Recent submissions

Comment · 9 years ago
> a Protestant culture which places a lot of religious and moral significance on conceiving human life

Er, that would be more characteristic of Catholicism. There's a reason for this Monty Python skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifgHHhw_6g8.

Francis Galton, a product of a thoroughly Protestant society, was already worrying about the negative correlation between socioeconomic status and fertility very shortly after the Industrial Revolution.

Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
I like the following anecdote of Darwin's (though it's from quite a bit later in time):

Many kinds of monkeys have a strong taste for tea, coffee, and spiritous liquors: they will also, as I have myself seen, smoke tobacco with pleasure. (6. The same tastes are common to some animals much lower in the scale. Mr. A. Nichols informs me that he kept in Queensland, in Australia, three individuals of the Phaseolarctus cinereus [koalas]; and that, without having been taught in any way, they acquired a strong taste for rum, and for smoking tobacco.) Brehm asserts that the natives of north-eastern Africa catch the wild baboons by exposing vessels with strong beer, by which they are made drunk. He has seen some of these animals, which he kept in confinement, in this state; and he gives a laughable account of their behaviour and strange grimaces. On the following morning they were very cross and dismal; they held their aching heads with both hands, and wore a most pitiable expression: when beer or wine was offered them, they turned away with disgust, but relished the juice of lemons. An American monkey, an Ateles, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus was wiser than many men. These trifling facts prove how similar the nerves of taste must be in monkeys and man, and how similarly their whole nervous system is affected.

- "The Descent of Man"

Comment · 9 years ago
The sentiment is lifted directly from the linked post.

It's hard to argue with given the subcontinent had agricultural, seafaring populations while Australian populations never made it past Paleolithic hunter-gathering.

Comment · 9 years ago
here's some interesting speculation on this topic: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/a-three-hour-tour/

Basically there's genetic (Y chromosome) and linguistic evidence suggesting an infusion of Indian immigration (~5000 years ago so maybe a distinct event from this). One plausible explanation is that some Dravidian seafarers crash-landed in Australia and got absorbed by the local population. From their perspective it probably would have felt like sinking into savagery.

Comment · 9 years ago
If you're a remotely rational government, why would you not subsidize it? The dividends you could reap from a population with greater health, intelligence, self-control, low time-preference, etc., would be ridiculous.

Of course maybe people will want to use it for more zero-sum things like height or looks, so maybe you ban or don't subsidize that, but inequality in more positive-sum traits is unlikely.

Comment · 9 years ago
> 90% of genetic variance in human races exists in the African continent

Counting neutral variation (the vast majority of genetic variation). You can get plenty of variation in non-coding DNA from drift without any effect on the variance in a trait. In fact, you rarely actually get effects on highly polygenic traits from drift without selection (imagine random directions chosen independently for each of the relevant alleles, and think in terms of the law of large numbers).

If you're getting this from Oded Galor or Deidre McCloskey, they're generally smart people but don't understand population genetics well.

Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
relsted to the secular decline in testosterone (whatever's causing that)?
Comment · 9 years ago
I've heard that there was a sharp increase from the early 20th century to the 70s-80s, then a small decline since then (maybe due to deleading gasoline among other things), and it seems to have happened in other countries too http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/olym....

It's a bit hard to judge since there are only a few crimes where measurement has been consistent and good, e.g., homicide and violent crime. And there you have to take into account the decline in lethality due to better medical care:

https://twitter.com/RAVerBruggen/status/754446756805509120

https://twitter.com/RAVerBruggen/status/756512858331082752.

I'd like to see the trend in assaults, which would be most relevant to free-range parenting, but haven't been able to find it anywhere.

Comment · 9 years ago
Alternate perspective:

"Rethinking the Transmission Gap: What Behavioral Genetics and Evolutionary Psychology Mean for Attachment Theory", https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303952365_Rethinkin...

"Top 10 Replicated Findings From Behavioral Genetics", http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1745691615617439

I would really recommend reading the above (in particular finding 9 from the second survey). The media has a strong bias towards environmental theories of human traits.

Comment · 10 years ago
Comment · 10 years ago
There was an interesting study looking at measures of honesty and economic growth: https://www.uea.ac.uk/documents/3154295/7054672/Honesty+pape....

Chinese nationals were in the top 2 of both measures of dishonesty (which didn't correlate all that well in general, so I'm not sure "honesty" is all that easy to measure), while British nationals were in the bottom 2 of both. One of the correlations they found was that rates of honesty were correlated with rates of Protestant Christianity.

Comment · 10 years ago
No self-experiments but he has posted this https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/537w8h/phys..., a twin study showing decreased body fat and increased grey matter in response to exercise.
Comment · 10 years ago
Yeah I was skimming replies and didn't notice the thrust of your comment. But I stand by my statement about that particular conversation.

Based off what I've seen, if Twitter goes under, I expect one of the participants (pseudoerasmus) would not switch to another social network and would just stick to blogging.

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