only thing in a policy and government sense Trump could realistically do that would improve things for him personally, his approval ratings, his next election and so on is starting a war. Probably provoking North Korea would bring more popularity than Iran or anywhere else. Obviously, nobody wants that.

One thing that could help the GOP but not Trump personally, that at least some people chat about, is really screwing with the next Census to help R numbers and gerrymandering and all that. Preventing illegal immigrants from being counted for reapportionment is really a constitutional-level thing but the Reps could try something by hook-or-by-crook. Doesn’t help Trump get reelected in 2020, and Trump himself won’t bother with this so it likely won’t come close to happening, but would keep the Republicans alive better for a decade plus. Likewise Trump himself has no real ways to sabotage the Democratic party organizationally, even the Republicans are unlikely to have anything they will do, they just have to hope the Dems shooting themselves in the foot happens on its own in elections.

There are many, many things that would be excellent policy and beneficial to the American people, that Trump can’t/won’t do; often, the Republican party is inherently opposed. For instance, legalizing marijuana and a vast overhaul of the Drug War would be great. Many such things would be wildly popular with the people, the working and middle classes for sure, and help both politicians and party organizations involved in turn, but again, won’t be done.

The chances of Trump individually going against the partisan grain or finding a weird wedge issue to promote or anything like that are very low.

There are also (fewer) similar things that hypothetically could be done by a Republican, but Trump still wouldn’t/couldn’t do. As an example of this, promoting nuclear power (even without any relevant policy on renewables, it would still be a long-term benefit in domestic policy) is not something that every Republican has to be opposed to, the weird creationist lobby isn’t that strong or anything, but Trump being an ignorant moron thinks he should be in bed with the coal industry.

The predictions markets etc. should probably just be estimating how much golf Trump will play each remaining year. Better than starting a war, but Trump won’t build the Wall or accomplish any other major policy the alt-right fantasizes about. Generic corporatist tax cuts and similar tripe are all the Republicans will get.

“Grades behind” is a fake statistic based on weird calculations; it’s not a particularly valid claim.

In general academic tests for young children are pretty unreliable but even if a certain assessment produces a reasonable rank-ordering and snapshot of skills it doesn’t translate into “grade levels” or something, that’s just garbage social science pseudoscience.

Much better would be if journalists, or even the people releasing the data, because who knows what the public can get it, would just report things in terms of sd on the test scores or something.

If 3rd graders were actually 3 grade levels behind, that would mean they would barely know the letters of the alphabet like kindergarten children. Likewise, no group of third graders from any general population demographic is actually 3 grades ahead; that would mean they all on average had mastered, say, math skills that sixth graders had. Not that these things can’t be true of individuals, but not averaged across thousands, tens of thousands of children in a population.

What actually happens with these tests for children is that black students might have scored 1.5 or 2 or whatever sd below the white students on a test, which is stupidly claimed to represent “years of learning” or grade levels when it’s not.

Methodological criticisms aside this doesn’t have that much relevance to the big picture (also, it is true that by older ages students on average can end up further behind, in raw terms) that “the gap” still exists and sjw reformist types don’t have any solutions for it.

The Republicans are losing 0.5-1 million votes a year from white population decline and nonwhite population growth. That’s not everything but it’s a reality to be recognized. The Republicans are never going to randomly surge back and win many more black voters or some fantasy like that.

At an individual level Trump will probably be less popular and voters will be more disappointed with him, true, but that’s also not the most salient compared to the rest of the cold numbers of party politics and how some number of voters respond to incumbents. (All the present polling is distorted by usual tricks of abandoning citizen/registerd voter etc criteria, you have to wait till nearer to elections to get polls consistent with other election cycles, but that’s a digression). Regardless Trump as a lame duck will be less popular since he won’t have built a wall/proved evolution wrong/colonized Mars/whatever moron thing diehard Trump supporters thought would happen. Before 2016, Trump was an unknown wild card that some voters projected their hopes onto too; in general that just doesn’t happen with any POTUS after being in office.

People might say a war could bolster Trump’s support, or of course typical stuff like a recession hurts the incumbent president, but he really just will be a lame duck who can’t compete against any remotely good candidate the next time around. (I don’t think Trump will be impeached etc with any likelihood either, just for the record. Though once again that is actually good for large groups of Dems/Berniecrats etc)

As I might point out elsewhere, the Republicans hold the Senate because of luck in prior election cycles and the House because of a mix of that and gerrymandering, and could through next fall. That won’t change 2020.

Trump didn’t actually have great success in 2016 in election terms; he didn’t meaningfully do better than Romney but won by a fluke (Hillary despised the American people and lost millions of votes that Obama had to third parties, for starters)

It’s impossible to understate in mere words how much better the Dems can do with anyone but Hillary next time around. At worst the Dems will have someone like Booker. (I know people around here would dislike him, I too think he is an empty shell, that doesn’t mean he couldn’t win the nomination process and be competitive in the general)

Finally it’s unclear what baseline assumptions everyone makes and of course there is the deeply ironic fundamental disconnect between koolaid drinkers and everyone else, where the alt-right all share one moronic belief with their mirror images. It’s more sad than funny that the alt-right takes seriously the idea that Oprah or Zuckerberg or someone like that will be chosen by the Democrats; for those who think so it shows they have no understanding of other groups of people whatsoever. The most deranged SJW shills believe Hillary was a brilliant candidate who only lost through Russian hacking, and the most hardcore far rightists believe Hillary was a brilliant candidate who was only beaten by Trump’s 24.5D chess. In reality everyone else reasonable knows that 2016 was flukey and nothing like Hillary’s terrible campaign will happen the same way again.

Trump got >50% of all white female voters in 2016. Not all white female adults, since voter turnout is not that high.

The reason you might not remember correctly is the MSM got this wrong and kind of memory-holed it. Before the election, there were thousands of journalists saying Hillary would win white women and most of them just sort of never admitted they were wrong and never mentioned it again.

And the polls themseleves, not just opinion writers, also were massively wrong, which they were about many, many other things too. For instance Johnson did not get close to as much as the polls often showed.

There will never be very accurate, valid data sources on everything like the actual third party vote because the polls (incl exit polls) were so screwed up. Still, more males voted third party than females, and actually it’s almost certain that >10% of white male voters voted third party.

People who didn’t predict Bernie, not Hillary, would win the Michigan 2016 primary shouldn’t even be counted as human for these purposes, since they obviously don’t understand anything about elections :p

More seriously, do you understand anything about US demographic trends? Beyond alt-right conspiracies about millions of illegal immigrants secretly voting? Huge proportions of commenters who come out of the woodwork are always Europeans or Russians who don’t seem to know anything.

The Republicans are disadvantaged by default and will be more disadvantaged over time, and the Dems won’t have a candidate as bad as Hillary, who was the worst campaigner in history.

Trump didn’t win because of 15D chess or being good at anything; he’s a narcissistic moron. Yet he won because Hillary was a worse candidate pushed through by collusion at least if not fraud by the establishment. Even so she still (surprisingly in the way it happened) won the popular vote, and clearly could have won the EC if her entire organization weren’t equally stupid paint-huffers who thought they should go after Texas and Arizona and not Wisconsin and Michigan in the EC. So the next D candidate winning the popular vote plus a little more is probable. If it was possible a golden retriever or maybe even a pitbull could beat Trump in the next election, so all the Dems need to do is not self-destruct and not have a terrible candidate.

The question of who actually runs and who wins the Dem primary (not Oprah) is of course relevant.

For instance, if the only D candidates running are Booker, Warren, some other less “big-name” D Senators and Governors, it will be hard to predict what happens. Trump does retain a possible chance of winning reelection against a wishy-washy Dem candidate, or some scandal occuring or something.

From time to time I end up thinking the worst part of all this type of rhetoric from liberal capitalists is actually its inaccuracy. The deranged mix of racism, sexism, and classism is something, but then again, women+Sailer’s Law etc.

The alt-right, by political movement standards, is quite traditional and boring in its social/personal sphere of behavior. The criticisms of the alt-right by the liberals here, of course, are not actually about anything particular to the alt-right at all but merely bashing broader groups of people they dislike, such as singles/nerds/whatever crazy obsession one particular newswriter has.

Liberal SJWs have far more ugly race fetishists or anything along those lines really than any other group.

Communists/socialists have way more, a higher proportion, of single and non-traditional people than the alt-right.

The percentage students in kindergartens who are white has fallen by nearly half in the US since about 1990. Coincidence, huh.

But then, professional journalists are the most ignorant class of people about basic numbers and statistics and those pesky facts in the whole world.

For various curious commenters – you can get data from the Census, CDC, and some government immigration sites to an extent, not perfectly accurate but estimates.

She is unable to win the nomination of course; even Tim Kaine (who has proven enough of a power-hungry weasel that he might try anyway) has a higher chance.

Ironically, Oprah running (I don’t think she’d choose to in the first place) could work out well for the Dems by sabotaging Booker/Harris and guaranteeing they won’t be nominated. Would be a hilarious joke for an Oprah candidacy to sabotage Booker’s with the result of, say, Warren winning the nomination, but that’s not outside the realm of plausibility for what would happen if she ran.

Naturally Bernie remains the most likely person to win the 2020 election, because if he runs, he’ll win, both the nomination and in November, so that’s the only question, and then Trump has some chance of reelection in some other matchups (I’d say the odds for Trump reelection since he would lose against many, many possible Dem candidates are about 1/6). After that Biden, Booker, etc have a chance where it depends most on the nomination process, and maybe a slim chance for Pence as the only other R if he takes over as POTUS before 2020 for some reason. It’s actually an interesting question whether a lower tier option like Warren or Pence is really more likely to win in 2020 because so much depends on who would get to run, not the actual general election, but ultimately not worth worrying about.

Ignoring the MSM trial balloons and hysterical right-wing conspiracies, the Dems actually have an extensive slate of other governors/senators in the background who could end up being President, if they ran and on the right platform. Hard to tell this far out what any one person would do; moreover, if Bernie or even Biden is running again there obviously won’t be randoms announcing months later that they are running since they would only lose.

The NYT did not undertake a study and did not examine 60 million death certificates; they effectively lied about how they queried results on a website for data entirely collated by others. I would give the author more benefit of the doubt but this pernicious myth has spread so rapidly that the original source can’t be said to be blameless

Infant mortality and the like overwhelmingly affect the calculated life expectancy numbers.

The metric is not just about “if you take a 60 year old person or something, how old will they live to be” even though average laypeople intuitively guess that’s the number they are looking at. In reality the metric is a weird running average that doesn’t intuitively reflect anything one would think of at a snapshot in time.

Subtle demographic effects by race etc probably play into the overall picture for the US in the present day too.

The past is a different country and all that, at least there aren’t that many alt-right anti-vaxxers and so forth.

I’m actually optimistic on the overall outlook for this drug epidemic both from history and statistics; it will eventually slow down just like all other novel drug epidemics. Again as I’ve said metaphorically it’s just like a fire burning through all its fuel. But then I don’t live in a state where I could have personally heard of a lot of cases, they’re just not around here, and middle-aged white women being disproportionate victims is weird if eventually truly confirmed (as opposed to the suicide rate just being counted wrong in the past and this just being an effective change of mechanism, or anything like that). So I’ll keep an open mind.

What’s annoying on the general topic is nobody has numbers straight; you have to understand the difference between numbers in a database and the real world. It’s even common among the alt-right to argue about things like the Census can’t even count the number of immigrants and illegal immigrants correctly, but if true this massively distorts things like death rates (there are more dead bodies, but there were more people in the first place not counted in the denominator).

Republicans will still likely gain seats in the Senate next year. Nothing to change that projection unless we actually see all the candidates out of the primaries being child molesters or whatever too.

The thing that people just refuse to get, though horse race pundits have a financial incentive not to, is just how boring most of the electorate is. Blacks have always been 95%+ Democratic voters for decades. Most of the 2012 Romney voters and 2014 R midterm voters voted Trump; 2018 will look like 2014 holistically. I understand non-Americans really might not grok stuff, look how surprised they were by Trump, but even so, it’s not hard. (any prediction market etc for Republicans to pick up Senate seats in the dark red states is a good recommendation right now; overseas markets are usually better for free money/arbitrage than anything in the US too, so you’re welcome for that)

Vox, like the idiots they are, seem to have interpreted something that’s about ISIS etc as hunting down their domestic political enemies. Maybe some random Turkish affiliated Twitter accounts will be shut down but it won’t be “Nazis.” I wouldn’t be worried about that.

I’m not paying much attention to Russian elections (really do appreciate your coverage and input, as I personally don’t read Russian+sources) or the WC, and a lot of material here, but one more comment on a topic that’s been common before: the USA benefits hugely from some rent-seeking in a global economy sense and you have factors like English is just an outright better language compared to so many world languages for commerce etc. This is not just common sense or human experience (other than forming novel phonemes English is a relatively easy to learn language for instance) but also quantified with Shannon entropy and all that. Never accounted for (saying something like English is a better language is a PC bombshell) in all the traditional humanities/whatever literature.

Like anonymous coward and others have said, deterministic, public information, zero-sum games: these just aren’t the types of things to best test AI performance other than for fun, or for curiosity about the game theoretic qualities of the game itself.

It’s like the story of two guys running from a bear; you just have to run faster than the other guy.

It’s really not clear how well metrics like ELO and other ways humans have been looking at things are the appropriate way to evaluate performance for AI play beyond human bounds. For any sort of game that is more rock-paper-scissors in strategy, that holds for sure. (Rock might beat Scissors 1000 times in a row but that doesn’t mean Rock is 4000 ELO while Scissors is 3000 ELO. With AI vs AI doing something outside of the bounds of human play it’s hard to tell)

Regardless, I think my gold standard has been the same for years and years; I’ll be impressed when a gaming AI can play a real time video game with a decent amount of strategy (by the human community’s gut test) where its inputs are a camera pointed at a computer screen. (camera doesn’t have to weirdly emulate a human eye or something weird, just no other cheating this requirement)

I actually think this is already feasible for almost everything in the present day already, so anything less is just an even more boring waste of time. Of course this if you had millions of dollars, the best supercomputer hardware, and human domain experts to set things up, which is what I think Go lacked compared to chess or even Arimaa all along; there simply weren’t actually talented humans working on Go AI.

The deranged neoliberal worldview in the present day would be really much more funny to see if it wasn’t happening in our country, if these were space aliens we were observing following the Prime Directive or something.

I liked how it had to be tied in to a completely unrelated piece on terrorism.

Black voters who had voted for Obama but didn’t turn out to vote for Hillary did so because:
a) Hillary was a terrible candidate who ran a terrible campaign of poor strategy and squandered resources
b) Russian mind control rays

I have no clue about the veracity of any of the above but the reason nobody talks more about this topic is in large part lack of data; it’s impossible to know how many times people take tests and stuff given publicly available data. Of course it differs between whites and Asians, males and females, citizens and non-citizens etc. The USA has the worst transparency in schools and standardized testing in basically the whole developed world. People are also uncomfortable understanding or discussing important related facts that go against their politics. (most scholastic tests are actually reasonably valid and not patriarchal hegemonic conspiracies or the like, but they also have low ceilings and sometimes poor floors too, random chance and regression to the mean, tests for younger than high school children are horribly unreliable, and the results in the big picture aren’t applied fairly given how much athletes and the wealthy and all are favored in the educational system)

I actually think a recent comment of mine was lost in a site crash on just this: White women underperform the most on testing/academic achievement (interesting in a Saileresque sense that they are the ones always writing bizarre news journalism rants about standardized testing). That is, the ratio of white females to white males doing well on math tests or something is almost invariably worse than Asians or immigrants respectively.

On topic:

It’s not surprising that the Flynn Effect would slow down/be ending, the same as its existence and a host of minor factors contributing to it isn’t surprising. It would be shocking for the Flynn Effect to not exist, at least in the sense that a country like the USA had its population average IQ go up by 10+ points since it was a rural, non-industrialized nation 150 years ago, or the comparable timeframes for still-developing countries too.

Accounting for exogenous demographic changes and other biases is always hard, but the Flynn Effect always was simple conceptually except for social scientists being an ignorant profession and a few people looking for non-existent “magic bullets.” In other words, the Flynn Effect is not caused by just one magic thing, like it’s only lead poisoning or something.

I’ll have to write more about this sometime, but there are only two interesting things about the Flynn Effect, both poorly understood popularly, the one being why there are so many insanely wrong people obsessed with false ideas about dysgenics and the like. (eg the population of Sweden did not lose 30 IQ points since 300-400 years ago or something crazy like that)

The obvious other problem people don’t understand is that the Flynn Effect isn’t a uniform shift of the intelligence distribution. It’s not that every child who would have 130 IQ a hundred years ago has 140 IQ today; that would be insanely noticeable and so isn’t true, but the causes of the Flynn Effect wouldn’t cause that either. Maybe for the wealthy upper classes and the lucky individuals in the category above better health accounts for 1 IQ point or something; but the population average for a whole society can of course change without the above.

Improvements in nutrition, health, etc. compared to pre-modern societies, education for girls and/or lower classes who used to be illiterate, all that and some selection and testing errors and biases add up to the Flynn Effect we see. Likewise it would make sense that changes in these factors are mostly over in developed countries.

I can guarantee that Asian American citizen female applicants to Harvard with an SAT score >=2300 have a higher rate of admission than corresponding white male applicants. Same at all other comparable elite US universities.

It might be by an order of magnitude, or more, something like 20 times.

Whatever anyone else says or cares about “racial discrimination” the above is the only thing any sane person would care about on this Asians vs whites discrimination issue (of course blacks and Hispanics are massively favored)

Of course the gender discrimination at all elite US universities is so overwhelming and obvious that someone has to be insane to deny it, even say MIT has outright published their admit rate for females is twice as high as males, but that’s not the point. Stupid racists, not necessarily excluding Asian racists filing lawsuits, are so stupid they don’t even understand the difference between gender discrimination and racial discrimination, nor the related factors like Simpson’s paradox that play into what we see in the real world. You’ve also got stupid racists failing to grasp many other simple facts, like that the high school student population of California is not the same as the rest of the country in percentage Asian, but ignoring all that for now.

FAPP everybody (even the Asian students at the elite schools, mostly) actually wants there to be a 50/50 gender split, regardless of the consequences.

What the universities are again deathly afraid of becoming public knowledge is their actual behavior regarding other factors that are salient even among whites only. A white male student with a 2300 SAT score will not be admitted to Harvard, in favor of an athlete or Jared Kushner (someone whose family/political connections/monetary bribery gets them admitted) with an SAT score hundreds of points lower.

Obama’s greatest failures are failing to close down Guantanamo, stop drone strike programs and pointless guerilla war sponsoring in the Middle East, the diplomatic side of the Arab Spring too, etc.

These are things he actually promised or closely related to them, as ending the Iraq War was not a mandate to start new ME wars, and his liberal constituents expected of him, not pie-in-the-sky goals, but he didn’t accomplish those.

Obamacare ended up sucking and didn’t fulfill the goal of being a temporary stopgap before a more comprehensive universal/singlepayer system was developed, but compared to the above that’s not as big of a deal or failure directly on him; it’s also on the party, the electorate and all.

Trump is too much of a moron to do anything like “Nazi Germany” of course, that’s the first place to start. I agree it is crazy all the neoliberal establishment literally believes in this propaganda.

None of Chetty’s data is properly anonymized; he just effectively lied, but we already know this from the studies he released on college admissions, because he would have had to have the actual names/SS numbers of each tax return to match with the college admissions data.

The real interesting story behind all the nonsense Chetty work is this massive breach of ethics, why the private data of Americans was unethically given away by the government, but maybe a hacker-of-Chetty in turn can find the Trump family tax records or something. Go out and do it, Russians! :p

There is no publicly available data on the actual performance of Asian American citizens on the SAT compared to non-citizens, of which there are tens of thousands who take the test and are included in aggregate statistics.

Please immediately link a document that explicitly provides the data you’re citing or don’t make such ignorant comments again.

(That said the estimate you stated could be close to true)

I doubt you’re an employee of the CollegeBoard.

Slightly, maybe. Not by much if it is so; 120s IQ seems about right for Obama, but it could be 115 vs 120 one way or the other way. Tangential is that I am always amazed by how utterly delusional the right-wing types who think he is a “secret anti-Christian” or something are because Obama, and with hundreds of his statements and speeches, is the most stereotypical new Age deist type of person one can possibly imagine. Absolutely a “we all believe in the same god” glib preacher type, not an atheist, not a fundamentalist Muslim, etc. Saying this as an atheist myself obviously, but Obama is exactly like every other middle-class, 120 IQ “spiritual” person, white or black or Asian I’ve ever witnessed or even heard of; people who think he’s secretly a Satanist or something are always speaking purely out of their racism towards blacks and not accurately assessing religion and culture.

Remember this is in the context of “lower than a Nigerian Scrabble champion” and all that.

The IQology sphere never gets over, not even 1% of the bloggers or commenters, crazy numerology about saying things like “billionaires have 180 IQ.” In reality the measurements themselves have distortions and errors, obviously ceilings and floors, and correlations are not perfect at the tails.

Just because a person does a 1-in-10000 thing does not mean the person is a 1-in-10000 person. Hit a hole in one in golf, or succeed in showbusiness or whatever, it doesn’t work that way.

So for Trump maybe his IQ is 120, 115, doesn’t really matter, but it demonstrates how someone who inherits a lot from a wealthy family and has the right luck can wind up. POTUS might be duller than his father or mother, not that we can directly tell, thought that’s good source material for armchair psychoanalysis, and his kids aren’t that bright either.

There is no anti-Asian discrimination in the Ivy-Leagues, for one. The opposite is true; Asians are probably favored in comparison to whites. As for why Asians have simply kicked all black people out of everything, that’s a different question but with an obvious answer.

Espenshade’s work is basically fraudulent , or more charitably, he made some trivial errors in computer code (off-by-one), or most charitably, someone else did the fabricating of data or Espenshade’s work includes nothing to do with what people says it does and he’s a blind middleman messenger. (For example, Espenshade might only have ever collected data from Oberlin and Wellesley or some places like that and never had anything from any actual Ivy League or other top tier school, like Stanford, and other people are just misinterpreting this).

Your response is close to the opposite of true. Every business school is known for being full of dimwits.

That said an accurate assessment of the whole Trump family would be that they are more like midwits. 110 IQ, 115 IQ, doesn’t matter, we’re not going to know formally; ignorance and lack of experience (with say diplomacy) are the much more salient concerns.

A huge proportion, if not close to all, of gay men in human history were involved with underage persons; if anything it’s a very small number of late 20th-21st century moderns that are the exceptions.

This has to be understood when looking at historical records, sources, and so on, with all the talk of governments and religious institutions and everything persecuting homosexuals; their behavior would also not be acceptable to modern moral crusaders. We’re talking all the way to Ancient Rome etc here. Just maybe the occasional historical figure, someone like Kolmogorov was otherwise on the level.

It’s one of the things that might eventually be properly explained with an understanding of the genetics of homosexuality, assuming there aren’t truly multiple types of male homosexuality that are poorly operationalized and measured. Regardless other crazy hypotheses are wrong, ignoring all completely nonscientific explanations (Satanism etc), homosexuality is caused by rare genetic mutations, and while the latter possibility is underexplored as a cause of confounding in noisy research datasets, there’s certainly nothing surprising or even necessary having an influence in modern day culture or politics per se.

It’s possible the outright majority of Libertarian party voters in 2016 were former Obama voters, in say 2012; the modal Libertarian party voter might even have been a Bernie primary supporter. This is not the case for McMullin, obviously, his voters were “NeverTrumpers” but for people not paying attention it’s almost unbelievable how many disaffected anti-establishment voters went all over the place (it makes little sense for Bernie supporters to have voted for Johnson’s ticket, doesn’t mean they didn’t)

Considering the polls were impossibly wrong and dishonest and post election and exit polls didn’t help it’s hard to figure out the exact picture of third party votes. It’s definitely not what msm propaganda holds these days.

Less than half of Bernie voters went for Hillary in the general, but it’s unclear the exact split. Trump supporters and crazy media brag about Trump having way more Bernie supporters than he did, which was definitely under 2 million, but there were so many third party votes and also people not voting or casting irrelevant (eg uncounted write-in) votes.

Trump in general did little to win the election; Hillary was just never ahead in the first place. If anything Hillary was even further behind months out but the p***yGate scandal shored up her vote among poorly-informed women voters. All other campaign incidents and October surprises matter even less, and of course Comey had no meaningful impact on the voting results.

If Zimmerman had only been charged with manslaughter from the start the prosecution would have had to present the case differently in the first place. With the way the court case went it’s obvious in a procedural sense that a jury should not accept the prosecution in effect contradicting themselves and their own narrative. Their simple problem was they couldn’t prove murder, since the only way they really could was intent, and with the circumstances (Trayvon dead, no other relevant witnesses to “intent”) Zimmerman was not going to incriminate himself. Just like with OJ or something, the fact that the prosecution was incompetent or corrupt and influenced by politics, or that the media spouted disturbing propaganda, doesn’t change the actual facts of the case.

This Kate Steinle result is also outrageous but it seems like nothing will ever convince insane wannabe cowboy vigilantes that we don’t live in a cowboy-videogame world. Dueling is not legal; anytime strangers get into a conflict or fistfight or anything in a public place should not mean, in a moral society, that any of them can then start killing. The countless thousands of incidents where strangers get into a fistfight and somene kills someone should all be treated as manslaughter at the least, even though no random low-profile case appears in the national MSM. People shouldn’t be shooting guns off into the air, public places, etc like Yosemite Sam. Wannabe cowboys all across American fantasize in a mentally ill way about obtaining their “right to kill” randomly so it’s not surprising this lack of respect for human life bleeds over into unintended consequences.

I don’t think even alt-right gun nuts actually want to live in a world where the next Ta-Nehisis Coates who thinks his kid bumped into someone on an escalator and happens to otherwise be legally carrying a weapon at the time decides he can open fire on a bunch of people in “self-defense.”

This story is just another datapoint in a long long stream of famous incidents and weird American public perception of homicide and manslaughter. Note how terrible the media and politics are about vehicular manslaughter all the time too; thousands of incidents occur every year with relatively light punishment for drunk drivers for instance, except when one case out of thousands that gets reported on by the media (say, affluenza kid) it distorts public perception.

Much more broadly, as often mentioned by criminal reform folks, for decades the American justice system just hasn’t been built to try cases; huge proportions of all the actual violent criminals take plea deals/never see a jury, and the pressure by the public and media on anything that actually goes to trial thus produces weird results.

So multiple others here were harping on something clearly factually incorrect. The candidate for the most stalwart immigration restrictionists was Scott Walker, who publicly discussed cutbacks on even legal immigration and somewhat plausibly could have made proposals into legal reality in a realpolitik sense. If all sorts of the moron Trump voters had actually pledged support to Walker while he was still in the race in the first place with this position he could have been their candidate; Trump was always a moron who never had clear policies on any aspect of immigration except animosity towards Mexicans specifically.

I had wanted to set down for the record a few basic things about the Trump election and presidency that I hadn’t summarized elsewhere; to anyone sane though we are constantly outnumbered this will be so utterly boring and trivial that you needn’t read it. Still, it’s some obvious assessments and predictions, and it’s curious how self-deluded much of the “alt-right” was and is about their expectations of the Trump presidency.

Trump is a moron with no knowledge of policy or governance. At a personal level, not even considering age related cognitive decline or anything else he might experience over the course of the Presidency, he’s still basically a dishonest narcissist and has been the whole time, and has surrounded himself with other morons as his advisers and staff. 4D chess doesn’t exist. Trump will accomplish just about nothing in office, he might spend his time feuding with the media and celebrities but making this prediction in 2017 is hardly different than in 2016. He meaningfully promised nothing to begin with except building “The Wall” (which isn’t going to happen.) The Republican Congress might push through some legislation on typical Republican corporatist and imperialist policies but this matters not a whit to the mythical Trump agenda and Trump will be indistinguishable from other R presidents here. The Republican party will do well in the 2018 midterms but this follows predictable trends-see below. Trump himself will much more likely than not lose the 2020 election but this was the preferred outcome since before the 2016 general election because it is the highest chance for the Bernie wing of the electorate to have near future successes out of the alternatives.

I guess it’s worth mentioning a few myths from other perspectivies for all the derangement of Clinton-supporting neoliberals. Since he’ll do little of note, and both the last election and 2018 elections will look mundane and not be historical outliers on the Republican side, the Trump presidency will not be the apocalyptic disaster all those nuts pretend it is and not worse than several previous Republican holders of the office.(In an election sense the Republican vote in the 2016 general election was very boring and predictable, hardly differing from 2012-to-2014 trends. What could be called an implosion/civil-war etc on the Dem side with Hillary a historically godawful candidate was the real story. This is not to say there will not be unusual developments in the Republican party in the future, just that the Trump era is all sound and fury.) There are no novel comic-book threats to democracy or rise of fascism that didn’t exist before. Trump will not be impeached and removed from office. Russian “hacking,” however poorly defined that is, of the election didn’t happen.

Trump might truly be less likely to start or escalate more wars, in say the Middle East, than Hillary would have been, for the point of comparing only those two possibilites and one is a counterfactual. Anyway, not starting wars and losing the 2020 election is the best outcome that could have been hoped for, notwithstanding the delusions of some of the alt-right (admittedly not all of them, to the credit of those individuals) that Trump was like some sort of fictional God-Emperor character.

(The best outcome the actual far right/alt-right etc could realistically hope for from the Trump administration is that it doesn’t lead to a quicker disintegration of the Republican party in the near future, but that’s up in the air and I doubt Trump himself made much difference anyway, as this is really all about demographic trends)

The evidence actually overwhelming suggests that to the extent it matters mismatch is mainly caused by sensitivity/specificity errors on academic metrics currently used by elite universities themselves. It’s literally classic regression to the mean.

In other words, the problem is that the cutoff thresholds themselves are affected by too much noise and random chance and it gets worse for lower performing groups like blacks, because the ratio of individuals truly over the threshold to not is lower.

There are plenty of blacks with top-notch HS GPAs (grade inflation) or even decent test score metrics, like ACT scores, but there’s always been a lot of bias or random chance going into those. Then of course non-quantitative factors like recommendation letters have horrible predictive validity. So even a black student accepted with high GPA/test scores/etc can be mismatched; that might even be the predominant experience at elite schools, more than athletes or other special cases who at least know their own situation. This leaves less blame on the school/legislature/etc than most think.

Few understand or accept this thesis because it challenges other unjustified assumptions they have and their bones to pick with political rivals. Remember that shifting to better quality, objective academic metrics (like raw scores on broader exams from say AP subjects) which would ameliorate the above effects for all races and genders would also be a massive hit to other privileged groups and classes. It’s not just the blacks, there would be a huge loss for “athletes” and the like in elite schools compared to the “nerds.”

To a large extent the annoying war for/against affirmative action is insane because it’s just a smokescreen for not fixing the above issue, which, while it might not be a Pareto improvement, it can at least be said it would create massive economic gains and other popularly desirable results for the country.

With how ridiculous that opening is I’ll chime in, more serious first and then the funny parts. Not sure it’s a project worth following through with, I thought the same with the previous posts mentioning this, but I don’t see how one can be that optimistic about Tsarist Russia in a parallel universe timelime.

First it’s a quite tenable position – Orwell was basically right about this – that by the end result WWII accelerated technological progress and a parallel universe without WWII or a comparable war that nonetheless resulted in sufficient gains by certain victorious sides could be decades behind our world in science and technology. The stagnant world in its year 2000 would be only as advanced as our world in 1970, instead of the other way around.

Obviously as a second matter, the most interesting, and not that unlikely, development in a parallel universe with the minimum requirements being something like “different WWI, no Lenin” would be a successful Communist revolution in the USA or Britain. Too complicated to talk about exploring that further here.

Russia at any rate had not necessarily converged with the military power of Japan, and what a thorn in the side that was! While “disappearing” certain historical figures might have clearer consequences in Europe, how much would have to be done in the rest of the world? (and colonial world too) Nor is there any reason to be optimistic that certain conflicts would be escaped; even the actual Russian Revolution (just the civil war, not WWII) was relatively bloodless compared to other historical civil wars and what might potentially happen in a parallel 20th century. Compare the Taiping Rebellion, and consider 20th century technology. In general, the instability of many, many states and empires suggest that even a “different or no WWI” parallel universe would not escape the first half of the 20th century to 1950 better off than our world; it could have been a lot worse.

Regardless, in a realpolitik sense, I think the USA/Britain/to a certain extent France alliance would be very likely to be drawn into an eventual “alternate universe world war” no matter what. Especially if that’s given no Communist Revolutions in the West, circa say 1932 in a “no WWI” universe. No clear reason why Russia would end up better off than the USSR-as-WWI-victor in our universe; 90% of the time it might end up much worse.

So here’s our story. By the 1940s, after a period of economic troubles across the world including many droughts and famines, the Empire of China, Empire of Japan, and Russia, a sorta-constitutional monarchy republic where the Tsars never fell, are at each other’s throats. While there is no crisis like that of Nazi Germany in Europe, states such as Britain, France, and Germany are preoccupied in Europe with Italian/Spanish/Eastern European civil wars and their consequences.

As war in Asia breaks out, the USA mostly backs China, sending them massive amounts of supplies and matériel.

Immigrants to the United States from Russia and a few other European countries, disproportionately Jewish, urge on each further action by the American state. Opinion writers whose motto is “If you hear hoofbeats, think neither zebras nor horses, but Cossacks” launch a campaign in the American news media to oppose the formerly-quasi-Tsarist state at all costs. This propaganda provides soft support to the geopolitical aims of the American state.

The Empire of China is eventually victorious, officially annexing territory out to the longitude of around Lake Baikal into its province of Northern Mongolia. Whatever European rump states remain suffer heavy sanctions and international scorn, in addition to raw wartime damages. Some tens of millions of Slavic peoples die in the latter decades of the 20th century, officially mostly by starvation but some by oppression and civil conflict in the remaining third-world level states.

Let’s turn to the arts and some other considerations for a broader universe-building picture. Without Battleship Potemkin and other works, Chinese cinematography is considered the only alternative to the Western form, but it’s esoteric and widely lacking in mass appeal, so Hollywood appears to be winning anyway.

As for other parts of the world, for example, India never develops a space program or first world economy or anything, but then again it didn’t in the 20th century in our universe either.

On the plus side, our parallel timeline counterparts by their year 2030, if they could communicate with us, would report that all their Internet videogame servers (though they are still decades behind in technical specs) are remarkably free* of foul language and indeed toxicity of any kind.

*Except the occasional Pinoy, of course, but for some reason that’s like the gravitational constant, a fixture in the universe.

I’m so glad these days that Firefly failed. I mean, I was before, it would be hard to find a harsher critic of Firefly vis-a-vis other skiffy, but even more lately.

Many other Republican primary candidates would also have beaten Hillary in the general; O’Malley probably would have beaten Trump. Admittedly Jeb! would have lost, but he wasn’t the only candidate.

The story of the election results has almost nothing to do with what Republicans did in the end, it was all about Hillary being a terrible candidate and losing tens of millions of potential voters the Democrats could otherwise have had.

Trump is disfavored to win re-election, of course, he’d only win against a really weak 2020 Dem candidate. With people always throwing guesses out there early might as well repeat the wisdom: either Bernie or Biden would win if they run, simply running being the only question; otherwise I think Booker is the next most likely bet, he would beat Trump and what’s only unclear is the path to the nomination.

Zimmerman, Leo Frank, OJ Simpson, and Dylann Roof obviously have one thing all in common.

It’s interesting the autistic “Bayes Theorem” crowd doesn’t have the right litmus tests on topics like these.

It’s of course the most amazing that a person being wrong about any of the above so predictably reflects huge numbers of other views and background characteristics.

Yeah, part of this is conflated terms because life expectancy is affected by a ton of things as it’s overall health; there’s obesity and all that. For decades it’s been pointed out that obesity and other health issues could come back to bite Americans, in terms of overall life expectancy or whatever, that’s not new in the literature. Then you have the “White Death” which is a poorly defined concept with the term mostly only heard around the alt-right anyway, and the opioid epidemic which is much more narrow, and also, applies to different groups besides the “White Death.” (Remember part of this whole White Death mania started by a clear error in counting and adjusting for the ages of people wrong, and it’s not like white people are the only ones doing drugs or anything)

Honestly the takes have always been in a terrible direction on this topic, veering into lunacy. An even more cynical but plausible view would be that the current hysteria is somehow a ploy by, say, Big Tobacco (far more Americans, including whites still die from tobacco-related maladies than the current wave of illegal drugs) to distract from their own bad publicity.

What’s really going in the media again is cognitive dissonance where neoliberal, establish Dems just can’t believe they have lost the support they lost; people can’t believe their middle class neighborhoods voted Republican or something. So they have to invent innumerate crazy canards; admittedly many alt-right bloggers aren’t so innumerate but people make wildly wrong estimates all the time. (POTUS does not help, but he’s a moron, not a 4D chessmaster). The situation is not that there are 20 million “coal miners” in the US and a million die from unnatural causes each year, and neoliberals are morally justified in trashtalking them, but laypeople don’t grok large numbers, can hardly tell between a million and a thousand and so on.

As for the drug epidemic talk itself, I think this will really confirm in the end qualitative things many experts already knew. By analogy, drug epidemics can be like forest fires, they eventually burn out in one generation until a new generation comes along, and that would often be with a new drug. Some of the far out media reports are likely caused again by innumeracy, because some events would be treated by the authorities more as mass murder or terrorism if the narratives were true, but the thousands of people across a country as big as ours being involved in drugs is just statistics. Not clear there is anything different in the cold, statistical perspective (obviously being sympathetic to the thousands of people involved is a qualm) than prior epidemics in the US involving cocaine, alcohol etc

The White Death doesn’t really exist the way Sailer thinks it does, is one reason why. Deaton and Case’s work of course was severely flawed from the start. It’s not like they collected any data properly themselves and they made major mistakes in analyzing it. Here are some summaries.

All of the discrepancies and then some that people are claiming exist in the 2000s era are actually, in hard numbers, accounted for by the deaths of military veterans, disproportionately white US adults, some in direct action in the War in Iraq and “War on Terror” but plenty in related circumstances that always result from wartime like suicide. Remember that adult white male death rates didn’t meaningfully increase, even with this decade-plus effect. Of course both the media and political establishment don’t like emphasizing this, and I guess a few partisan sources never put two and two together on reporting when they do talk about this, but don’t realize the huge effects on death rates. (Remember that so few young people, like under age 60, die in the first place, that any shocks such as military deaths can cause huge percentage point effects. As one example, that came up long ago in looking at numbers like these, the 9/11 attacks just about doubled the homicide rate, which is how it’s weirdly counted, for groups adult white males for a year-remember working age white adults were the modal victims of 9/11)

Only somewhere in the tens millions of the leftwing, anti-war voters and Bernie supporters and so on could have told you this for fifteen years.

While it is a little curious to suppose there is otherwise some novel discrepancy with white female adult death rates, there are a host of other factors including professional practice on the medicine end and data collection unaccounted for. Also, there are extremely subtle and complicated effects in both health and demography that could lead to counterintuitive results such as a decrease in childhood death rate that shows back up at older ages eventually, ceteris paribus. If someone with severe birth defects, for instance including Down Syndrome used to die at age 5, and now dies at age 40 in present-day society, that skews statistics.

Lastly but at least second-most importantly, it’s quite possible that bias in the US Census (which the organization freely admits often exist, and in fact the alt-right constantly assumes in other circumstances) has thrown off the objectively small percentage changes in death rates and whatnot that this is all about. The data sources are completely different, not necessarily reliable, and any error there would overwhelm all other effects. Instead of the number of deaths being meaningfully different, it could be the estimates of population that went wrong (and again, the Census often claims errors of 3-5% in measuring white vis-a-vis non-Hispanic white population)

So, the much vaunted drug epidemic really mostly took off after 2010 and it’s still not clear there that changes in data collection and attention don’t make up a lot of the statistical hubbub compared to something like 50 years ago. We can’t trust data from back then; doctors, families, etc would and did to an unknown extent coverup when people died of drugs or suicide or something and it would be attributed to other causes. It’s possible the Internet age and changes in culture and technology are what changed the final data reporting, with nothing being qualitatively different from the past.

Other than the few hundred people, in different age range groups than everyone made a fuss abou, in a few geographically concentrated areas a year the opiod epidemic has little large scale impact on deaths per se and isn’t necessarily meaningfully different from other drug epidemics in the past. Nor is it even different from other pathologies common in the US from car accidents to homicide when compared on an international scale.

Incidentally, though this has been said before, all the propaganda about the white “lower class” and their drug addictions and all in the media is a nonsensical effort to distract from the fact that the white “middle class” also has strongly shifted to the Republican party in the last few years. Even Sailer himself didn’t know the numbers or made the wrong estimate; the white middle class went more R in 2012, 2014, and 2016 than MSM propagandists are trying to claim and erase.

It’s just not that funny but I’m sure all of us have seen plenty worse; keeping in mind Steve is an LA fan himself and this is just a fan getting naturally enraged by something disappointing.

This has been a huge year for chokes in sports though, when you step outside of the moment and think about it. The Falcons back in the Super Bowl, the US MNT (soccer), we’ll see what else.

Right I was just noticing that the results produced can be odd or counterintuitive to those with less experience with the situation, and merely being a test-taker oneself doesn’t mean knowing better or really considering and observing how students behave. Some complicated strategy that doesn’t benefit individual students isn’t necessary, rather there have always been sufficient really simple strategies that some students apply and others don’t. (I’m also just saying I wouldn’t blame students for not doing so, and much like with sports or anything else adults have more discipline, more chance of being exposed to doing things the right way if involved in an activity, or less excuse for ignoring or disobeying authority and recommendations on such).

If you necessary, see whatever is my next comment too for some related ideas, will probably have to argue about patently obvious things like the SAT Math ceiling, but on this and related subject:

Merely eliminating clearly wrong/impossible answers, even on questions a student has to otherwise guess at (say due to time) has always applied to all the standardized tests along the lines of the SAT. Whether it’s math, verbal sections, this same strategy produces net expected value even if not of the same magnitude for each section or type of question. A triangle with impossible sides is the wrong answer regardless of the context of the question, simply determining if the correct answer is a verb or a noun when there are a couple choices for each, all that quickly eliminating wrong answers improves chances.

I agree the SAT (and related groups) purposefully don’t design tests to maximize split of MC answers across the distribution of all students, often including trap wrong answers or whatever, that is true from experience and common sense, but it doesn’t preclude the crazy stuff actual students will do. Teenagers in the past might have had even less prior experience with standardized or even sufficiently long MC tests that in the present test-heavy era students younger than HS usually would.

Of course the “correct” way to take a test, ie for a student with 150 IQ, is something like:
1a) Answer all the questions
1b) Answer all the questions correctly

Students nevertheless do insane things on their own which anyone with experience knows could be routinely improved. Not that the ability to enact test-taking strategy wouldn’t be somewhat correlated with g, or that we are concerned with average students from the root topic of discussion, but much can affect the tails too. Even changes in whether there is a penalty for wrong vs blank answers, and choice of leaving answers blank, could have had effects over time.

So my point there was that it’s clearly quite likely vast changes in test taking preparation or strategy could have happened over time, especially given the secular effects of Internet-age access. I think it’s possible that test structure bias in these senses, and sociocultural advantages creating bias were both somewhat meaningful and greater in the distant past (contrary to constant whinging by hippie types who hate standardized tests there would be massive declines towards the present day on this specific factor thanks to the Internet leveling playing fields and such.) So any populations further in the past, or comprising younger, non-native speakers, or otherwise unusual individuals contrasted to the intended US HS student test takers, could have differences in test taking preparation or strategy skewing assumptions about results. That’s on top of non-g traits like “stamina;” there are plenty of hypotheses like young girls might proportionally have higher stamina than boys at certain ages or something accounting for discrepancies between youth performance and most typical high IQ adult distributions.

Throwing this onto this comment, but one more factor that distorts distributions of scores at tails or at any rate can reflect vast differences and changes over time in test strategy etc. is students effectively only taking one section of the test. This doesn’t mean cheating or breaking any rules or procedures of the test, just that all the time and effort can basically be put into one section, often the math questions as with thousands of present day non-citizen foreign students applying to US colleges. Huge groups of foreign students literally don’t care about SAT Verbal/Reading/Writing because they have to take a separate TOEFL that universities look at, regardless of scoring 400/450/500 or whatever on the aforementioned.

Though this could broadly differ between time periods or affect any non-standard test population (say younger students). However, the ability to focus on only one part of the test can create distortion and is not a natural or intended situation; few legitimate US test takers sit it this way. Incidentally anyone is welcome to take up this recommendation for any projects/charities like improving minority (black/Latinx) test scores, it could likely work well enough to push, say some members of a group chosen for originally scoring around 600 to 700 (a rare score for these demos) or something like that. (Focus only on the math questions on one sitting of the test and just do the rest later) Whether society/the media would be ultimately critical or favorable of gaming the test versus getting these actual results is unknown.

imho, actual tutoring on SAT-like standardized tests probably produces lower benefits than it potentially could because tutors themselves don’t know what they are doing in this sense. Tutors might try to teach crystallized knowledge in limited amounts of time, simply teach vague platitudes and inefficient strategies, or try to force students into a one-size-fits-all system, when what an individual student might need most to improve can be vastly different. This accounts for discrepancies in studies on the effects of tutoring and test prep (plus really poor adjustments for tons of things like exogenous changes over time that students experience regardless of tutoring, eg growth/maturity/improvements in stamina or crystallized knowledge from school classes.) Some of the broken clocks right twice a day around the IQology-sphere are correct in thinking the SAT is more tutorable than popular myths have it. (This again might have been even more true in the past, for the rounded off 1950 to 2000 comparison, but we lack the raw data to know exactly)

Yeah, this is in line with something I said before and I see this point, though few are making it well or addressing this. I’ll be responding to some other comments later but this is quick.

I don’t care about any of Lynn’s specific numbers like that; my purpose here is supporting the claims I made.

My default assumption (not saying this is necessarily true, and obviously given populations like Bushmen it’s insane to expect every ethnic subgroup in all of Africa to the same) for the sake of argument here is that black Africans might have a genotypic IQ of 85.

Nothing Chanda Chisala has ever posted contradicts the above, both arguing about selective immigration to the US, and this Scrabble nonsense (where the egregious estimate of Scrabble player eliteness was still far more galling). I don’t think “the only point” is accurate because it’s almost just a strawman for a much broader argument; one can see the author was cherrypicking stories about immigration after some arbitrary larger attack on “hereditarianism” well before this Scrabble debacle even started.

Anything from endogamous subgroups in a country’s population with a slightly different distribution to an upper class that avoids environmental disadvantages could create more of a range and variance than the assumption you mention of the entire country’s population having a specific mean and sd. (I don’t believe anyway that g is normally distributed so perfectly, especially at the tails, even between men and women there might be bimodal distributions in a given population…)

So granted my default position (for the argument I don’t really care about here either) might be somehow more generous than people (if they exist) who are trying to defend Lynn as religious apologists would. Though the observed population means reflecting the influence environment (and the measurement process and measurement bias) doesn’t guarantee there is even a contradiction.

Also I think the current living population of black Americans has much less than 20-25% white admixture, wherever that myth comes from, but I have other points to get to later and would rather cut down on responses to my comments I’d have to respond to later, so please anyone who was mentioning this, any more better, solid sources? Thanks in advance for the courtesy.

All Interent sites everywhere seem to have about a 10-1 overinflation of user, member, etc. count. That’s excepting such obvious affected-by-spam sites that have higher numbers, and extremely small communities (100 persons or less). Being even a somewhat larger site and not having this property is often a very strong signal of quality and strong community management (I suspect that is not true for this particular case here)

It’s an interesting sort of law, because there is no clear general reason for it. Maybe the behavior of people is consistent enough across cultures and times that not just the proportion of humans who would be active users on a site but things like creating sockpuppets results in the same ratios about everywhere. Conversely the number of legitimate humans who add to the count by signing up one time but then disappearing or being permanently inactive might be somehow stable.

It could also be top-down, which could easily be explained by a few marketing and business programs promoting the same drivel, at the largest organizations first, in that 10-1 just sounds like a good limit to safely inflate to without suspicion. That doesn’t cut across cultures fully though. Plausibly, this could also just happen to be around what human curation against a much vaster and unseen to end users sea of bot traffic and spam is able to cut numbers to, going the other way. These factors would just happen to line up.

Apologies site-side if this comment was somehow duplicated

No, I’m right.

I know you’re a commenter worth responding to and this is a pernicious myth, so let’s see if I can be clear enough and I’ll edit this better than a usual drive by.

Individual test sections of the SAT never had a ceiling above 130, could have been lower sometimes, and taking into account the Flynn effect and ses biases really old tests have other questionable issues too. Although there is some correlation with “grit” and IQ and ease of test-taking and so on such that total scores reflect a little higher; high scorers on all sections will be a little higher than a model of each section+pure random change.

To think otherwise requires someone to literally not understand how multiple choice tests work, or more complicated concepts like Poisson distributions. Or most charitably, foreigners who don’t understand and have no experience with the SAT (or corresponding tests) because claims otherwise are crazy uninformed, the SAT ceiling really has been around 130 since forever, and of course correlation with g (or an actual instantiation of an IQ test score) is not even close to perfect.

The IRT data really, really reflect this (also funny things like large proportions of students scoring below guessing percentages, at least on certain questions, but to be fair they are kids)

Suppose something like an athletic quotient existed (AQ) and you got 10 million test subjects and wanted them to shoot basketballs.

So, you put everybody on the OPPOSITE side of the court and have them shoot a basketball, awarding perfect scores to those who make the shot. You could award partial but lower scores for hitting the backboard or something but that’s not relevant to our hypothetical, just an analogy.

Even in only 1 out of 7000 or something shooters do so, that does not mean that those who made the shot are the best basketball players in the sample or in the word, or that the AQ is correspondingly high. In percentile terms, they in that corresponding percentile of performance, but do not have an AQ of 150whatever. Rather, the people who made the shot would on the median be a group of someone like 130 AQ folks (healthy, relatively fit adult males) who just got lucky. Maybe zero 100 AQ people make the difficult basketball set shot, but that’s not our concern. Likewise, an actual professional basketball player with a lot of experience and training might have a slightly higher chance of making the random, difficult shot than the median 130 AQ subject, but then such subjects would be vanishingly rare.

Now basketball throwing would seem random in this context even though it’s not “really truly random”, but the SAT is literally a multiple choice test with a huge probability of students semi-randomly guessing at MC questions, besides other forms of random variance (relative to trying to equate the test to g or something). If Student A answers 48 MC questions and randomly guesses at 2 and Student B does the same they can get different scores, raw or scaled.

Brief interlude, but one thing a ton of people don’t understand is that changes in the SAT before the 1995 scoring changes also exist, and not just on the fake social justice issues like removing rare “classist” questions, but on actually changing the expected difficulty of the exam. Some of the only publicly available/peer-reviewed studies on the SAT in old timeframes like that discuss this. In other words, the most notable purposeful decline in “hard questions” occurred might have in the mid-1980s, at any rate there was such a change, while the nonlinear scoring change that happened later isn’t really the same thing, even though it’s what everybody cites.

In our basketball analogy, this would be like giving also credit to shooters who also shot a ball that bounced out of the inside of the rim on a nonlinear scoring scale; but it changes very little about the “raw” data or the overall picture (It’s not that everybody perfect shot is literally by a 160 AQ subject)

Realistically, because of the variance of multiple choice tests, and massive influences of things like that internet, the largest effects on tail-end changes in SAT scores are due to changes in test-taking behavior, like leaving multiple choice questions blank. In other words, it’s probable that many 1950s era (or whatever old timey period you choose) test takers did things like leave questions blank while post-Internet era moderners did not, and again, it’s mostly or entirely (depending on iteration and section) a multiple choice test so brute force random guessing will go a long way. (there are not that many “hard” questions, and well, one should know the statistical concepts in the prior paragraphs anyway, law of large numbers and all. Also, if the reason for different score distributions in the past was that students got “easy” questions wrong or something then that raises entirely different questions a la the Flynn effect and savvy people like us would have to puzzle that out ignoring old social scientists or nutty groups like mensa)

I do think there was a bit of a deliberate effort, even before the third section introduction or other such changes, to make girls score higher relative to boys, in a smoky room IRT test designer choice sense, and that has some effects on test prep effectiveness or suchlike, but the SAT never had that high of ceilings.