—“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.” — Ann Coulter
(great quote really)(Not so interested in the christianity thing, but it seems to work.)
Source date (UTC): 2015-11-09 08:11:00 UTC
–“We not interested in should. We are interested in shall. Not in persuasion but compliance. Not in tolerance but in deportation. Not in compromise but in defeat.”–
(digging this meme)
Source date (UTC): 2015-11-09 08:10:00 UTC
INTERNET MALE-NESS
Most males on the internet are seeking dominance-expression through argument. The internet is a safe place to fail. And they learn through increasing tests of their abilities. Some learn the first year over and over again. Others progress every year. But it is merely combat practice – training, in an effort to both vent the stress if powerlessness and rejection, as well as the stress of being surrounded by ignorance and error, as well as an attempt to transcend the boy and become the man. So while I would prefer that such gladiators prefer to improve, than prefer to justify their failure to improve, or merely seek attention by discounted means, I also see the rattling of cages, positioning and threats, and the trowing of feces as mere, learning by doing. And I would rather see men learn than not. My advice is to help those years behind you. And together as a group we all advance.
Source date (UTC): 2015-11-09 06:10:00 UTC
—We can purge all forms of lies from this earth. And in doing so, transform man into gods. For what is a god but a wielder of truth? And what is a devil, but a wielder of error, bias, wishful thinking, and deceit?—
(worth repeating)
Source date (UTC): 2015-11-09 06:05:00 UTC
WHY I AM NOT GOOD AT ARITHMETIC, MULTIPLICATION, DIVISION AND CHESS
I have a lot of friends who are good at chess, and I do think chess is a pretty good determinant of intelligence, and perhaps a better determinant of academic and career success.
I was in a chess club through seventh or eighth grade, and really never got that good until the first machines came out because they played perfectly – too perfectly.
But as an illustration, There are three reasons I am not very good at it:
(a) Puzzles vs Problems ethic: I have a problem with puzzles as wasted effort, when I should be working on problems. Just as I have a problem going from books to problems, rather than from problems to books. So in effect I see playing games that require more than casual attention (cards), as an immoral waste of my time. (Which a certain girlfriend in college beat into me through insults as well.) So I cant make myself spend times on such things without feeling like I’m letting the time run out on my lifespan.
(b) Working (short term) memory – one of the reasons I became interested in IQ is the understanding of both the myopia of my autistic thinking and what I began to understand was a problem for me in arithmetic calculation despite my abilities in mathematical reasoning. I work on certain categories of problems partly because I seemed to have a fairly weak working memory compared to other students. I have trouble adding and multiplying, or working with a lot of states: like origami requires. I have no problem reasoning. I can detect truth content pre-cognitively, and I can define spectra – lines of causality. I cannot however juggle many independent and as I see it – unrelated – states of things.
(c) Limited lateral thinking. (which I suppose I could overcome with practice) but not only do I have trouble with humor – which depends upon it, with cunning in a game of chess (i tend to play aggressively with every move and am too concerned with optimum moves and can be baited by them), but I tend not to find ‘shortcuts’ so much as ‘truths’.
Basically ‘if its in motion in time’ I intuit it. If it exists in states I don’t. Everything consists of flights of arrows.
This tells me a lot really, because again, I see the world as a division of cognitive labor, with all these variations in smart people producing different ‘sensors’ that detect different ‘bits’ of reality, and our voluntary cooperation and trade as the information system by which we different sensors share that information.
Man is a gloriously fascinating creature.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine
Source date (UTC): 2015-11-09 06:00:00 UTC
BANKERS RARELY KNOW THEY’RE IMMORAL
(worth repeating)
Well to be honest, they don’t even know that themselves. I think a better test is the evidence of the volume of insider trading in the stock market, and the manipulation of the market by large houses in order to bait and trap retail investors on momentum plays. Other immoralities are anti-consumer nonsense like penalties for cell phone usage, entrapment into contracts one cannot afford, baiting people into mortgages they can’t manage, the multitude of investment and insurance schemes, and the entirety of the democratic political process which is a race-to-corruption.
Most if not all but a few bankers are too ignorant (and from too low in their class rankings) to have any idea what they are really doing.
I don’t think most politicians know that they are corrupt.
Source date (UTC): 2015-11-09 05:45:00 UTC
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000421DELIBERATE PRACTICE IS NOT SUFFICIENT TO EXPLAIN EXPERT PERFORMANCE – IT’S INTELLIGENCE
Deliberate practice: Is that all it takes to become an expert?
Pages 34-45 David Z. Hambrick, Frederick L. Oswald, Erik M. Altmann, Elizabeth J. Meinz, Fernand Gobet, Guillermo Campitelli
– Ericsson and colleagues argue that deliberate practice explains expert performance.
– We tested this view in the two most studied domains in expertise research.
– Deliberate practice is not sufficient to explain expert performance.
– Other factors must be considered to advance the science of expertise.
Source date (UTC): 2015-11-09 05:09:00 UTC
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000949IT”S NOT JUST NORTHER RACES AND SOUTHERN RACES, BUT GRADIENTS WITHIN THE SAME RACES AND TRIBES
(for those new followers, my position is that ‘circumpolar peoples’ -meaning north-baltic sea, han, korean, and japanese – have practiced both climate-selection, manorial-(economic)-selection, and the physical culling of malcontents for thousands of years. And that the ‘lesser peoples’ are burdened by not having experienced this eugenic process. … Worse, I argue that we may have passed ‘peak human’ and are in the process of devolution, because the Southern peoples compete by higher aggression, lower pro-social behavior, higher impulsivity, lower intelligence, and higher rates of reproduction. In other words, the problem is the distribution of abilities within races not necessarily racial differences themselves.)
FROM: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000949
–“It has become increasingly evident that human populations have different behavioral propensities and intelligence levels. Those who have adapted to the harsh northern climate worldwide are taller, more intelligent, more pro-social, less crime prone, and exhibit less fertility. This is said to be due to the more cognitively demanding long winter season (Lynn, 2006 and Lynn, 2008). In a similar and more speculative vein, the differential r/K theory (Rushton, 1988 and Rushton, 1994) predicts that a more demanding cold climate has induced more intelligent and pro-social personality in general.
While these differences in intelligence and behavioral traits were reported mainly with respect to racial categories in the twentieth century (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994 and Rushton, 1994), even finer gradients of these personality traits from all over the world have been reported in the twenty-first century (Lynn, 2006, Lynn, 2010, Lynn, 2012, Lynn and Vanhanen, 2002, Lynn and Vanhanen, 2006 and McDaniel, 2006).
Since nation states like Italy and Spain exhibit north–south differences in their behavioral propensities in the above expected directions, it is natural to expect the same gradients in other parts of the world. In Japan, although casual observation sometimes admits that regional behavioral and IQ differences result in relatively poor economic performances in the south, there exists only one paper suggesting regional IQ differences on Okinawa, the southernmost region (Agarie, 1959). Serious inquiry on this topic has been effectively prohibited due to the political correctness and self-censorship in Japanese academia. Since various kinds of IQ tests such as the WISCor Progressive Matrices were no longer being conducted after the 1970s, this paper examines this conjecture by utilizing national achievement test scores from Japan’s 47 prefectural populations.
Additionally, income returns to IQ premium are calculated at the prefectural level so that it could be included in the database of the robust IQ/income relationships reported to date (Jencks, 1972, Herrnstein and Murray, 1994, Murray, 1998, Murray, 2002, Altonji and Pierret, 2001, Zax and Rees, 2002 and Hanushek and Woessmann, 2008).”—-
Source date (UTC): 2015-11-09 05:00:00 UTC
USE OF THE WORD “NATURAL” IN ECONOMICS
(re: Tyler Cowen/ Scott Sumner / Econlib ) (important idea )
—“Economic activity consists of interactions between people, and it’s not ever independent of human influence, and so it’s never “natural”.—
One can however, increase the truth content of human relations, or one can decrease the truth content of human relations. One can increase the truth content of human relations in times of shock. One can decrease the truth content of human relations in order to accelerate consumption.
So human relationships are in a natural state any time we improve institutions that improve information by reducing informational asymmetry, or distributing information that was previously unavailable (prices, interests rates, money supply, etc).
Human relations are in an unnatural state when we insert disinformation in order to fool people into acting other than they would in the natural state. For this reason it is perhaps more accurate to distinguish not between natural and artificial, but truth and deception, morality and immorality.
The most accurate model of the social sciences, like the physical sciences is information.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine
Source date (UTC): 2015-11-09 04:39:00 UTC
The Modern, Postmodern, and Testimonial Ages?
Source date (UTC): 2015-11-09 03:55:00 UTC