Links for June 2025

Human Progress columns, becoming your caricature, digitized government, AI genius list, and more

I was on two podcasts this month. Here’s my discussion with Brad Polumbo. Note I didn’t choose the headline.

I also appeared on Liron Shapira’s AI doom podcast (Substack, YouTube). If you want to hear me talk for two hours about various scenarios I find plausible or implausible, you’re in luck. I enjoy these types of exchanges, but realize they might not be for everyone.

In other news, I’ll be writing a monthly column for the Human Progress website from now on, so look out for that. There’s too much pessimism in the discourse, which I find both contrary to the facts and unmanly. The world is in fact tragic but the trends are in the grand scheme of things good, which is something that too few are now willing to acknowledge and incorporate into how they see reality. Happy to be part of a project seeking to make a difference on that front.

1. I thought Bimbo Ubermensch was one of those black women you see in commercials but never in real life, skinny and stylish with the wild curly hair.

Apparently, she is a Coptic Christian. This essay on bringing her boyfriend to meet her parents hits home, with the fair warning that some or all of it might be fictionalized. I assume it's mostly true.

I relate to the feeling of being embarrassed and overwhelmed by awkwardness when seeing your unsophisticated Middle East family members. Unintellectual, boring conversation, a focus on material gain and status seeking in the most transparent ways possible, devoid of any kind of virtue signalling, which some of us have a tendency to dislike until we see what the alternative is. And the kitsch. The kitsch is just unbearable. Do you understand now why immigrants are going MAGA?

"Under their roof, I tended to linguistically regress. Not into baby talk exactly, like I often did with men in more amorous contexts, but into simplified vocabulary, shorter sentences." Yes, I get this too.

I'm not a fan of the discussion of the supposed trauma she suffered. When people say they've been harmed by abuse, I think that's almost always a case of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and except in the most extreme situations when you hear someone complain about how broken they are due to their childhood, they're just confessing something about themselves as an adult and the narratives they've bought into.

Here, I think that she's pretending that her parents' supposedly abusive behavior was a big deal because the truth is she feels uncomfortable around them due to them being boring and cringe, and doesn't want to admit that.

Regardless, highly recommended for the insights into cringe immigrant parents and the kids that they end up alienating.

2. The Yarvin profile is long, and I think confirms a few points I've made before: 1) the dissident right is really white nationalism; the assumptions are all about the centrality of HBD, the dangers of immigration, etc. 2) The right-wing epistemological environment is bad. Most telling anecdote here is Yarvin believes in the Brigitte Macron was born a man theory. I guess he’s of the position that all modern thinkers are useless other than Candace Owens?

As to Scott Alexander's view that Yarvin sold out by discarding a lot of his ideas about seeking and achieving power, I think that the fact that he won't budge on the biological racialism indicates what's important here. Though I concede that walking back the race stuff would probably not be good for him anyway, since all these guys want is to just say "based" and that's what really counts.

3. Remarkable piece on the terrible state of data collection in Sub-Saharan Africa. GDP is simply a series of guesses. Murder rates are implausibly low. For a certain period of time, just compiling news reports of violent deaths in Nigeria gave you three times the number of murders reported by police.

For homicide rates in most African countries, the WHO doesn't rely on any underlying data, but gives you a model estimate based on various economic and demographic factors!

Population estimates are based on old censuses that had all kinds of problems, including fraud. “Only 5 mainland Sub-Saharan African countries have a birth registration system that registers at least 90% of births: Botswana, Congo Republic, Djibouti, Sierra Leone and South Africa (Mo Ibrahim Foundation, 2024, p. 16). In Angola, Chad, Ethiopia, Niger, Tanzania and Zambia, fewer than 30% of births are registered." Death registration is also of poor quality.

This is very bleak, given how much of the growth of humanity is going to come from Africa. There's just a lot we won't know about how much humans are progressing. Or maybe the fact that we won't have the numbers to even know how well we're doing will tell us all we need to know.

Someone needs to dive into the African population numbers. You won't get accurate totals, but the question is whether the official figures are likely to be over or under estimates. Same with fertility rates. From the article, it seems that the bias is towards incentives for overestimating, but I hope to dig more into this at some point.

4. Nate Silver on why Democrats are losing young men. This shifted my views a bit. I’ve been thinking too much of the incel and online rightoid as representative of the young conservative male, but generally they are too mentally healthy, risk accepting, and anti-feeling like a victim for the modern Democratic Party to appeal to them. Glad there isn’t much in the way of anti-immigrant sentiment among them either.

5. Enjoyed this article tracing changes in how Americans have viewed their role in the world through the prism of the Call of Duty franchise.

6. Review of a book claiming that free trade has stronger intellectual roots on the left than the right. One thing about the trade issue that I think is interesting is that opposition to trade is unusually likely to be driven by bad motives.

Imagine two politicians. Both are equal in their support for markets overall. But A is a protectionist who is relatively more pro-market domestically. B is a free trader who wants a more expansive welfare state. How should we judge these two individuals?