barry-cotter

It is productive to decline to use propaganda terms. If, every time someone says they support affirmative action they are asked if they support having higher standards for Asian applicants to medical school than for white applicants that’s good because forcing people to defend their support of racist policies reduces support for them. By the same token pointing out that affordable housing doesn’t mean housing people can afford, it means politician allocated housing paid for by the general taxpayer, reduces support. Reducing support for bad things is good.

> When my son was in first grade, he came home from school in tears saying that he hated math. My wife and I are both engineers, so this was the sort of all-hands-on-deck shock that demanded our immediate attention. Before this my son had loved math. He would demand that we challenge him with math problems to do in his head in the car and over dinner. He loved doing flashcards. He played math games on his tablet unsupervised for hours. Even now, years later in 4th grade, he has decided he wants to learn calculus, so he insisted I start explaining it to him as best I could in the car, and started working through pre-algebra in Khan Academy on his own. How is it possible that a kid like this had decided he hated math?

> His misery was all due to i-Ready, the software product our district had purchased for math work and testing. During that period my kids’ happiness at the end of the school day was entirely determined by how much time their school had made them spend on i-Ready. If they hadn’t touched i-Ready, they were happy. If they were forced to do it, they were sad. If they had to spend an unusual amount of time on it, they were in tears. I started asking around to the other kids’ parents, and I heard similar stories from all of them. Their kids described it as torture. Some of them would hide in the bathroom to avoid it. None of the parents felt that their kids were learning anything at all from it.

> Executive Summary Citizens’ Assemblies, in which a representative selection of members of the public are invited to consider policy on contentious areas, are increasingly in the news. Supporters claim they will enhance public confidence in democracy, and could also break the deadlock on issues from assisted dying to climate change. They are claimed to give politicians and policy makers insight into what an informed common ground might look like. This paper examines the case for these claims. We have reviewed over 700 initiatives covered in an OECD database, focusing in particular on 17 examples from Ireland, several US states and two Canadian provinces where the deliberation of a citizens’ assembly was followed by a public vote on the same subject. We have then analysed the results in the light of academic literature on political behaviour and opinion forming. Our conclusion is that citizens’ assemblies are a poor predictor of what the public is likely to decide if asked. With the recommendation of citizens’ assemblies rejected on 10 out of 17 occasions, they are worse at forecasting the public mood than tossing a coin. Even in cases where assemblies were praised for anticipating the popular vote, like on abortion or gay marriage in Ireland, the winning margin at the assembly was around 40 percentage points higher than at the referendum. The error is consistently in the same direction - assemblies were more supportive than the general public of progressive policies on 15 of 17 occasions1 and the proportion of people who voted for the progressive option was, on average, 25 percentage points higher in the citizens’ assembly than in the subsequent referendum. Even when every effort is made to conduct them robustly, the structure of these assemblies seems highly vulnerable to a series of biases, in particular selection bias, issue framing and ‘polarization effects’ – a type of group think. There is good evidence that the contentious issues for which they are most often proposed, like assisted dying, might be the very ones for which citizens’ assemblies are least suited.

> America has more murders because we make murder easy. No other country is awash in guns.

Switzerland, Canada. The US has more illegal guns but ~every adult male Swiss citizen has access to a gun and training in how to use it. Hunting is as popular in Canada as it is with similar demographics in the US and having plenty of guns around does not make them anomalously murderous.

Depressing to realise that soon most people will not even have second hand experience with children being useful.

> In the nineteenth century, cities grew quickly. Between 1800 and 1914, the population of Berlin’s metropolitan area grew twenty times, Manchester’s twenty-five times, and New York’s a hundred times. Sydney’s population grew around 240 times and Toronto’s maybe 1,700 times. Between 1833 and 1900, Chicago’s population grew around five thousand times, meaning that on average it doubled every five years.

> Raw population growth understates the speed of expansion. The number of people per home fell, and, in Britain and America, the size of the average home roughly doubled. At the same time, those homes fit on a smaller share of land, with huge swaths given over to boulevards, parks and railways. The expansion in surface area was thus often several times greater than the expansion in raw population. Meanwhile, real house prices remained flat, while incomes doubled or tripled, generating a huge improvement in housing affordability. Far more people were enjoying far larger homes for a far smaller share of their income.

Net loss of €2.8 billion not gain of €1 billion.

> The ISF was controversial; critics claimed it drove away wealthy individuals from the country, resulting in financial loss. A report by senator Philippe Marini estimated that 843 people left France in 2006 because of the tax, resulting in a net loss of €2.8 billion.[2][3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_tax_on_wealth

The quality of economic research from an advocacy organisation with no commitment to the truth as such is about as good as you’d expect.

https://iea.org.uk/media/impractical-outrage-iea-economist-r...

> Oxfam’s perspective is global, but we don’t have a world government, so all wealth taxes would have to be national. Very few countries have wealth taxes of the kind Oxfam seems to be seeking. One which does is France. Its imposition – at much lower rates than Oxfam seems to be advocating – raises comparatively little, and has driven many rich people abroad. And as in any country the super-rich are a vanishingly tiny minority, wealth taxes will inevitably catch people who are very far from being billionaires. The French wealth tax hits assets in excess of just €1.3 million. The most recent figures suggest that, of 350,000 households liable to the tax, 250,000 paid less than €5,000.

> If taxes could be devised which would catch much larger amounts of billionaires’ wealth, how would it be redistributed, with no world government in prospect?

> Without a plausible plan for practical redistribution, the annual Oxfam report has become simply an opportunity for the left’s performative outrage, as pointless in its own way as the World Economic Forum which they bemoan. No political party in Britain should take it seriously and neither should the public.

If you want critique from a committed Democrat look here. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/oxfam-serves-up-a-lot-of-dodgy...

> South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world. Its population is (optimistically) projected to shrink by over two thirds over the next 100 years. If current fertility rates persist, every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them.

> This disaster has sources that will sound eerily familiar to Western readers, including harsh tradeoffs between careers and motherhood, an arms race of intensive parenting, a breakdown in the relations between men and women, and falling marriage rates. In all these cases, what distinguishes South Korea is that these factors occur in a particularly extreme form. The only factor that has little parallel in Western societies is the legacy of highly successful antinatalist campaigns by the South Korean government in previous decades.

That is not by any reasonable definition a monopoly. 12 landowners owning more than 50% of the property isn’t even an oligopoly.

The author of Imagined Communities was a nationalist, not a post-nationalist.

All violence is physical violence and any non-metaphorical attempt to define anything else as really violence is Orwellian.

Nintendo, Studio Ghibli, Cartoon Saloon. I’m sure there are many others in creative industries since you have to delight customers at least some of the time there. A large part of the reason Nvidia is a big deal is that they were willing to make the best drivers, that they just cared more about making a quality product. Lots of companies well exceed minimum quality necessary to keep customers from switching.

> Kirk’s legacy is real. TPUSA lives on. The Arizona GOP has been remade in his image. Donald Trump won the popular vote. His administration is staffed by dozens of men Kirk handpicked. Tens of thousands—maybe hundreds of thousand—of young Republicans have the courage to be young Republicans because of him. The Republican Party is now a populist, nationalist institution. Save for the life and labors of Charlie Kirk, none of this would have happened.

> A reckoning is due. Justice must be served. But we should not forget why Charlie Kirk was assassinated: he figured out how to make conservative populism work. His conviction that nationalist populism could win in America has been vindicated by events. His strategy proved so powerful that his enemies were left with no recourse but to murder him. It is up to us to decide whether the victory-path Kirk cleared dies with him.

99.99% of the population of the Mediterranean basin at the time Jesus lived were white, almost certainly more given that the trans-Saharan slave trade was a creature of the camel and post dated the Arab conquest of North Africa.

> Irish people […] were considered at one point to not be "white"

This isn’t true. Naturalisation was limited to white people and no Irish person was ever denied it in account of their race.

> he also wasn‘t European looking (should be obvious).

Spaniards, Egyptians, Greeks and Levantines all look very similar and Jesus was definitely of the Levant. I hope you won’t deny Spaniards and Greeks are European.

> I wanted to read Henry Kissinger’s 400 page undergraduate thesis (it has an incredible first page), but really didn’t feel like dealing with a scanned PDF that’s annoying to read on a phone without constantly zooming and panning.

> So I decided to convert it to a nice markdown format using OCR and LLMs. Then I thought it would be nice to fix the footnotes and get rid of the page breaks and to fix the line breaks and other things like that.

> I was already working on some other coding projects, so I had the idea of loading up the draft markdown file in Claude Code and having it work on fixing these issues using a swarm of 20 sub-agents, which worked well.

> Then I thought it would be cool to link to the full sources for all the many references on sites like the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg, so I had another swarm of sub-agents do a ton of searches to track the links down and insert them into the footnotes and bibliography.

> Then I figured that I might as well run it through my mind-map generator and summarization code to see what it comes up with, so I tried that. But now I had a few files to present, so needed some kind of index page.

> So I asked Codex with GPT-5 to whip up a slick looking web page to present the stuff nicely, which it did a yeoman’s job with.

> Note that I was already working with these tools in a bunch of other sessions on other projects, so my work here was occasionally giving some instructions to the coding agents and letting them crank away. I really didn’t spend much active time on this!

> Anyway, the net result is clearly the premier way in the world today to consume Henry Kissinger’s undergraduate thesis electronically. I’ll post the link in the next tweet to avoid getting punished by the algorithm.

> As for the thesis itself, it’s wild how erudite he was as a young man, and also what a great writer he was. And even more impressive considering that English was his second language.

> The thesis is basically him trying to come to grips with, and to mentally organize in an internally consistent way, a vast swath of Western thought. From what I’ve read so far, I think he did a pretty good job.

> Incidentally, his thesis is the reason Harvard changes the rules to limit the undergrad honors thesis to a maximum of 35,000 words. Good thing they didn’t apply this silly limit to Henry!

https://x.com/doodlestein/status/1961817172516168098

> most high school graduates in the US come out with a good basic understanding of supply/demand and labor/capital basic inputs to businesses

If this was true politics would be so profoundly different the entire world would be unrecognisable.

You get a job offer for very large amounts of money and their HR will handle you getting a work visa. If you’re making very large amounts of money and still feel like living in China after five years apply for a green card.

You would have to be insane to consider founding or investing in a Chinese startup when you could do so in Silicon Valley or even NYC or Austin.

I have a Master’s and never got a Bachelor’s. Universities can admit people more or less as they please, subject only to the very forgiving scrutiny of accreditation agencies or whatever government department officially supervises them.

What it means is this, if you are from a polity that has less than 10% of the global population nothing you will ever do matters. You are irrelevant.

> More than half of students predicted to succeed in advanced math are denied access to those classes.

> Our research firm evaluates federally funded education programs in K-12 schools. In the early to mid-2000s, these grant-funded program evaluations began requiring measurable objectives and pre- and post-data comparisons. During this period, federal grants aimed at getting more low-income and minority students into advanced STEM courses became a common trend.

> These program evaluation requirements led to a striking discovery. Tens of thousands of high-scoring students in North Carolina were not enrolled in advanced math courses. When staff working on the grant-funded programs (typically school counselors, school improvement teams, and administrators) discovered they already had hundreds of top-scoring, academically successful students in a single middle or high school who were not in advanced math, they usually wanted to enroll them. More often than not, they were told by their math departments that they couldn't enroll these students because students needed a teacher recommendation.

They don’t make law. It’s purely advisory. The two main purposes are for politicians to try to avoid responsibility for making decisions and consensus laundering. The secretariat has been really great at picking facilitators that will get the right recommendations through though they put their thumb on the scales too hard with the last referendums to amend the constitution and two proposals were defeated.

> Ireland has a Citizens Assembly, which is selected by sortition.

Ireland occasionally has a Citizen’s Assembly when the elected politicians feel it is best to do so. The members are supposed to be selected by sortition but this has not always been adhered to. “ Seven replacements joining in January 2018 were removed the following month when it emerged they were recruited via acquaintances of a Red C employee, who was then suspended, rather than via random selection.”

> The process has been very successful at neutralizing contentious topics. The assembly on abortion showed that a healthy majority consensus could emerge, and led to abortion being legalized in Ireland after a constitutional amendment.

You have to give the secretariat their due. They were excellent at getting the right facilitators, who would ensure the Assembly came to the conclusion the government wanted them to. Eventually they messed up and pushed so hard against public opinion that they got the Assembly to vote in favour of deleting mothers from the constitution and in favour of a meaningless expression of respect for carers. Both were then roundly defeated but the Assembly has been great as a way for governments to build consensus by putting their thumb on the scales.

> The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere.

Contemptible. If politicians don’t want to deal with socially divisive topics they should be doing something else with their lives.

Different people react differently to flu and different strains are different. I remember when I was 30 I got the flu and I had enough energy to walk to the nearest convenience store to get lunch and enough energy to do an hour of driving practice a day and the rest of the time I lay in bed. I did not have the energy to read a book. I didn’t have the motivation to turn on the radio. It was awful. Glad I haven’t had the flu since.

That was hilarious. Perfect, absolutely pitch perfect, therapy brain. You are a gifted satirist. I love how you end on the part that’s most important to the character of the therapy worshipper, the defence of the core of their identity, that therapy is an unalloyed good.

Please stop trying to impose your frame of victimhood on people who reject it.

You can but then you need some other way to gatekeep because a community of trust has to have an inside and an outside. Someone needs to keep people who don’t belong out, for whatever value of “don’t belong” you want to build a community around.

Because men and women are different and have mixed and single sex spaces have radically different norms and interaction styles. Given that all respectable mixed institutions default to female interaction styles this is profoundly alienating for men.

If one has never spent any time in all male spaces or has and thinks that men are defective women, like the average male therapist or counsellor this may not be obvious.