In summer 2022, I did a reader survey. Here are Part I, Part II, and Part III of the results.
When I last did the survey, I had 1/5th of the readers I have now. I think it would be fascinating to see how the audience has changed over time, if at all. I plan to throw the results into AI and ask it to tell me what’s new or interesting.
After publishing my article on the Eyferth study, I learned that there’s a replication study from Japan. Two of the authors are the familiar names of Kirkegaard and Lasker. The sample sizes involved are even smaller than Eyferth, but they do find no difference between the children of black and white occupation troops. Of course, if you don’t find Eyferth convincing you won’t find this convincing either, since the same selection effects are an issue. But the result indicates that the German results weren’t just a fluke.
It’s good that those who accept hereditarianism publish studies like this. In general, the hereditarians in these debates have always been more careful and honest than the environmentalists. James Flynn was a rare exception as an environmentalist who added to knowledge, in contrast to figures like Gould and Turkheimer who simply obfuscate on the issue.
I was on the Comedy Cellar this month to talk about Kakistocracy with my friend Noam Dworman.
I discussed the book on the Quillette podcast too.
Finally, I went on Rising to talk about my piece on climate change not being that big of a deal.
Links for the month are below.
1. Throughout the whole Cofnas controversy, you might have wondered how he was hired in the first place given how woke Ghent University turned out to be. This provides the background. Individual professors in the department are given a lot of freedom to hire them, and Cofnas has one particularly important fan. One amusing thing I learned from this article is that the trans rector of Ghent University, Petra De Sutter, has spoken positively about designer babies despite cancelling Cofnas. She was also the deputy prime minister of Belgium from 2020 to 2025. This is a data point in support of my view that we can not talk about race and IQ and nonetheless have a healthy intellectual environment without it. Focus on improving humanity, not ranking races.
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2. Yglesias on Trump’s war on skilled immigration. The correct attitude is of course 1) H-1B and OPT are working great; and 2) they could be better by being more selective. But people who don’t agree with 1 are unlikely to institute positive reforms, since it reflects an inability to clearly understand what is going on. One of the biggest problems with the H-1B program is that it relies on the theory of labor competition, with candidates ranked based on what they would be paid relative to those in their field. This is a stupid way of looking at the world. A janitor who earns slightly more than the average janitor is not producing more value than a below average engineer. Ranking things in this way makes sense if you start with the assumption that there is a set number of jobs and we have to worry about Americans competing with foreigners over them. Those who want less skilled immigration agree with this framing, so are unlikely to reform in the desired direction since they just want fewer people coming in. So in a sense the status quo and the attacks on skilled immigration have the same flaw, which is the lump of labor fallacy. The changes to OPT seem like they’re going to be more damaging than those to H-1B. In fact, the changes to H-1B might be on net positive if the $100K fee actually leads to better selection effects, assuming that the slots fill up. But OPT is uncapped, and here they are just shrinking the program.
3. On female beauty:
I think some people have managed to convince themselves that if they keep to genteel company – with the educated, the kind, and the rational – then they haven’t cost themselves anything by eschewing feminine effort. But I think they have actually just silenced the men around them and not actually rewired their desires.
Science and common sense say men like a low hip-to-waist ratio, low body fat, and giant breasts. People like to pretend otherwise because 1) it sounds too unsophisticated, like enjoying fast food; and 2) upper class Westerners spend a lot of time dancing around the feelings of women. But the younger people are when they learn the truth, the better. A lot more women should be getting breast implants.
4. As countries get wealthier, the environment first gets worse and then gets better. This is called the Kuznets Curve. Can something similar happen with how we treat animals? This makes a somewhat optimistic case, but it sounds to me like it’s a political choice. We can treat animals we farm for meat better, but whether we do largely depends on what kinds of laws are passed. Cleaning up the environment was more natural, since people care about the water they drink and the air they breathe. For farm animals, it needs to be pure altruism. Nonetheless, there’s something here, and wealth does open up options. It’s still up to us to make the moral case.
5. A top lawn care influencer named Greg Chism found that he could make a lot of money on YouTube by having his two young daughters get into food fights and dress up and act like babies, which he did for his channel Toy Freaks. He eventually found that to keep the momentum going he’d have to become the third baby. I was shocked to learn that there were months around 2016 to 2017 when Chism was the top content creator on YouTube. Watching the clips from Toy Freaks embedded in the story, they’re quite disturbing, and I wonder how many viewers were pedophiles or pedo-adjacent, and how many were, as the article implies, actual kids. YouTube eventually terminated the channel, with Chism saying he had been informed that “my videos were attracting audience members who do not have childrens’ best interests in their hearts.” The role of the company itself in training Chism to be a better content creator is a fascinating tidbit into how the company grew.
I kept thinking about why I found Toy Freaks clips so disturbing while reading this.
