Month: January 2019

Psychologist Dr. Patrick Lockwood wonders why there is so much discussion about IQ, when other factors such as the “big 5” and emotional intelligence are (according to him) more important. I disagree that the “big 5” is important or useful. The reason is, unlike IQ, personality scores can be faked by any reasonably competent person… Continue reading Video: Re: Stefan Molyneux, Nassim Taleb, Race, IQ, Twitter

Saw this interesting question and discussion on Reddit: You have (probably) never encountered a Chinese shill on Reddit, in which the author explains why Chinese shills on Reddit likely don’t exist. The economics of it don’t make sense.   Being fluent in English at a high enough level to debate politics with someone else on… Continue reading The China-U.S. Cultural and Economic Connection

Is it too soon to be celebrating correct 2019 predictions? Earlier in the week I predicted that the Euro would fall against the US dollar, and indeed over the past week it has fallen mightily from 1.154 to 1.139, which is one of the strongest reversals in a long time. In January 2018, the Euro… Continue reading The Daily View 1/16/2019

Yes, there people who are successful at business without having a high IQ, such as in retail or auto, by applying ‘social skills’ such as negotiation to get what one wants, but this is very few people. Trump used negotiating skills to build his real estate empire and to negotiate better terms for his loans,… Continue reading IQ: Still the Best Predictor of Upward Mobility

Venture Capitalist Howard Lindzon makes his 2019 predictions, writing: I believe that we will have a different President of the United States by the end of 2019. The catalyst for this change will be a devastating report issued by Robert Mueller that outlines a history of illegal activities by our President going back decades, including… Continue reading What Is Going To Happen In 2019

There is tentative talk about Trump wanting to fire Fed chief Powell, which I don’t believe will happen. The consensus by pundits is that this will have serious negative consequences. From Forbes, How Trump Could Fire Powell And Rebuild The Fed: And from Vox, Trump’s perhaps correct critique of the Federal Reserve, explained: Premature interest… Continue reading Why the Federal Reserve cannot do much

This is the third and for now final chapter of the Taleb IQ series. See part 1 and part 2. It has been almost two weeks since Taleb’s original anti-IQ Twitter rant and four days since the publication of a Medium blog post also attacking IQ. So far, his statements have generated significant rebuke. More… Continue reading Taleb on IQ: more responses, debunking IQ cultural bias, and the philosophy of Taleb’s liberalism

It has been three weeks since the shutdown began yet these has been no significant interruption. For most people, the changes are imperceptible. This vindicates to some degree the libertarian position that most government employees and programs are useless/redundant/unnecessary. One of the most common arguments against libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism is that there will be chaos… Continue reading The wall & shutdown

There are a plethora of stories of how hard millennials’ lives are and how they are the ‘poorest generation’. However, I think many of these studies and stories have methodological errors that overstate the severity of the problem. From Pew Research, More Millennial households are in poverty than households headed by any other generation: In… Continue reading Are millennials really that poor and struggling?

It’s not news that many pundits, both on the left and the right, dislike Trump, who is possibly the most polarizing politician in recent history, but the reasons are not always as simple as ideological differences, but rather due to fundamental differences in how pundits see the world versus how most of Trump’s voters do.… Continue reading The pundit disconnect