House DIY

"If you want to know who controls you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize." - Voltaire

New paper, in which I argue you don't live in a democracy. "Democracy and the Academy" at Philosophy & Public Affairs Link below. Tell me why I'm wrong in the replies!

It can be difficult to grasp just how recent the Mexicanization of America is. In the 1970s, less than 70,000 net Mexicans were immigrating per year. Then from 1980-2010, you had about 700,000 net migrating every year, on top of Baby Boom levels of TFR.

This - the state funding lawyers to sue the state to compel it to do leftist things - is one of the most important ways modern Western governments coordinate. It's very Kafkaesque.

Skip California entirely and spend the money that would take to increase the rest of the high-speed national railway maybe 20% more miles, including Albuquerque and Anchorage Alaska. Make Salt Lake City a hub.

Homeopathic Psychotherapy.

Aging and the selection-decline effect should grow beyond thinking in terms of an overall effect spread evenly, but will eventually consider specific traits that are selected upon differently across the lifespan. This should generate new and interesting testable hypotheses!

One thing that’s treated very flippantly by the plastic surgery people is how significant going under general anesthesia is for your long term health. Going under one time is equivalent to a concussion in terms of brain damage. It should not be done frivolously.

Among the Ache and Hadza hunter-gatherers individuals interact with over 1000 others over their lifetime. I don’t think 100 is plausible for the vast majority of historical hunter-gatherer societies

On January 17, 1961, in his farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned against the establishment of a “military-industrial complex,” but he also warned about a scientific-technological elite:

Watch this video below. Shocking that it was aired on CNN. By @FareedZakaria no less! All the problems he describes in California result from total Democrat control of the state for years. And that total control / no competitive elections result from election laws written that way on purpose. By the politicians who care only about staying in power. This is the same result EVERYWHERE when the election system itself is designed to take the power from the voters and hand it to the governing officials. Where the voters no longer choose their leaders - because the leaders have rigged the process to perpetuate themselves, to ensure their continued power and control. The election system in California is based NOT on access to and control by the voters. No. Instead, the election laws in CA are designed to vest total access to and control of the election process by the politicians. @EIwatchdogs published the Model Election Laws Handbook last month: the blueprint to repair the damage done to America’s election systems by the Democrats’ Leftwing Corrupt Elections crowd over the past 30 years. Who has attacked the Handbook repeatedly in the past month? @marceelias - yes, a key architect of the corrupt elections in CA and other blue states. The pro corrupt elections cabal wants EVERY state to be California- where the Democrat politicians control the election results. California’s inability to govern itself is a result of corrupt elections and NOTHING will or can change until the CA election code is completely replaced with laws such as those in the Model Election Laws Handbook. modelelectionlaws.org It is a binary choice: either the system has integrity, so the voters control the outcome OR the system is corrupted by politicians who control the outcome. There is no substitute in a constitutional republic for honest, transparent, and accurate elections. That’s real voter access. Not politician access. Until the voters control the outcome of elections in California - and everywhere - the political ruling class will continue to do what it has done in California and, frankly, in every blue state. Join the election integrity movement. Help save our country. And even save once proud but now sad places like California ElectionIntegrityNetwork.org

2/ The vast majority of ways to make a mark on the world require tools, skill, and space / property. To an acceptable approximation, in 2026 no one under the age of 29 has a backyard, a circular saw, or a set of sawhorses. The only mark that 99% of people can make is a wound.

Disaster Cycle. 'The spin axis is quick, the rock is slow.. Maxwell time (viscosity/rigidity).. during the event.. Earth behaves elastically — a spring, not honey. Love Number.. 0.6.. every day: the solid ground rises and falls roughly 30 cm twice daily as the Moon tugs..' Etc.

As this is doing numbers let me elaborate a bit. The traditional definition of what counts as original is indeed quite restrictive. Obviously once civilization advanced and writing spread, all writing was likely to be influenced by some other. Still we must acknowledge the influences. Some derived scripts were more innovative than others. Latin from Greek was a very small change. Greek from Phoenician was a pretty big one. New category, abjad to alphabet. Brahmi from Aramaic was also a big jump, abjad to abugida. Indians deny the descent but they deny everything. Hangul was very innovative too, but the influence of phagspa is undeniable. At any rate, if you change the taxonomy to classify the more innovative scripts as original, you get a category including hieroglyphs, Chinese, Brahmi, Hangul. If you include those with no graphic resemblance, you get those plus Glagolitic, Georgian, Armenian (made to look different to Greek on purpose), Deseret. Those just aren't useful categories at all. The traditional taxonomy on writing system is about understanding the history of the spread of writing. And the history says there are two extant branches, Egyptian and Chinese. QED.

Kurt Gödel's two Incompleteness Theorems were four years before Alonzo Church's Lambda Calculus, a kind of third theorem perhaps? (For any sufficiently complex system you can't prove it contains no contradictions. Nothing's perfect. Consilience and comparative methods matter.)

Average SAT by major at Columbia. Classics improbably edges out Math and Physics for the top spot at 1529. Sociology is on the bottom (1422), though "Ethnicity & Race Studies", "Public Health", and "Human Rights" aren't too far in front. The within-school spread is 100 points or so — around half of a standard deviation of the SAT-taker population.

Five reasons the twin findings of very high heritability of IQ) remain important are: 1. Twin studies capture the entire genome and all types and modes of genetic variant and effect (baring denovo mutations etc.). 2. They capture and expose variance both within and between families: 3. They are the reality on the ground: a) MZ twins are as similar in IQ as the same person taking the WAIS twice (!) b) DZ twins sharing half their DNA are only half as similar. 4. If indirect effects of parental DNA are active for IQ, then this is is the extended phenotype of IQ. Rather than something to dismiss as "not h^2", it reveals that the selective benefit of the IQ adaptation includes: a) Creating high SES niches for one's offspring. b) Responding to the needs of the infant. That's everything from things as simple as treating crying etc as a need to respond too and effectively solve. More broadly, parental IQ enables the evoked environment: Answering questions about calculus or why the sky is blue accurately, curiously, and responsively. Buying engineering toys if that's the child's interests lie, or art or music or... c) Supporting training and investing in the offspring's adult journey. 5. If part (or all) of apparent indirect genetic effects result from assortative mating, that too is not to be dismissed. Assortment is key to the ability distribution of the next generation and the variance of IQ and it creates a massive genetic conveyor belt sorting alleles so they end with other alleles point in the same phenotypic direction. a) People choose mates about as well as they could if they received WAIS scores from potential partners and made maximizing that a top priority. b) Assortative mating pumps in variance in genetics (making more high (and more low scorers) than would happen at random). c) The exceptional parents are aligned with their exceptional offspring. d) If high ability couples fail to have offspring that's a double whammy for the next generation. There's much more we learn from twins, but that's plenty of reason they are as important as ever and the higher than current SNP-based heritability estimate is important as ever. As Alex says, academia is perversely silent on all of this.