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a Protestant culture which places a lot of religious and moral significance on conceiving human life

Er, that would be more characteristic of Catholicism. There's a reason for this Monty Python skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifgHHhw_6g8.

Francis Galton, a product of a thoroughly Protestant society, was already worrying about the negative correlation between socioeconomic status and fertility very shortly after the Industrial Revolution.

I just remembered this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DVR27dKuQY, a chimpanzee smoking a cig somewhere in China.

I like the following anecdote of Darwin's (though it's from quite a bit later in time):

Many kinds of monkeys have a strong taste for tea, coffee, and spiritous liquors: they will also, as I have myself seen, smoke tobacco with pleasure. (6. The same tastes are common to some animals much lower in the scale. Mr. A. Nichols informs me that he kept in Queensland, in Australia, three individuals of the Phaseolarctus cinereus [koalas]; and that, without having been taught in any way, they acquired a strong taste for rum, and for smoking tobacco.) Brehm asserts that the natives of north-eastern Africa catch the wild baboons by exposing vessels with strong beer, by which they are made drunk. He has seen some of these animals, which he kept in confinement, in this state; and he gives a laughable account of their behaviour and strange grimaces. On the following morning they were very cross and dismal; they held their aching heads with both hands, and wore a most pitiable expression: when beer or wine was offered them, they turned away with disgust, but relished the juice of lemons. An American monkey, an Ateles, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus was wiser than many men. These trifling facts prove how similar the nerves of taste must be in monkeys and man, and how similarly their whole nervous system is affected.

- "The Descent of Man"

The sentiment is lifted directly from the linked post.

It's hard to argue with given the subcontinent had agricultural, seafaring populations while Australian populations never made it past Paleolithic hunter-gathering.

here's some interesting speculation on this topic: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/a-three-hour-tour/

Basically there's genetic (Y chromosome) and linguistic evidence suggesting an infusion of Indian immigration (~5000 years ago so maybe a distinct event from this). One plausible explanation is that some Dravidian seafarers crash-landed in Australia and got absorbed by the local population. From their perspective it probably would have felt like sinking into savagery.

If you're a remotely rational government, why would you not subsidize it? The dividends you could reap from a population with greater health, intelligence, self-control, low time-preference, etc., would be ridiculous.

Of course maybe people will want to use it for more zero-sum things like height or looks, so maybe you ban or don't subsidize that, but inequality in more positive-sum traits is unlikely.

90% of genetic variance in human races exists in the African continent

Counting neutral variation (the vast majority of genetic variation). You can get plenty of variation in non-coding DNA from drift without any effect on the variance in a trait. In fact, you rarely actually get effects on highly polygenic traits from drift without selection (imagine random directions chosen independently for each of the relevant alleles, and think in terms of the law of large numbers).

If you're getting this from Oded Galor or Deidre McCloskey, they're generally smart people but don't understand population genetics well.

*related

since this doesn't seem familiar to people, a little more detail:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/16/did-falling-testosteron...

https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article-lookup/doi/10.1210/jc....

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17895324

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323394504578607...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/active/mens-health/10695991/W...

Serum testosterone levels and sperm count and quality seem to be declining. Not entirely clear it's real and not all clear why it would be happening.

Some contrary evidence: http://www.harryfisch.com/pdf/Declining%20Worldwide%20Sperm%...

relsted to the secular decline in testosterone (whatever's causing that)?

I've heard that there was a sharp increase from the early 20th century to the 70s-80s, then a small decline since then (maybe due to deleading gasoline among other things), and it seems to have happened in other countries too http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/olym....

It's a bit hard to judge since there are only a few crimes where measurement has been consistent and good, e.g., homicide and violent crime. And there you have to take into account the decline in lethality due to better medical care:

https://twitter.com/RAVerBruggen/status/754446756805509120

https://twitter.com/RAVerBruggen/status/756512858331082752.

I'd like to see the trend in assaults, which would be most relevant to free-range parenting, but haven't been able to find it anywhere.

Alternate perspective:

"Rethinking the Transmission Gap: What Behavioral Genetics and Evolutionary Psychology Mean for Attachment Theory", https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303952365_Rethinkin...

"Top 10 Replicated Findings From Behavioral Genetics", http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1745691615617439

I would really recommend reading the above (in particular finding 9 from the second survey). The media has a strong bias towards environmental theories of human traits.

Has Thiel described himself as "libertarian" recently? Even if he has, I'm not sure he means it in the same sense as the general population.

I like Samuel Hammond's analysis. His shorthand for Thiel's political philosophy is "corporate feudalism":

https://medium.com/@hamandcheese/why-peter-thiels-endorsemen...

https://medium.com/soapbox-dc/peter-thiels-plan-to-become-ce...

Strange to be investing this late in the race though.

There was an interesting study looking at measures of honesty and economic growth: https://www.uea.ac.uk/documents/3154295/7054672/Honesty+pape....

Chinese nationals were in the top 2 of both measures of dishonesty (which didn't correlate all that well in general, so I'm not sure "honesty" is all that easy to measure), while British nationals were in the bottom 2 of both. One of the correlations they found was that rates of honesty were correlated with rates of Protestant Christianity.

No self-experiments but he has posted this https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/537w8h/phys..., a twin study showing decreased body fat and increased grey matter in response to exercise.

Yeah I was skimming replies and didn't notice the thrust of your comment. But I stand by my statement about that particular conversation.

Based off what I've seen, if Twitter goes under, I expect one of the participants (pseudoerasmus) would not switch to another social network and would just stick to blogging.

G+ was good (a lot of academics were using it heavily for a while and I think John Baez, for example, still is), but it never accumulated much of a userbase (the reason I don't spend much time on it and probably the same reason you don't).

I don't think the character limit is a boon. Sina Weibo removed it, and that seemed to go well.

edit:

One thing I forgot to mention: I use Twitter lists a lot and have various ones assigned to different fields (econ, genetics, politics/current events, microfiction, etc.). Twitter search can filter by list, so, eg, I can see any idle comment any of ~70 economists has ever made about: real business cycles, endogenous vs. exogenous effects, moral hazard, regression discontinuities, etc., at least on Twitter. I can't really do that on Facebook (no real search, right?) or G+ (might have something similar but not enough people using it).

Facebook is a walled garden w/ no anonymity. Privacy (specifically, most posts are only seen by friends of poster) can be good but it can also stifle discussion. Google Plus might have been good (and got some notable adoption among academics initially) but could never accumulate enough of a network for a variety of reasons. Reddit actually has a lot going for it for these purposes, but doesn't work well for "personal brand" building, so doesn't get much uptake among experts.

Other social networks I can think of are mostly focused on sharing pictures and experiences among close friends.

Here's one discussion that I don't think could have taken place on another social network: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/771434850863583233.

There a lot of people I follow on Twitter who value their anonymity, like https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus, and being able to see them debate others real-time about issues of substance is valuable to me.

Some other examples of recent, useful tweets:

https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/775038793376231424

https://twitter.com/cblatts/status/685580497859252224

Twitter encourages interactivity in way that Facebook does not (though that might have more to due with the existing userbase than the UX), and it's text-focused in a way that Instagram, Snapchat, etc., are not.

There's preliminary evidence for weak but steady selection against cognitive ability and/or educational attainment over the past century.

http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/05/037929

http://www.pnas.org/content/113/24/6647/F2.expansion.html

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615...

https://jasoncollins.org/2016/07/22/kaufmanns-shall-the-reli...

The main driving factor seems to be educated people (and women in particular; some studies have found positive selection for men) not having children.

I'd recommend it. I was grandfathered into the free plan but $11/year seems fair.

Regardless of what you settle on I'd look for the equivalent of http://www.packal.org/workflow/alfred-pinboard for whatever service and platform you use. Being able to instantly search through all fields of all items in your archive is pretty great and has changed the way I work.

I've started keeping such a list actually: [redacted]

I like the scenarios described in https://carcinisation.com/2015/07/23/defensive-epistemology/.

One of them is using the efficient market hypothesis (true enough for this application) to avoid being taken in by a real estate broker.

Yes, they still haven't replied to a question about this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4p5xgx/ai_hedge_fu...

Based off that article they don't seem to understand the homomorphic in homomorphic encryption.

The mix of technical BS and seemingly expert advisers is weird.

The point he's making is that Facebook can't be trusted to self-regulate (in the context of privacy). With that assumption you probably wouldn't accept their opaque self-investigation so placidly.

I think the point is that a casual observer would not have guessed trending tropics were so influenced by human intervention, and might have taken them to be an actual reflection of the Facebook hivemind. Further the statement of "no evidence of systematic political bias" is a bit hard to swallow given reports of Facebook employees asking "what Facebook can do to stop Donald Trump" at their all-hands (one of the top 5 questions in a poll [0] not just a lone employee walking up to the microphone). Further, the people curating these feeds are probably underpaid and young, and hence are probably going to skew left of the average journalist. Bias doesn't have to be explicit to be systematic.

Anyway I find Donald Trump + much of the rest of the GOP field pretty reprehensible politics-wise, Facebook seems to be handling things well [1], and we shouldn't worry about a conflict of interest as much as w/ advertising+privacy [2], but some amount of vigilance seems wise given how much influence these platforms can have over political outcomes [3]. Twitter in particular seems to have made a few fairly illiberal moves lately from my POV.

[0] http://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-...

[1] https://medium.com/@glennbeck/what-disturbed-me-about-the-fa...

[2] One shouldn't discount the H1B angle completely though.

[3] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-co...