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Sean Last Profile picture
Sean Last
@Sean__Last
6 subscribers
Jun 21 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Political bias has caused a clear decline in academia's quality. To reverse this, academics would have to do some smart and truth seeking things. For that to happen, we'd need to have more academics who are not dogmatic leftists. The right increasingly consisting of uneducated... ...people, people with low IQs, etc. makes that less likely to happen. To fix academia, we'd want a trend in the opposite direction.

In response to how bad academia, and so the media, has gotten, alternative media has become more popular. It gets some things right in...
Jun 18 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The idea that you can "expose yourself to intense suffering to toughen yourself up" is one influential idea that is pretty plausibly wrong. First, there's the research on self control training where people practice doing one hard thing and then we... ...see if an increase in their tolerance for that thing transfers over to an increased tolerance for doing other hard things. Generally, it does not. Sometimes, the opposite happens.

Then, there's all the literature in developmental psychology about what happens to people...
Jun 18 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
This reminds me, I think people don't talk enough about differences in sensation seeking. Roughly, some people get easily bored if extreme things are not happening, externally or internally, and so are frequently chasing a desire to make them happen. Often, such people like... ...doing this in groups because this lessens their feeling of individual agency, which is also exciting.

In part, people will probably tend to be high in sensation seeking if they are unable to pay close attention to stimuli that doesn't capture their attention with force...
May 27 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The most obvious argument for censorship is that when people who are smarter, more educated, and spend more time thinking about politics, than the masses, say that a significant number of the masses are dangerously wrong about something our priors should favor elites being... ...right over the masses.

The most obvious argument against "doing your own research" is that however much research you do, the experts will have done far more, so if you end up disagreeing with them you will probably be wrong.

In recent years, people have talked a lot...
May 27 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I am a fan of Sailer as well. I somewhat disagree with his take on the history of the left, but it is important to note that this is a standard take in American political history, many mainstream books will tell you about the old protestant left, and it's been common on the... ...far right for years in Nrx circles, and Paleo ones before that. Given this, I don't think it's justified to conclude that Sailer being part Jewish is the cause of him holding these views. Also, the antisemitic attacks from Groypers on Sailer recently have obviously been bad.
Apr 22 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Because women, but specifically young women, moved way to the left in many countries in the 2010s, it seems plausible that social media is a big explanatory factor. And it seems plausible that the thing women find on social media that moves them to the left is the posts of men... Image ...who obviously hate women and who are conservative, or at least anti-left. My guess is this is not true of most conservative men, but it is true of some of them and they, like many anti-social groups, like to be loud on the internet. Probably, they were on the right before...
Mar 28 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
This is a good example of how, in live debates, how people look, move, and speak, causes in people a perception of winning and losing that is fairly independent of the arguments being made.

Consider the first thing they go back and forth on, Peterson's claim that... "It didn't do anything to transmission". Destiny points out that this is false because it reduced the rates of transmission. Peterson then seemingly completely abandons his original claim, that vaccine's don't influence transmission, and moves to the claim that the government...
Aug 6, 2023 • 29 tweets • 6 min read
Hanania has explained his change in views. In this thread I will, because people were asking about this and it is probably an unusual frame, self indulgently use comparisons between this and my own reasons for changing the racial views I held back then to argue this... ... implies some negative things about Hanania. First, three examples of my own changes.

In my late teens I saw Putnam's work showing that ethnic diversity predicts less social cohesion and I overestimated this effect, and didn't understand that economic variables are even...
Aug 4, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
It's surprising to me that anyone would be surprised if men didn't want to have sex as much with women while they were pregnant. Evolutionarily, there's no point. Many responding to this thread recommend lying to your wife if this is the case. This reminds me of the norms... ... encouraging men to lie to their wives about how attractive they are as they get older. I've spoken to some women about this, and seen others talk about it, and many express that they would feel a sense of worthlessness knowing that their husband didn't think they were hot...
Aug 3, 2023 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
There are so many infinite variations within a single color that, when you add in mixes between them, primary colors become meaningless.

Racial differences are large. Even at the individual level, race makes important predictions. Some examples:

Within a given occupation...
Image ...IQ differs greatly by race.

Relatedly, even comparing people working the same jobs, job performance differs by race (whites > blacks).

sci-hub.wf/10.1037/0021-9…
Image
Jul 28, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Kids from poor families don't commit more crime because their families are poor. You can tell this because when the families gain money and have new kids they are just as criminal as their siblings who grew up in poverty.


We can see the true reasons... pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25147371/
...why poverty correlates with crime in studies that measure psychology. For instance, in this paper IQ and impulsivity predicted crime while, after controlling for these sorts of variables, parental socio-economic status did not.


Wrt to race... researchgate.net/profile/Joseph…
Image
Jul 28, 2023 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
We don't consistently transfer resources from the ancestors of victims to the ancestors of whoever victimized them so this whole line of reasoning is special pleading.

Furthermore, black people today aren't significantly harmed by these historical incidents.

Wrt red... ...lining, the worst marked neighborhoods on the maps redlining was based on were 15% black and 85% white. Black people were rare in neighborhoods marked as safe to give loans in, but the relationship between neighborhood racial composition and loan rating was extremely weak... Image
Mar 28, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
It is true that since the 1970s the right has made progress on issues relating to abortion, school, and guns. But these represent the partial regaining of ground lost in the 1950s-1970s. If you expand the time horizon examined, most conservative short run "wins" become losses... ...Even with respect to taxes, Hanania looks at changes in the top marginal tax rate which is a misleading metric of taxes on the rich. Looking at effective tax rates over a longer time horizon makes clear this too is a conservative (or libertarian) loss.

The rise of...
Mar 26, 2023 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
The idea that there isn't a single person who can't be successful if given a good family is so self evidently false I assume this guy doesn't actually even think this.

Anyway, the idea that black parents don't value education is not supported by survey data. The assumption... Image ...that parenting style has a significant effect on student achievement is also generally not supported, good parents have good kids largely due to genes (e.g. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…).

As for two parent homes, prior to the rise of the federal welfare state... Image
Mar 17, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
@Langerhans_isle They do think this for groups in their coalition. It's worth noting that some long poor performing groups are not in their coalition (e.g. appalachian whites) that show they don't do this with any and all traditionally poor groups. More importantly, while this belief is a... @Langerhans_isle ...common gateway, probably the most important one, for becoming woke, wokeness goes beyond this. You could accept this thesis and be focused on eliminating the effects of past oppression, or even just accepting that history wasn't fair and moving on, w/o hating the groups...
Mar 17, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Wokeness is not thinking that all group differences must be due to discrimination. Woke people don't generally say that about group differences favoring women, homosexuals, or a non-white minority. Wokeness is about hating the groups that have traditionally done well in society.. ...and trying to invert traditional hierarchies so as to dominate those groups. Narratives about equality are deceptive. The only cases where they care about equality are those where their groups are losing. When they flip a group difference, such as education by sex, their...
Mar 16, 2023 • 4 tweets • 4 min read
Dozens of studies spanning over a century of research have shown that at every level of socio-economic status racial gaps in IQ still exist. IQ gaps not explainable by SES are present before children even begin school (e.g. jstor.org/stable/1131385…). SAT scores show the same... ...and these analyses over-state the role of the environment because SES is partly caused by IQ.

As for other countries, the racial IQ gaps found in the US have also been found in Europe (e.g.researchgate.net/publication/34…), Latin America (e.g. researchgate.net/publication/29… , and Africa...
Nov 6, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
It is potentially important that the number of election denying republicans is likely going to increase relative to 2020 suggesting very serious election skepticism will continue to grow. They won't get enough key positions this time around, but if they keep at this they could... ...capture a number of key states in the future. Looking like they will get AZ this time. Will be interesting to see if election skepticism outlives Trump. If so, this could make for some very eventful future elections.

In this sense, I don't think democrats are totally...
Nov 4, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Jackon's argument seems to be that banning racial considerations would inhibit people's ability to submit life stories that revolve around race to college admissions. I doubt that Jackson would generally endorse the view that when people have racial motivations to do something... Image ...these motivations can be considered in selection processes w/o being unfairly discriminatory.

By this logic, there's be no legal problem with a firm hiring people or a college admitting people partly because they said that as white men they felt they deserved the thing in...
Jul 25, 2022 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
The recent Mr. Beat video on the great replacement is one of the dumbest things I've watched in a long time. Can't tell whether he's lying or really stupid or both. Crazy to think there are people who liked that video. Even if you're not familiar with any empirical evidence, what he says lacks basic logical coherence in such an explicit and over the top way it's honestly kind of astonishing.
Jul 13, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Large RCT (n=5,000) gave 0$, 500$, or $2000 to a group of poor Americans (median monthly income including unearned income was $1,028, $414 earned). Over 15 weeks the money was shown to largely have negative or non-significant effects on various outcomes.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
Image The study also had a group of lay people and a group of experts (social scientists and policy makers) predict the outcomes of the study. They incorrectly predicted positive outcomes. Image