Month: September 2022

This is pretty funny…cry me a river. Taleb is virtue signaling about Covid again, like I said he does in my post 2 days ago. The guy is obsessed with pain and suffering. "…how it would have sounded in 2020 when we had field hospitals in Central Park, bodies were stacked in trailers as funeral… Continue reading Covid is bad, but so is living in a permanent state of fear and anger

I have been trying to pin down or delineate the battlelines for the ideological strife America has been embroiled in since 2016, particularly online, and has accelerated since 2020. Obviously, Trump. But this alone does not explain the major divide within the left between the anti-idpol left vs. the SJW/woke-left. Or the alliance between the… Continue reading battlelines and woke framing

I saw this video going viral by a critic of the British monarchy, calling hereditary power unfair: Hereditary power may seem unfair, but how it is more unfair than favoritism or crony capitalism in the US, or having wealthy parents, a superior IQ, or other innate, hereditary advantages at life. Inequality, unfairness exists everywhere, and… Continue reading Monarchies may seem unfair, but so are a lot of other things in life

The problem with the student loan/college bubble debate is both sides are plagued by predictable biases and flawed arguments. The left believes that making college more accessible and more affordable will improve economic mobility, ignoring or overlooking the high dropout rate. Dropouts get none of the benefits of graduating college but all of the debt… Continue reading Blame College Wage Premium for Tuition Surge, not Government

Saw this tweet, which went hugely viral (and was deleted): The Bell Curve was the most prophetic book of the last 50 yrs. Got trashed b/c of one chapter on race (which no one ever successfully contradicted), but real message was the concentration of cognitive elite away from normal people. — FischerKing (@FischerKing64) September 16,… Continue reading The Implications of The Bell Curve

Scott Greer (the guy who is 6’2″ with the 187 IQ) has for the past week or so been getting into a Twitter spat of sorts between his followers regarding the NFL and conservatism. Greer argues that the NFL is woke, and that conservatives should not support it or watch it. He tweeted: It’s important… Continue reading The Diversity of Conservatism

I saw this: In a partnership with the “CSPI and Salem Center UT”, Manifold Markets is having a $25,000 forecasting tournament. Here is the website for the prediction market itself, with various markets/contracts, such as “Will Donald Trump Be Indicted for a Crime in 2022),” which shows 40% odds he will be indicted. One thing… Continue reading Forecasting: The Importance of Having an Edge

Freddie argues that America lusts for another war War as Cope: Ukraine as Desert Storm, Iraq-Afghanistan as Vietnam It was not until I was an adult that I realized that the absurd fervor for Desert Storm was in fact about Vietnam. Fifteen years earlier, American helicopters had fled in humiliation from Saigon, and nothing had… Continue reading The Russia-Ukraine situation could have been far worse

Interesting article Thoughts on the origins of wokeness Another perspective is that woke-ism isn’t new. It’s just that we have a new name for it. In the past it would have been called ‘anti racism’, ‘civil rights’ or something like that. In an earlier article I give a bunch of examples of past incidents which… Continue reading Origins of the woke

An oft-repeated factoid or ‘info nugget’ is that ancient and medieval people lived long lives, comparable even to today, after excluding child/infant mortality. Infant mortality skews the data so much that average life expectancy was otherwise similar to today. Not quite so. Rather than the assurance of a long life conditional on surviving infancy or… Continue reading Modern medicine is keeping a lot of young and middle-aged people alive