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

One of the ironies of crypto currency is that although the developers are pretty smart, the average speculator or pundit is really dumb. One thing you may notice is that there a lot of people who have money but are stupid…people who hype crypto currencies and other bad investments, as well as those who invest… Continue reading James Altucher Wrong About Crypto Currency

BlogviewRon Unz Archive An Open Letter to the “Alt-Right” and Others Ron Unz is one of the rare specimens of smart empiricists. As I argue, empiricism and materialism are ‘easier’ than rationalism and idealism, because the former can merely defer to manifest reality whereas the latter has to create reality in his or her own… Continue reading Ron Unz on Hispanic Crime

Nassim Taleb is at it again with a Medium post that expounds on his anti-IQ twitter rant, which I critiqued earlier. Taleb’s argument, essentially, is that IQ tests only work on the ‘low end’ and not ‘high end’, and that IQ is not a predictor of above-average ability. Taleb’s post is mostly incoherent. As a… Continue reading Taleb: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (Wrong again!)

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or… Continue reading The Sam Vimes “Boots” Theory of Economic Injustice

Vox Day put out a really interesting video purporting to give the ‘true’ value of of Dr. Jordan Peterson’s IQ, which he puts at only 115-120. He bases this on Dr. Peterson failing to get into law school, which suggests an unimpressive LSAT score, and on Dr. Peterson’s own GRE scores. For reference, here is… Continue reading Jordan Peterson’s IQ…estimate and Vox Day may be wrong

From Quillette Reversing the Descent of Man: Heavy rates of unemployment are widely seen as related to the collapse of male morale and motivation. But it is a mistake to regard joblessness in itself as the cause of men’s problems. Male unemployment is no novelty, and reached high levels in the ’30s without weakening male… Continue reading The Descent of Man: Culture vs. Economics