Does democracy or self-governance do something to your personality or values? Maybe yes says this clever study of Switzerland.

In ... 1218 the last ruler of Zähringen dies, leaving no heir, so the lands revert to imperial rule and gain some kind of self-governance.
It appears, these areas are still to this day higher in cooperative attitudes and voting turnout. It can't be explained in terms of crude sociological factors, and due to the geographical diversity, one can also employ fixed effects, none of which remove the pattern.

Even extreme luck from natural resources does not outweigh psychology in explaining variation in wealth. Take Nauru, the fattest country in the world, 95% are overweight and 70%+ are obese.

In the 1970s, they mined bird poo (guano) and sold it so that their country was the wealthiest in the world GDP per capita (population about 10k Polynesians). The plan was to put the money into a national trust fund, like Norway does. The interests from this massive wealth would enable them to basically finance a welfare state perpetually. However, it was not to be due to "mismanagement and corruption". Today they are about as poor as they were to begin with. Rags to riches to rags.

nytimes.com/1982/03/07/mag…

Richard Lynn published a posthumous papers on race differences in schizophrenia. The worldwide pattern in races living in Western countries appear to follow their relative intelligence levels. Highest in Blacks, elevated in various other groups, Amerindians/Hispanics, Aboriginies, Maori, MENAP and so on. East Asians seem to be slightly lower, but little data. Africans (Blacks) vs. Europeans (Whites) higher no matter if they live in USA, UK, or Sweden.

Everybody knows some topics or questions are taboo, but which ones? Do people agree? Decided to find out. We asked 500 Americans online to rate the tabooness of 29 questions, and this was the result.

Race and IQ was the winner, even beating incest, pedophilia, gay germs etc. The results were almost entirely consistent across all subgroups: age, sex, politics, race, science knowledge. The correlations for taboo ratings across groups were >.90, close to 1.00 without sampling error.

Though note that some grounds find everything more taboo than others.

The egalitarians in power were quick to cancel those academics who dared write that Dutch immigration report.

demo-demo.nl/wp-content/upl…
Socialism attracts losers. This is also true for immigration socialism.

To understand the fiscal effects of immigration you have to start with a plot like this one. From the perspective of the government, people below 25 are net negatives, between 25 and 75, they are net positive, and then negative again. The reasons for this are straightforward. Below 25's cost the state money in terms of childcare and education and don't yet make much money, and thus don't pay much in income tax. Old people cost money in retirement, old peoples homes, and healthcare.

Education attainment is often given as the best example of heritability not being noticeably stronger than shared environment. But this conclusion is somewhat incorrect because of the assortative mating bias. In this study of Finnish and Dutch families, heritabilities were estimated at 55% and 66%, compared with shared environment of 16% and 13%.

frontiersin.org/articles/10.33… In this Norwegian family study, heritability for education was estimated at 55%, close the above. Shared environment was 27%.

nature.com/articles/s4146…

Among those below 30, support for freedom of speech is a Right-Wing thing. This interaction with age was seen in both UK and US samples.



Of the more familiar factors, support for freedom of speech predictors were:

- being a man
- intelligence
- valuing freedom (duh)
- intellectual humility

Who likes big butts? Who prefers breasts instead? @MrGeorgeFrancis and I decided to look into this in more detail using national and subnational data.

The main source of data here are Pornhub and Google searches for body-related terms. There is strong agreement across sources. The main metric from the data is the relative interest in butts versus breasts. Behold, science.

I published a new study and it's a juicy one.

The establishment's theory of race differences in socially valued metrics is that this is due to "systemic racism", a kind of Marxist conspiracy theory where the dominant group (Whites) keeps other peoples down.





There are clear testable predictions from this theory. In places where racist, White people have more power, outcomes for non-Whites, especially Blacks and Hispanics should be worse. Recall that the US demographics by county look like this.

Of course, Republicans are racist in this theory.

Private market fans are usually a fan of private education. The trouble is that educational outcomes are mostly just genetics, so there isn't much room for improvement. One way to study this is to look at school voucher randomized trials.

This meta-analysis shows that they don't do anything for reading or math ability in the West. The results for non-Western countries are larger, but not very trustworthy due to rampant scientific misconduct in those countries. Shrug tier.

Private education probably preferable on other grounds, but not for actual learning outcomes.


The Participant Effects of Private School Vouchers Across the Globe: A Meta-Analytic and Systematic Review

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

Our reply is now out to Giangrande and Turkheimer's 2022 attack on our meta-analysis.

authors.elsevier.com/c/1giweaSXM2aHr
This article took a long time to publish, as the journal G&T published in didn't want to allow us a reply, so we had to appeal, and then their editor got fired for unrelated reasons. Science publishing is very political on these topics. You can read the timeline in the paper too.

@Steve_Sailer Your Ratwiki page has in fact been edited by Oliver D Smith a few times already. By my judgement, he's hiding under a few usernames here: Johns, Danak, Brain Galaxy (banned by staff for being Smith). I see 3 people in your comments who are Oliver D Smitht too. How to spot Oliver D Smith accounts:

1. Anyone who compulsively edits Karlin, Kirkegaard, Dutton, Winegard, Cofnas, etc.
2. Watch for the usual edit pattern of fanatically editing many times in a row instead of big edits.
3. British spellings like "paedophile" & missing spaces.

American criminology is seeing this pattern, and coming up with every alternative theory, however implausible, for why this is not caused by demographics

https://twitter.com/DukeKent29/status/1503012704981762052

That said, this particular version seems to only float around suspect sites (e.g. archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/218…), so can we verify it? Here's some quite similar looking data. Diversity index will be about the same as non-White%, which is same as Black+Hispanic.

visme.co/blog/gun-viole…

Science has spoken: communism is the best solution to the obesity pandemic.

Overweight trends among Polish schoolchildren before and after the transition from communism to capitalism

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26439757/ Would you like to learn more?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

"It’s as if Wernher von Braun had been given all the resources in the world to run a space program and had been beaten to the moon by an African witch doctor."

richardhanania.substack.com/p/tetlock-and-… I think the main problem with the indictment of experts from cases like this one is that the experts promoted in the media are not necessarily representative of expert opinion. Who has an anonymous survey of pol. scientists in 2001 about Afghanistan's prospects? @RichardHanania

I don't get the fascination with this app. It obviously sucks for anyone who wants to build a dissident community.

npr.org/2021/04/05/983… Not new stuff

2017

nytimes.com/2017/08/15/tec…

New paper out!

The Negative Religiousness-IQ Nexus is a Jensen Effect on Individual-Level Data: A Refutation of Dutton et al.’s ‘The Myth of the Stupid Believer’

PDF is on RG in link

bit.ly/3rHgNdS We show that prior negative results are due to toward-0 bias from Jensen's method when used with small gaps and small sample sizes (unreliability of the gap vectors).

"if it were possible to develop a treatment that reduced prostate cancer risk in the African-American population to the level that is seen in men who carry two copies of 8q24 inherited from recent European ancestors, the rate of prostate cancer would decrease by ≈49%" Admixture mapping identifies 8q24 as a prostate cancer risk locus in African-American men (2006!)

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Heat exposure from sauna and sperm quality? n=10 but hear it out Even 3 months after last sauna exposure, with n=10, still get p < .01 worse sperm quality. That's nuts!

Anyone know of some detailed stats on mental illness by occupation? Stereotype is that people who work in mental health are doing so for partly 'doctor heal thyself' reasons. Is the stereotype true?

apa.org/gradpsych/2012… "Responses were collected from 678 UK-based clinical psychologists through an anonymous web survey"

"Two-thirds of participants had experienced mental health problems themselves."

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.100…