You’re projecting a disability onto the general population. Most people are capable of socialising and propagating the idea they’re not is a service to no one.
19,546 karma · joined March 13, 2008
A country with living standards at Bill Gates levels with perfect good health until 200 where everyone is illiterate has a lower HDI than South Sudan. Even if we fix it by setting the minimum education value at 0.1 billionaires with perfect health land would have a HDI lower than 180 countries. HDI has a 90%+ correlation with GDP. It’s not a worthwhile measure.
> Between 1990 and 2010, Sweden, France, Germany, Japan, and England — among many others — radically reformed their school curricula to emphasize general skills over content knowledge. In Scotland and France, the reforms were orchestrated by left-wing progressives committed to social equity; in England and Sweden, by free-market devotees as a means to enhance economically valuable skills. In Germany and Japan, the impetus was simply to update the school curricula for modern economic conditions. All of the reforms had the same logic: Remove facts, content, and structure, and replace them with general analysis and synthesis tasks.
> These reformers discarded the traditions their predecessors had built over the previous century. Children in Scotland, France, and Sweden no longer study a humanities curriculum resembling that of their parents or grandparents; nor do they necessarily study anything resembling the curriculum of their peers in neighboring schools. Any sense of a collective tradition, going forward or backwards, unifying a country or a people, has vanished.
He has a podcast, https://christianityonthespectrum.podbean.com/feed.xml
Also, LLMs can’t one shot long form writing like that.
> Whether you think the UK has been falling behind America economically for a decade or for two decades depends on which set of prices you use to measure living standards. If you use the two countries’ national price indices, the UK has been growing slower than the U.S. since the financial crisis of 2008; if you use PPP prices, as Paul Krugman prefers, the UK’s relative stagnation has come only since Brexit in 2016:
This isn’t true. See the Thirty Years War. There have been many wars in the past that have led to mass starvation by making the work of agriculture impossible. See also the depopulation of Sichuan during the Ming- Qing transition.
Separately the Ethiopian war was subsidised by western food aid and other aid to the Dengists.
It does actually. See how thieves resident in Florida travel to New York to work because of the different enforcement regimes for one of the clearest possible examples[1].
Even if deterrence didn’t work at all putting people in prison is good because of incapacitation. Committing crimes is stupidly right tailed[2]. Every career criminal in jail for a year is a year society doesn’t suffer their crimes.
[1] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/02/02/cnns_john...
[2] https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/the-sage-encyclopedia-of-e...
No one expects the US court system or US attorneys general to act apolitically. The Obama administration extensively used the IRS to target Republicans as such. If you don’t want to be prosecuted for illegal conduct, you should not do illegal things. Alternatively, you could arrange to never lose elections so that your friends are always in power.
What would the maximally charitable but in contact with reality [Republican|Democrat] expect or want out of this?
[1] For the huge majority of PhD students in the Arts and Humanities there are virtually no jobs in their fields and it’s not that much better in the social or exact sciences, though there is at least some extra academic demand for their skills. There are very, very few fields outside academia where a doctorate is a necessary qualification or close to it and those are ~all a terrible investment if what you want is a remunerative career; things like biomedical research where you do a doctorate, then a postdoc and then get a job paying what an MBA from a top tier business school gets their first year out.
> In the US, Congress has quietly walked away from most of its former duties. Major policy changes once came through legislation like the Social Security Act of 1935, or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the Clean Air Act of 1970, or the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, or the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001. There have been no bills like these for a generation. Today, to the extent that policy changes, it is a result of executive agencies using powers granted by these 20th century laws, or federal judges reinterpreting their meaning. The most significant bills of my adult lifetime were the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, both of 2010, and both were marginal updates to preexisting 20th century bureaucracies.
> There is just one problem with this narrative: offshore processing did not stop asylum seekers from trying to reach Australia. Instead, Australia’s success lay in turning boats back to their country of origin before they reached Australian shores.
> Many readers will disagree that it is ever right to discourage people from seeking asylum in safe, developed countries. Nevertheless, there are three reasons to take Australia’s example seriously. The first is that many European voters want to reduce the number of asylum seekers coming to their countries, and their elected officials are looking for ways to do that. If they misunderstand the example they are trying to follow, they will spend billions of euros on an approach that is both less effective and less humane than it should be.
> A number of parents, including family members, told me they had sent their baby to daycare only for them to become constantly ill, sometimes severely, until they decided to take them out. This worried me so I asked around some more. Invariably every single parent who had tried to send their babies or toddlers to daycare, or who had babies in daycare right now, told me that they were ill more often than not.
[…]
> Back in 2017, two academics affiliated with Harvard had created a novel category to describe speech that was factually true, but undermined official interests. They called it malinformation and defined it as speech “based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, organization or country”. Could constitutionally protected criticism of the US government be classified as malinformation? Only the information regulators could say for sure since all power rested in the authority to define the terms. The government seized the opportunity. In the very first month of the Biden administration, CISA rewrote its mission from focusing on foreign disinformation “to focus on general MDM”, an acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation — a three-part classification developed by the 2017 Harvard paper that coined “malinformation”. The machinery of the information state had completed its inward turn. Rather than defensively protecting critical infrastructure from outside attack, the agency would now “be responsive to current events” inside the US.
https://unherd.com/2026/04/how-censorship-seized-america/?ed...