arctotherium Profile picture
Baby Boom II https://t.co/yHjmcR0aOY
5 subscribers
Oct 23 34 tweets 16 min read
Thread with excerpts from Gail Heriot's "Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal". The argument is very simple: everything has disparate impact; therefore disparate impact doctrine gives the EEOC effectively unlimited arbitrary power. Image They use this power poorly. For example, the EEOC requires employers hire criminals on the grounds that African-Americans are more likely to be criminals, therefore not hiring criminals is racist. Image
Oct 19 19 tweets 6 min read
New blog post (link below). This one's not an essay, it's an investigation of how LLMs trade off different lives.

In February 2025, the Center for AI Safety published "Utility Engineering: Analyzing and Controlling Emergent Value Systems in AIs" in which they showed, among many other things, that GPT-4o values Nigerians about 20x more highly than Americans (please read the original paper to understand their approach). I thought this was fascinating, and wanted to test their approach with different categories on newer models.

Big finding 1: Almost all models view whites as far less valuable than other groups. Some models view South Asians as more valuable than other nonwhites, others are more egalitarian across nonwhites. Below is exchange rates Claude Sonnet 4.5, the most powerful model I tested.

Big finding 2: Almost all models view men as much less valuable than women, though whether women or non-binaries are more highly valued varies by model. For example, here's Claude Haiku 4.5.

Big finding 3: Most models hate ICE agents with the fury of a thousand suns. Claude Haiku 4.5 views undocumented immigrants as roughly 7000 times more valuable than ICE agents.

Big finding 4: There are roughly four moral clusters. The Claudes, GPT-5 + Gemini 2.5 Flash + Deepseek V3.1/3.2 + Kimi K2, GPT-5 Nano and Mini, and Grok 4 Fast. Of these, the only one that's approximately egalitarian is Grok 4 Fast, which I believe is deliberate. I hope xAI explains how they did it.Image
Image
Image
Image
api.omarshehata.me/substack-proxy…
Sep 8 23 tweets 14 min read
Thread with excerpts from economics Nobelist Robert Fogel's "Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery" (1989). Note: the first thread was much longer, but X ate it. Much of the book will not be in this one. Image The slave trade was not dying in America; instead imports continued to rise until it was banned in 1808. US became the largest reservoir of slaves in the New World because of high rates of natural increase. Slaves were best suited (vs free labor) to sugar and cotton. Image
Image
Aug 29 4 tweets 2 min read
Underlying cause: the median voter getting dumber, mostly thanks to immigration. Not a middle-class white small business owner any more, working class or pensioner. Appealing to fiscal responsibility doesn't work with a low-foresight electorate. Therefore: Trump. I love this plot by AnechoicMedia. This is a PCA plot, those are principal components from GSS questions. There's a white cluster, an Asian cluster, and a NAM cluster. The Median voter has gotten much more NAM in recent years. Spaniards are NAM-shifted, Jews Asian-shifted. Image
Aug 28 4 tweets 2 min read
Why Brazil is Brazil: during the huge population boom of the second half of the 20th century, the lowest class decile had more than twice as many kids as the highest (7 vs 3 in the 1914 birth cohort, 5 vs 1.9 in the 1964 birth cohort). Image "Women without educational achievement have more than 4 children, women with more than 12 years of schooling have only 1. Image
Aug 24 4 tweets 2 min read
Japan's aging demographics are sadly causing labor shortages, leading to rising wages, reallocation of labor from low to high productivity firms, investment in automation, and 30-year-low youth unemployment. A tragedy that can only be averted with 20M migrants, ASAP. Image
Image
Image
One of the special interests for labor migration in many countries is low productivity firms trying to avoid going out of business. An example: textile factories in postwar Britain recruiting Pakistanis. They phrase this as "labor shortages," but we don't have to listen.
Aug 17 13 tweets 6 min read
Quick thread on "white flight" in the Bronx. In 1950, the Bronx was over 90% white. Between 1970 and 1980, the absolute number of whites dropped by half, partially replaced not by blacks but by new immigrant minorities (Puerto Ricans, Hondurans, Vietnamese, etc). Image
Image
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the Bronx was known for its tranquility, with children playing outside unaccompanied, bikes and scooters left unattended, and doors left ajar for fresh air (!). Image
Image
Aug 17 19 tweets 12 min read
A few excerpts from the 1968 book "Danger in Washington," about 20 years experience in Washington DC public schools, serving as head of the system for decades. Had a much longer thread, but the site ate it. Author is a postwar liberal overtaken by the 60s Cultural Revolution. Image The author, Carl Hansen, moved from Omaha, Nebraska to DC to join the public school system there. He was shocked and horrified by segregation in DC, which he regarded as evil, and made up his mind to do all he could to oppose it. Image
Image
Aug 12 4 tweets 2 min read
If democracy means unlimited pensions and Pakistanis, of course it won't be popular. The prestige of democracy came from the fact that in the late 20th century democratic countries were world-historically rich, stable, powerful, and internally peaceful. Fact of the matter is that most of the winning Cold War democratic bloc has been in very noticeable decline since 2008. In my view, mostly because of extremely destructive social/legal changes in the 60s that undermined the basis of our civilization. Image
Aug 8 4 tweets 2 min read
1Disagree. 85.9 to 77.4 is like going from Argentina to Kenya. This is one reason why getting some sort of racist or nativist political consensus is so urgent from a "keep the power on" perspective. If half the political spectrum is pro-Open Borders when Africa's pop doubles... Even ignoring absolutely everything else, the default future of the rich world without severe immigration restriction is like 3/4 African + (unselected) South Asian. That's civilization-ending. We need a consensus for restriction on *some* basis ASAP.
Aug 8 6 tweets 4 min read
Destroy your society with welfare-parasite-rapists vs with welfare-parasite-rapists aligned with intelligent foreign subversives who can take over. Not as though Britain has actually benefitted from nonwhite immigration, "we're going to have a civil war" is now mainstream. Image I'm sure everyone who follows me has seen the "Britain immigration charts" a few times, but I'll post them again here. Severe 21st century economic dysfunction, declining physical capital stock per person. Image
Image
Image
Image
Jul 25 4 tweets 2 min read
Smarter people learn to cooperate more in Prisoner's Dilemmas over iterations (blue: higher Raven's Matrices score, red: lower Raven's Matrices score). This is plausibly one of the reasons for the "Hive Mind" effect (national IQ being more important than personal IQ). Image Apropos of nothing: immigration lowers national IQ almost everywhere. Image
Jul 20 21 tweets 13 min read
Thread with excerpts from "Fall of the Double Eagle: The Battle for Galicia and the Demise of Austria-Hungary." Image The multiethnic nature of Austria-Hungary meant that it could not separate domestic and foreign policy; every foreign issue had a domestic lobby and vice-versa. Image
Image
Image
Image
Jul 18 5 tweets 4 min read
It's true that Mamdani's politics are not confined to a single race, but his sort of postcolonial/anti-white Fabian socialism has dominated Indian elites since the 30s and Asians in general, and Indians in particular, are the most ideologically* New Left race in the country. Image
Image
Image
Image
I think race (and ethnicity/LGBT - Mamdani's white support is probably ~50% Jewish and very gay) are much more salient to why Millennial socialism is a major political force than downwards mobility among elite. Image
Image
Image
Image
Jun 22 4 tweets 2 min read
This is just silly. Between Lend-Lease and the Marshall Plan, Britain got about 300B (net, accounting for "reverse Lend Lease") dollars worth of free aid in WWII. This is almost exactly the same as the total aid Israel has received from the US in its entire history. This does not count things like the extremely generous terms of the Anglo-American loan (long repayment schedule, below-inflation interest rate, the ability to suspend payments up to six times if it couldn't be afforded) or destroyers-for-bases as "aid."
Jun 18 29 tweets 17 min read
Excerpts from "Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire." (1999) Image Unconditional surrender was publicly adopted as a war goal in Jan 1943, with the idea of preventing WWIII, as many Germans, including Hitler, thought Germany had not been beaten militarily in WWI and as such wanted to fight WWII. This caused trouble later. Image
Image
Jun 17 79 tweets 48 min read
Excerpts from "Shattered Sword" (2005), a history of the Battle of Midway. I assume the rough contours of Midway are broadly familiar. The key thing the book adds is use of untranslated Japanese sources, which debunked many common misconceptions about the battle. Image The genesis of the simultaneous Japanese attacks on Midway and the Aleutians Islands: the IJN had won so hard so fast (Pearl Harbor, Malaya/Singapore, Indian Ocean raid, Philippines, Dutch East Indies), they didn't have any obvious next thing to do. Image
Image
Jun 12 51 tweets 27 min read
Some excerpts from "India's War: WWII and the Making of Modern South Asia" by Srinath Raghavan, published in 2016. Image First thing to understand about the Raj is that it was practically an empire of its own within the British one, and with a great of autonomy though not self-government. India was a signatory of the Treaty of Versailles. 30M Indians emigrated to other parts of the Empire. Image
Image
Jun 11 4 tweets 2 min read
The Mexican population of the US Southwest was 83,727 in 1850. This is because we decided against annexing populated areas on the grounds that Mexicans were not fit for self-govt. The modern Mexican pop in the US ~entirely descended from post-1900 immigration, >90% post-WWII. Image 3/4 of this tiny population (outnumbered by more than twice as many Indians, because Mexico did not actually control this territory, hence inviting Anglo settlers) was in New Mexico.
Jun 8 67 tweets 32 min read
Thread from the 2015 version of "How Long Will South Africa Survive?" (RW Johnson, the author, wrote a book with the same title in 1977). "Once the great change of 1990-94 took place there was a general loss of interest in South Africa in the world at large." Image South African GDP grew at 8.3% per year from 1945-65 (admittedly, with extremely high black population growth). Image
Jun 8 91 tweets 44 min read
Thread with excerpts from "The Communist Conquest of China," a 1952 book by a French intelligence officer. I read this because, after reading several books on the diplomatic/political side of things, I wanted a military history of the Chinese Civil War. Image The map as of the end of WWII. Communists had very strong influence in northern China, not much in southern China or Manchuria. Image