I skimmed the report on Kenya's 2013 SACMEQ test. It looked authentic, in the sense that it was well-written, well-proofread, had nice graphics. Now, it's possible that all the data was just completely made up. But more often than you'd think, cheaters then can't be bothered to do a half-assed job on filling in the paperwork. Who knows? Maybe in Kenya, they put their all-around best guy in charge of cheating on national prestige projects and he does a really good job.
But I also have this probably forlorn (but not wholly hopeless) hope that Kenya actually is a pretty high potential place. English aristocrats tended to look upon it fondly. Rhodesia was the other place north of South Africa that Brits liked. Rhodesia attracted competent ambitious British farmers, while owning a farm in Kenya attracted rich wastrels, but rich wastrels with good taste.
Arguably, Kenya was greatest literary subject of Sub-Saharan Africa (Blixen, Markham, Huxley)*. With varied terrain, port access, and decent roads and rail, it might be the second-best outfitted non-petroleum SSA country after South Africa.
Churchill famously called Uganda the "pearl of Africa", but things didn't work out so well for Uganda in the 20th century, nor for its neighbor Rwanda. Rhodesia had potential, but Zimbabwe is a byword for failure. South Africa is ... TBD.
If Kenya has not achieved greatness, it has at least avoided catastrophe, which sadly few other SSA countries can say. Maybe that's enough of a platform for some academic achievements? It might by useful to know how Kenya did on previous SACMEQ tests (or other IQ-type tests). Was there a ramping up to the 2013 result, or did it pop out of the blue?
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* It's curious how many of Sub-Saharan Africa's well-known writers were women (the above, plus Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing), and also how long lived those women were.
People don't appreciate how vanishingly rare 100% results are in any study of phenomena in complex systems like human populations. Steve's oft cited fact that there are 0 school districts in the US where blacks outscore whites is bonkers if true. In medicine if you ever see a treatment that worked 100% of the time you would assume the paper was fake.
1 out of 147? I'd expect more than that over time just from random noise.
"If you question an authority or church doctrine, you may be said to be 'in Doubt.' You must then complete the 'Doubt Formula' — a written process that helps the person to conclude that remaining loyal to Scientology is the ethical choice."
There's also "Being PTS (Potential Trouble Source)." That means you are connected to a “Suppressive Person” or negative influence that causes your doubts.
The Scientologists must be pleased at the spread of their doctrines, well beyond the boundaries of their Church.
Ah yes a suppressive person. That was mentioned in "The Kominsky Method". When I was in college the woman in the Back Bay who would try to convince you to come in for the personality test told me I wasn't crazy. I told the guys in my fraternity and learned decades later that the story had grown into one in which Erik was the only person ever turned down by Scientology. I think the implication was that I already at the top level but it could also be that they assumed I was just too much.
Too much Bad Nurture, or Bad Nature? Perhaps the Scientologists are like Steve, Murray, and Watson: so moderate that they allow for both influences on phenotype?
The first quote on your list is from when Watson said:
"Should you be allowed to make an anti-Semitic remark? Yes, because some anti-Semitism is justified. Just like some anti-Irish feeling is justified. If you can’t be criticized, that’s very dangerous."
'Antisemitism' has moral content, so it is *supposed* to mean something like "injustice toward Jews on account of their Jewishness", so it would by definition be wrong, and therefore "never a good look" in terms of what it objectively points to.
But in contemporary society nine times out of ten it is applied as a slur against those who are merely critical of Jews in some respect or who oppose some aspect of the Jewish agenda, in the same way 'racist' is used as a slur against whites. But its moral content is precisely why it can be effective as a slur (This is why I rarely ever use the term, instead usually opting for something like 'anti-Jewish' or 'Jew-hatred' if I want to refer to morally bad behavior toward Jews, although neither of these terms is perfect either).
I took Watson to mean rational criticism of Jews in his use of the word.
It wasn’t that there weren’t any women in the lab. There were lots of women in the lab, because Jim fervently believed that if men had attractive women around, they would want to come to the lab and get more done. There were always, especially in the summertime, a lot of undergrad women technicians in the lab. If you read his books, you are horrified by some of the things he says that seem so misogynist you can’t believe anyone would say those things. But when it comes to judging people in science, he judged them by what he believed they could contribute to science. He came up with assessments too quickly—and probably unfairly—if people would be positive contributors or not. And, if you made it onto the contributor list, it didn’t matter what sex you were or what color your skin was—what was important was your contribution to science. Somehow, I came up on that positive list early on. Jim, for me, has always been a very encouraging and inspiring mentor.
That is a good response (although I no longer consider Scientific American to be a reliable source, on matters touching politics or culture, as here). Joan Argetsinger Steitz cites both negatives and positives; she appears to be trying to be fair.
I queried ChatGPT for summaries of the views of prominent female mentees of Watsons, here is its list.
1. Nancy Hopkins (MIT biologist) -- ... she also wrote about James Watson as an unusually supportive scientific mentor early in her career. "Watson was one of the few senior scientists in the 1960s and 1970s who believed women could do first-rate molecular biology and encouraged them to do so."
2. Carol Greider (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2009) -- ... Greider has spoken about how Watson created an environment at CSHL that was unusually open to women. She has said that as a young scientist she felt supported and evaluated on her scientific merit rather than her gender...
3. Barbara McClintock (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1983) -- Watson was not her mentor, but she had a long and positive relationship with him at CSHL...
Watson recruited McClintock to Cold Spring Harbor... He championed her work and ensured institutional resources for her research even when cytogenetics was unfashionable. McClintock expressed appreciation for Watson’s support in sustaining her work during a period when she had little backing elsewhere.
4. Linda Wilbrecht (neuroscientist; PhD at CSHL) -- Wilbrecht has stated that Watson’s influence helped shape CSHL into a place where women felt able to succeed, and that she did not witness sexist treatment of women during her PhD years there.
ChatGPT added "Several women who trained at CSHL in the 1970s–1990s (group testimony)" -- "Historians of science have noted a recurring pattern in oral-history interviews of women who worked at CSHL, [for example that] Watson cultivated a meritocratic, fast-moving research environment where women were promoted based on productivity..." I did not follow up to get a list of their names.
"The main reason that the media treated Watson so shamefully, of course, was not because there was something factually or logically wrong about his observation, but because the implication that the great man of science drew from these facts is so obviously plausible. It might still turn out not to be true in the end, but Occam’s razor suggests that Watson’s surmise sure is the way to bet."
Whatever the topic, the most angry responses always come from stating something that is logically irrefutable but contradicts everything the other person has been fooled into thinking.
Try telling someone that the Soviets won WW2 pretty much by themselves by killing 80% of the German military. 8 out of 10 go furious with that. Not heard a counter argument yet but got a lot of abuse.
But that is just one of many examples. Steve gives another -
Pinker: Irony: Replicability crisis in psych DOESN’T apply to IQ: huge n’s, replicable results. But people hate the message..
It is a good question. Of course UK and France declined to work with Soviets as allies in 1939 giving Soviets little choice but to be about the 10th country to sign a non-aggression pact with Germany.
Short answer - UK was already fighting Germany before Russia, US wasn't significantly involved until too late. Materials made a difference to Russian losses but arrived too late to affect the result.
UK technically dclared war in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and then in practice soon after when UK went to the defence of France. But much of the next 2 years was low key for UK they only really got back into action in 1943 or 44. From early 1941 after Germany attacked Soviets both UK and Soviets were on the same side.
Essentially the war was over after Stalingrad in 1943 at which point Germany could not win and was losing the Economic war badly. (Some say that effectively Germany lost in 1941 when it failed to crush the Soviets and afterwards the deep Soviet hinterland was always going to supply sufficient reserves - personally I agree).
US in effect only entered WW2 in Europe in 1943 - too late to make an impact.
US materials: some than 10% of deliveries to Russia by weight arrived by end 1943.
Exactly. But a lot of apparently extremely serious internet posters are convinced that not only version 3 was most probable but that only lunatics (and assorted ad hominem insults) could think otherwise.
Another way of looking at it is that Soviets killed 8-10m German soldiers. UK 385k (and a slightly larger number of civilians through bombing) and US were the same scale or less than UK.
I've read that Hitler's motivation for attacking the Soviets was that if he didn't, in ten years they would be so strong they would attack Germany. But wasn't his real motive that he realized in a modern industrial economy you either had huge tracts of land like the USSR and US or you were always dependent on the good will of others and the maintenance of the free trade system. You were always militarily vulnerable to those other kinds of powers should they decide to become acquisitive.
The result of the war kind of showed he was right. And wasn't that what Japan was up to as well?
Well yes both Germany and Japan were engaged in Settler colonialism. Not the traditional British kind where you just steal the wealth streams and leave the local peasants alone, but the kind where you remove the locals by forcing them out or murder and put your own people in.
Japan killed more civilians than Hitler - more even than the most exagerrated claims about Stalin (they don't get referenced much though...).
Other examples of Settler colonialism were Americans on native Americans and of course Israel in Gaza West Bank Lebanon today, and Syria and Jordan very soon.
This was very clear from the start with Germany - there was an explicit plan to remove 11m Jews and Poles. I don't think anyone can answer where Hitler thought he would find the German settlers from though.
ChatGPT's assessment sounds sensible and even-handed.
It's also significant albeit not determinative that in August 1939, Japan's strategic posture vis-a-vis the Pacific and the Soviet Far East was not yet settled.
>> Of course UK and France declined to work with Soviets as allies in 1939 giving Soviets little choice but to... sign a non-aggression pact with Germany.
Of course, prior to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, reasons gave Stalin little choice but to set up the gulag, execute hundreds of thousands, and starve millions to death. Etc.
And of course, the Soviet leadership also had little choice but to sign the secret protocol, invade Poland etc., and undertake the unfortunate activities of Katyn Forest. Etc.
".... reasons gave Stalin little choice but to set up the gulag, execute hundreds of thousands, and starve millions to death. Etc."
The scale of all this is highly contentious amongst historians not least because continued growth in population stats and GDP figures for the 1930s make it highly improbable. And because Historians rightly obsess about the motives of previous historians - try any history of Ancient Rome where interpretation and "why did he say this" is the main topic. It is pretty clear that most historians of Soviet Union have had their agendas.
(The argument "X would say that - he is marxist/Russian propaganda" is not an effective counter)
Hasn't stopped it being de rigor in the mainstream media.
Katyn was unnecessary sure but clear the protocol secret or not was essential, We Brits have been signing them with France and others for centuries.
chatGPT does well on tasks where there has been a lot of discussion among experts. It cuts through all the internet noise and SEO. It's like searching the early internet and having someone summarize it in clear language. I will be sad when this too is ruined by humans being humans.
We need to start thinking past the possibility of racial differences in IQ, which we can do by working to create a society in which anyone, regardless of IQ, who works had and plays be the rules can realistically look forward to a rich and fulfilling life: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
I realize your goal is to promote a concept, and that’s fine. But you have to realize that to “think past” we have to convince a lot of people to stop counting the racial makeup of brain surgeons and particle physicists and reaching the conclusion that white people are evil.
So your idea is, 'Reward those who work hard and play by the rules, regardless of IQ and this will make race irrelevant'? Two things:
1. I think this has been suggested before and is in fact the stated goal of most societies, regardless of whether they achieve it or not.
2. Why would rewarding good behaviour across the board make racial hostility go away? Once there was even-handedness in the state's dealings with blacks the racial disparaties in outcomes would be even starker. What makes you think that black people and their white knights would like this state of affairs any more than they like the current dispensation?
'Why would rewarding good behaviour across the board make racial hostility go away?"
The idea is that once making it into the upper middle-class is not such a high stakes thing (because now there would be a perfectly acceptable alternative further down the income scale}--blacks would be much more satisfied with their life prospects. It was notable that blacks were far more interested in the new lifestyle (two-thirds said they would either dfinitely or probably like to live this way) than the general population (40 percent). See the opening pages.
I can't speak about America but neither I, nor anyone else I know, is 'well above average in intelligence' and we all lead perfectly satisfactory lives (if only we could change our spouses). Are Americans different in this respect to us Europeans?
When you say, 'forty percent of the population said they would like to live this way', what way is that? Lowering upper middle-class status and pay and correspondingly increasing those of people on lower rungs? How does a government increase the status of a job while keeping all else about the job the same? Advertising campaigns? Or would the government have to step in and insist on pay increases for those not in the upper middle-class?
You first have to tell us what you are talking about before lecturing us on how we've all gone wrong. You see, we don't have access to your head to know what you're referring to.
Usually the reply goes right under the contextual comment. It's a feature of the early 90s internet.
But ill directly contextualise
"Why would rewarding good behaviour across the board make racial hostility go away? Once there was even-handedness in the state's dealings with blacks the racial disparities in outcomes would be even starker"
I'm trying to understand , maybe you can help... how did you figure this math out? Africans were above and beyond Europeans for 1000s of years, in technology / civilization building, and MANY MANY other categories. You only have a relative 500 years of dominance in the west (250 in USA). Is this another unfounded armchair assumption?
Firstly, that wasn't Math. It was social science. Secondly, where do you get the idea that Africans were 'above' Europeans in technology etc. etc.? When you watched Wakanda did you believe it to be a documentary? Thirdly, who is talking about dominance? Here we are talking about IQ, time preference, impetus-control etc. You can claim that blacks score just as highly as whites on those traits if you like but you'd be alone in doing so.
It isn’t social science … you didn’t do an inch of thought before saying what you did.
And the fact you addressed that statement about math is disappointing 😂
I can tell this isn’t worth my time , you don’t have it all up there .
Egypt/Kemet - African 1000s of years more advanced than Europe - not Arabian - not nearly European . Started approximating 3000 years before any Persian - Arab - Greek - or Roman was a thought
Kush - more advanced than Europe
Meroe - more advanced than Europe
Axum - more advanced than Europe
Go fucking read a history book idiot. IQ for one isn’t nearly intelligence in any broad scale. If anything it’s alignment with western culture education. So it’s irrelevant, it’s better as a proxy for western economic involvement , than anything organically attached to intellectual performance
first one would have to define race…. then one can simply stratify the difference between a eastern european “white” and a western european “white” with a south european “white” and you can see the difference isnt racial. But thats too much diligence for the lazy pseudo intellectuals
Let's use Steve's nature | nurture theory. Assume there is a base level of natural intelligence with nurture (education, culture, nutrition, etc.) providing a increase factor.
Example: Group A 90 natural and Group B 75 natural, so there is a difference of 15 points (20% of Group A), prior to nurture factor.
If the nurture factor is the same for both groups, the absolute difference grows while the percentage difference does not change.
Example: nurture raises both groups 30%, we now have Group A at 117 and Group B at 97.5, a difference of 19.5 (the percentage difference remains 20%).
For this example, in order to achieve equality, Group B nurture must be 2.25 times more effective than Group A nurture.
Example: Group B 45% nurture increase = 109 and Group A nurture increase at 20% = 108.
IDK, that seems hard to believe. Indeed it could be argued that Group A would have more effective nurture impact.
I think the woke (at least some) understand the implications.
The photo on wikipedia showing earrings that match your description is from 2016. Looks pretty good for 54. It says he was married to a lady molecular biologist Nobel winner for a time.
I have often wondered at the bizarre high education/IQ white and black political alliance, but reading this it struck me that the characteristic they have in common is an extreme tendency to social conformity. Depressing and terrifying considering the influence they have on politics and culture.
Anyway, I don’t know how anyone who has kids could not think genes play a massive role in personality, interests, and ability. Same goes for anyone who reaches middle age and realizes the saying about people becoming their parents definitely has some truth. Obviously there are environmental and cultural influences within families that exist and drive some behavior but that’s not all of it.
In the end, it's not about Watson. What happened after the communist win in WW2 and extending into 1949 was that large parts of Europe and Asia became incorporated into a rather incompetent economic system. Once Americans were cognizant of the result, it encouraged being relaxed on merit in school, further education and employment. This was the advent of social democracy (including race communism) throught the West.
The point is that China gradually moved to a highly efficient market economy starting in the 1980s, and that Russia started making their economy more efficient since 2000s. One can see the results from the economic and military Juggernaut of the China-Russia alliance, for example in the current Ukraine war. Facing against the combined productive capacity of the global West with approx 1 Billion inhabitants (NAFTA, Japan&SK, EU&EFTA), the juggernaut prevails.
So basically, if the West is going to succeed, it would need to dismantle the ideological underpinnings for the changes in education and employment since 1950s. Being race realist is part of the deal.
But it's not the only thing. Welfarism needs to go. Crime needs to go. Moreover, since real-estate is not that productive (see China!), maybe one should readjust old-age income for moderately wealthy not from their real-estate rent but from income taxes and dues of their biological offspring up to the nth generation.
"One can see the results from the economic and military Juggernaut of the China-Russia alliance, for example in the current Ukraine war. Facing against the combined productive capacity of the global West with approx 1 Billion inhabitants (NAFTA, Japan&SK, EU&EFTA), the juggernaut prevails."
No Sarcasm intended - I was talking about the Russia-China Juggernaut. Since 2025 Trump has made some headway - number of US citizens employed has gone up by 2 Mio, number of non-citizens has dropped by 1.6 Mio - but it is going to be a very long recovery needed. If Trump will not be stopped by the mid-terms already. And that is just employment. Education is a complete sh*th*le.
I'm not saying the US is perfect or even great but it sounds like you are absurdly overestimating Russia and China. My understanding is they are both a few years away from demographic time bomb explosion. When the Ukraine war was started all the experts told me that Russia would roll over them. Feels like it's been a few years and Russia hasn't made much progress.
It's a different type of war due to the introduction of reconnaissance and suicide drones. These favor defense instead of offense, so now wars are much more like WW1 than WW2. You see it everywhere where there is access to modern military equipment - it's the same in Gaza or Lebanon.
In 1967 Israelis could walk over the Sinai Peninsula in 4 days or drive up to Beirut in 1982 in 2 weeks or so. It's the same with WW1 vs WW2 - it's not the combatants in WW2 were more courageous or competent - it's just that Panzers introduced a difficult to neutralize mobility into the war theater in WW2. Now, both Russians and Israelis husband their tanks like precious zoo animals to protect them from destruction.
Nevertheless, you can see Russkies are winning because Trump appears prepared to accept near-capitulatory terms for the Ukraine theater...
Demographic time bomb - a lot of it is due to public sentiment downstream of mainstream media (these exist in Russia and China too, lol). But there is a second component due to the combination of availability of contraception and old age provision independent of offspring total economic contribution - the Bismark pension system. I would bet maybe 100$ that China and Russia will deal with these components faster than the West.
>> Russia hasn't made much progress [in its war with Ukraine].
> [The] Russkies are winning because Trump appears prepared to accept near-capitulatory terms for the Ukraine theater.
The Ukrainian performance in the field has been outstanding, for the most part. (Political and military strategic leadership, much less so.) Unfortunately, this is not a war that the Ukrainian side could win, however "win" is defined. The current battlefield situation is not a stalemate, but a slow-motion collapse; it is not in the power of the U.S. or the EU to alter that.
This essay by analyst Gray Connolly from 2023 has, regrettably, held up well.
Trump doesn't like war and made his career (in his mind at least) as a negotiator. He looks at the current situation, what each sides motivation are, where they'll dig in their heels, and tries to get the best deal. He knows the American president isn't going to dig in his heels to save Ukraine. I don't think that means he knows the Ukrainians are destined to lose. Though I assumed from the beginning that they were. It's the surprise drag out of the situation that has me wondering. It's like the west is supplying the Ukrainians with just enough to make the Russians slowly bleed. Maybe the strategy of the Machiavellians is to make the Russian victory Pyhhric?
I suspect that Matt Yglesias has never been to many of the countries on the list whose populations have higher average IQs than the United States. Is the US richer than Japan, a country whose land area is roughly equal to Montana? Is New York City richer than Greenwich, CT?
Trust me, Liechtenstein is really rich; even though it's small and full of smart white folks who speak two languages.
Nathaniel Comfort must be an utter, grovelling worm, precisely the kind of person you wouldn't want on your side in a tight spot. Or any other kind of spot. What a coward.
Wikipedia says, "After working as a science writer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, he [Comfort] completed his Ph.D. in history at Stony Brook University in 1997."
So here he is crapping on the guy who made Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, his old employer, famous. Disgraceful.
I’ve been following the debate on vaccines and autism now that RFK jr has changed some of the guidance on this subject. The only information I’ve gleaned is that both sides are absolutely adamant in their beliefs and use supposedly use science to make their points. As a nonexpert I have no idea who is right. Prior to the cOVID debacle I reflexively sided with the HHS and other “authorities.” I think that would be case for the vast majority of people around this issue of race and IQ. The race issue is something we all grew up with and imbibed the conventional wisdom our entire lives, unless you are about 90. The Covid thing was completely novel to steal a phrase. So I’m not sure what the reasons are for such certainty on both topics. Are there underlying similarities as to why we believe what we think or are their different root causes as to what why we believe what we think? Is it simply blue team vs red team?
More important than Attia's conclusion is the careful and methodical way that he approaches a complicated and contentious medical issue.
Other sober, knowledgeable, (seemingly) disinterested people have done the same for the claimed vaccine/autism link. It should be straightforward to find some via Google etc.
Kierkegaarde and Cremieux - who are both very good bio-statisticians - both tore the autism/acetaminophene story apart. You can look through their evidence - they are both on substack and feature as Steve's sources.
Vaccine and autism had nothing going for it from the start. They are just reminders of the original cartoons and anti-vaccine propaganda printed when Jenner introduced the original cow-pox vaccination in the 18th century.
Moderna, Biontech and cardiovascular events - yep, these do happen, but apparently not as frequently as when you contact the original (stress on original) Wuhan corona virus.
At the height of COVID a doctor I know posted to his social media the fact that COVID could cause myocarditis. He presented this as evidence that COVID is not "just the flu". I pointed out that influenza can cause myocarditis and he responded with a different point. A few months later he posted the same thing.
I don't think the vaccine should have been forced on people and the younger you were, the less you needed it. The idea that it would stop the spread and convey herd immunity was obviously wrong pretty early on. OTOH, even though the stellar results of the original trials were not matched by experience over the course of the pandemic, it is pretty clear that it drastically reduced bad outcomes in vulnerable individuals.
The tech behind it is amazing and has great potential. That doesn't mean we should abandon caution in pursuing it. It's a strange facet of human nature that almost no one can maintain a moderate view of anything that becomes political.
Agree totally. The main selling point of the mRNA vaccines is that they don't need a viral vector that expresses the selected antigen as payload. With the mRNA you can simply express it directly. So it is much simpler (and faster) to build the selected antigen directly.
Also you don't have to worry about the immune response to the viral vector. In particular, you no longer have to worry that the immune response on the first immunization is going to interfere with viral expression on the second round. Astra-Zenecca vaccine had exactly that problem. The Russians had an ingenious workaround for this by using two different viral vectors for immunization #1 and #2. Hey, that's really an expensive way to go around, but intellectually pleasing. Anyway, the West boycotted them... At that point I lost my belief in scientific sanity of the West.
But yes, if you are aware of myocarditis side effects, it makes much more sense to have immunizations voluntary, and in particular think very hard whether those under 35 really need them. IIRC there are still colleges and universities in the US that demand that students have a recurring vaccination for Wuhan Corona Virus...
> Vaccine and autism had nothing going for it from the start.
Agree. I have not read a paper that both (1) presents a strong case for vaccines causing autism and (2) withstands scrutiny.
For instance, it is clear that most of the increase in rates of claimed autism in the US over the past few decades correlate with -- and are caused by -- successive relaxations in the diagnostic criteria for this condition.
Any paper that asserts that vaccines are a major cause of increased autism, but doesn't address "diagnostic criteria" confounders -- it should not be taken seriously.
> Moderna, Biontech and cardiovascular events - yep, these do happen, but apparently not as frequently as when you contact the original (stress on original) Wuhan corona virus. <
Do you have a good source for that?
That was my take back during 2021--yeah, spiky is bad and causes bad shit to happen, but getting a little dose of spiky from the vax, should be better than getting a huge dose when you've got the bug and it is replicating like crazy in your cells.
But the original Pfizer data--when it was finally released after being hidden during the rollout--was pretty terrible, lots of cardio-vascular issues. But, of course, few of the people in the placebo arm had gotten Covid yet, so it was not apples-to-apples.
That apples-to-apples thing--getting the vax, versus getting covid--is what actually matters. Or more globally, comparable overall health outcomes of demographically (inc. health conditions) matched vax vs. non-vaxed over the last four years.
You'd think getting and presenting this apples-to-apples data would be most important public health issue in infectious disease, or at least relevant to Covid. But ... crickets.
Cremieux.xyz had links to original data on his substack
But yeah - I was quite surprized by the West not interested in doing what I would call "real science" on Wuhan Corona Virus 2020-2023 and instead politicized the issue.
"The race issue is something we all grew up with and imbibed the conventional wisdom our entire lives, unless you are about 90. ... So I’m not sure what the reasons are for such certainty on both topics. ..."
I guess, but I have no memory of ever believing the conventional wisdom on race: perhaps I did for a time before I had ever really reflected on it (in other words, perhaps when I was in elementary school), but for as long as I can remember, it has always seemed obvious to me that the different races differed in abilities, including intellectual ability. One just needs to be minimally observant about the world around him. I remember getting into debates about this in high school and college before I knew anything about Sailer or IQ test results by race.
Which brings me to the whole IQ evidence for differing racial abilities: it always strikes me as a bit silly that one feels the need to rely on that, as if we would be totally in the dark about varying intellectual ability by race if we did not have such tests.
I think the Left (socialists) have a sola scriptura mentality. When Darwin wrote his famous book on the origin of species, he did not know about Mendelian genetics. His assumed that acquired characteristics could be inherited. The Socialist/commies of course embraced Darwin's theory, mainly because it bolstered their belief in atheism and their war against Christianity. They still hold on to that Faith, that acquired characteristics are inherited. That implies that with the correct kind of training, IQ's can be elevated. This notion became an important part of sociology, the official science of socialism/communism. Emil Durkheim, an early sociologist, discusses this in his writings. He avers that society determines everything. For example, we know a fact as a fact because society has implanted it into our memory or psychology. So, the task of socialists is to control society and allow it to "socially construct reality." This cannot work in a system where people make up their own minds about things. No. Those who fail to accept the official Narrative must be punished and censored. There is no other way. This of course applies to behavioral genetics and all their implications.
What was going on in Kenya in 2013?
Some kind of belated Obama Effect?
Deets please.
I skimmed the report on Kenya's 2013 SACMEQ test. It looked authentic, in the sense that it was well-written, well-proofread, had nice graphics. Now, it's possible that all the data was just completely made up. But more often than you'd think, cheaters then can't be bothered to do a half-assed job on filling in the paperwork. Who knows? Maybe in Kenya, they put their all-around best guy in charge of cheating on national prestige projects and he does a really good job.
But I also have this probably forlorn (but not wholly hopeless) hope that Kenya actually is a pretty high potential place. English aristocrats tended to look upon it fondly. Rhodesia was the other place north of South Africa that Brits liked. Rhodesia attracted competent ambitious British farmers, while owning a farm in Kenya attracted rich wastrels, but rich wastrels with good taste.
Arguably, Kenya was greatest literary subject of Sub-Saharan Africa (Blixen, Markham, Huxley)*. With varied terrain, port access, and decent roads and rail, it might be the second-best outfitted non-petroleum SSA country after South Africa.
Churchill famously called Uganda the "pearl of Africa", but things didn't work out so well for Uganda in the 20th century, nor for its neighbor Rwanda. Rhodesia had potential, but Zimbabwe is a byword for failure. South Africa is ... TBD.
If Kenya has not achieved greatness, it has at least avoided catastrophe, which sadly few other SSA countries can say. Maybe that's enough of a platform for some academic achievements? It might by useful to know how Kenya did on previous SACMEQ tests (or other IQ-type tests). Was there a ramping up to the 2013 result, or did it pop out of the blue?
---------
* It's curious how many of Sub-Saharan Africa's well-known writers were women (the above, plus Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing), and also how long lived those women were.
People don't appreciate how vanishingly rare 100% results are in any study of phenomena in complex systems like human populations. Steve's oft cited fact that there are 0 school districts in the US where blacks outscore whites is bonkers if true. In medicine if you ever see a treatment that worked 100% of the time you would assume the paper was fake.
1 out of 147? I'd expect more than that over time just from random noise.
> Steve's oft-cited fact
Often cited by Steve. I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere.
What do they call it in Scientology, when someone doubts any of the word of dear leader? :)
Uh, I had to ask for the answer(s).
"If you question an authority or church doctrine, you may be said to be 'in Doubt.' You must then complete the 'Doubt Formula' — a written process that helps the person to conclude that remaining loyal to Scientology is the ethical choice."
There's also "Being PTS (Potential Trouble Source)." That means you are connected to a “Suppressive Person” or negative influence that causes your doubts.
The Scientologists must be pleased at the spread of their doctrines, well beyond the boundaries of their Church.
Ah yes a suppressive person. That was mentioned in "The Kominsky Method". When I was in college the woman in the Back Bay who would try to convince you to come in for the personality test told me I wasn't crazy. I told the guys in my fraternity and learned decades later that the story had grown into one in which Erik was the only person ever turned down by Scientology. I think the implication was that I already at the top level but it could also be that they assumed I was just too much.
Too much Bad Nurture, or Bad Nature? Perhaps the Scientologists are like Steve, Murray, and Watson: so moderate that they allow for both influences on phenotype?
No. Next question.
Kudos to Nathaniel Comfort. It takes real skill to write something so mendacious.
RIP James Watson. A great scientist and a fearless truth teller.
And mad props to the Russian who bought his Nobel and then gave it back to him.
If Watson was correct on race-based IQ, was he also correct on his opinions on women and Jews?
what were his opinions on them?
Read for oneself.
https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/james-watson-in-his-own-words/
Steve seems to refuse to believe that Watson was cancelled for a long history of bigotry and misogyny and not just one statement.
Steve already commented on this before:
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/the-wit-and-wisdom-of-james-d-watson
The first quote on your list is from when Watson said:
"Should you be allowed to make an anti-Semitic remark? Yes, because some anti-Semitism is justified. Just like some anti-Irish feeling is justified. If you can’t be criticized, that’s very dangerous."
The list cut out all but the second sentence.
Defending anti-Semitism is never a good look no matter how one tries to spin it.
Then you should ask the author of your list why he felt the need to cut sentences 1,3, and 4 from the quote.
'Antisemitism' has moral content, so it is *supposed* to mean something like "injustice toward Jews on account of their Jewishness", so it would by definition be wrong, and therefore "never a good look" in terms of what it objectively points to.
But in contemporary society nine times out of ten it is applied as a slur against those who are merely critical of Jews in some respect or who oppose some aspect of the Jewish agenda, in the same way 'racist' is used as a slur against whites. But its moral content is precisely why it can be effective as a slur (This is why I rarely ever use the term, instead usually opting for something like 'anti-Jewish' or 'Jew-hatred' if I want to refer to morally bad behavior toward Jews, although neither of these terms is perfect either).
I took Watson to mean rational criticism of Jews in his use of the word.
> Watson was cancelled for a long history of bigotry and misogyny
Could you qualify your characterization of Watson's posture towards women by commenting on his female mentees' evaluations of his conduct?
I don't read iSteve for one-dimensional strawmen. Those are easy to find elsewhere.
I am going to answer your question even though you could not care less about the answer and will probably just nitpick the wording.
You were the first female grad student to work with James Watson. What was that like?
From https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rna-expert-wins-american-nobel/
It wasn’t that there weren’t any women in the lab. There were lots of women in the lab, because Jim fervently believed that if men had attractive women around, they would want to come to the lab and get more done. There were always, especially in the summertime, a lot of undergrad women technicians in the lab. If you read his books, you are horrified by some of the things he says that seem so misogynist you can’t believe anyone would say those things. But when it comes to judging people in science, he judged them by what he believed they could contribute to science. He came up with assessments too quickly—and probably unfairly—if people would be positive contributors or not. And, if you made it onto the contributor list, it didn’t matter what sex you were or what color your skin was—what was important was your contribution to science. Somehow, I came up on that positive list early on. Jim, for me, has always been a very encouraging and inspiring mentor.
That is a good response (although I no longer consider Scientific American to be a reliable source, on matters touching politics or culture, as here). Joan Argetsinger Steitz cites both negatives and positives; she appears to be trying to be fair.
I queried ChatGPT for summaries of the views of prominent female mentees of Watsons, here is its list.
1. Nancy Hopkins (MIT biologist) -- ... she also wrote about James Watson as an unusually supportive scientific mentor early in her career. "Watson was one of the few senior scientists in the 1960s and 1970s who believed women could do first-rate molecular biology and encouraged them to do so."
2. Carol Greider (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2009) -- ... Greider has spoken about how Watson created an environment at CSHL that was unusually open to women. She has said that as a young scientist she felt supported and evaluated on her scientific merit rather than her gender...
3. Barbara McClintock (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1983) -- Watson was not her mentor, but she had a long and positive relationship with him at CSHL...
Watson recruited McClintock to Cold Spring Harbor... He championed her work and ensured institutional resources for her research even when cytogenetics was unfashionable. McClintock expressed appreciation for Watson’s support in sustaining her work during a period when she had little backing elsewhere.
4. Linda Wilbrecht (neuroscientist; PhD at CSHL) -- Wilbrecht has stated that Watson’s influence helped shape CSHL into a place where women felt able to succeed, and that she did not witness sexist treatment of women during her PhD years there.
ChatGPT added "Several women who trained at CSHL in the 1970s–1990s (group testimony)" -- "Historians of science have noted a recurring pattern in oral-history interviews of women who worked at CSHL, [for example that] Watson cultivated a meritocratic, fast-moving research environment where women were promoted based on productivity..." I did not follow up to get a list of their names.
"The main reason that the media treated Watson so shamefully, of course, was not because there was something factually or logically wrong about his observation, but because the implication that the great man of science drew from these facts is so obviously plausible. It might still turn out not to be true in the end, but Occam’s razor suggests that Watson’s surmise sure is the way to bet."
Whatever the topic, the most angry responses always come from stating something that is logically irrefutable but contradicts everything the other person has been fooled into thinking.
Try telling someone that the Soviets won WW2 pretty much by themselves by killing 80% of the German military. 8 out of 10 go furious with that. Not heard a counter argument yet but got a lot of abuse.
But that is just one of many examples. Steve gives another -
Pinker: Irony: Replicability crisis in psych DOESN’T apply to IQ: huge n’s, replicable results. But people hate the message..
Would they have won if the UK, US et al had declined to participate? Didn't we supply the USSR with material at least?
It is a good question. Of course UK and France declined to work with Soviets as allies in 1939 giving Soviets little choice but to be about the 10th country to sign a non-aggression pact with Germany.
Short answer - UK was already fighting Germany before Russia, US wasn't significantly involved until too late. Materials made a difference to Russian losses but arrived too late to affect the result.
UK technically dclared war in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and then in practice soon after when UK went to the defence of France. But much of the next 2 years was low key for UK they only really got back into action in 1943 or 44. From early 1941 after Germany attacked Soviets both UK and Soviets were on the same side.
Essentially the war was over after Stalingrad in 1943 at which point Germany could not win and was losing the Economic war badly. (Some say that effectively Germany lost in 1941 when it failed to crush the Soviets and afterwards the deep Soviet hinterland was always going to supply sufficient reserves - personally I agree).
US in effect only entered WW2 in Europe in 1943 - too late to make an impact.
US materials: some than 10% of deliveries to Russia by weight arrived by end 1943.
chatGPT says the experts agree:
The consensus among military historians
Most specialists take one of these positions:
1. USSR wins, but years later — the mainstream view
Likely victory around 1946–48 instead of 1945.
Higher Soviet casualties—possibly another 5–10 million.
Germany still gets ground down by attrition and production imbalance.
Why?
The USSR was too big, too resilient, too far from being exhausted; Germany was already declining industrially.
2. USSR and Germany fight to a stalemate — minority view
Without U.S. trucks and food:
Soviet offensives become slower and more costly.
Germany can fully focus on the east.
The front could freeze along the Dnieper or pre-war borders, leading to some kind of negotiated settlement.
3. USSR collapses — fringe view
Almost no serious historian believes this anymore: by late 1942 the USSR was past the point where collapse was plausible.
Exactly. But a lot of apparently extremely serious internet posters are convinced that not only version 3 was most probable but that only lunatics (and assorted ad hominem insults) could think otherwise.
Another way of looking at it is that Soviets killed 8-10m German soldiers. UK 385k (and a slightly larger number of civilians through bombing) and US were the same scale or less than UK.
I've read that Hitler's motivation for attacking the Soviets was that if he didn't, in ten years they would be so strong they would attack Germany. But wasn't his real motive that he realized in a modern industrial economy you either had huge tracts of land like the USSR and US or you were always dependent on the good will of others and the maintenance of the free trade system. You were always militarily vulnerable to those other kinds of powers should they decide to become acquisitive.
The result of the war kind of showed he was right. And wasn't that what Japan was up to as well?
Well yes both Germany and Japan were engaged in Settler colonialism. Not the traditional British kind where you just steal the wealth streams and leave the local peasants alone, but the kind where you remove the locals by forcing them out or murder and put your own people in.
Japan killed more civilians than Hitler - more even than the most exagerrated claims about Stalin (they don't get referenced much though...).
Other examples of Settler colonialism were Americans on native Americans and of course Israel in Gaza West Bank Lebanon today, and Syria and Jordan very soon.
This was very clear from the start with Germany - there was an explicit plan to remove 11m Jews and Poles. I don't think anyone can answer where Hitler thought he would find the German settlers from though.
ChatGPT's assessment sounds sensible and even-handed.
It's also significant albeit not determinative that in August 1939, Japan's strategic posture vis-a-vis the Pacific and the Soviet Far East was not yet settled.
>> Of course UK and France declined to work with Soviets as allies in 1939 giving Soviets little choice but to... sign a non-aggression pact with Germany.
Of course, prior to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, reasons gave Stalin little choice but to set up the gulag, execute hundreds of thousands, and starve millions to death. Etc.
And of course, the Soviet leadership also had little choice but to sign the secret protocol, invade Poland etc., and undertake the unfortunate activities of Katyn Forest. Etc.
".... reasons gave Stalin little choice but to set up the gulag, execute hundreds of thousands, and starve millions to death. Etc."
The scale of all this is highly contentious amongst historians not least because continued growth in population stats and GDP figures for the 1930s make it highly improbable. And because Historians rightly obsess about the motives of previous historians - try any history of Ancient Rome where interpretation and "why did he say this" is the main topic. It is pretty clear that most historians of Soviet Union have had their agendas.
(The argument "X would say that - he is marxist/Russian propaganda" is not an effective counter)
Hasn't stopped it being de rigor in the mainstream media.
Katyn was unnecessary sure but clear the protocol secret or not was essential, We Brits have been signing them with France and others for centuries.
Are you saying the Holodomor numbers are wrong? Do you have a reference where someone runs the numbers?
chatGPT does well on tasks where there has been a lot of discussion among experts. It cuts through all the internet noise and SEO. It's like searching the early internet and having someone summarize it in clear language. I will be sad when this too is ruined by humans being humans.
We need to start thinking past the possibility of racial differences in IQ, which we can do by working to create a society in which anyone, regardless of IQ, who works had and plays be the rules can realistically look forward to a rich and fulfilling life: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
I'm looking for a good publisher by the way.
I realize your goal is to promote a concept, and that’s fine. But you have to realize that to “think past” we have to convince a lot of people to stop counting the racial makeup of brain surgeons and particle physicists and reaching the conclusion that white people are evil.
So your idea is, 'Reward those who work hard and play by the rules, regardless of IQ and this will make race irrelevant'? Two things:
1. I think this has been suggested before and is in fact the stated goal of most societies, regardless of whether they achieve it or not.
2. Why would rewarding good behaviour across the board make racial hostility go away? Once there was even-handedness in the state's dealings with blacks the racial disparaties in outcomes would be even starker. What makes you think that black people and their white knights would like this state of affairs any more than they like the current dispensation?
'Why would rewarding good behaviour across the board make racial hostility go away?"
The idea is that once making it into the upper middle-class is not such a high stakes thing (because now there would be a perfectly acceptable alternative further down the income scale}--blacks would be much more satisfied with their life prospects. It was notable that blacks were far more interested in the new lifestyle (two-thirds said they would either dfinitely or probably like to live this way) than the general population (40 percent). See the opening pages.
I
I can't speak about America but neither I, nor anyone else I know, is 'well above average in intelligence' and we all lead perfectly satisfactory lives (if only we could change our spouses). Are Americans different in this respect to us Europeans?
When you say, 'forty percent of the population said they would like to live this way', what way is that? Lowering upper middle-class status and pay and correspondingly increasing those of people on lower rungs? How does a government increase the status of a job while keeping all else about the job the same? Advertising campaigns? Or would the government have to step in and insist on pay increases for those not in the upper middle-class?
Read https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
“good” to who… thats how the economy already works . its just a lot of you havent taken enough time from arm chairing to see it
You first have to tell us what you are talking about before lecturing us on how we've all gone wrong. You see, we don't have access to your head to know what you're referring to.
Usually the reply goes right under the contextual comment. It's a feature of the early 90s internet.
But ill directly contextualise
"Why would rewarding good behaviour across the board make racial hostility go away? Once there was even-handedness in the state's dealings with blacks the racial disparities in outcomes would be even starker"
I'm trying to understand , maybe you can help... how did you figure this math out? Africans were above and beyond Europeans for 1000s of years, in technology / civilization building, and MANY MANY other categories. You only have a relative 500 years of dominance in the west (250 in USA). Is this another unfounded armchair assumption?
Firstly, that wasn't Math. It was social science. Secondly, where do you get the idea that Africans were 'above' Europeans in technology etc. etc.? When you watched Wakanda did you believe it to be a documentary? Thirdly, who is talking about dominance? Here we are talking about IQ, time preference, impetus-control etc. You can claim that blacks score just as highly as whites on those traits if you like but you'd be alone in doing so.
It isn’t social science … you didn’t do an inch of thought before saying what you did.
And the fact you addressed that statement about math is disappointing 😂
I can tell this isn’t worth my time , you don’t have it all up there .
Egypt/Kemet - African 1000s of years more advanced than Europe - not Arabian - not nearly European . Started approximating 3000 years before any Persian - Arab - Greek - or Roman was a thought
Kush - more advanced than Europe
Meroe - more advanced than Europe
Axum - more advanced than Europe
Go fucking read a history book idiot. IQ for one isn’t nearly intelligence in any broad scale. If anything it’s alignment with western culture education. So it’s irrelevant, it’s better as a proxy for western economic involvement , than anything organically attached to intellectual performance
https://maatsson.substack.com/p/the-5000-year-lag-why-europe-took?r=5ziwze
first one would have to define race…. then one can simply stratify the difference between a eastern european “white” and a western european “white” with a south european “white” and you can see the difference isnt racial. But thats too much diligence for the lazy pseudo intellectuals
> brandishing a copy of ... ‘The Bell Curve,’
Brandishing is definitely not a neutral gerund
In the quoted sentence, it isn't a gerund of any kind.
Yep a participle
Let's use Steve's nature | nurture theory. Assume there is a base level of natural intelligence with nurture (education, culture, nutrition, etc.) providing a increase factor.
Example: Group A 90 natural and Group B 75 natural, so there is a difference of 15 points (20% of Group A), prior to nurture factor.
If the nurture factor is the same for both groups, the absolute difference grows while the percentage difference does not change.
Example: nurture raises both groups 30%, we now have Group A at 117 and Group B at 97.5, a difference of 19.5 (the percentage difference remains 20%).
For this example, in order to achieve equality, Group B nurture must be 2.25 times more effective than Group A nurture.
Example: Group B 45% nurture increase = 109 and Group A nurture increase at 20% = 108.
IDK, that seems hard to believe. Indeed it could be argued that Group A would have more effective nurture impact.
I think the woke (at least some) understand the implications.
Comfort is 63 and wears those giant earplug hipster earrings, at least in semi recent photos
A certain sartorial silliness is a running theme in the very “finger on the pulse of the now” realms of academia
The photo on wikipedia showing earrings that match your description is from 2016. Looks pretty good for 54. It says he was married to a lady molecular biologist Nobel winner for a time.
Comfort's ex-wife Carol W. Greider, won the Nobel in 2009. She's another woman Laureate who was mentored by Watson along with the CRISPR lady.
https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/summer-2010-shelf-life/fast-learner/
I have often wondered at the bizarre high education/IQ white and black political alliance, but reading this it struck me that the characteristic they have in common is an extreme tendency to social conformity. Depressing and terrifying considering the influence they have on politics and culture.
Anyway, I don’t know how anyone who has kids could not think genes play a massive role in personality, interests, and ability. Same goes for anyone who reaches middle age and realizes the saying about people becoming their parents definitely has some truth. Obviously there are environmental and cultural influences within families that exist and drive some behavior but that’s not all of it.
Those earrings make it impossible to take him seriously. It seems that his writing is just as bad.
In the end, it's not about Watson. What happened after the communist win in WW2 and extending into 1949 was that large parts of Europe and Asia became incorporated into a rather incompetent economic system. Once Americans were cognizant of the result, it encouraged being relaxed on merit in school, further education and employment. This was the advent of social democracy (including race communism) throught the West.
The point is that China gradually moved to a highly efficient market economy starting in the 1980s, and that Russia started making their economy more efficient since 2000s. One can see the results from the economic and military Juggernaut of the China-Russia alliance, for example in the current Ukraine war. Facing against the combined productive capacity of the global West with approx 1 Billion inhabitants (NAFTA, Japan&SK, EU&EFTA), the juggernaut prevails.
So basically, if the West is going to succeed, it would need to dismantle the ideological underpinnings for the changes in education and employment since 1950s. Being race realist is part of the deal.
But it's not the only thing. Welfarism needs to go. Crime needs to go. Moreover, since real-estate is not that productive (see China!), maybe one should readjust old-age income for moderately wealthy not from their real-estate rent but from income taxes and dues of their biological offspring up to the nth generation.
"One can see the results from the economic and military Juggernaut of the China-Russia alliance, for example in the current Ukraine war. Facing against the combined productive capacity of the global West with approx 1 Billion inhabitants (NAFTA, Japan&SK, EU&EFTA), the juggernaut prevails."
Sarcasm?
No Sarcasm intended - I was talking about the Russia-China Juggernaut. Since 2025 Trump has made some headway - number of US citizens employed has gone up by 2 Mio, number of non-citizens has dropped by 1.6 Mio - but it is going to be a very long recovery needed. If Trump will not be stopped by the mid-terms already. And that is just employment. Education is a complete sh*th*le.
I'm not saying the US is perfect or even great but it sounds like you are absurdly overestimating Russia and China. My understanding is they are both a few years away from demographic time bomb explosion. When the Ukraine war was started all the experts told me that Russia would roll over them. Feels like it's been a few years and Russia hasn't made much progress.
It's a different type of war due to the introduction of reconnaissance and suicide drones. These favor defense instead of offense, so now wars are much more like WW1 than WW2. You see it everywhere where there is access to modern military equipment - it's the same in Gaza or Lebanon.
In 1967 Israelis could walk over the Sinai Peninsula in 4 days or drive up to Beirut in 1982 in 2 weeks or so. It's the same with WW1 vs WW2 - it's not the combatants in WW2 were more courageous or competent - it's just that Panzers introduced a difficult to neutralize mobility into the war theater in WW2. Now, both Russians and Israelis husband their tanks like precious zoo animals to protect them from destruction.
Nevertheless, you can see Russkies are winning because Trump appears prepared to accept near-capitulatory terms for the Ukraine theater...
Demographic time bomb - a lot of it is due to public sentiment downstream of mainstream media (these exist in Russia and China too, lol). But there is a second component due to the combination of availability of contraception and old age provision independent of offspring total economic contribution - the Bismark pension system. I would bet maybe 100$ that China and Russia will deal with these components faster than the West.
>> Russia hasn't made much progress [in its war with Ukraine].
> [The] Russkies are winning because Trump appears prepared to accept near-capitulatory terms for the Ukraine theater.
The Ukrainian performance in the field has been outstanding, for the most part. (Political and military strategic leadership, much less so.) Unfortunately, this is not a war that the Ukrainian side could win, however "win" is defined. The current battlefield situation is not a stalemate, but a slow-motion collapse; it is not in the power of the U.S. or the EU to alter that.
This essay by analyst Gray Connolly from 2023 has, regrettably, held up well.
https://arena.org.au/reflections-on-the-novorossiya-war/
Trump doesn't like war and made his career (in his mind at least) as a negotiator. He looks at the current situation, what each sides motivation are, where they'll dig in their heels, and tries to get the best deal. He knows the American president isn't going to dig in his heels to save Ukraine. I don't think that means he knows the Ukrainians are destined to lose. Though I assumed from the beginning that they were. It's the surprise drag out of the situation that has me wondering. It's like the west is supplying the Ukrainians with just enough to make the Russians slowly bleed. Maybe the strategy of the Machiavellians is to make the Russian victory Pyhhric?
Watson had two sons, only one of whom was schizophrenic.
I suspect that Matt Yglesias has never been to many of the countries on the list whose populations have higher average IQs than the United States. Is the US richer than Japan, a country whose land area is roughly equal to Montana? Is New York City richer than Greenwich, CT?
Trust me, Liechtenstein is really rich; even though it's small and full of smart white folks who speak two languages.
Nathaniel Comfort must be an utter, grovelling worm, precisely the kind of person you wouldn't want on your side in a tight spot. Or any other kind of spot. What a coward.
Wikipedia says, "After working as a science writer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, he [Comfort] completed his Ph.D. in history at Stony Brook University in 1997."
So here he is crapping on the guy who made Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, his old employer, famous. Disgraceful.
I’ve been following the debate on vaccines and autism now that RFK jr has changed some of the guidance on this subject. The only information I’ve gleaned is that both sides are absolutely adamant in their beliefs and use supposedly use science to make their points. As a nonexpert I have no idea who is right. Prior to the cOVID debacle I reflexively sided with the HHS and other “authorities.” I think that would be case for the vast majority of people around this issue of race and IQ. The race issue is something we all grew up with and imbibed the conventional wisdom our entire lives, unless you are about 90. The Covid thing was completely novel to steal a phrase. So I’m not sure what the reasons are for such certainty on both topics. Are there underlying similarities as to why we believe what we think or are their different root causes as to what why we believe what we think? Is it simply blue team vs red team?
If you can tolerate listening to podcasts, I recommend Peter Attia's evaluation of RFK's acetaminophen/pregnancy/autism narrative.
Episode -- https://peterattiamd.com/tylenolandautism/
More important than Attia's conclusion is the careful and methodical way that he approaches a complicated and contentious medical issue.
Other sober, knowledgeable, (seemingly) disinterested people have done the same for the claimed vaccine/autism link. It should be straightforward to find some via Google etc.
That’s all I do in life is listen to podcasts
Kierkegaarde and Cremieux - who are both very good bio-statisticians - both tore the autism/acetaminophene story apart. You can look through their evidence - they are both on substack and feature as Steve's sources.
Vaccine and autism had nothing going for it from the start. They are just reminders of the original cartoons and anti-vaccine propaganda printed when Jenner introduced the original cow-pox vaccination in the 18th century.
Moderna, Biontech and cardiovascular events - yep, these do happen, but apparently not as frequently as when you contact the original (stress on original) Wuhan corona virus.
At the height of COVID a doctor I know posted to his social media the fact that COVID could cause myocarditis. He presented this as evidence that COVID is not "just the flu". I pointed out that influenza can cause myocarditis and he responded with a different point. A few months later he posted the same thing.
I don't think the vaccine should have been forced on people and the younger you were, the less you needed it. The idea that it would stop the spread and convey herd immunity was obviously wrong pretty early on. OTOH, even though the stellar results of the original trials were not matched by experience over the course of the pandemic, it is pretty clear that it drastically reduced bad outcomes in vulnerable individuals.
The tech behind it is amazing and has great potential. That doesn't mean we should abandon caution in pursuing it. It's a strange facet of human nature that almost no one can maintain a moderate view of anything that becomes political.
Agree totally. The main selling point of the mRNA vaccines is that they don't need a viral vector that expresses the selected antigen as payload. With the mRNA you can simply express it directly. So it is much simpler (and faster) to build the selected antigen directly.
Also you don't have to worry about the immune response to the viral vector. In particular, you no longer have to worry that the immune response on the first immunization is going to interfere with viral expression on the second round. Astra-Zenecca vaccine had exactly that problem. The Russians had an ingenious workaround for this by using two different viral vectors for immunization #1 and #2. Hey, that's really an expensive way to go around, but intellectually pleasing. Anyway, the West boycotted them... At that point I lost my belief in scientific sanity of the West.
But yes, if you are aware of myocarditis side effects, it makes much more sense to have immunizations voluntary, and in particular think very hard whether those under 35 really need them. IIRC there are still colleges and universities in the US that demand that students have a recurring vaccination for Wuhan Corona Virus...
That last part is bonkers. Nice to know that Universities remain insanely committed to never admitting they were wrong. I'm the same.
> Vaccine and autism had nothing going for it from the start.
Agree. I have not read a paper that both (1) presents a strong case for vaccines causing autism and (2) withstands scrutiny.
For instance, it is clear that most of the increase in rates of claimed autism in the US over the past few decades correlate with -- and are caused by -- successive relaxations in the diagnostic criteria for this condition.
Any paper that asserts that vaccines are a major cause of increased autism, but doesn't address "diagnostic criteria" confounders -- it should not be taken seriously.
> Moderna, Biontech and cardiovascular events - yep, these do happen, but apparently not as frequently as when you contact the original (stress on original) Wuhan corona virus. <
Do you have a good source for that?
That was my take back during 2021--yeah, spiky is bad and causes bad shit to happen, but getting a little dose of spiky from the vax, should be better than getting a huge dose when you've got the bug and it is replicating like crazy in your cells.
But the original Pfizer data--when it was finally released after being hidden during the rollout--was pretty terrible, lots of cardio-vascular issues. But, of course, few of the people in the placebo arm had gotten Covid yet, so it was not apples-to-apples.
That apples-to-apples thing--getting the vax, versus getting covid--is what actually matters. Or more globally, comparable overall health outcomes of demographically (inc. health conditions) matched vax vs. non-vaxed over the last four years.
You'd think getting and presenting this apples-to-apples data would be most important public health issue in infectious disease, or at least relevant to Covid. But ... crickets.
Cremieux.xyz had links to original data on his substack
But yeah - I was quite surprized by the West not interested in doing what I would call "real science" on Wuhan Corona Virus 2020-2023 and instead politicized the issue.
"The race issue is something we all grew up with and imbibed the conventional wisdom our entire lives, unless you are about 90. ... So I’m not sure what the reasons are for such certainty on both topics. ..."
I guess, but I have no memory of ever believing the conventional wisdom on race: perhaps I did for a time before I had ever really reflected on it (in other words, perhaps when I was in elementary school), but for as long as I can remember, it has always seemed obvious to me that the different races differed in abilities, including intellectual ability. One just needs to be minimally observant about the world around him. I remember getting into debates about this in high school and college before I knew anything about Sailer or IQ test results by race.
Which brings me to the whole IQ evidence for differing racial abilities: it always strikes me as a bit silly that one feels the need to rely on that, as if we would be totally in the dark about varying intellectual ability by race if we did not have such tests.
I think the Left (socialists) have a sola scriptura mentality. When Darwin wrote his famous book on the origin of species, he did not know about Mendelian genetics. His assumed that acquired characteristics could be inherited. The Socialist/commies of course embraced Darwin's theory, mainly because it bolstered their belief in atheism and their war against Christianity. They still hold on to that Faith, that acquired characteristics are inherited. That implies that with the correct kind of training, IQ's can be elevated. This notion became an important part of sociology, the official science of socialism/communism. Emil Durkheim, an early sociologist, discusses this in his writings. He avers that society determines everything. For example, we know a fact as a fact because society has implanted it into our memory or psychology. So, the task of socialists is to control society and allow it to "socially construct reality." This cannot work in a system where people make up their own minds about things. No. Those who fail to accept the official Narrative must be punished and censored. There is no other way. This of course applies to behavioral genetics and all their implications.