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arctotherium

@arctotherium42

Jun 10

Thread with excerpts from the pre-Columbian chapters of T. R. Fehrenbach's Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico (1973/1995). This is a very dense and detailed book; this thread is not even close to comprehensive.

Meso-American civilization was one civilization; there were no separate Aztec/Mexic/Yucatec/Maya/etc civilizations. The peoples discovered by Cortes were inheritors rather than creators.

For its entire history, Meso-American culture was extraordinarily urban, more like the Orient than that of the European dark ages. But these were not so much commercial or mercantile cities as religious and defensive ones.

Read 36 tweets

arctotherium

@arctotherium42

Jun 2

Thread with excerpts from Richard Pipes' Property and Freedom (1999). Pipes is a historian of Russia, and the thesis of the book is that private property, as something distinct and protected from public power and sovereignty, is indispensable to human freedom.

One of the fundamental differences between Russia and the rest of Europe lay in the weak development of private property; one of the major themes of Western philosophical history is the benefits and drawbacks of private property; Russian philosophers unanimously condemn it.

Freedom, as used by Pipes, includes political freedom, legal freedom, economic freedom, and personal rights. It does not include the right to public support ("freedom from want"); such 'rights' are at best a moral claim and at worst an unearned privilege.

Read 67 tweets

arctotherium

@arctotherium42

Jun 1

Red state pension funds tend to vote with management if management is providing good returns (ie, doing their job); blue state pension funds tend to vote with management if the company does leftist things (ie, ESG, or not paying CEOs very much).

This reflects a general difference in attitude towards institutions; rightists prefer institutions do what they were created for (eg police should fight crime, the military should fight wars, companies should make money doing their business, schools should teach)...

...while left-wingers want every institution to have pushing the Party Line as its #1 priority (extremely totalitarian in that regard). The formers produces a better society, the latter is more politically powerful but destroys everything in the long run.

Read 5 tweets

arctotherium

@arctotherium42

Jun 1

Training an LLM to be more politically evenhanded (as opposed to left-wing, as almost all LLMs are - so more right-wing) makes it more egalitarian in how it values the lives of people of different races without training to do so. PCT = Political Consistency Training.

LLMs trained in this way also value members of different religions, political creeds, and public figures coded left vs right more equally.

Almost all notable LLMs except Grok are left-wing on the US political spectrum, but in a very particular way, sort of like a superhumanly-knowledgeable Redditor or Wikipedia editor from the year 2018.

Read 4 tweets

arctotherium

@arctotherium42

May 9

Since 2009, medical schools have had to prove they sufficiently discriminate against white men ("achieve mission-appropriate diversity outcomes") to get accredited.

White men are now significantly underrepresented among med school students.

Fortunately, competence isn't that important in doctors, so purging white men in favor of "underrepresented minorities" (blacks, LatinX) who can't pass clinical exams shouldn't matter.

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arctotherium

@arctotherium42

May 8

European IQ's rising due to natural selection (as measured by PGS) continuing into the modern era whereas it stalled in East Asia could have been predicted from Gregory Clark's genealogical studies in both regions.

Clark found that "survival of the richest" was the rule in England from 1300-1880 or so, with huge differences in surviving offspring by class and this was much weaker in Qing China because higher class women didn't have more kids due to elite polygamy.

(IQ is not the only trait that goes into income or wealth, of course, so selection for wealth is only indirectly selection for IQ and also selects for a package of other traits, some of which are collective goods like IQ and some of which are not.)

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