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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • IQ isn’t even a good metric of intelligence, just of the ability to do well at IQ tests.

    It is the best way we have to measure g factor. IQ is highly correlated with life outcomes, so the argument that it only measure one’s ability to do IQ tests well is clearly specious. It’s measuring g factor, and g factor enables one to work more productively and delay gratification, meaning less crime. The average IQ in prisons in America is something like 85. That’s near the cutoff for the army, because not even they can teach such a person to peel potatoes. The ramifications of this are obvious: we’ve built economies which require intelligence. Someone with an 85 IQ (more than 10% of the population) can’t even be trained to run cash registers at McDonald’s. What does one do if they can’t work? Crime, poverty, self harm, and chronic welfare. We need to figure out what to do with these people, and the first step is acknowledging that not everyone is equally capable of contributing to society. Then we can have an honest discussion about welfare and UBI for these vulnerable people. Pretending they’re not severally disadvantaged is harming them immensely.







  • Personally, as much as these little things annoy me, the big things just work. Games just work. My hardware just works. Updates just work. Software just works. I never, ever, ever have to open fucking terminal. That alone is worth all the bullshit in the world. I got into an argument the other day with someone who was chastising a Linux user for updating their distro without checking dependencies first. Like doing homework before an update is a normal thing everyone should be expected to do. It’s not, and until Linux figures this shit out, it’s going to stay niche in the consumer space.

    Just to be perfectly clear, I am rooting for Linux to succeed. I think our best chance at this stage is Valve. I suspect the use of immutable SteamOS will begin to creep into the desktop space. Developers will love it because they can build exactly one repo and call it a day. Users will love it because shit will “just work.” Yes, we lose some control, but no one will care because the biggest flaws will be gone.


  • I’d like to preface this by saying I have all the vaccines, including four covid vaccines.

    Until just a few years ago, I was all-in on the institutions. You see, institutions have been synonymised with science and intellectualism. Fast forward to covid and we had our healthcare professionals lying to us. “Masks are ineffective.” “Sorry I lied. You’ll die if you don’t wear masks in public.” “Except if you’re a BLM looter, then racism is a public health emergency.” Our leaders were locking us in our homes, closing our bank accounts, banning us from social media, shutting down free speech, and effectively forcing us to take very minimally tested vaccines, repeatedly. They gaslit us about the origin of the virus. We learned that the people who were likely responsible for the lab leak were working in collusion with the Chief Medical Adviser/Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases/Chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation.

    Kind of alarming, right? Data suggests trust in institutions took a huge hit under covid. Not because of “misinformation,” but because of dishonest and authoritarian actions by leaders.

    Then we have science. Data shows that political partisanship is at an all time high in universities. Up to 20% of lecturers identify as communists. There is no equivalent on the right. In fact, the mix of liberal and conservative faculty members in universities in America is so lopsided now, it’s as much as 10:1. We can all pretend like this hyper-partisanship doesn’t lead to research and educational biases, but we can see that it does, in real time. For example, trans research. It would be hard to name a field receiving more funding today, nor a field less impartial. Many advocates and researchers argue vehemently that transitioning is necessary to save the lives of those with gender dysphoria. Yet there is not a single study, anywhere, which shows this. The closest researchers have come is arguing that “suicidal ideation” is a synonym for “suicide,” and because self-reported ideation decreases in some studies, this means transition saves lives. Clearly this is incorrect, but such research is so widely used and misused that the President of the U.S. has endorsed it.   Conversely, there are numerous reports of researchers being barred from testing hypotheses which question this premise, or outright removed from universities. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]  When researchers are prevented from studying all sides of an issue, all that’s left is the narrative of those in power.

    For me, the question isn’t “will the world ever stop being anti-intellectual?” Instead, it really should be, “what are institutions doing to mend the immense harm they have caused to trust?” I am amazed it hasn’t happened sooner, and that the backlash isn’t even larger.