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_h4xron The Secret to a Happy Marriage: Do the Dishes, Put Out, Don’t Talk So Much

"You are aware that the very definition of a fact precludes it from having exceptions, right?"

He's talking about statistical distributions. "It's an established fact that six-year-olds are taller than five-year-olds. There are exceptions."

I'm not sure where he got the "hipster" stuff, though.

_h4xron The Secret to a Happy Marriage: Do the Dishes, Put Out, Don’t Talk So Much

I know. I often fear a nightmarish reality in which women spend minutes or even hours per day carefully disguising natural facial features, odors, and hair--or even exercising at a gym--just so they can manipulate men into wanting to be with them. I pity the guys who get suckered into preferring women who engage in such behaviors. It's almost as bad as men altering their behavior to be more attractive to women.

Empirically, prior girlfriends have been unimpressed with my slavish devotion to their every-moment's well-being. My current girlfriend is much more devoted, and much more enthusiastic.

I am fairly overt about this. I told her to read The Red Queen after our first date. And I don't lie about this. But when I'm asking myself what's better for the relationship, and what's going to make the person I'm with happier, I have to take into account that my behavior affects her happiness indirectly, too. You'd have to be a real jerk to make her date a nebbish.

_h4xron The Secret to a Happy Marriage: Do the Dishes, Put Out, Don’t Talk So Much

I recommend The Red Queen if you want to start learning about this. The short answer: men largely choose mates based on looks; women choose based more on social status. Signalling low social status reduces male attractiveness; signalling high social status raises it.

n = 1, but this has worked for me. Deliberately act like you can take it or leave it, and you're unlikely to be left. (And note that women initiate the majority of breakups and divorces, so you're not risking much if you risk a breakup.)

_h4xron American Kids Aren't Getting Dumber; They Were Just Never That Smart

It is odd that you're demonizing Malcolm X and Steve Sailer, while refusing to address their arguments. Apparently they are "clumsy," "racist," and "grotesque," producing "simplifications" and a "non-sequitur." But in the time it took you to tell me all about the hypothetical explanations for the data you refuse to believe but even more ardently refuse to check ("My dog didn't bite you, it's not my dog, and what do you have against bulldogs, mister?"), you could have, well, fact-checked Sailer's claims.

It is striking that you've mustered so much rhetoric about conclusions in order to avoid looking at the facts behind those conclusions. It is a little like preachers talking up hellfire when someone questions the 6,000-year-old-earth thing.

_h4xron American Kids Aren't Getting Dumber; They Were Just Never That Smart

It's still ad hominem, even if it's also inductive reasoning.

I'm still hoping for a follow-up addressing the claims, rather than the person making those claims.

_h4xron American Kids Aren't Getting Dumber; They Were Just Never That Smart

Has anyone disputed them? This seems like a great example of an ad hominem attack--you haven't had to question their data, or their logic, just the fact that they've found an argument supporting their conclusions.

That's a good way to talk past people. If you're legitimately concerned with their views, this is a great opportunity to identify what flaws there are with this argument, instead of the ways you already disagreed with the conclusion.

I mean, think about this in terms of who is contributing to the argument. Vdare: "Here is some analysis of the data, revealing what may be surprising results!" You: "Like most people, I disagree with VDare's conclusions. I'm not going to address their arguments, and I'd like to warn others against doing so, too." Who is contributing, here?

_h4xron American Kids Aren't Getting Dumber; They Were Just Never That Smart

There is a big difference. You're a "supremacist" if you think one group is better. You're a "nationalist" if you think these groups should be separate. Many white nationalists will freely admit that Japan is much more law-abiding than the US or Europe. But they might still want the US to be a whiter country (the way Japan is very Japanese, with <1% of the population having non-Japanese ancestry).

Perhaps you should call the VDare people "White Nationalists and Japanese Supremacists," to clarify your position.

If you read the Autobiography of Malcolm X, you'll see that he's a "white supremacist" and a "Jewish supremacist" in some respects, but still a "black nationalist" in terms of how he wants to live.

_h4xron Ask HN: The one thing you believe is true, but most people think is untrue?

Would you laugh at someone who thought that it was a good thing for humans to selectively breed plants and animals? We certainly couldn't maintain our population without them. Would you laugh at someone who had a preference for a desirable spouse? That's a common form of eugenics: people prefer healthy, sane, productive mates.

There's obviously a difference between preference and policy. But my guess is that you're willing to reap the benefits of eugenics without considering the ethical implications.

_h4xron Ask HN: The one thing you believe is true, but most people think is untrue?

Okay, that's what I suspected. At the right level of abstraction, you can certainly find non-selfish activities. But a gene's-eye-view is the most significant view, because in the long term anything that doesn't adhere to that view is extinct.

Certainly a complete sociopath will still have non-selfish internal organs. But it's highly reductionist to claim that a sociopath is not sociopathic because his heart generously pumps blood to his other organs.

What looks like generosity generally falls into a few categories of gene-level selfishness, e.g. kin altruism, in-group altruism, reciprocal gifts, etc. Our evolutionary inheritance doesn't allow for pure altruism; that's a bug that gets fixed by selfish groups out-reproducing.

_h4xron Ask HN: The one thing you believe is true, but most people think is untrue?

Define "Selfishness" in this context.

In a broad sense, it's very hard to argue that selfish genes don't explain most human behavior. Certainly, I would spend my time differently if I weren't the result of a couple billion years of brutal gene-versus-gene competition.

_h4xron Ask HN: The one thing you believe is true, but most people think is untrue?

Conservatives say they don't believe in evolution, but act like they do (in the sense they tolerate "animal spirits" in economics, a sexual division of labor, and racial disparities which may be genetic in origin). Liberals say they believe in evolution, but act like they don't. And our most destructive policies happen at the intersection of these two forms of hypocrisy.

A runner-up: "social security" is not the exact nature of the problem we face. Instead, the problem is the dependency ratio: old people can live off of million-dollar 401K portfolios and the proceeds from selling million-dollar houses, or live off of social security--in either scenario, the working population will be forced to accept lower available consumption (and low returns on their savings) for a given level of income.

_h4xron Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

That is definitely not an answer. Grandparent suggested that genetics plays a role in why people in one country are different from people in another. And you respond by saying that if he says that, he might say something else, which you find even more unacceptable!

It should be possible to admit that if 1) you're dealing with a country of genetic relatives, and 2) genetic factors are responsible for 60-80% of the variance in IQ, then Finland's superior education can be explained in part by the fact that it's full of Finns.

_h4xron Actions That Made Me Happier

You don't need to get drunk. Alcohol gradually reduces inhibitions, so if everyone has had a few drinks, they'll be able to sustain a conversation about, e.g., which project is actually way behind schedule, or what they really think about the sales team's overpromise-and-let-someone-else-deliver attitude.

_h4xron Actions That Made Me Happier

Then you're not drinking enough.

Seriously.

Alcohol is a great evolutionary adaptation, since it allows people to be extremely dour and responsible most of the time, while being able to loosen up with chemical assistance. Countries that are known for their seriousness and work ethic often have a strong drinking culture (e.g. Germany, Japan). There's a Steve Sailer article about this; I can't find it, and the domain is auto-killed upon submission anyway.

_h4xron Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See

I don't understand. That Time article is very clear about how beneficial European rule was. It goes on and on--about the mines and the industries and the shops and the general sense of law and order.

Did the Belgians just find a country like that, and take it over?

_h4xron Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See

If the smartest non-C programmers all started programming in C, and the C programmers never switched to something else, you could make that judgment.

What's interesting is that I almost never find out, halfway through an argument like this, that I'm talking to someone who moved to a place unspoiled by Western imperialism. Mongolia, for example.

_h4xron Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See

You know, their crime rate is amazingly low. Seriously, if you compare their numbers to the US, your first instinct is to assume that they moved the decimal point over. So it seems that these "accidents" are rare, there.

_h4xron Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See

The third-world isn't some laggard full of overbreeding simpletons.

Any concrete reason for that belief? It looks like the "overbreeding" is objectively true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_birth_rate . As far as simpletons go, you tell me: is there any intelligence test you know of that routinely ranks people in Djibouti over people in Japan? If not, it sounds like your statement is unfounded.

The rest of your interpretation is also suspect. The places Victorians conquered weren't more advanced than the places the Victorians came from. Regardless of the reason, Europe was more technologically advanced than the rest of the world, and they used that advantage to conquer as much of the world as they could.

When you complain about how the Victorians ran things, you have to compare it to something. If you compare, e.g., the Congo in 1955 (http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,866343,00.html ) to the Congo in 2008 (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1713275,00.htm... ) you get the idea. You might not like how imperialists run things--but they run things well because they run them for profit. You can also consider Singapore (which is basically Victorian, and basically paradise on earth for law-abiding people).

_h4xron Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See

I recommend getting over it. You are almost certainly the descendants murderers and conquerors.

http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7819&...

That's just how humans roll.

Western Europe had lots of problems, but countries that operate in the European tradition are better places to live. (At least, when you look at the immigration patterns between third-world and first-world countries, it's clear that first world countries export idealism, which is then processed into jaded realism and returned. Meanwhile, poor countries send their top .1% to join the Western world's top 10%; a good deal for both sides).

_h4xron Obama Offers Millions for Muslim Tech Fund

Of course technical people would be the ones you find behind successful acts of destruction.

But that does not mean that all engineering and hard-science types are more likely to become terrorists.

Right, but that's not what I said at all. Regardless of why there is a correlation between engineering education and terrorism, there is a correlation; whether you're equipping potential terrorists with the tools to commit terrorist acts, or somehow making non-terrorists more terroristic, the end result is the same.

It just means that if you take a random sampling of people and you test them for terrorist potential you will find that the technical ones will do better at it.

That's interesting; I hadn't heard that the same kind of study had been duplicated elsewhere. Do you have a source? Before I saw the study, I was struck by how many of the 9/11 hijackers had an engineering, compared to, e.g., American terrorists. (The Unabomber is the closest analogue, and his academic background was fairly abstract).

What I think is that if having an education will make them less susceptible to brainwashing.

And yet that effect is clearly counteracted by whatever else it is that makes engineers more likely to blow stuff up. If they're half as willing but ten times as able to commit terrorist acts, we still lose.

_h4xron Obama Offers Millions for Muslim Tech Fund

This seems like an incredibly poor idea. For whatever reason, people with engineering and hard-science backgrounds are much more likely to become terrorists (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/30/engineers_terrorists...). And dollar-for-dollar, US companies still seem to get more out of engineering investments than overseas companies do (even when they're using workers who immigrated). And with a deficit like the one we have, throwing more money at uncertain projects is a poor plan, even if it is investment, rather than spending.

So, this is a waste of money we don't have, in order to get worse results that it would get if we spent it here, with the side effect that it could increase the supply of terrorists.

_h4xron SAT Scores and Family Income: The least surprising correlation of all time

(Based on my own anecdotal experience, rich people are not especially smarter than the poor or middle-class)

IQ correlates better that parental socio-economic standing. But there are lots of factors that make this appear false -- the people you spend time with might be mostly of a certain class, or in a particular IQ stratum.

_h4xron SAT Scores and Family Income: The least surprising correlation of all time

My impression was that it's pretty rare to move more than half a standard deviation by using test prep. And that median is skewed by the fact that scores fluctuate from one session to another, but the lower scores are discarded.

_h4xron Taking "Me, Inc." Public: Market Caps for Individuals

Right. If you're okay with selling it in increments, but not selling all of it, there's probably a cutoff. And your cutoff is probably lower than 99%.

_h4xron Taking "Me, Inc." Public: Market Caps for Individuals

Of course it can be beneficial to slaves. If they're an asset, and the appreciation in that asset's value accrues mostly to the owner, that owner has every incentive to maximize their value.

As Mencius Moldbug (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-car...) points out, one modern version of this is the Japanese lifetime employment system. If a company pays 2% on money it borrows, and gets to keep employees for twenty years or more, it can afford to spend years training them without getting any revenue from their work.

_h4xron Taking "Me, Inc." Public: Market Caps for Individuals

Even if, theoretically, it might benefit someone to sell their freedom, its too dangerous to allow such a transaction to be considered legitimate.

That is simply untrue. We sell our freedoms all the time. I sell big chunks of mine in two-week increments when I work; I sell my freedom for other times when I go home to an apartment where there are certain limits on my behavior.

_h4xron Raising the World’s I.Q. with Micronutrients

No, no, no... I'm not saying that! :) That's how you're interpreting it.

You're almost there. I understand that you, yourself, do not think that raising IQ is rational and sensible -- that if we just give Nigeria a few billion dollars more in aid, it's going to look like Westport, Connecticut. The joke is that when you condemned something as Western, the thing you condemned was actually a pretty good idea, so calling it Western really sounded like Western was a nice thing. Maybe a different example will make it clear. If two American political partisans are arguing, and you hear:

"Raising taxes on the rich is so typical of liberals,"

and then "But when Clinton did it, our economy performed incredibly well. So you must mean that liberals are typically pretty damn awesome!"

You can follow the joke, right? That is the joke I'm making.

Indeed, that very behavior is "Western" in style because you are assuming that what you think is good is good for everyone else too.

I notice it's been pretty good for the rest of the world, actually. Lots of countries have adopted market systems and the rule of law to some extent, and they've really benefitted from it (not to mention Western technological advances -- the West, of course, has done plenty of the same in the other direction). And when we adopt communitarian values, or try to support collectivist compromise over individualism, it tends to lead to stagnation at best and disaster on average.

_h4xron Raising the World’s I.Q. with Micronutrients

Would you argue, then, that instead of sending food and medical aid to poor countries, we should send teachers?

Teachers do not raise IQ. Proper nutrition does.

And accusing someone of holding racist and vile views is sarcasm - the lowest form of wit?

Okay, read through the comment I made. I am sorry this is unclear, but I am being very sarcastic. I know you are saying that it is Western to want to raise IQ rather than reduce pain; I am saying that this is, in fact the right thing to do and thus that you are using "Western" to mean "logical and sensible" -- and then I say what I'm guessing you would say to someone who said "His views are very Western -- that is, logical, and sensible, and not driven by emotion or ignorance." That is the joke: that you accidentally said something nice about Western culture, and that had someone else said that to you and meant it, you would likely have been annoyed.

I am sorry about that. Frog dissection, etc.

_h4xron Raising the World’s I.Q. with Micronutrients

I'm sorry my sarcasm was not more apparent. My point was that raising IQ would do a lot of good for those people -- more than reducing their pain, in the long term. High IQ groups tend to create stable states and nice places to live, and they're also responsible for a lot of technological advancement.

My sub-point was that often the same people uncomfortable with this kind of talk are down on Western culture in particular.

_h4xron Raising the World’s I.Q. with Micronutrients

isn't it rather Western to consider raised intelligence the most talkworthy improvement!?

I assume you're using "Western" to mean something very racist and vile, like "analyzing the data rationally and coming to the most sensible conclusion." You are unfairly assuming that only Europeans can look at the correlation between IQ and income, or IQ and crime, or whatever. Obviously, the Japanese (IQ 105, crime 5% to 10% of that in the US) or South Koreans (IQ 106, crime rate about 15% of what it is in the US) can look at these data, too, and hope that the rest of the world catches up.

The prevalence of TV and gossip magazines in our culture are responsible for a lot more than that. I don't see a big crusade to fix that.

Probably because you haven't read about how hard it is to change IQ. Nutrition is one of the only things that can measurably affect IQ in the long run. The other one -- the big one, accounting for 40-80% of all IQ variation -- is genetics.

On the other hand, stupid but happy people are probably easier to control.