Some pieces of advice Machiavelli offers to rulers:

•Punishment should be delivered in a swift and brutal manner, while rewards should be dispersed in small amounts over time

🧵 1/ •Religion must be promoted regardless of how truthful it is, because it supplies social solidarity

2/

Fertility among college-educated women hasn't changed much since a generation ago. Fertility collapse is among poor women. In 1994, the average age of a first-time mother without a university degree was 20. Today, two-thirds of women without degrees in their 20s have no children. A generation ago, a poor woman would have children with a man in the hope that this would lead to marriage and family. This seldom happened. Those children witnessed this failure, absorbed its lessons, grew up, and now are simply not having kids.

Wrong. They're expensive. Takes yrs to cultivate an understanding of them; to keep up with them, to express them without error. Helps to be immersed in affluence from birth. This is why Bourdieu, Fussell, Fitzgerald etc wrote real mobility is something of a myth.

https://twitter.com/bryan_caplan/status/1792577808960544936

Saying defund the police in 2024 is like wearing Canada Goose in 2019. You reveal yourself as behind the fashion; a wannabe; an arriviste. Cringe. etc. Gotta be close to the source of the trends (typically elite institutions). Requires money, connections, cultural capital etc.

3 interesting findings:

1. On Tinder, women in their twenties are roughly twice as likely to swipe right (“like”) for the same man if he has a master's degree compared with a bachelor's degree. 2. Sociometric status (respect and admiration from peers) is a stronger predictor of happiness than socioeconomic status. This finding held up after controlling for gender, ethnicity, and extraversion.

My most popular Substack posts of 2022:

1. How I Read: Non-secrets for voracious reading robkhenderson.com/p/how-i-read 2. Why Dumb Ideas Capture Smart and Successful People robkhenderson.com/p/how-dumb-ide…

3 interesting findings:

1. In contentious disputes with another person, a man is nearly twice as likely to apologize if his adversary is a woman and 3X more likely to physically attack if his adversary is a man. 2. Despite being only 1.2 percent of the population, psychopaths commit 30 to 40 percent of all violent crimes.

Lots of discussion at the sexual revolution debate about whether the revolution failed men, or failed women, or helped men more than women, or helped women more than men. Nobody asked whether the sexual revolution failed children. People already know. Too depressing a topic. The sexual revolution did not fail— it succeeded in its aim: more freedom. Today people (esp women, are less happy but more free. What’s more important—happiness or freedom? For adults, freedom. Better for people to have the ability to choose badly than have no choice at all.

“A stringer is a man who strings women along…they con women into wasting the years when they are most attractive and most likely to get a proposal…If a man had even one long-term relationship with someone else, he’s very likely to be a stringer.” today.com/health/reason-…
On average, for every guy who perpetually strings girls along in relationships with no ring, he is responsible for two women who remain unmarried into older age.

Three interesting findings:

1. People who believe that it's wrong to have children (anti-natalists) are much more likely to score highly on Dark Triad personality traits (psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism). 2. Study with more than 11 thousand participants in 45 countries: Attractive men and women are viewed as relatively more intelligent, dominant, trustworthy, confident, responsible, caring, and sociable. They are also viewed as less weird and more happy.

Most respondents got these answers right. The majority result for each poll was the correct answer.

The rich faces were composites of real people with annual incomes over $150K). The poor faces were composites of real people with annual incomes below $35K.… https://t.co/dE7xosFklbtwitter.com/i/web/status/1…

https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1684251896523919361

People generally seem to infer that positive emotion (or at least the relative absence of negative emotion) is a cue for higher social class.

It’s just a movie tagline relax it has no meaning beyond that you’re reading too much into it let people enjoy things. Yes we spent decades deconstructing culture and society to understand how corporate and political messaging promotes and reinforces prevailing dogma and no we aren’t using the lessons we gleaned to implement our preferred ideology and it’s good that we are. So stop asking.

"It is often easier to manipulate smart people than stupid people...The less smart people can see how manipulated the smarter people are. They also see that the smarter people look down on them and attack their motives and intellects."marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…

https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1387087455732572164?s=20

3 interesting findings:

1. The most common high school grade for girls is now an A. For boys, it is a B. Girls now account for two-thirds of high schoolers in the top 10%, ranked by GPA, while the proportions are reversed on the bottom rung. 2. Among men, handgrip strength is negatively correlated with Neuroticism and positively correlated with Extraversion. Stronger men tend to score relatively low on neuroticism and high on extraversion. There were no other personality correlates for male handgrip strength.

"Brainwashing, as popularly understood, does not exist or is of almost zero effectiveness...in practice, 'cults' have retention rates in the single percentage point range..Typically, a conversion sticks because an organization provides value to its members"lesswrong.com/posts/TiG8cLkB… "The CIA experimented with brainwashing...with drugs (including LSD) and medical therapies such as electroshock in their research on mind control. Their experiments failed to produce even one potential Manchurian Candidate, and the program was abandoned."

The Cost of Luxury Beliefs, Time Trap, Half-life of Friend Groups robkhenderson.substack.com/p/the-cost-of-… 3 interesting findings:

1. Only one in ten college-educated mothers in the U.S. are unmarried compared with more than half of mothers who do not have a college degree.

A brief chronology of the Communist regime’s Cultural Revolution in China

May 15, 1966: The communist party circulates a letter from Mao stating that bourgeois control of schools “cannot be allowed to continue.” /1 May 16, 1966: The communist regime launches the cultural revolution. It calls for a “thorough criticism of academia, educators, journalists, artists, publishers and other representatives of the bourgeois class, and seizing leadership in those culture spheres.” /2

Word Games, Frictionless Existence, Psychopathic Males robkhenderson.substack.com/p/word-games-f… 3 interesting findings:

1. Having tattoos is associated with low impulse control. Interestingly, even the expressed intention to get a tattoo is associated with impulsivity and short-sightedness.

Sentiment and Facts, Academic Cheating, Paying on Dates
robkhenderson.substack.com/p/sentiment-an… Three interesting findings:

1. A man is more than twice as likely as a woman to have a car accident and almost three times more likely to have two car accidents. Even when not driving, men are more careless; twice as many men are killed simply crossing the street.

Five minutes into the new @chrisrock special on Netflix:

“Anyone who says words hurt has never been punched in the face.”

“In the old days, if someone wanted your job, they just worked harder than you. Now, they just wait for you to say some dumb shit.” “Motherfuckers are typing woke tweets on a phone made by child slaves.”

“I saw a sign at Lululemon that said ‘We don’t support racism, sexism, discrimination, or hate.’ And I’m like, ‘Who gives a fuck? You’re just selling yoga pants.’”

Soft Anti-Heroes, Global Elites, Wealth Dysmorphia
robkhenderson.substack.com/p/soft-anti-he… 3 interesting findings:

1. The common reason single women say it is difficult to find a partner is that it's hard for them to find someone who is compatible with them. The most common reason single men say it is difficult is that it's hard for them to approach people.

Deadwood, Cruel Moralizers, CEO Salaries
robkhenderson.substack.com/p/deadwood-cru… 3 interesting findings:

1. Nearly eight in 10 of all suicides are male. In 2013, if you were a man between the ages of 20 and 49 who’d died, the most likely cause was not assault nor car crash nor drug abuse nor heart attack, but a decision that you didn’t wish to live any more.