Author: smartistone

If you visit cryptocurrency reddit subs, one thing you may observe is that hardly anyone is making money, for reasons discussed earlier: too much volatility relative to returns, inconsistent gains, exchange hacks, and other reasons. Turing a $100 deposit in Coinbase into $200 is considered an enviable success in in the world of crypto. It… Continue reading 3x Tech ETFs Destroy Bitcoin

The stock market is sure acting like this is of no consequence, and predictions of this being the undoing of the US hegemony so far have been wrong or premature. The fall of Saigon only saw America become bigger and more powerful than ever in the decades following. America’s dominance is more cultural , economic,… Continue reading Afghanistan: The Big Nothing

The problem with conservatism is that it has adopted the same universalist values as the left. Like the left, conservatives go out of their way to prove how un-racist they are. Conservatives are opposed to CRT, but for the same reason the left supports it. Conservatives seek a post-racial society, whereas liberals seek a post-white… Continue reading The Universalism of Conservatism

Scott’s article Adumbrations Of Aducanumab went viral, which takes aim at the FDA for purportedly delaying potentially life-saving treatments. Most people seem to be in agreement with Scott that the FDA is too inefficient, too slow, and too stringent. Yet there needs to be some sort of impartial filtering mechanism for separating the wheat from… Continue reading The FDA Debate, and the Infant Fish Oil Saga

So much going on lately. Sometimes it feels overwhelming. From the NyTimes (obligatory archive.is link) YouTube suspends Rand Paul for a week over a video disputing the effectiveness of masks. The good ol’ “spreading Covid-19 misinformation,” a favorite, along with ‘hate speech’ and ‘inciting violence’. A YouTube representative said the Republican senator’s claims in the… Continue reading Social Media Censorship Continues, Rand Paul and Marjorie Taylor Greene suspended

A few days ago, Tucker Carlson met with Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban. This apparently caused a lot of outrage by ‘the left’, yet until someone mentioned the controversy on Reddit, I wasn’t even aware of this meeting. Even though I think I spend too much time online, somehow this went undetected on my radar.… Continue reading The Declining Relevance of the Mainstream Media

Saw this viral tweet by Edward Snowden: I was looking to understand why @nntaleb was cyber-bullying a young woman who writes on economics, and I stumbled upon a frankly unbelievable history of inability to handle even gentle criticism—by a man who titled his book "Antifragile." This behavior goes back years. pic.twitter.com/Jm2cSqC0EC — Edward Snowden (@Snowden)… Continue reading Taleb vs. Snowden

I suspect there is a sort of cognitive dissonance between what upper-income, professional-class liberals say they believe in, and what they actually believe and do. I think they know that conveying wokeness in public and on social media is just the socially accepted thing to do, not something to base one’s life around or as… Continue reading The Great Disconnect

Came across a recent meta-study purporting that effect of lead on crime is negligibly small, effectively debunking the lead-crime hypothesis. From the abstract: Does lead pollution increase crime? We perform the first meta-analysis of the effect of lead on crime by pooling 529 estimates from 24 studies. We find evidence of publication bias across a… Continue reading The effects of childhood lead exposure on crime and IQ likely overstated

The Gwern article McNamara’s Folly: The Denial of Individual Differences has gone viral many times. I think however he overstates his case. I, probably like many others who read his review or similar articles about Project 100,000, such as on Unz.com or on Reddit, was under the mistaken impression that McNamara enlisted literal retards (or… Continue reading Project 100,000: An Analysis