Mental issues roughly follow a hierarchical pattern, like cognitive abilities, like a general factor on top. At least, statistically. The motivating factors behind this approach compared to the categorical (diagnostic) approach are: 1) evidence of continuity between clusters, 2) binary encoding of continuous data loses information, 3) correlations among diagnoses are the norm, 4) a given person may not quality for any particular diagnosis, yet have severe symptoms.

What makes a good computer game?
An analysis of 60k Steam game ratings First ratings were adjusted for small sample bias using empirical Bayes

We just published a study showing that national stereotypes of intelligence are also accurate. It looks like this. You may be able to see that the pattern is quite nonlinear, and a spline test confirms this.

It looks like the more women we get into academia, the less of a university it will be and the more of a left-wing emotional playground it will be. emilkirkegaard.com/p/who-values-a…

US Naval Academy: "a white applicant with a 5% chance of admission would have a 50% chance if evaluated as Black, and more than 70% of Black admits would not have been admitted under a race-neutral system"

Whites the most systematically discriminated against race. The usual SAT gaps among applicants.

Americans are super fat, so many people look for explanations for this, usually something USA-specific like seed oils, or corn syrup. Americans have some race differences too, but they aren't that large. The White Americans are quite fat by themselves, only Asians drag the mean down.

Soyboyism is also heritable. In fact, the most heritable (snp h²) dietary habit in this study! (bottom right) Study

nature.com/articles/s4146…

Can Europe learn from Ghana? Buried on Wikipedia is a 3 sentence part about how Ghana deported 20% of the population -- 3 million people -- all the non-Ghanans. And it only took 3 months. The "Ghana Aliens Compliance Order" (GACO)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_i… This website provides the history. It begins, of course, with economic migration since Ghana was the gold coast. In fact, these migrants were going into a British colony, probably for the usual reasons of wanting to live under European domain: rule of lawand prosperity.

The racism of teachers In Germany, non-German students (anyone with "migration background") get lower grades and test scores.

The decline of intelligence, as measured by genetic scores. The decline of intelligence estimated by fertility and intelligence correlations by country.

New Dutch results on immigration. Sobering as usual. There are 3.7 million foreigners in the Netherlands. One can calculate a given person's contribution to the state budget by adding up all their contributions (revenue) and subtracting all of their costs. Doing so gives a net contribution metric. Dutch people are c. net 0, and the others groups net negatives.

Many of you have seen this figure. A pessimist's favorite. A massive innovation decline starting from 1880 or so. It fits suspiciously well with the onset of dysgenic fertility in NW Europe, or at least the UK.

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.