I did read the article. For all of the bragging about noticing things, Steve ignores the achievement gap in academic achievement between males and females.
Look up the writings of Richard Reeves. From completing kindergarten to finishing graduate school, females outperform males. Steve knows this but ignores it since it does not fit his leanings to believe in nature over nurture.
The academic achievement gap is perfectly consistent with women being naturally more conscientious than men. It's also consistent with the hypothesis that education settings are repugnant to men. You're not proving what you think you are.
61% of college gradutes in 2025 were female. At the mean, women are outperforming men academically and having extreme outliers be more male does not help the average male.
Those aren't as relevant as you make them seem. Average performance from kindergarten through high school is just as related to maturity (which females achieve earlier) as intelligence. As for grad school, grad school in which disciplines? To the extent there is a gap it's based on choice and people don't much care if men are racking up less debt for more worthless degrees. OTOH people care deeply (for some reason) that far fewer blacks become tenured professors of physics.
Thanks for pointing out that part of male underachievement is nature. The nature aspects of male underperformance is better understood than the sub-Saharan underachievement.
And women are more than 50% of medical school, law school, dental school, etc.
From Google AI: Approximately 42% of full-time MBA students were women in 2024 and 2023, with a growing number of schools achieving gender parity (50% women) and several exceeding 45% women enrollment, according to the Forté Foundation. The percentage of women in MBA programs has been steadily increasing, with record numbers of women enrolled in recent years, compared to just 28% ... in 2002.
"The nature aspects of male underperformance is better understood than the sub-Saharan underachievement."
How so? Mens average IQs are the same as women's but with a greater standard deviation. Sub saharan african descendants IQ are a standard D lower than whites. It's intuitive that that would cause relative underperformance in G loaded tasks like graduate degrees in science medicine or law.
Earlier emotional maturity explains a lot of why girls do better than boys in school but that effect is mostly over by the time grad school comes around.
Changing ratios in the grad programs you mentioned could be driven by many factors, several of which have more to do with the surrounding societal conditions than the individuals.
Steve - one of the reasons 80:20 split in adopted identical twins may be too extreme is that kids are adopted into particularly caring environments. That, by itself, will strongly reduce the variation of nurture. IE in adoptions, standard deviation on nurture quality may be significantly reduced, compared to the natural nurture quality.
Re: 80:20 split being extreme -- Yeah, a lot has to depend on the definition of the Nurture side. Prenatal exposure to drugs (or Beethoven), poor nutrition, an intellectually monotonous home life, psychological abuse, classroom chaos, being repeatedly hit on the head with a hammer... do the ground rules of your analysis include or exclude such potential environmental influences?
Given that this a glaringly obvious issue, did the field adopt a sensible consensus position, long ago?
You can't - adoption studies are done after the fact. They are like natural experiments. The only things going for the psychometrician who evaluates them is that identical twins share 100% of their DNA, and non-identical twins roughly about 50% (with some variance up or down). But assuming 50% roughly is OK.
You also have the problem that the non-DNA component of variance is not just nurture. Part of that component is white noise. Let's say you have an 80:10:10 split. Instead of an 80:20 split. The intermediate 10% would be noise.
In such a situation, if you (hypothetically) enlarge the nurture variance by a factor of 3, you would end up with 80:10:30. So a 2:1 breakdown of nature:non-nature. If, on the other hand, you had no noise, you would end up with 80:60 split, a 4:3. By the way, a 4:3 split is just 7% away from a 50:50...
I was unclear, above. By "your analysis," I meant "psychometricians' analyses, generally." Still, I think your explanation of "shared environment" vs. "non-shared environment" is generally accepted in the intelligence-research community.
Obviously, it's much easier to do studies with identical twins that are NOT adopted. But there you don't have a good handle on the nurture side. In such a set-up one could argue most of the variation could be due to white noise.
I think they just consider the noise to be nurture, i.e. nurture isn't just things parents do on purpose to help or hinder you--it's everything minus genetics.
Economists have a similar thing going with their definition of "technology".
Right. For example, I'm adopted. My adoptive parents weren't anything hugely special on the positive side, but they also had been screened so well that they had virtually zero flaws. Lots of non-adopted kids had worse upbringings than I had.
I’ve seen the Christmas picture. Your dad had the steam to work in responsible positions at Lockheed when that meant something. I’d say they had a great deal of positives.
I tend to think that people who have gone to the time and effort to become adoptive parents are on average better suited to it than those of us who had a spontaneous good time and had a new arrival nine months later.
Do you think you being adopted had any effect on your views of the importance of genetics? If you're fine sharing, do you know anything about your biological parents and how similar or dissimilar you are to them versus your adoptive parents?
If Steve would read Troubled by Rob Henderson, Steve would not have the nature percentage so high. The outcome for the median foster child shows nurture is important.
What Mr Sailer actually wrote in the linked article.
"You might argue that twin studies suggest 80 percent nature and only 20 percent nurture. But be aware that twin studies don’t adjust for changes in era. All twins were born within a few minutes of each other rather than a generation apart.
So, I’m okay with assuming a Dysonian fifty-fifty split."
Children aren't randomly assigned to foster care. That said, isn't the consensus these days that there isn't a great amount of stuff you can do to make an average child much better than his genes, but a horrible traumatic environment can mess up just about anyone?
> But that is inconceivable to them [Sailer-haters] because it would suggest that I’m morally better than them.
If Harvard geneticist and race-Bolshevik Sasha Gusev PhD isn't your most prominent academic hater, it's not for want of trying. Here, he points out in passing that you've ruined the Comments at Astral Codex Ten by disguising your racism with politeness (or your politeness with racism). By tolerating your participation, host Scott Alexander is unwittingly making Holocaust denial respectable.
Freeman Dyson seems to have come up with his own version of the Anthropic Principle. Where the basic AP idea is that the physics of our universe seems to be finely tuned to allow life to exist within it, Dyson seems to suggest a universe with its physics tuned for maximum interestingness. Truly a deep thinker. I had wondered if there was any connection to the vacuum cleaner guy.
Brady may have constantly played around on his ex, Giraffe Bundtcake, for all I care, but the Mannings stooped to advertising gambling, so Peyton lost his chance at goathood in my book.
I would guess nature sets your upper boundary and nurture decides how close you can get to it. I could have majored in physics or chemistry instead of mathematics, but every relativity problem I did came out diametrically wrong, so I didn't go any further than Maxwell's equations, which I soon forgot.
Since you mention Fred Hoyle, I'll go off on a little tangent and recommend his 1994 autobiography, HOME IS WHERE THE WIND BLOWS. He didn't admit that he'd ever been wrong about anything, and he was smart enough to come up with very impressive arguments to defend even those views of his that the largest groups of experts had discarded. He lays those out so clearly that they are fun to think about, even if you are sure you shouldn't take them seriously. And one of the things that makes the book particularly valuable are his arguments that many of his opponents were as stubborn and given to special pleading as he obviously was. Along the way, he drops a lot of nuggets of insight into how universities and other research institutions operate.
I think nurture is important, if you consider the thought experiment of the extreme case of a child under in total sensory deprivation, obviously that person is gonna be very stunted no matter what their jeans were like. But to me it’s a necessary, but not sufficient condition. It’s like a plant that needs water. Every plant needs sunlight and water, but a bush will grow into a bush ann ancorn into an oak. It’s not as like you can crank the nurture gear to make someone of poor genetic ability into an aero space engineer or something. The person of limited genetic ability will hit a ceiling.
So to me it’s a truth, no doubt, but Steve is saying it in a way so as to appease the wokesters.
What’s been amazing me lately is the extremely young people who are doing extremely well in difficult formerly adult cognitive areas. For example Liam and a few younger people in jeopardy, gukesh the 17 year-old chess world champion, and now that Cairo girl who came up with the counter example to the theorem. It just seems that young people are getting extremely smart. I wonder why.
Hypothesis: assortative mating is becoming more common and more focused. The downside is the left side distribution becomes more barbaric and human mutational load is increasing.
Harvard geneticist George Church is trying to counter mutational load, but obviously his tech can and will be applied to positive eugenics as well.
For now, the egalitarian nurture > nature religion is useful to society's upper classes. Lots of them make good livings off it, and it provides a patina of moral superiority: I made it on my merits unlike those white-trash Trump voters and not by mere accident of birth or hereditary patronage networks.
It's a false religion of course, and hopefully at some point society's thought leaders adopt Sailer's more sensible views before we hit the Great Filter.
The narrative seems to be changing. Perhaps those who brand you an extremist are losing traction with the general public as more people are exposed to your rather moderate takes on things?
Could Brady-Manning debate be similar to the Steph Curry-LeBron James debate? One may have achieved more but the other fundamentally changed the game. Steph with the 3=pointer and Manning with the primacy of the QB in the teams success.
Cosmology is the study of the universe. Cosmogony is the study of the origin of the universe, a subset of cosmology.
In 1968 I attended a weekly lecture series at Cal Tech on cosmology and cosmogony. Every week a noted astronomer or astrophysicist would discuss aspects of the then recently accepted Big Bang theory. The accelerating expansion of the universe was not yet a topic, so the discussions revolved around whether the universe would continue to expand forever or would eventually collapse in on itself.
Most of the lecturers would touch on the issue of origins. Every one of them who did ascribed the answer to how it all began as God. I guess atheism wasn’t de rigor among scientific elites in 1968.
In 2021 I met a former NASA physicist, Louise Riofrio, in Hawaii. She had published a book, “The Speed of Light,” the thesis of which is that the speed of light is getting slower. The rate of slowing is a function of time, so was much faster immediately after the Big Bang. Her theory accounts for both inflation and what we perceive as the accelerating expansion of the universe. As a fellow who made a C in his “Relativity and Quantum Mechanics” class, I’m ill-equipped to comment on the accuracy of her theory but enjoyed our discussion and reading her book.
Concerning IQ, “The Bell Curve” authors posit a 60% nature, 40% nurture mix, not far from your 50/50.
Humans cannot conceive of something without a beginning--everything comes from something else. That model is hard-coded in our brains. But when we follow the chain of causality back, it inevitably occurs to us that the model breaks down, but we can't grok it. So many of us offload responsibility to God. "I may not be able to understand it--above my pay grade--but God has it handled"
I get that. Comedian Pete Holmes has a bit in which he says God is (something like) the name we assign to the wonders of the universe that we cannot understand. Comforting but to me (not that I get to decide these things) the sine qua non of a god is intelligence and doing things on purpose.
I highly recommend the Netflix series "Midnight Mass." It is literally
young adult goth horror-cheese but Mike Flanagan is obviously a serious person and weaves in some thoughtful metaphysics.
I gave formal Christianity a very earnest try for practically my whole life but the events of 2020 did it for me. I can elaborate but bottom line, the religion's highest, God-selected practitioners didn't believe their own faith, so I stopped trying. Religion is downstream of culture which is downstream from people, and the feedback loop for genetics.
If you pinned me down on theology at this point, I'd say the Universe is "God" and life is the Universe dreaming about itself. But it's a genuine mystery why life is so rare. All religions are their cultures' attempts to grapple with the universals and imponderables and some do it better than others. Wahabbist Islam seems to encourage consanguinity and fatalism, so it's one of the civilizational Dont's.
"I’m constantly being accused of being a horrific hater by people who seem to assume that if I dare say X out loud, I must really believe X-squared because they only say in public the square root of what they really believe."
So true, so of the moment. These days left wing and right wing are less a set of policies and more a set of personality traits.
BTW- I recently asked chatGPT if it was true that blacks score lower on IQ tests than whites and it gave a sensible almost Sailerian answer. They have defenses up in the secret preprompts and training data, but you can still get heretical answers if you ask nicely.
You've shown plenty of talent, courage and honesty so it's normal that those who sold themselves in the service of lies hate you.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Unfortunately that is so true. People are so naive as not to be able to contemplate future horrors possible.
One's position would be stronger if one applied it ti the male/female achievement gap as well instead of ignoring the gap.
What achievement gap?
Don't bother. This dude either didn't read the article or is deliberately misconstruing what Mr Sailer said in it. See his other comment below.
I did read the article. For all of the bragging about noticing things, Steve ignores the achievement gap in academic achievement between males and females.
Like in successfully "rebranding" companies...?
Look up the writings of Richard Reeves. From completing kindergarten to finishing graduate school, females outperform males. Steve knows this but ignores it since it does not fit his leanings to believe in nature over nurture.
The academic achievement gap is perfectly consistent with women being naturally more conscientious than men. It's also consistent with the hypothesis that education settings are repugnant to men. You're not proving what you think you are.
Damn Nobel Prizes!! Always counterintuitive.
61% of college gradutes in 2025 were female. At the mean, women are outperforming men academically and having extreme outliers be more male does not help the average male.
Those aren't as relevant as you make them seem. Average performance from kindergarten through high school is just as related to maturity (which females achieve earlier) as intelligence. As for grad school, grad school in which disciplines? To the extent there is a gap it's based on choice and people don't much care if men are racking up less debt for more worthless degrees. OTOH people care deeply (for some reason) that far fewer blacks become tenured professors of physics.
Thanks for pointing out that part of male underachievement is nature. The nature aspects of male underperformance is better understood than the sub-Saharan underachievement.
And women are more than 50% of medical school, law school, dental school, etc.
From Google AI: Approximately 42% of full-time MBA students were women in 2024 and 2023, with a growing number of schools achieving gender parity (50% women) and several exceeding 45% women enrollment, according to the Forté Foundation. The percentage of women in MBA programs has been steadily increasing, with record numbers of women enrolled in recent years, compared to just 28% ... in 2002.
"The nature aspects of male underperformance is better understood than the sub-Saharan underachievement."
How so? Mens average IQs are the same as women's but with a greater standard deviation. Sub saharan african descendants IQ are a standard D lower than whites. It's intuitive that that would cause relative underperformance in G loaded tasks like graduate degrees in science medicine or law.
Earlier emotional maturity explains a lot of why girls do better than boys in school but that effect is mostly over by the time grad school comes around.
Changing ratios in the grad programs you mentioned could be driven by many factors, several of which have more to do with the surrounding societal conditions than the individuals.
Steve - one of the reasons 80:20 split in adopted identical twins may be too extreme is that kids are adopted into particularly caring environments. That, by itself, will strongly reduce the variation of nurture. IE in adoptions, standard deviation on nurture quality may be significantly reduced, compared to the natural nurture quality.
Re: 80:20 split being extreme -- Yeah, a lot has to depend on the definition of the Nurture side. Prenatal exposure to drugs (or Beethoven), poor nutrition, an intellectually monotonous home life, psychological abuse, classroom chaos, being repeatedly hit on the head with a hammer... do the ground rules of your analysis include or exclude such potential environmental influences?
Given that this a glaringly obvious issue, did the field adopt a sensible consensus position, long ago?
You can't - adoption studies are done after the fact. They are like natural experiments. The only things going for the psychometrician who evaluates them is that identical twins share 100% of their DNA, and non-identical twins roughly about 50% (with some variance up or down). But assuming 50% roughly is OK.
You also have the problem that the non-DNA component of variance is not just nurture. Part of that component is white noise. Let's say you have an 80:10:10 split. Instead of an 80:20 split. The intermediate 10% would be noise.
In such a situation, if you (hypothetically) enlarge the nurture variance by a factor of 3, you would end up with 80:10:30. So a 2:1 breakdown of nature:non-nature. If, on the other hand, you had no noise, you would end up with 80:60 split, a 4:3. By the way, a 4:3 split is just 7% away from a 50:50...
Thanks.
I was unclear, above. By "your analysis," I meant "psychometricians' analyses, generally." Still, I think your explanation of "shared environment" vs. "non-shared environment" is generally accepted in the intelligence-research community.
Obviously, it's much easier to do studies with identical twins that are NOT adopted. But there you don't have a good handle on the nurture side. In such a set-up one could argue most of the variation could be due to white noise.
I think they just consider the noise to be nurture, i.e. nurture isn't just things parents do on purpose to help or hinder you--it's everything minus genetics.
Economists have a similar thing going with their definition of "technology".
Right. For example, I'm adopted. My adoptive parents weren't anything hugely special on the positive side, but they also had been screened so well that they had virtually zero flaws. Lots of non-adopted kids had worse upbringings than I had.
I’ve seen the Christmas picture. Your dad had the steam to work in responsible positions at Lockheed when that meant something. I’d say they had a great deal of positives.
I tend to think that people who have gone to the time and effort to become adoptive parents are on average better suited to it than those of us who had a spontaneous good time and had a new arrival nine months later.
Adoption was easier in 1959 than today but still.
Do you think you being adopted had any effect on your views of the importance of genetics? If you're fine sharing, do you know anything about your biological parents and how similar or dissimilar you are to them versus your adoptive parents?
If Steve would read Troubled by Rob Henderson, Steve would not have the nature percentage so high. The outcome for the median foster child shows nurture is important.
What Mr Sailer actually wrote in the linked article.
"You might argue that twin studies suggest 80 percent nature and only 20 percent nurture. But be aware that twin studies don’t adjust for changes in era. All twins were born within a few minutes of each other rather than a generation apart.
So, I’m okay with assuming a Dysonian fifty-fifty split."
Look up Rob Henderson’s mother’s family. He had a lot going for him on the nature side.
Other than being Korean and a college drop out, what else is known?
Children aren't randomly assigned to foster care. That said, isn't the consensus these days that there isn't a great amount of stuff you can do to make an average child much better than his genes, but a horrible traumatic environment can mess up just about anyone?
> But that is inconceivable to them [Sailer-haters] because it would suggest that I’m morally better than them.
If Harvard geneticist and race-Bolshevik Sasha Gusev PhD isn't your most prominent academic hater, it's not for want of trying. Here, he points out in passing that you've ruined the Comments at Astral Codex Ten by disguising your racism with politeness (or your politeness with racism). By tolerating your participation, host Scott Alexander is unwittingly making Holocaust denial respectable.
Or something.
https://x.com/SashaGusevPosts/status/1960039620852449337
Freeman Dyson seems to have come up with his own version of the Anthropic Principle. Where the basic AP idea is that the physics of our universe seems to be finely tuned to allow life to exist within it, Dyson seems to suggest a universe with its physics tuned for maximum interestingness. Truly a deep thinker. I had wondered if there was any connection to the vacuum cleaner guy.
Brady may have constantly played around on his ex, Giraffe Bundtcake, for all I care, but the Mannings stooped to advertising gambling, so Peyton lost his chance at goathood in my book.
I would guess nature sets your upper boundary and nurture decides how close you can get to it. I could have majored in physics or chemistry instead of mathematics, but every relativity problem I did came out diametrically wrong, so I didn't go any further than Maxwell's equations, which I soon forgot.
I recall Steve using the high jumper analogy: nature sets the bar, nurture determines whether you clear it.
Since you mention Fred Hoyle, I'll go off on a little tangent and recommend his 1994 autobiography, HOME IS WHERE THE WIND BLOWS. He didn't admit that he'd ever been wrong about anything, and he was smart enough to come up with very impressive arguments to defend even those views of his that the largest groups of experts had discarded. He lays those out so clearly that they are fun to think about, even if you are sure you shouldn't take them seriously. And one of the things that makes the book particularly valuable are his arguments that many of his opponents were as stubborn and given to special pleading as he obviously was. Along the way, he drops a lot of nuggets of insight into how universities and other research institutions operate.
I think nurture is important, if you consider the thought experiment of the extreme case of a child under in total sensory deprivation, obviously that person is gonna be very stunted no matter what their jeans were like. But to me it’s a necessary, but not sufficient condition. It’s like a plant that needs water. Every plant needs sunlight and water, but a bush will grow into a bush ann ancorn into an oak. It’s not as like you can crank the nurture gear to make someone of poor genetic ability into an aero space engineer or something. The person of limited genetic ability will hit a ceiling.
So to me it’s a truth, no doubt, but Steve is saying it in a way so as to appease the wokesters.
What’s been amazing me lately is the extremely young people who are doing extremely well in difficult formerly adult cognitive areas. For example Liam and a few younger people in jeopardy, gukesh the 17 year-old chess world champion, and now that Cairo girl who came up with the counter example to the theorem. It just seems that young people are getting extremely smart. I wonder why.
Hypothesis: assortative mating is becoming more common and more focused. The downside is the left side distribution becomes more barbaric and human mutational load is increasing.
Harvard geneticist George Church is trying to counter mutational load, but obviously his tech can and will be applied to positive eugenics as well.
For now, the egalitarian nurture > nature religion is useful to society's upper classes. Lots of them make good livings off it, and it provides a patina of moral superiority: I made it on my merits unlike those white-trash Trump voters and not by mere accident of birth or hereditary patronage networks.
It's a false religion of course, and hopefully at some point society's thought leaders adopt Sailer's more sensible views before we hit the Great Filter.
Well said.
The narrative seems to be changing. Perhaps those who brand you an extremist are losing traction with the general public as more people are exposed to your rather moderate takes on things?
Could Brady-Manning debate be similar to the Steph Curry-LeBron James debate? One may have achieved more but the other fundamentally changed the game. Steph with the 3=pointer and Manning with the primacy of the QB in the teams success.
Shoot, Steve. I thought from the teaser we were going to get an ontology column out of you!
I'm glad you and your adoptive parents were so blessed. From what I have heard and read, adoption works out less commonly than we'd like to think.
Cosmology is the study of the universe. Cosmogony is the study of the origin of the universe, a subset of cosmology.
In 1968 I attended a weekly lecture series at Cal Tech on cosmology and cosmogony. Every week a noted astronomer or astrophysicist would discuss aspects of the then recently accepted Big Bang theory. The accelerating expansion of the universe was not yet a topic, so the discussions revolved around whether the universe would continue to expand forever or would eventually collapse in on itself.
Most of the lecturers would touch on the issue of origins. Every one of them who did ascribed the answer to how it all began as God. I guess atheism wasn’t de rigor among scientific elites in 1968.
In 2021 I met a former NASA physicist, Louise Riofrio, in Hawaii. She had published a book, “The Speed of Light,” the thesis of which is that the speed of light is getting slower. The rate of slowing is a function of time, so was much faster immediately after the Big Bang. Her theory accounts for both inflation and what we perceive as the accelerating expansion of the universe. As a fellow who made a C in his “Relativity and Quantum Mechanics” class, I’m ill-equipped to comment on the accuracy of her theory but enjoyed our discussion and reading her book.
Concerning IQ, “The Bell Curve” authors posit a 60% nature, 40% nurture mix, not far from your 50/50.
Humans cannot conceive of something without a beginning--everything comes from something else. That model is hard-coded in our brains. But when we follow the chain of causality back, it inevitably occurs to us that the model breaks down, but we can't grok it. So many of us offload responsibility to God. "I may not be able to understand it--above my pay grade--but God has it handled"
I get that. Comedian Pete Holmes has a bit in which he says God is (something like) the name we assign to the wonders of the universe that we cannot understand. Comforting but to me (not that I get to decide these things) the sine qua non of a god is intelligence and doing things on purpose.
I highly recommend the Netflix series "Midnight Mass." It is literally
young adult goth horror-cheese but Mike Flanagan is obviously a serious person and weaves in some thoughtful metaphysics.
I gave formal Christianity a very earnest try for practically my whole life but the events of 2020 did it for me. I can elaborate but bottom line, the religion's highest, God-selected practitioners didn't believe their own faith, so I stopped trying. Religion is downstream of culture which is downstream from people, and the feedback loop for genetics.
If you pinned me down on theology at this point, I'd say the Universe is "God" and life is the Universe dreaming about itself. But it's a genuine mystery why life is so rare. All religions are their cultures' attempts to grapple with the universals and imponderables and some do it better than others. Wahabbist Islam seems to encourage consanguinity and fatalism, so it's one of the civilizational Dont's.
"I’m constantly being accused of being a horrific hater by people who seem to assume that if I dare say X out loud, I must really believe X-squared because they only say in public the square root of what they really believe."
So true, so of the moment. These days left wing and right wing are less a set of policies and more a set of personality traits.
BTW- I recently asked chatGPT if it was true that blacks score lower on IQ tests than whites and it gave a sensible almost Sailerian answer. They have defenses up in the secret preprompts and training data, but you can still get heretical answers if you ask nicely.