very short

Overall, there is a suggestion of two different reproductive strategies proving to be successful in modern Western societies: (1) a strategy associated with socially conservative values, including a high commitment to the bearing of children within marriage; and(2) a strategy associated with antisocial behavior, early sexual experimentation, a variety of sexual partners, low educational attainment, low commitment to marriage, haphazard pregnancies, and indifference to politics. This notion of distinct lifestyles characterized in common by relatively high fertility deserves further empirical and theoretical study.

- ways to get out of Malthusian conditions: expansion to new frontiers, new technology, redistribution/theft
- some discussion of existential risk
- wants to change humanity's "purpose" to one that would be safe in the long run; important thing is it has to be ESS (maybe he wants a singleton?)
- not too impressed by transhumanism (wouldn't identify with a brain emulation)

I’m going to review David Reich’s new book, Who We Are and How We Got Here. Extensively: in a sense I’ve already been doing this for a long time. Probably there will be a podcast. The GoFundMe link is here. You can also send money via Paypal (Use the donate button), or bitcoins to 1Jv4cu1wETM5Xs9unjKbDbCrRF2mrjWXr5. In-kind donations, such as orichalcum or mithril, are always appreciated.

This is the book about the application of ancient DNA to prehistory and history.

height difference between northern and southern europeans: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/who-we-are-1/
mixing, genocide of males, etc.: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/who-we-are-2-purity-of-essence/
rapid change in polygenic traits (appearance by Kevin Mitchell and funny jab at Brad Delong ("regmonkey")): https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/rapid-change-in-polygenic-traits/
schiz, bipolar, and IQ: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/rapid-change-in-polygenic-traits/#comment-105605
Dan Graur being dumb: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/the-usual-suspects/
prediction of neanderthal mixture and why: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/03/who-we-are-3-neanderthals/
New Guineans tried to use Denisovan admixture to avoid UN sanctions (by "not being human"): https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/04/who-we-are-4-denisovans/
also some commentary on decline of Out-of-Africa, including:
"Homo Naledi, a small-brained homonin identified from recently discovered fossils in South Africa, appears to have hung around way later that you’d expect (up to 200,000 years ago, maybe later) than would be the case if modern humans had occupied that area back then. To be blunt, we would have eaten them."

Live Not By Lies: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/08/live-not-by-lies/
Next he slams people that suspect that upcoming genetic genetic analysis will, in most cases, confirm traditional stereotypes about race – the way the world actually looks.

The people Reich dumps on are saying perfectly reasonable things. He criticizes Henry Harpending for saying that he’d never seen an African with a hobby. Of course, Henry had actually spent time in Africa, and that’s what he’d seen. The implication is that people in Malthusian farming societies – which Africa was not – were selected to want to work, even where there was no immediate necessity to do so. Thus hobbies, something like a gerbil running in an exercise wheel.

He criticized Nicholas Wade, for saying that different races have different dispositions. Wade’s book wasn’t very good, but of course personality varies by race: Darwin certainly thought so. You can see differences at birth. Cover a baby’s nose with a cloth: Chinese and Navajo babies quietly breathe through their mouth, European and African babies fuss and fight.

Then he attacks Watson, for asking when Reich was going to look at Jewish genetics – the kind that has led to greater-than-average intelligence. Watson was undoubtedly trying to get a rise out of Reich, but it’s a perfectly reasonable question. Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than the average bear and everybody knows it. Selection is the only possible explanation, and the conditions in the Middle ages – white-collar job specialization and a high degree of endogamy, were just what the doctor ordered.

Watson’s a prick, but he’s a great prick, and what he said was correct. Henry was a prince among men, and Nick Wade is a decent guy as well. Reich is totally out of line here: he’s being a dick.

Now Reich may be trying to burnish his anti-racist credentials, which surely need some renewal after having pointing out that race as colloquially used is pretty reasonable, there’s no reason pops can’t be different, people that said otherwise ( like Lewontin, Gould, Montagu, etc. ) were lying, Aryans conquered Europe and India, while we’re tied to the train tracks with scary genetic results coming straight at us. I don’t care: he’s being a weasel, slandering the dead and abusing the obnoxious old genius who laid the foundations of his field. Reich will also get old someday: perhaps he too will someday lose track of all the nonsense he’s supposed to say, or just stop caring. Maybe he already has… I’m pretty sure that Reich does not like lying – which is why he wrote this section of the book (not at all logically necessary for his exposition of the ancient DNA work) but the required complex juggling of lies and truth required to get past the demented gatekeepers of our society may not be his forte. It has been said that if it was discovered that someone in the business was secretly an android, David Reich would be the prime suspect. No Talleyrand he.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/12/who-we-are-6-the-americas/
The population that accounts for the vast majority of Native American ancestry, which we will call Amerinds, came into existence somewhere in northern Asia. It was formed from a mix of Ancient North Eurasians and a population related to the Han Chinese – about 40% ANE and 60% proto-Chinese. Is looks as if most of the paternal ancestry was from the ANE, while almost all of the maternal ancestry was from the proto-Han. [Aryan-Transpacific ?!?] This formation story – ANE boys, East-end girls – is similar to the formation story for the Indo-Europeans.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/18/who-we-are-7-africa/
In some ways, on some questions, learning more from genetics has left us less certain. At this point we really don’t know where anatomically humans originated. Greater genetic variety in sub-Saharan African has been traditionally considered a sign that AMH originated there, but it possible that we originated elsewhere, perhaps in North Africa or the Middle East, and gained extra genetic variation when we moved into sub-Saharan Africa and mixed with various archaic groups that already existed. One consideration is that finding recent archaic admixture in a population may well be a sign that modern humans didn’t arise in that region ( like language substrates) – which makes South Africa and West Africa look less likely. The long-continued existence of homo naledi in South Africa suggests that modern humans may not have been there for all that long – if we had co-existed with homo naledi, they probably wouldn’t lasted long. The oldest known skull that is (probably) AMh was recently found in Morocco, while modern humans remains, already known from about 100,000 years ago in Israel, have recently been found in northern Saudi Arabia.

While work by Nick Patterson suggests that modern humans were formed by a fusion between two long-isolated populations, a bit less than half a million years ago.

So: genomics had made recent history Africa pretty clear. Bantu agriculuralists expanded and replaced hunter-gatherers, farmers and herders from the Middle East settled North Africa, Egypt and northeaat Africa, while Nilotic herdsmen expanded south from the Sudan. There are traces of earlier patterns and peoples, but today, only traces. As for questions back further in time, such as the origins of modern humans – we thought we knew, and now we know we don’t. But that’s progress.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/18/reichs-journey/
David Reich’s professional path must have shaped his perspective on the social sciences. Look at the record. He starts his professional career examining the role of genetics in the elevated prostate cancer risk seen in African-American men. Various social-science fruitcakes oppose him even looking at the question of ancestry ( African vs European). But they were wrong: certain African-origin alleles explain the increased risk. Anthropologists (and human geneticists) were sure (based on nothing) that modern humans hadn’t interbred with Neanderthals – but of course that happened. Anthropologists and archaeologists knew that Gustaf Kossina couldn’t have been right when he said that widespread material culture corresponded to widespread ethnic groups, and that migration was the primary explanation for changes in the archaeological record – but he was right. They knew that the Indo-European languages just couldn’t have been imposed by fire and sword – but Reich’s work proved them wrong. Lots of people – the usual suspects plus Hindu nationalists – were sure that the AIT ( Aryan Invasion Theory) was wrong, but it looks pretty good today.

Some sociologists believed that caste in India was somehow imposed or significantly intensified by the British – but it turns out that most jatis have been almost perfectly endogamous for two thousand years or more…

It may be that Reich doesn’t take these guys too seriously anymore. Why should he?

varnas, jatis, aryan invastion theory: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/who-we-are-8-india/

europe and EEF+WHG+ANE: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/05/01/who-we-are-9-europe/

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/book-review-david-reich-human-genes-reveal-history/
The massive mixture events that occurred in the recent past to give rise to Europeans and South Asians, to name just two groups, were likely “male mediated.” That’s another way of saying that men on the move took local women as brides or concubines. In the New World there are many examples of this, whether it be among African Americans, where most European ancestry seems to come through men, or in Latin America, where conquistadores famously took local women as paramours. Both of these examples are disquieting, and hint at the deep structural roots of patriarchal inequality and social subjugation that form the backdrop for the emergence of many modern peoples.

https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/981291048965087232
https://archive.is/dUTD5
Would you endorse choosing policy to max the expected duration of civilization, at least as a good first approximation?
Can anyone suggest a different first approximation that would get more votes?

https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/981335898502545408
https://archive.is/RpygO
How useful would it be to agree on a relatively-simple first-approximation observable-after-the-fact metric for what we want from the future universe, such as total life years experienced, or civilization duration?

We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-the-risk-of-human-extinction/253821/
An Oxford philosopher argues that we are not adequately accounting for technology's risks—but his solution to the problem is not for Luddites.

Anderson: You have argued that we underrate existential risks because of a particular kind of bias called observation selection effect. Can you explain a bit more about that?

Bostrom: The idea of an observation selection effect is maybe best explained by first considering the simpler concept of a selection effect. Let's say you're trying to estimate how large the largest fish in a given pond is, and you use a net to catch a hundred fish and the biggest fish you find is three inches long. You might be tempted to infer that the biggest fish in this pond is not much bigger than three inches, because you've caught a hundred of them and none of them are bigger than three inches. But if it turns out that your net could only catch fish up to a certain length, then the measuring instrument that you used would introduce a selection effect: it would only select from a subset of the domain you were trying to sample.

Now that's a kind of standard fact of statistics, and there are methods for trying to correct for it and you obviously have to take that into account when considering the fish distribution in your pond. An observation selection effect is a selection effect introduced not by limitations in our measurement instrument, but rather by the fact that all observations require the existence of an observer. This becomes important, for instance, in evolutionary biology. For instance, we know that intelligent life evolved on Earth. Naively, one might think that this piece of evidence suggests that life is likely to evolve on most Earth-like planets. But that would be to overlook an observation selection effect. For no matter how small the proportion of all Earth-like planets that evolve intelligent life, we will find ourselves on a planet that did. Our data point-that intelligent life arose on our planet-is predicted equally well by the hypothesis that intelligent life is very improbable even on Earth-like planets as by the hypothesis that intelligent life is highly probable on Earth-like planets. When it comes to human extinction and existential risk, there are certain controversial ways that observation selection effects might be relevant.

Fig. 3. Bar plots showing genetic correlations between a selection of traits and rLRS for females (red) and males (blue).

supporting material:
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2017/12/12/1707227114.DCSupplemental
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2017/12/12/1707227114.DCSupplemental/pnas.1707227114.sapp.pdf

Fig. S10. Predicted relative fitness as a function of Fluid intelligence.

Women in the Work Force: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1986/09/women-in-the-work-force/304924/
Gender disparity in the workplace might have less to do with discrimination than with women making the choice to stay at home

I have said before that no currently popular ideology acknowledges well-established results of behavioral genetics, quantitative genetics, or psychometrics. Or evolutionary psychology.

What if some ideology or political tradition did? what could they do? What problems could they solve, what capabilities would they have?

Various past societies knew a few things along these lines. They knew that there were significant physical and behavioral differences between the sexes, which is forbidden knowledge in modern academia. Some knew that close inbreeding had negative consequences, which knowledge is on its way to the forbidden zone as I speak. Some cultures with wide enough geographical experience had realistic notions of average cognitive differences between populations. Some people had a rough idea about regression to the mean [ in dynasties], and the Ottomans came up with a highly unpleasant solution – the law of fratricide. The Romans, during the Principate, dealt with the same problem through imperial adoption. The Chinese exam system is in part aimed at the same problem.

...

At least some past societies avoided the social patterns leading to the nasty dysgenic trends we are experiencing today, but for the most part that is due to the anthropic principle: if they’d done something else you wouldn’t be reading this. Also to between-group competition: if you fuck your self up when others don’t, you may be well be replaced. Which is still the case.

If you were designing an ideology from scratch you could make use of all of these facts – not that thinking about genetics and selection hands you the solution to every problem, but you’d have more strings to your bow. And, off the top of your head, you’d understand certain trends that are behind the mountains of Estcarp, for our current ruling classes : invisible and unthinkable, That Which Must Not Be Named. .

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/10/08/biopolitics/#comment-96613
“The closest…s the sort of libertarianism promulgated by Charles Murray”
Not very close..
A government that was fully aware of the implications and possibilities of human genetics, one that had the usual kind of state goals [ like persistence and increased power] , would not necessarily be particularly libertarian.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/10/08/biopolitics/#comment-96797
And giving tax breaks to college-educated liberals to have babies wouldn’t appeal much to Trump voters, methinks.

It might be worth making a reasonably comprehensive of the facts and preferences that a good liberal is supposed to embrace and seem to believe. You would have to be fairly quick about it, before it changes. Then you could evaluate about the social impact of having more of them.

Rise and Fall: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/rise-and-fall/
Every society selects for something: generally it looks as if the direction of selection pressue is more or less an accident. Although nations and empires in the past could have decided to select men for bravery or intelligence, there’s not much sign that anyone actually did this. I mean, they would have known how, if they’d wanted to, just as they knew how to select for destriers, coursers, and palfreys. It was still possible to know such things in the Middle Ages, because Harvard did not yet exist.

A rising empire needs quality human capital, which implies that at minimum that budding imperial society must not have been strongly dysgenic. At least not in the beginning. But winning changes many things, possibly including selective pressures. Imagine an empire with substantial urbanization, one in which talented guys routinely end up living in cities – cities that were demographic sinks. That might change things. Or try to imagine an empire in which survival challenges are greatly reduced, at least for elites, so that people have nothing to keep their minds off their minds and up worshiping Magna Mater. Imagine that an empire that conquers a rival with interesting local pathogens and brings some of them home. Or one that uses up a lot of its manpower conquering less-talented subjects and importing masses of those losers into the imperial heartland.

If any of those scenarios happened valid, they might eventually result in imperial decline – decline due to decreased biological capital.

Right now this is speculation. If we knew enough about the GWAS hits for intelligence, and had enough ancient DNA, we might be able to observe that rise and fall, just as we see dysgenic trends in contemporary populations. But that won’t happen for a long time. Say, a year.

hmm: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/rise-and-fall/#comment-100350
“Although nations and empires in the past could have decided to select men for bravery or intelligence, there’s not much sign that anyone actually did this.”

Maybe the Chinese imperial examination could effectively have been a selection for intelligence.
--
Nope. I’ve modelled it: the fraction of winners is far too small to have much effect, while there were likely fitness costs from the arduous preparation. Moreover, there’s a recent
paper [Detecting polygenic adaptation in admixture graphs] that looks for indications of when selection for IQ hit northeast Asia: quite a while ago. Obvious though, since Japan has similar scores without ever having had that kind of examination system.

decline of British Empire and utility of different components: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/rise-and-fall/#comment-100390
Once upon a time, India was a money maker for the British, mainly because they appropriate Bengali tax revenue, rather than trade. The rest of the Empire was not worth much: it didn’t materially boost British per-capita income or military potential. Silesia was worth more to Germany, conferred more war-making power, than Africa was to Britain.
--
If you get even a little local opposition, a colony won’t pay for itself. I seem to remember that there was some, in Palestine.
--
Angels from on high paid for the Boer War.

You know, someone in the 50’s asked for the numbers – how much various colonies cost and how much they paid.

Turned out that no one had ever asked. The Colonial Office had no idea.

In 18 B.C., the Emperor Augustus turned his attention to social problems at Rome. Extravagance and adultery were widespread. Among the upper classes, marriage was increasingly infrequent and, many couples who did marry failed to produce offspring. Augustus, who hoped thereby to elevate both the morals and the numbers of the upper classes in Rome, and to increase the population of native Italians in Italy, enacted laws to encourage marriage and having children (lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus), including provisions establishing adultery as a crime.

Jus trium liberorum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_trium_liberorum
The ius trium liberorum, meaning “the right of three children” in Latin,[1] was a privilege rewarded to Roman citizens who had borne at least three children or freedmen who had borne at least four children.[2] It was a direct result of the Lex Iulia and the Lex Papia Poppaea, bodies of legislation introduced by Augustus in 18 BC and 9 AD, respectively.[3] These bodies of legislation were conceived to grow the dwindling population of the Roman upper classes. The intent of the jus trium liberorum has caused scholars to interpret it as eugenic legislation.[4] Men who had received the jus trium liberorum were excused from munera. Women with jus trium liberorum were no longer submitted to tutela mulierum and could receive inheritances otherwise bequest to their children.[5] The public reaction to the jus trium liberorum was largely to find loopholes, however. The prospect of having a large family was still not appealing.[6] A person who caught a citizen in violation in this law was entitled to a portion of the inheritance involved, creating a lucrative business for professional spies.[7] The spies became so pervasive that the reward was reduced to a quarter of its previous size.[8] As time went on the ius trium liberorum was granted to those by consuls as rewards for general good deeds, holding important professions or as personal favors, not just prolific propagation.[9] Eventually the ius trium liberorum was repealed in 534 AD by Justinian.[10]

The Purpose of the Lex Iulia et Papia Poppaea: https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.jstor.org/stable/3292043

Roman Monogamy: http://laurabetzig.org/pdf/RomanMonogamy.pdf
- Laura Betzig

Mating in Rome was polygynous; marriage was monogamous. In the years 18BC and AD 9 the first Roman emperor, Augustus, backed the lex Julia and the lex Papia Poppaea, his “moral” legislation. It rewarded members of the senatorial aristocracy who married and had children; and it punished celibacy and childlessness, which were common. To many historians, that suggests Romans were reluctant to reproduce. To me, it suggests they kept the number of their legitimate children small to keep the number of their illegitimate children large. Marriage in Rome shares these features with marriage in other empires with highly polygynous mating: inheritances were raised by inbreeding; relatedness to heirs was raised by marrying virgins, praising and enforcing chastity in married women, and discouraging widow remarriage; heirs were limited— and inheritances concentrated—by monogamous marriage, patriliny, and primogeniture; and back-up heirs were got by divorce and remarriage, concubinage, and adoption. The “moral” legislation interfered with each of these. Among other things, it diverted inheritances by making widows remarry; it lowered relatedness to heirs by making adultery subject to public, rather than private, sanctions; and it dispersed estates by making younger sons and daughters take legitimate spouses and make legitimate heirs. Augustus' “moral” legislation, like canon law in Europe later on, was not, as it first appears, an act of reproductive altruism. It was, in fact, a form of reproductive competition.

Did moral decay destroy the ancient world?: http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2014/01/17/did-moral-decay-destroy-the-ancient-world/

hmmm...:
https://www.thenation.com/article/im-a-marxist-feminist-slut-how-do-i-find-an-open-relationship/
https://www.indy100.com/article/worst-decision-you-can-ever-make-have-a-child-science-research-parent-sleep-sex-money-video-7960906

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/913087174224044033
https://archive.is/LRpzH
Cato the Elder speaks on proposed repeal of the Oppian Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Oppia) - from Livy's History of Rome, Book 34

"What pretext in the least degree respectable is put forward for this female insurrection? 'That we may shine,' they say."

The Crisis of the Third Century as Seen by Contemporaries: https://grbs.library.duke.edu/article/viewFile/9021/4625
"COMPLAINTS OF EVIL TIMES are to be found in all centuries which
have left a literature behind them. But in the Roman Empire
the decline is acknowledged in a manner which leaves no
room for doubt."

Morals, Politics, and the Fall of the Roman Republic: https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.jstor.org/stable/642930

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_historiography#Livy
The purpose of writing Ab Urbe Condita was twofold: the first was to memorialize history and the second was to challenge his generation to rise to that same level. He was preoccupied with morality, using history as a moral essay. He connects a nation’s success with its high level of morality, and conversely a nation’s failure with its moral decline. Livy believed that there had been a moral decline in Rome, and he lacked the confidence that Augustus could reverse it. Though he shared Augustus’ ideals, he was not a “spokesman for the regime”. He believed that Augustus was necessary, but only as a short term measure.

Livy and Roman Historiography: http://www.wheelockslatin.com/answerkeys/handouts/ch7_Livy_and_Roman_Historiography.pdf

Imperial Expansion and Moral Decline in the Roman Republic: https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.jstor.org/stable/4435293

Ilpo Kauppinen, Panu Poutvaara, and I have just finished a paper that examines the selection characterizing emigrants from Denmark, one of the richest and most redistributive European welfare states.

The paper makes a neat theoretical contribution. It derives the conditions that determine whether the skill distribution of the emigrants stochastically dominates (or is stochastically dominated by) the skill distribution of the stayers. Because the rewards to skills in Denmark are low (relative to practically all possible destinations), the model predicts that the emigrants will be positively selected, and that the skill distribution of the movers will stochastically dominate that of the stayers.

Our analysis of administrative data for the entire Danish population between 1995 and 2010 strongly confirms the implications of the model. Denmark is indeed seeing an outflow of its most skilled workers. And that is one of the consequences that a very generous welfare state must learn to live with.

The paper is forthcoming in the Economic Journal.

hard classics + basicish math

To better understand the forces underlying fertility decisions, we look at the forerunners of fertility decline. In Rouen, France, completed fertility dropped between 1640 and 1792 from 7.4 to 4.2 children. We review possible explanations and keep only three: increases in materialism, in women’s empowerment, and in returns to education. The methodology is one of analytic narrative, bringing together descriptive evidence with a theoretical model. We accordingly propose a theory showing that we can discriminate between these explanations by looking at childlessness and its social gradient. An increase in materialism or, under certain conditions, in women’s empowerment, leads to an increase in childlessness, while an increase in the return to education leads to a decrease in childlessness. Looking at the Rouen data, childlessness was clearly on the rise, from 4% in 1640 to 10% at the end of the eighteenth century, which appears to discredit the explanation based on increasing returns to education, at least for this period.

Fertility Fall Myths: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/09/fertility-fall-causes.html
In the latest JEL, Tim Guinnane does a nice job debunking misconceptions about the great fertility fall associated with the industrial revolution. For example, “The decline in French fertility began in the late eighteenth century,” and fertility declines were not uniform across Europe:

Mortality decline doesn’t work as an explanation for fertility declines:

Nor do child labor laws:

Nor do new social insurance programs:

Still in the running, he thinks, are increases in urbanization, female employment, and gains to schooling:

The way things are going, the cats with the greatest reproductive success will be feral, and the cats best adapted to living with people will have low fitness. Razib Khan has talked about this.  There are a number of other cases in which humans are inadvertently selecting for outcomes they don’t like: deer are getting smaller antlers, we’re seeing more and more jack salmon, etc.  And of course we’re selecting ourselves for this and that, none of it good.

Yet Carlos Driscoll, a University of Oxford biologist, says there’s nothing to worry about re cats. “The population of domestic cats has been stable for a very long time,” Driscoll said.
“There’s a lot of genetic inertia there.”

The thing is, there’s no such thing as genetic inertia.   You can change any species with selection. Horseshoe crabs have been around for something like 450 million years – they’re older than most mountain ranges –  but if you started selecting them for size, or a different reproductive schedule, or the ability to live in brackish water, or the ability to play Go  – change would come.

Specifically, the Flynn effect was found for forward digit span (r = 0.12, p < 0.01) and forward Corsi block span (r = 0.10, p < 0.01). Moreover, an anti-Flynn effect was found for backward digit span (r = − 0.06, p < 0.01) and for backward Corsi block span (r = − 0.17, p < 0.01). Overall, the results support co-occurrence theories that predict simultaneous secular gains in specialized abilities and declines in g. The causes of the differential trajectories are further discussed.

http://www.unz.com/jthompson/working-memory-bombshell/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2146752-we-seem-to-be-getting-stupider-and-population-ageing-may-be-why/

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1058905.shtml

Population planning in Singapore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_planning_in_Singapore
Fewer babies born in Singapore last year despite incentives: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-singapore-population/fewer-babies-born-in-singapore-last-year-despite-incentives-idUSKCN1C2138
Late marriage and low fertility in Singapore: the limits of policy: http://www.ipss.go.jp/webj-ad/webjournal.files/population/2012_Vol.10/Web%20Journal_Vol.10_05.pdf

The results highlight the downsides of controlled processing. Within a population, controlled processing may—rather than ensuring undeterred progress—usher in short-sighted, irrational, and detrimental behavior, ultimately leading to population collapse. This is because the innovations produced by controlled processing benefit everyone, even those who do not act with control. Thus, by making non-controlled agents better off, these innovations erode the initial advantage of controlled behavior. This results in the demise of control and the rise of lack-of-control. In turn, this eventually leads to a return to poor decision making and the breakdown of the welfare-enhancing innovations, possibly accelerated and exacerbated by the presence of the enabling technologies themselves. Our models therefore help to explain societal cycles whereby periods of rationality and forethought are followed by plunges back into irrationality and short-sightedness.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/51ed234ae4b0867e2385d879/t/595fac998419c208a6d99796/1499442499093/Cyclical-Population-Dynamics.pdf
Psychologists, neuroscientists, and economists often conceptualize decisions as arising from processes that lie along a continuum from automatic (i.e., “hardwired” or overlearned, but relatively inflexible) to controlled (less efficient and effortful, but more flexible). Control is central to human cognition, and plays a key role in our ability to modify the world to suit our needs. Given its advantages, reliance on controlled processing may seem predestined to increase within the population over time. Here, we examine whether this is so by introducing an evolutionary game theoretic model of agents that vary in their use of automatic versus controlled processes, and in which cognitive processing modifies the environment in which the agents interact. We find that, under a wide range of parameters and model assumptions, cycles emerge in which the prevalence of each type of processing in the population oscillates between 2 extremes. Rather than inexorably increasing, the emergence of control often creates conditions that lead to its own demise by allowing automaticity to also flourish, thereby undermining the progress made by the initial emergence of controlled processing. We speculate that this observation may have relevance for understanding similar cycles across human history, and may lend insight into some of the circumstances and challenges currently faced by our species.

Hermann J. Muller (1890-1967) was not only a great geneticist but a visionary full of messianic zeal, profoundly concerned about directing the evolutionary course of mankind toward what he believed a better future.

https://www.the-american-interest.com/2007/03/01/cities-and-their-consequences/
http://malcolmpollack.com/2017/06/21/rise-and-fall-3/
http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/2506/

http://www.xenosystems.net/cold-water/
Modernity crushes fertility because it sees ahead better than you do — you just don’t like what it’s seeing.

A recent series of research papers, by Reich et al. (2009), Metspalu et al. (2011), and Moorjani et al. (2013), make clear that India was peopled by two distinct groups who split genetically ca. 50,000 years ago,[81][82] which they called "Ancestral North Indians" (ANI) and "Ancestral South Indians" (ASI) respectively.[note 1] They found that the ANI genes are close to those of Middle Easterners, Central Asians and Europeans whereas the ASI genes are dissimilar to all other known populations outside India.[note 2][note 3] These two distinct groups, which had split ca. 50,000 years ago, formed the basis for the present population of India.[83]

According to Moorjani et al. these two groups mixed between 4,200 and 1,900 years ago (2200 BCE-100 CE), whereafter a shift to endogamy took place.[84] David Reich stated, "Prior to 4,200 years ago, there were unmixed groups in India. Sometime between 1,900 to 4,200 years ago, profound, pervasive convulsive mixture occurred, affecting every Indo-European and Dravidian group in India without exception.".[85] Following this mixture,

Strong endogamy must have applied since then (average gene flow less than 1 in 30 per generation) to prevent the genetic signatures of founder events from being erased by gene flow. Some historians have argued that "caste" in modern India is an "invention" of colonialism in the sense that it became more rigid under colonial rule. However, our results suggest that many current distinctions among groups are ancient and that strong endogamy must have shaped marriage patterns in India for thousands of years.[81]

Moorjani et al. discerned two waves of admixture in this period, with northern India showing later dates of admixture.[86] GaneshPrasad et al. (2013) studied "12 tribal and 19 non-tribal (caste) endogamous populations from the predominantly Dravidian-speaking Tamil Nadu state in the southernmost part of India." According to this study, southern India was already socially stratified 4,000 to 6,000 years ago, which is best explained by "the emergence of agricultural technology in South Asia." The study concludes that "The social stratification (in Tamil Nadu) was established 4,000 to 6,000 years ago and there was little admixture during the last 3,000 years, implying a minimal genetic impact of the Varna (caste) system from the historically-documented Brahmin migrations into the area."[87]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Genetic_research_on_the_origins_of_India%27s_population

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/world/asia/11caste.html
A crucial factor is the collapse of the caste system over the last half century, a factor that undergirds many of the other reasons that the south has prospered — more stable governments, better infrastructure and a geographic position that gives it closer connections to the global economy.

“The breakdown of caste hierarchy has broken the traditional links between caste and profession, and released enormous entrepreneurial energies in the south,” said Ashutosh Varshney, a professor at Brown University who has studied the role of caste in southern India’s development. This breakdown, he said, goes a long way to explaining “why the south has taken such a lead over the north in the last three decades.”

http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/FLn6TiQPArdQZUN9LE2ZsM/The-impact-of-caste-on-economic-mobility-in-India.html
Caste Is Stunting All of India’s Children: http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/09/15/caste-is-stunting-all-of-indias-children/
Fears of impurity continue to steer Indians away from toilets — and towards deadly fecal germs.

https://twitter.com/MWStory/status/895580461879107584
https://archive.is/AsTwB
These Indian govt funded ads to encourage the wealthy but declining Parsi population to reproduce are quite extraordinary

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/12/india-marriage-markets-everything.html
India’s government has expanded a scheme offering payment incentives to Hindus who marry members of the country’s poorest and most oppressed caste, the Dalits.

declining political knowledge among all partisans (Figure 7): https://prowag.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/cew_final_political-ideology-in-american-politics2.pdf

From Political Ignorance to Political Polarization: https://niskanencenter.org/blog/political-ignorance-political-polarization/

On a broad scale, hereditary disease risks are similar for ancient hominins and modern-day humans, and the GRS percentiles of ancient individuals span the full range of what is observed in present day individuals. In addition, there is evidence that ancient pastoralists may have had healthier genomes than hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists. We also observed a temporal trend whereby genomes from the recent past are more likely to be healthier than genomes from the deep past.

Gwern has interesting take (abstract is misleading): https://twitter.com/gwern/status/871061144152178688

here it is in conclusion (and cf Figure 3A):
The genomic health of ancient individuals appears to have improved over time (Figure 3B). This calls into question the idea that genetic load has been increasing in human populations (Lynch 2016). However, there exists a perplexing pattern: ancient individuals who lived within the last few thousand years have healthier genomes, on average, than present day humans.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/08/08/1703856114
After controlling for age, BMI, and other variables, knee OA prevalence was 2.1-fold higher (95% confidence interval, 1.5–3.1) in the postindustrial sample than in the early industrial sample. Our results indicate that increases in longevity and BMI are insufficient to explain the approximate doubling of knee OA prevalence that has occurred in the United States since the mid-20th century. Knee OA is thus more preventable than is commonly assumed, but prevention will require research on additional independent risk factors that either arose or have become amplified in the postindustrial era.

small decline starting at YOB~1980:
Growing evidence suggests that the Flynn effect has ended and may have reversed in Western Europe (32, 33, 44–46). The last three birth cohorts in our data coincide with the peak in cognitive test scores in Finland (31). There is no clear trend for personality scores between these cohorts, which suggests that the end of the Flynn effect could also be reflected in personality traits. However, the data on these three birth cohorts are not fully comparable with our main data, and thus, it is not possible to make strong conclusions from them.

Steven Pinker is not wrong to say that some things have got better – or even that some things are getting better. We live longer. We have more food. We have more medicine. We have more free time. We have less chance of dying at another’s hands. My main objection to his arguments is not that some things have got worse as well (family life, for example, or social trust). It is not that he emphasises proportion when scale is more significant (such as with animal suffering). It is the fragility of these peaceful, prosperous conditions.

Antibiotics have made us healthier but antibiotic resistance threatens to plunge us into epidemics. Globalisation has made us richer but is also a powder-keg of cultural unease. Industrialisation has brought material wealth but it is also damaging the environment. Nuclear weapons have averted international conflict but it would only take one error for them to wreak havoc.

At his best, Pinker reminds us of how much we have to treasure, then. At his worst, he is like a co-passenger in a car – pointing out the sunny weather and the beautiful surroundings as it hurtles towards the edge of a cliff.

http://takimag.com/article/dusting_off_the_crystal_ball_john_derbyshire/print
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/11/the-new-york-times-on-violence-and-pinker/

methodology:
Using Extended Genealogy to Estimate Components of Heritability for 23 Quantitative and Dichotomous Traits: http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1003520
Pedigree- and SNP-Associated Genetics and Recent Environment are the Major Contributors to Anthropometric and Cardiometabolic Trait Variation: http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1005804

Missing Heritability – found?: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/02/09/missing-heritability-found/
There is an interesting new paper out on genetics and IQ. The claim is that they have found the missing heritability – in rare variants, generally different in each family.

Some of the variants, the ones we find with GWAS, are fairly common and fitness-neutral: the variant that slightly increases IQ confers the same fitness (or very close to the same) as the one that slightly decreases IQ – presumably because of other effects it has. If this weren’t the case, it would be impossible for both of the variants to remain common.

The rare variants that affect IQ will generally decrease IQ – and since pleiotropy is the norm, usually they’ll be deleterious in other ways as well. Genetic load.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/06/06/happy-families-are-all-alike-every-unhappy-family-is-unhappy-in-its-own-way/
It now looks as if the majority of the genetic variance in IQ is the product of mutational load, and the same may be true for many psychological traits. To the extent this is the case, a lot of human psychological variation must be non-adaptive. Maybe some personality variation fulfills an evolutionary function, but a lot does not. Being a dumb asshole may be a bug, rather than a feature. More generally, this kind of analysis could show us whether particular low-fitness syndromes, like autism, were ever strategies – I suspect not.

It’s bad new news for medicine and psychiatry, though. It would suggest that what we call a given type of mental illness, like schizophrenia, is really a grab-bag of many different syndromes. The ultimate causes are extremely varied: at best, there may be shared intermediate causal factors. Not good news for drug development: individualized medicine is a threat, not a promise.

see also comment at: https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:a6ab4034b0d0

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/5sldfa/genomic_analysis_of_family_data_reveals/
So the big implication here is that it's better than I had dared hope - like Yang/Visscher/Hsu have argued, the old GCTA estimate of ~0.3 is indeed a rather loose lower bound on additive genetic variants, and the rest of the missing heritability is just the relatively uncommon additive variants (ie <1% frequency), and so, like Yang demonstrated with height, using much more comprehensive imputation of SNP scores or using whole-genomes will be able to explain almost all of the genetic contribution. In other words, with better imputation panels, we can go back and squeeze out better polygenic scores from old GWASes, new GWASes will be able to reach and break the 0.3 upper bound, and eventually we can feasibly predict 0.5-0.8. Between the expanding sample sizes from biobanks, the still-falling price of whole genomes, the gradual development of better regression methods (informative priors, biological annotation information, networks, genetic correlations), and better imputation, the future of GWAS polygenic scores is bright. Which obviously will be extremely helpful for embryo selection/genome synthesis.

The argument that this supports mutation-selection balance is weaker but plausible. I hope that it's true, because if that's why there is so much genetic variation in intelligence, then that strongly encourages genetic engineering - there is no good reason or Chesterton fence for intelligence variants being non-fixed, it's just that evolution is too slow to purge the constantly-accumulating bad variants. And we can do better.
https://rubenarslan.github.io/generation_scotland_pedigree_gcta/

The surprising implications of familial association in disease risk: https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.00014
https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2017/06/09/personalized-medicine-wont-work-but-race-based-medicine-probably-will/
As Greg Cochran has pointed out, this probably isn’t going to work. There are a few genes like BRCA1 (which makes you more likely to get breast and ovarian cancer) that we can detect and might affect treatment, but an awful lot of disease turns out to be just the result of random chance and deleterious mutation. This means that you can’t easily tailor disease treatment to people’s genes, because everybody is fucked up in their own special way. If Johnny is schizophrenic because of 100 random errors in the genes that code for his neurons, and Jack is schizophrenic because of 100 other random errors, there’s very little way to test a drug to work for either of them- they’re the only one in the world, most likely, with that specific pattern of errors. This is, presumably why the incidence of schizophrenia and autism rises in populations when dads get older- more random errors in sperm formation mean more random errors in the baby’s genes, and more things that go wrong down the line.

The looming crisis in human genetics: http://www.economist.com/node/14742737
Some awkward news ahead
- Geoffrey Miller

Human geneticists have reached a private crisis of conscience, and it will become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis has depressing health implications and alarming political ones. In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races.

2009!

A normal good is a good for which demand increases with income.

More than in the past, we have doctors marrying other doctors, rather than nurses, basically because of an increase in assortative mating for education. Ceteris paribus, this would tend to cause greater income equality among families. Is it the main driver of increasing income inequality?

Not at all. Most of the increase over the last 30 years has been among business executives and people working in finance. Since 1979, 58% of the expansion of income of the top 1% of households has this origin. For the top 0.1% of households, it’s been 67%.

...

Now I’m about to say something a little dangerous – so get your nitroglycerin pills ready.

Maybe those finance guys and CEOs are delivering enormously more value than they did in the 1950s!

For those remaining readers that haven’t died laughing, increased assortative mating probably has contributed to income inequality. Just not very much. Changes in the tax code, outsourcing, automation, smothering the board of directors in cream, and inattentive stockholders all matter more.

capital gains: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/assortive-mating-and-income-inequality/#comment-24318
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/millman/assortative-mating-and-income-inequality/
Educational Homogamy and Assortative Mating Have Not Increased: http://sci-hub.tw/http://www.nber.org/papers/w22927.pdf
1960-2010, so all post WW2
https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/840379325908049920
Highly educated women partner more often “downwards” and medium educated women partner less often “upwards”
The new assortative mating (phenotypical, perhaps no change in genotypical assortative mating) due to women outnumbering men at university
If this means less genotypic assortative mating, then BAD NEWS: the smart fraction will shrink, and #decline will accelerate
Counterrevolutionary and reactionary elements warned it was a mistake to debauch higher education by over-expansion. Maybe they were right?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-016-9407-z

Nobody at the Times noticed it at first. I don’t know that they ever did notice it by themselves- likely some reader brought it to their attention. But this happens all the time, because very few people have a picture of the world in their head that includes any numbers. Mostly they don’t even have a rough idea of relative size.

In much the same way, back in the 1980s,lots of writers were talking about 90,000 women a year dying of anorexia nervosa, another impossible number. Then there was the great scare about 1,000,000 kids being kidnapped in the US each year – also impossible and wrong. Practically all the talking classes bought into it.

You might think that the people at the top are different – but with a few exceptions, they’re just as clueless.

A Population-Level Decline in Serum Testosterone Levels in American Men: http://sci-hub.tw/10.1210/jc.2006-1375
Secular trends in sex hormones and fractures in men and women: http://www.eje-online.org/content/166/5/887.full.pdf
https://twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/984543033285898246
https://archive.is/dcruu
Small n and older sample, but interesting that while testosterone decreases have been large for men they’ve been even larger (in % terms) for women; wonder if this contributes to declining pregnancy and sexual frequency, rising depression.

https://www.labcorp.com/assets/11476
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/sperm-killers-and-rising-male-infertility/
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jul/25/sperm-counts-among-western-men-have-halved-in-last-40-years-study
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/most-men-in-the-us-and-europe-could-be-infertile-by-2060
Strangelove: https://youtu.be/N1KvgtEnABY?t=67

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sperm-count-dropping-in-western-world/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14855796
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14857588
People offering human-centric explanations like cell phones: Note also that the sperm quality of dogs has decreased 30% since 1988.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/august-3-2019-science-of-awe-blue-whales-and-sonar-chromosomes-and-sleep-and-more-1.5047142/man-and-man-s-best-friend-have-both-been-experiencing-declines-in-sperm-quality-1.5047150
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20636757

mendelian rand.:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28448539
1 SD genetically instrumented increase in BMI was associated with a 0.25 SD decrease in serum testosterone
https://twitter.com/SilverVVulpes/status/857902555489341441

Ibuprofen linked to male infertility: study: https://nypost.com/2018/01/08/ibuprofen-linked-to-male-infertility-study/
http://www.pnas.org/content/115/4/E715.full

Tucker Carlson: "Men Seem To Be Becoming Less Male": https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/03/08/tucker_carlson_men_seem_to_be_becoming_less_male.html
Carlson interviewed Dr. Jordan Peterson who blamed the "insidious" movement being driven by the "radical left" that teaches there a problem of "toxic masculinity." He said ideological policies focus on "de-emphasizing masculinity may be part of the problem."

...

Those are the numbers. They paint a very clear picture: American men are failing, in body, mind and spirit. This is a crisis. Yet our leaders pretend it’s not happening. They tell us the opposite is true: Women are victims, men are oppressors. To question that assumption is to risk punishment. Even as women far outpace men in higher education, virtually every college campus supports a women’s studies department, whose core goal is to attack male power. Our politicians and business leaders internalize and amplify that message. Men are privileged. Women are oppressed. Hire and promote and reward accordingly.

https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:bd7b0a50d741
But it also hints at an almost opposite take: average testosterone levels have been falling for decades, so at this point these businessmen would be the only “normal” (by 1950s standards) men out there, and everyone else would be unprecedently risk-averse and boring.

U-shaped but still quite dysgenic
for Britain, see Section 4 and Figure 10 here: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/cmpo/migrated/documents/wp165.pdf

- Table 1 is a good summary, but various interesting tidbits throughout
main points:
- latrones reminds me of bandit-states, Big Men in anthropology, and Rome's Indo-European past
- started having trouble recruiting soldiers, population less martial
- Church opposition to State violence, preferred to 'convert enemies by prayer'
- a Christian could use violence 'only to defend others and not for self-defense'
- Altar of Victory was more metaphorical than idolatrous, makes its removal even more egregious

http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2010/07/roman-state-and-genetic-pacification.html

should read:
Pax and the ‘Ara Pacis’: http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-roman-studies/article/pax-and-the-ara-pacis1/1EE241F03F65C42B09AB578F83C7002C
PAX, PEACE AND THE NEW TESTAMENT: https://www.religiologiques.uqam.ca/no11/pax.PDF
BANDITS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE: http://sci-hub.tw/http://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/105/1/3/1442375/BANDITS-IN-THE-ROMAN-EMPIRE
Bandits in the Roman Empire: Myth and reality: https://historicalunderbelly.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/thoma-grunewald-bandits-in-the-roman-empire-myth-and-reality-2004.pdf

What Difference Did Christianity Make?: http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.jstor.org/stable/4435970
Author(s): Ramsay Mac Mullen

The extent of this impact I test in five areas. The first two have to do with domestic relations: sexual norms and slavery. The latter three have to do with matters in which public authorities were more involved: gladiatorial shows, judicial penalties, and corruption.

Clark/Frost Domestication: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/clarkfrost-domestication/
Thinking about the response of the pacified and submission Roman population to barbarian invaders immediately brings to mind the response of contemporary North Americans and Atlantic Europeans to barbarian invaders. It reads just the same: “welcome new neighbor!”

What about the Eastern empire? They kept the barbarians out for a few centuries longer in the European half, but accounts of the loss of the Asian provinces show the Clark/Frost pattern, a pacified submissive population hardly contesting the invasion of Islam (Jenkins 2008, 2010). The new neighbors simply walked in and took over. The downfall of the Western Roman empire reads much like the downfall of the Asian and North African parts of the empire. It is certainly no accident that the Asian provinces were the heartland of Christianity.

This all brings up an interesting question: what happened in East Asia over the same period? No one to my knowledge has traced parallels with the European and Roman experience in Japan or China. Is the different East Asian trajectory related to the East Asian reluctance to roll over, wag their tails, and welcome new barbarian neighbors?

gwern in da comments
“empires domesticate their people”
Greg said in our book something like “for the same reason that farmers castrate their bulls”

Is there a dysgenic secular trend towards slowing simple reaction time? Responding to a quartet of critical commentaries: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289614000841

https://twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/852935953505280000
https://archive.is/E9fRu
The original NIT experiments got killed by Moynihan after it was shown they reduced marriage rates among recipients,prob wouldn't matter now
you mean UBI wouldn't reduce marriage today or ppl wouldn't care?
People wouldn't care
http://www.nytimes.com/1978/11/16/archives/moynihan-says-recent-studies-raise-doubts-about-negative-income-tax.html

The Reversal of the Gender Gap in Education and
Female Breadwinners in Europe: http://www.familiesandsocieties.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/WP26KlesmentVanBavel.pdf

A Record Share of Men Are “Marrying Up” Educationally: https://ifstudies.org/blog/a-record-share-of-men-are-marrying-up-educationally
Even though overall, wives have more education than their spouses today, men are still the primary provider in a majority of marriages. In 2015, more than 7-in-10 married men (73%) had a higher income than their spouse, although the share was down from 91% in 1960. During the same period, the share of married women who out-earned their spouses rose from 6% to 25%.

A Gender Reversal On Career Aspirations: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/04/19/a-gender-reversal-on-career-aspirations/

health, teaching, etc. do best, social sciences worst

https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/848791087099637760/
https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol14/16/14-16.pdf
http://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2006-004.pdf
http://imgur.com/a/ZeuOU

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/08/10/interview/

- IQ enhancement (somewhat apprehensive, wonder why?)
- ~20 years to CRISPR enhancement (very ballpark)
- cloning as an alternative strategy
- environmental effects on IQ, what matters (iodine, getting hit in the head), what doesn't (schools, etc.), and toss-ups (childhood/embryonic near-starvation, disease besides direct CNS-affecting ones [!])
- malnutrition did cause more schizophrenia in Netherlands (WW2) and China (Great Leap Forward) though
- story about New Mexico schools and his children (mostly grad students in physics now)
- clever sillies, weird geniuses, and clueless elites
- life-extension and accidents, half-life ~ a few hundred years for a typical American
- Pinker on Harvard faculty adoptions (always Chinese girls)
- parabiosis, organ harvesting
- Chicago economics talk
- Catholic Church, cousin marriage, and the rise of the West
- Gregory Clark and Farewell to Alms
- retinoblastoma cancer, mutational load, and how to deal w/ it ("something will turn up")
- Tularemia and Stalingrad (ex-Soviet scientist literally mentioned his father doing it)
- germ warfare, nuclear weapons, and testing each
- poison gas, Haber, nerve gas, terrorists, Japan, Syria, and Turkey
- nukes at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incirlik_Air_Base
- IQ of ancient Greeks
- history of China and the Mongols, cloning Genghis Khan
- Alexander the Great vs. Napoleon, Russian army being late for meetup w/ Austrians
- the reason why to go into Iraq: to find and clone Genghis Khan!
- efficacy of torture
- monogamy, polygamy, and infidelity, the Aboriginal system (reverse aging wives)
- education and twin studies
- errors: passing white, female infanticide, interdisciplinary social science/economic imperialism, the slavery and salt story
- Jewish optimism about environmental interventions, Rabbi didn't want people to know, Israelis don't want people to know about group differences between Ashkenazim and other groups in Israel
- NASA spewing crap on extraterrestrial life (eg, thermodynamic gradient too weak for life in oceans of ice moons)

some pretty dysgenic fertility in India

- in most of the premodern period, the density of observed achievement (relative to population, time, space) was so small that you don’t need very many intelligent people to explain it;
- I really don’t know what the intelligence of premodern peoples was, but we probably shouldn’t infer the population mean from premodern achievements;
- there’s no need to invoke dysgenic or eugenic reasons for the fluctuations in the fortunes of civilisations, as so many cranks are wont to do.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science
https://gnxp.nofe.me/2017/08/24/arab-islamic-science-was-not-arab-islamic/
https://gnxp.nofe.me/2003/11/24/iranians-aren-t-arabs/

Given that nowadays women’s fertility reflects, to a greater extent, their basic preferences and that personality traits are intimately related to individual’s preferences, we expect to find an association between personality traits and fertility. Indeed, we find that whereas high levels of Agreeableness, Extroversion and Neuroticism accelerate childbirth, high levels of Conscientiousness and Openness are associated with childbirth postponement.

The nature of the relationship between education and postponement of fertility is far less clear. We explore two possible ways through which personality traits might help explain the fertility timing gap between more and less educated women: one is that some of the personality traits that drive some women to study more also influence their fertility behaviour; the other one is that individual differences in personality traits translate into variation in time to first birth especially among more educated women. Our results support both hypotheses i.e. on the one hand, personality traits influence both education and fertility decisions; on the other hand, more educated women do not equally delay childbirth compared with less educated women: the more “open-minded” ones postpone childbearing for longer.

The study reveals that as fertility declines, there is a general shift from a positive to a negative or neutral status-fertility relation. Those with high income/wealth or high occupation/social class switch from having relatively many to fewer or the same number of children as others. Education, however, depresses fertility for as long as this relation is observed (from early in the 20th century).

- good survey with trends for different regions, including UK+North America
- Figure 4: quadratic for UK+NA, crossing zero around 1800 or so and quickly leveling off
http://imgur.com/a/xjwO1
- also Figure 5: fertility differential by total TFR (quadratic trend), so worst dysgenics in middle of demographic transition
- dataset: http://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol18/5/files/StatusFertilityDataset.xls

This article discusses how fertility relates to social status with the use of a new dataset, several times larger than the ones used so far. The status-fertility relation is investigated over several centuries, across world regions and by the type of status-measure. The study reveals that as fertility declines, there is a general shift from a positive to a negative or neutral status-fertility relation. Those with high income/wealth or high occupation/social class switch from having relatively many to fewer or the same number of children as others. Education, however, depresses fertility for as long as this relation is observed (from early in the 20th century).

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2017/08/23/two-sided-markets-and-diversity/
https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/888550038888214528
https://archive.is/BveDx
or.... maybe capital in the short run likes anarcho tyranny, big sclerotic capturable states, dumb pliant consumers, etc

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/910652855832457218
https://archive.is/PmyQU
The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter XI, Part III

Adam Smith on why Capital ought to be scrupulously distrusted in politics:
The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

Roundworm Eyed Doll: Neoliberalism, Social Justice and Barbie's New Hair: http://roreiy.blogspot.com/2016/02/a-response-to-southwood-thesis.html

Corporate Leaders: Progressive Activists, Not Conservative Villains: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445705/corporate-leaders-progressive-activists
The Market for Virtue: Why Companies like Qantas are Campaigning for Marriage Equality: http://quillette.com/2017/08/29/market-virtue-companies-like-qantas-campaigning-marriage-equality/
But companies aren’t being altruistic when they back causes like marriage equality. Research shows that executives pursue ethical behaviour because they think there is a business case for it. This is called the “market for virtue”, in which businesses aim to improve their public image or ward off regulation in exchange for ethical behaviour.

But there is little evidence that social responsibility initiatives necessarily result in positive outcomes for businesses. In fact, it may result in worse outcomes for society as a whole, as businesses put their resources behind causes that are already popular and ignore pressing issues such as inequality and stagnating wage growth.

https://twitter.com/menangahela/status/899281975898501120
its hard to disentangle the extent to which these things are done because they make them money
or because these values have become universal in the managerial caste from which they draw their leadership/upper echelon employees
https://twitter.com/ThomasHCrown/status/899653245450067968
Here is the essential difference in the models left and right must employ to publish: The left gets sponsors, we get scraps.

https://twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/1138993744169054209
https://archive.is/VhE2a
Since I should try to tweet a minimum number of tweets that will actually get me in trouble when I get inevitably doxxed: whatever else it is about, Woke Capital is probably also about average members of the Anglosphere/American population getting stupider.

The Rise of Woke Capital: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/corporate-america-activism.html
There's a simple reason companies are becoming more publicly left-wing on social issues: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-companies-ditching-nra-delta-selling-guns-2018-2
The main reason that companies have been increasingly willing to take one side of hot-button social issues (the left-leaning side) is that's increasingly a good strategy to please customers and employees.

Partly this is because certain policy issues have disproportionately left-leaning polling. Gay rights are popular. Most of the gun regulations on offer in the current debate poll well, too.

But it's also because socially liberal segments of the public punch above their weight as potential customers (and, in some cases, as potential employees) for these companies.

There have been societies that functioned for a long time, thousands of years. They had sustainable demographic patterns. That means that they had enough children to replace themselves – not necessarily in every generation, but over the long haul. But sustainability requires more than that. Long-lived civilizations [ones with cities, literacy, governments, and all that] had a pattern of natural selection that didn’t drastically decrease intelligence – in some cases, one that favored it, at least in some subgroups. There was also ongoing selection against mutational accumulation – which meant that individuals with more genetic load than than average were significantly less likely to survive and reproduce. Basically, this happened through high child mortality, and in some cases by lower fitness in lower socioeconomic classes [starvation]. There was nothing fun about it.

Modern industrialized societies are failing on all three counts. Every population that can make a decent cuckoo clock has below-replacement fertility. The demographic pattern also selects against intelligence, something like one IQ point a generation. And, even if people at every level of intelligence had the same number of children, so that there was no selection against IQ, we would still be getting more and messed up, because there’s not enough selection going on to counter ongoing mutations.

It is possible that some country, or countries, will change in a way that avoids civilizational collapse. I doubt if this will happen by voluntary action. Some sort of technological solution might also arise – but it has to be soon.

Bruce Charlton, Victorian IQ, Episcopalians, military officers:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/sustainability/#comment-13188
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/sustainability/#comment-13207
Again, I don’t believe a word of it. As for the declining rate of innovation, you have to have a really wide-ranging understanding of modern science and technology to have any feeling for what the underlying causes are. I come closer than most, and I probably don’t know enough. You don’t know enough. Let me tell you one thing: if genetic potential IQ for IQ had dropped 1 std, we’d see the end of progress in higher mathematics, and that has not happened at all.

Moreover, the selective trends disfavoring IQ all involve higher education among women and apparently nothing else – a trend which didn’t really get started until much more recently.

Not long enough, nor is dysgenic selection strong enough.

ranting on libertarians:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/sustainability/#comment-13348
About 40% of those Americans with credit cards keep a balance on their credit cards and pay ridiculous high interest. But that must be the right decision!
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/sustainability/#comment-13499
” then that is their decision” – that’s fucking obvious. The question is whether they tend to make decisions that work very well – saying ‘that is their decision” is exactly the kind of crap I was referring to. As for “they probably have it coming” – if I’m smarter than you, which I surely am, using those smarts to rook you in every possible way must be just peachy. In fact, I’ll bet I could manage it even after warning you in advance.

On average, families in this country have paid between 10% and 14% of their income in debt service over the past few decades. That fraction averages considerably higher in low-income families – more like 18%. A quarter of those low income families are putting over 40% of their income into debt service. That’s mostly stuff other than credit-card debt.

Is this Straussian?

hmm:
Examining Arguments Made by Interest Rate Cap Advocates: https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/peirce_reframing_ch13.pdf

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/964972690435133440
https://archive.is/r34J8
Interest rate caps on $1,000 installment loans, by US state, today and in 1935

One consideration in the question of what drove the Great Divergence [when Europe’s power and wealth came to greatly exceed that of the far East] is the extent to which Europe was already ahead in science, mathematics, and engineering. As I have said, at the highest levels European was already much more intellectually sophisticated than China. I have a partial list of such differences, but am interested in what my readers can come up with.

What were the European advantages in science, mathematics, and technology circa 1700? And, while we’re at it, in what areas did China/Japan/Korea lead at that point in time?

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/03/10/how-big-was-the-edge/#comment-89299
Before 1700, Ashkenazi Jews did not contribute to the growth of mathematics, science, or technology in Europe. As for the idea that they played a crucial financial role in this period – not so. Medicis, Fuggers.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/03/10/how-big-was-the-edge/#comment-89287
I’m not so sure about China being behind in agricultural productivity.
--
Nor canal building. Miles ahead on that, I’d have thought.

China also had eyeglasses.
--
Well after they were invented in Italy.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/03/10/how-big-was-the-edge/#comment-89289
I would say that although the Chinese discovered and invented many things, they never developed science, anymore than they developed axiomatic mathematics.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/03/10/how-big-was-the-edge/#comment-89300
I believe Chinese steel production led the world until late in the 18th century, though I haven’t found any references to support that.
--
Probably true in the late Sung period, but not later. [ed.: So 1200s AD.]

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/03/10/how-big-was-the-edge/#comment-89382
I’m confess I’m skeptical of your statement that the literacy rate in England in 1650 was 50%. Perhaps it was in London but the entire population?
--
More like 30%, for men, lower for women.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/03/10/how-big-was-the-edge/#comment-89322
They did pretty well, considering that they were just butterflies dreaming that they were men.

But… there is a real sense in which the Elements, or the New Astronomy, or the Principia, are more sophisticated than anything Confucious ever said.

They’re not just complicated – they’re correct.
--
Tell me how to distinguish good speculative metaphysics from bad speculative metaphysics.

random side note:
- dysgenics running at -.5-1 IQ/generation in NW Europe since ~1800 and China by ~1960
- gap between east asians and europeans typically a bit less than .5 SD (or .3 SD if you look at mainland chinese not asian-americans?), similar variances
- 160/30 * 1/15 = .36, so could explain most of gap depending on when exactly dysgenics started
- maybe Europeans were just smarter back then? still seems like you need additional cultural/personality and historical factors. could be parasite load too.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2019/09/07/wheel-in-the-sky/
scientifically than europe”. Nonsense, of course. Hellenistic science was more advanced than that of India and China in 1700 ! Although it makes me wonder the extent to which they’re teaching false history of science and technology in schools today- there’s apparently demand to blot out white guys from the story, which wouldn’t leave much.

Europe, back then, could be ridiculously sophisticated, at the highest levels. There had been no simple, accurate way of determining longitude – important in navigation, but also in mapmaking.

...

In the course of playing with this technique, the Danish astronomer Ole Rømer noted some discrepancies in the timing of those eclipses – they were farther apart when Earth and Jupiter were moving away from each other, closer together when the two planets were approaching each other. From which he deduced that light had a finite speed, and calculated the approximate value.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2019/09/07/wheel-in-the-sky/#comment-138328
“But have you noticed having a better memory than other smart people you respect?”

Oh yes.
--
I think some people have a stronger meta-memory than others, which can work as a multiplier of their intelligence. For some, their memory is a well ordered set of pointers to where information exists. It’s meta-data, rather than data itself. For most people, their memory is just a list of data, loosely organized by subject. Mixed in may be some meta-data, but otherwise it is a closed container.

I suspect sociopaths and politicians have a strong meta-data layer.

While cross-sectional in nature, when our results are combined with evidence that both religiosity and fertility are substantially heritable traits, findings are consistent with view that earlier trends toward secularization (due to science education surrounding advancements in science) are currently being counter-balanced by genetic and reproductive forces. We also propose that the inverse association between intelligence and religiosity, and the inverse correlation between intelligence and fertility lead to predictions of a decline in secularism in the foreseeable future. A contra-secularization hypothesis is proposed and defended in the discussion. It states that secularism is likely to undergo a decline throughout the remainder of the twenty-first century, including Europe and other industrial societies.

Secularism and Fertility Worldwide: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/pvwpy/
This study hypothesizes a link between societal secularism and fertility. Using country-level data from multiple sources (N=181) and multilevel data from 55 countries in the World Values Survey (N=78,639), I document a strong negative relationship between societal secularism and both country-level and individual-level fertility. Secularism, even in small amounts, is associated with population stagnation or even decline, whereas highly religious countries have higher fertility. This country-level pattern is driven by more than aggregate lower fertility of individual nonreligious people. In fact, secularism is more closely linked to religious than nonreligious people’s fertility and appears to be a function of different cultural values related to gender and reproduction in more secular societies. Beyond its importance for the religious composition of the world population, the societal-level association between secularism and fertility is relevant to key fertility theories and may help account, in part, for below-replacement fertility.

The negative correlation is present in nearly all countries, is stronger in females than males, is greater for educational level than for length of schooling, and is not mediated by personal wealth. It is strongest at relatively low levels of economic, social and cognitive development and becomes weaker in the most advanced societies. However, it is also less than maximal in the least developed countries. The relationship is strongest in Latin America and the Middle East, where the typical correlations for cohorts with completed fertility are -.31 for females and -.24 for males, and weakest in Protestant Europe, where average correlations are -.10 for females and -.01 for males. The negative relationship persists in the younger generation of advanced societies, who are reproducing under conditions of sub-replacement fertility.

- Michael A. Woodley

We argue that in social species, interorganismal gene-gene interactions, which in previous literatures have been termed social epistasis, allow genomes carrying deleterious mutations to reduce via group-level pleiotropy the fitness of others, including noncarriers. This fitness reduction occurs by way of degradation of group-level processes that optimize the reproductive ecology of a population for intergroup competition through, among other mechanisms, suppression of free-riding.

--

Fitness indicators theory (Houle 2000; Miller 2000) predicts that the behavioral and physiological condition of prospective partners strongly influences female mate choice in particular, as these constitute honest indicators of underlying genetic quality. Furthermore, as deleterious mutations are pleiotropic (i.e., they can influence the development of multiple traits simultaneously), they are a source of genetic correlation among diverse behavioral and physiological domains, yielding a latent general fitness factor( f ). This optimizes the efficiency of sexual selection, as selection for quality with respect to one domain will increase the probability of selection for quality “across the board” (Houle 2000; Miller 2000). If purifying selection is primarily cryptic—working by virtue of those lower in f simply being less successful in competition for mates and therefore producing fewer offspring relative to those higher in the factor—then considerably less reproductive failure is needed to solve the mutation load paradox (19% instead of 88% based on simulations in Leseque et al. 2012).

...

Theoretical work involving humans suggests a loss of intrinsic fitness of around 1% per generation in the populations of modernized countries (Lynch 2016; Muller 1950). Thus, these might yet be undergoing mutational meltdown, albeit very gradually (i.e., over the course of centuries)

...

An interesting observation is that the fitness of the populations of modernized nations does appear to be rapidly decreasing—although not in a manner consonant with the direct action of deleterious mutations on the fitness of individuals (as per the mutation load paradox).

...

Increased education has furthermore encouraged individuals to trade fertility against opportunities to enhance their social status and earning power, with the largest fitness losses occurring among those with high status who potentially carry fewer deleterious mutations (i.e., by virtue of possessing higher levels of traits that exhibit some sensitivity to mutation load, such as general intelligence; Spain et al. 2015; Woodley of Menie et al. 2016a). Hitherto not considered is the possibility that the demographic transition represents a potential change in the fitness characteristics of the group-level extended phenotype of modernized populations, indicating that there might exist pathways through which deleterious mutations that accumulate due to ecological mildness could pathologically alter fertility tradeoffs in ways that might account for the maladaptive aspects of the fertility transition (e.g., subreplacement fertility; Basten, Lutz and Scherbov, 2013).

...

Cooperation, though offering significant fitness benefits to individual organisms and groups, involves some costs for cooperators in order to realize mutual gains for all parties. Free riders are individuals that benefit from cooperation without suffering any of the costs needed to sustain it. Hence, free riders enjoy a fitness advantage relative to cooperators via the former’s parasitism on the latter.

...

The balance of selection can alternate between the different levels depending on the sorts of selective challenges that a population encounters. For example, group selection may operate on human populations during times of intergroup conflict (i.e., warfare), whereas during times of peace, selection may tend to favor the fitness of individuals instead (Woodley and Figueredo 2013; Wilson 2002). A major factor that seems to permit group-level selection to be viable under certain ecological regimes is the existence of free-rider controls, i.e., features of the group’s social ecology that curb the reproductive fitness of the carriers of “selfish” genetic variants (MacDonald 1994; Wilson 2002).

...

High-status individuals participate in the generation and vertical cultural transmission of free-rider controls—these take the form of religious and ideological systems which make a virtue out of behaviors that overtly benefit the group, and a vice out of those that only favor individual-level fitness, via the promotion of ethnocentrism, martyrdom, and displays of commitment (MacDonald 1994, 2009, 2010; Wilson 2002). Humans are furthermore equipped with specialized mental adaptations for coordinating as part of a group, such as effortful control—the ability to override implicit behavioral drives via the use of explicit processing systems, which allow them to regulate their behavior based on what is optimal for the group (MacDonald 2008). The interaction between individuals of different degrees of status, i.e., those that generate and maintain cultural norms and those who are merely subject to them, therefore constitutes a form of social epistasis, as the complex patterns of interactions among genomes that characterize human culture have the effect of regulating both individual- and group-level (via the curbing of free-riding) fitness (MacDonald 2009, 2010).

Mutations that push the behavior of high-status individuals away from the promotion of group-selected norms may promote a breakdown of or otherwise alter these social epistatic interactions, causing dysregulation of the group’s reproductive ecology. Behavioral changes are furthermore a highly likely consequence of mutation accumulation, as “behavior” (construed broadly) is a large potential target for new mutations (Miller 2000; Lynch 2016) 1 owing to the fact that approximately 84% of all genes in the human genome are involved in some aspect of brain development and/or maintenance (Hawrylycz et al. 2012).

Consistent with the theorized role of group-level (cultural) regulatory processes in the maintenance of fitness optima, positive correlations exist between religiosity (a major freerider control; MacDonald 1994; Wilson 2002) and fertility, both at the individual differences and cross-cultural levels (Meisenberg 2011). Religiosity has declined in modernized nations—a process that has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of a values system called postmaterialism (Inglehart 1977), which is characterized by the proliferation of individualistic, secular, and antihierarchical values (Welzel 2013). The holding of these values is negatively associated with fertility, both at the individual level (when measured as political liberalism; Goldstone et al. 2011) and across time and cultures (Inglehart and Appel 1989). The rise of postmaterialist values is also associated with increasingly delayed onset of reproduction (Klien 1990) which directly increases the (population) mutation load.

Pathological Altruism

Some of the values embodied in postmaterialism have been linked to the pathological altruism phenomenon, i.e., forms of altruism that damage the intended recipients or givers of largesse (Oakley et al. 2012; Oakley 2013). Virtues associated with altruism such as kindness, fidelity, magnanimity, and heroism, along with quasi-moral traits associated with personality and mental health, may be under sexual selection and might therefore be sensitive, through the f factor, to the deleterious effects of accumulating mutations (Miller 2007).

...

Another form of pathologically altruistic behavior that Oakley (2013) documents is self-righteousness, which may be increasing, consistent with secular trend data indicating elevated levels of self-regarding behavior among Western populations (sometimes called the narcissism epidemic; Twenge and Campbell 2009). This sort of behavior constitutes a key component of the clever silly phenomenon in which the embrace of counterfactual beliefs is used to leverage social status via virtue signaling (e.g., the conflation of moral equality among individuals, sexes, and populations with biological equality) (Dutton and van der Linden 2015; Charlton 2009; Woodley 2010). There may be a greater number of influential persons inclined to disseminate such beliefs, in that the prevalence of phenotypes disposed toward egoistic behaviors may have increased in Western populations (per Twenge and coworkers’ research), and because egoists, specifically Machiavellians and narcissists, appear advantaged in the acquisition of elite societal stations (Spurk et al. 2015).

[Do Bad Guys Get Ahead or Fall Behind? Relationships of the Dark Triad of Personality With Objective and Subjective Career Success: http://sci-hub.tw/http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550615609735

After controlling for other relevant variables (i.e., gender, age, job tenure, organization size, education, and work hours), narcissism was positively related to salary, Machiavellianism was positively related to leadership position and career satisfaction, and psychopathy was negatively related to all analyzed outcomes.]

...

By altering cultural norms, elite egoists may encourage the efflorescence of selfish behaviors against which some older and once highly influential cultural systems acted. For example, Christianity in various forms strongly promoted personal sacrifice for the good of groups and proscribed egoistic behaviors (Rubin 2015), but has declined significantly in terms of cultural power following modernization (Inglehart 1977). Thus, it is possible that a feedback loop exists wherein deleterious mutation accumulation raises population levels of egoism, either directly or indirectly, via the breakdown of developmental constraints on personality canalization; the resultantly greater number of egoists are then able to exploit relevant personality traits to attain positions of sociocultural influence; and through these … [more]

Having an accurate evaluation of a syndrome as a generally bad thing isn’t equivalent to attacking those with that syndrome. Being a leper is a bad thing, not just another wonderful flavor of humanity [insert hot tub joke] , but that doesn’t mean that we have to spend our spare time playing practical jokes on lepers, tempting though that is.. Leper hockey. We can cure leprosy, and we are right to do so. Preventing deafness through rubella vaccination was the right thing too – deafness sucks. And so on. As we get better at treating and preventing, humans are going to get more uniform – and that’s a good thing. Back to normalcy!

focus: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/02/22/neurodiversity/#comment-88691
interesting discussion of mutational load: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/02/22/neurodiversity/#comment-88793

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/blurry/
I was thinking again about the consequences of having more small-effect deleterious mutations than average. I don’t think that they would push hard in a particular direction in phenotype space – I don’t believe they would make you look weird, but by definition they would be bad for you, reduce fitness. I remembered a passage in a book by Steve Stirling, in which our heroine felt as if her brain ‘was moving like a mechanism of jewels and steel precisely formed.’ It strikes me that a person with an extra dollop of this kind of genetic load wouldn’t feel like that. And of course that heroine did have low genetic load, being the product of millennia of selective breeding, not to mention an extra boost from the Invisible Crown.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/blurry/#comment-12769
Well, what does the distribution of fitness burden by frequency look like for deleterious mutations of a given fitness penalty?
--
It’s proportional to the mutation rate for that class. There is reason to believe that there are more ways to moderately or slightly screw up a protein than to really ruin it, which indicates that mild mutations make up most load in protein-coding sequences. More of the genome is made up of conserved regulatory sequences, but mutations there probably have even milder effects, since few mutations in non-coding sequences cause a serious Mendelian disease.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/blurry/#comment-12803
I have wondered if there was some sort of evolutionary tradeoff between muscles and brains over the past hundred thousand years through dystrophin’s dual role. There is some evidence of recent positive selection among proteins that interact with dystrophin, such as DTNBP1 and DTNA.

Any novel environment where higher intelligence can accrue more caloric energy than brute strength alone (see: the invention of the bow) should relax the selection pressure for muscularity. The Neanderthals didn’t fare so well with the brute strength strategy.
--
Sure: that’s what you might call an inevitable tradeoff, a consequence of the laws of physics. Just as big guys need more food. But because of the way our biochemistry is wired, there can be tradeoffs that exist but are not inevitable consequences of the laws of physics – particularly likely when a gene has two fairly different functions, as they often do.

- Michael Woodley

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13759949

Human populations living in Eurasia during the Holocene experienced significant evolutionary change. It has been predicted that the transition of Holocene populations into agrarianism and urbanization brought about culture-gene co-evolution that favoured via directional selection genetic variants associated with higher general cognitive ability (GCA).
...
These observations are consistent with the expectation that GCA rose during the Holocene.

https://twitter.com/ThomasHCrown/status/880926029027696640
http://quillette.com/2017/02/02/if-youre-reading-this-essay-you-should-probably-have-more-children/
https://twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/898520772632694785
https://archive.is/AoVcV
Hypothesis: to slow demographic/cultural transformation,no ideology will make any difference,only rich/powerful people having huge families.
You can keep one or two kids walled off from a decaying society,if you have enough money and connections. You can't do that with eight kids.
...
I don't worship Elon Musk,but it seems nonaccidental that only plutocrat with any kind of vital or inspiring vision of the future has 5 kids

Demographics, Robots, and AI | Elon Musk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA4ydDUsgJU
- TFRs about 50% of replacement throughout much of Europe. what's that gonna do to society?
- like the comment about people needing to develop a sense of duty to reproduce.

I think I think demographics is is a real issue where people are not having kids in a lot of countries and very often they'll say I'll solve it with immigration. Immigration from where?! If...Europe has an average of many plots...Europe have an average of of a 50 or six...you know they're only at fifty or sixty percent of what's needed for replacement or China for that matter they're at half replacement rate where exactly are we going to find six hundred million people to replace the ones that were never born. I think people are going to have to regard to some degree than the notion of having kids as almost a social duty. Within reason, I mean just if you can and you're so inclined you should, you should. You know it's like otherwise civilization will just die literally.

https://twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/869959152898117634
that's true of older generation of, eg, NYT writers but I think this new crop will just have fewer kids, be less hypocritical, more terrible

https://twitter.com/jeffgiesea/status/997126388086951937
https://archive.fo/7fk4a
Many of the smartest people I know are quietly giving up on America. They don't see viable future. Very troubling.
They are choosing "exit" instead of voice. Abandoning politics. This takes many forms:
>denialism - tuning it out; moving to the country or gated community
>localism - rebuilding at local levels
>futurism - embracing tech to build the future
>nihilism - not voting; drugs
People point to American resilience throughout history. They view this period of time as different for a variety of reasons: debt, demographics, cultural decline, destructive technology, etc. Late-stage empire decline.

that netouyo__ comment (deleeted) about 'The Sopranos' and how the subtext was that we're at the end of America, not the beginning

Our results do not provide support for the hypothesis of universally high fertility among the upper classes in pre-transitional society, but do support the idea that the upper classes acted as forerunners by reducing their fertility before other groups. Farmers and unskilled workers were the latest to start limiting their fertility. Apart from these similarities, patterns of class differences in fertility varied significantly between populations.

pretty damn shite situation
edit: Scott Aaronson got into a lengthy argument w/ Curtis Yarvin (Boldmug), lmao

Ratchets Within Ratchets: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/02/ratchets-within-ratchets.html
https://twitter.com/turrible_tao/status/914583517157347328
https://archive.is/aBs6i
i remember on I think scott aaronsons blog? after trump won in the comment section mm was arguing w/ ppl and his most bombastic point was
if you dropped 19th century america in the ocean next to us and gave them wikipedia they would conquer us within the decade
which I remember being hilarious because it was p literally true

conscientiousness (stronger trend in women) and openness-to-new-experience have increasingly negative impact on RS for 1920-1960 cohorts

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/epiphenom/2012/10/why-are-religious-people-so-fertile.html

- Chinese eugenics [Geoffrey Miller. Pretty weird take. ("30 years running"? No.)]
- finance [Seth Lloyd]
- demographic collapse
- quantum mechanics [Lee Smolin]
- technology endangering democracy
- "idiocracy looming"
- the Two Culture and the nature-nurture debate [Simon Baron-Cohen]
- "the real risk factors for war" [Pinker]

- trends in polygenic scores for various traits in the US
- BMI (?) and height going up, education going down: https://www.gwern.net/images/genetics/2016-domingue-usa-education-dysgenics.png

first direct, genotypic, longitudinal evidence I think?
fulltext: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9vq5t6urtu930xe/2017-kong.pdf

Epidemiological and genetic association studies show that genetics play an important role in the attainment of education. Here, we investigate the effect of this genetic component on the reproductive history of 109,120 Icelanders and the consequent impact on the gene pool over time. We show that an educational attainment polygenic score, POLY_EDU, constructed from results of a recent study is associated with delayed reproduction (P < 10^−100) and fewer children overall. _The effect is stronger for women and remains highly significant after adjusting for educational attainment._ Based on 129,808 Icelanders born between 1910 and 1990, we find that the average POLY_EDU has been declining at a rate of ∼0.010 standard units per decade, which is substantial on an evolutionary timescale. Most importantly, because POLY_EDU only captures a fraction of the overall underlying genetic component the latter could be declining at a rate that is two to three times faster.

- POLY_EDU has negative effect on RS for men, while EDU itself (or just controlling for POLY_EDU?) has positive effect
- also has some trends for height (0) and schizophrenia (-)

Natural selection making 'education genes' rarer, says Icelandic study: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/5opugw/natural_selection_making_education_genes_rarer/
Gwern pretty pessimistic
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/study-shows-genes-associated-education-are-declining-180961836/

http://andrewgelman.com/2017/07/30/iceland-education-gene-trend-kangaroo/

The Marching Morons: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/01/22/the-marching-morons/
There’s a new paper out on how the frequency of variants that affect educational achievement (which also affect IQ) have been changing over time in Iceland. Naturally, things are getting worse.

We don’t have all those variants identified yet, but from the fraction we do know and the rate of change, they estimate that genetic potential for IQ is dropping about 0.30 point per decade – 3 points per century, about a point a generation. In Iceland.

Sounds reasonable, in the same ballpark as demography-based estimates.

It would be interesting to look at moderately recent aDNA and see when this trend started – I doubt if has been going on very long. [ed.: I would guess since the demographic transition/industrial revolution, though, right?]

This is the most dangerous threat the human race faces.

Paper Review: Icelandic Dysgenics: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/paper-review-icelandic-dysgenics/
The main mechanism was greater age at first child, not total number of children (i.e. the clever are breeding more slowly).

So chances are, as economic growth sails forward, there will be in the future a persistent mismatch in the number of men and women who are employable and gainfully employed. And thus there will also be a persistent mismatch in the number of men and women who could be assortatively mated. Unless women by the millions decide to marry well beneath their status and support lout-husbands, or become single-mothers through various options for reproduction, the fertility of the lower half of the income distribution could drop. Maybe not, but why not?

deleted?

low-skilled immigration -> cheaper childcare -> higher upper-class fertility

Natives and Migrants in Home Production: The Case of Germany: http://doku.iab.de/discussionpapers/2016/dp2816.pdf

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/888265995101495297
there's also prob a case to be made that whatever social stigma there was preventing market forces from pushing women into work... was good

not necessarily a contradiction imo. capital relentlessly seeks factor price equalization, needs strong culture/authority to resist such

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/11/sentences-to-ponder-99.html
Policies, such as the minimum wage, that affect the cost of marketization, have a large [negative] effect on the fertility and labor supply of high income women.

Is the Market Pronatalist? Inequality, Differential Fertility, and Growth Revisited: https://www.tau.ac.il/~davidweiss/BHLWZ_October_2017.pdf

Figure 1: Fertility by Income Decile 1980 & 2010. Authors calculations using Census and American Community Survey Data. See Appendix A for more details.

Poor countries are predicted to keep raising their game, and their intellects, richer countries less so. The USA is the only country predicted to decline in ability, presumably because of mass migration. The real experts take an even more jaundiced view, and hold out little hope for The West. These predictions will be partly testable within one generation, so pin this table to your study notice board, and test for goodness of fit in 2040.

The FLynn Effect to 2100: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/the-flynn-effect-to-2100/
(iq change predictions)

- p-values are much lower for women but effect sizes aren't much different?
- actually I think sample sizes are larger so that makes sense
- but there are sex-dependent factors
- FOXP2 makes an appearance, hmm
- Figure 3 is a nice summary of genetic correlations

supplements:
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v48/n12/extref/ng.3698-S1.pdf
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v48/n12/extref/ng.3698-S2.xls

Khan on Twitter: "figure on right from @tuckerdrob lab is depressing (the knowledge plateau). do i read in vain??? https://t.co/DZzBD8onEv": https://twitter.com/razibkhan/status/809439911627493377
- reasoning rises then declines after age ~20
- knowledge plateaus by age 35-40
- different interpretation provided by study authors w/ another graph (renewal)
- study (can't find the exact graph anywhere): http://www.iapsych.com/wj3ewok/LinkedDocuments/McArdle2002.pdf

School’s out: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/12/29/schools-out/
I saw a note by Razib Khan, in which he mentioned that psychometric research suggests that people plateau in their knowledge base as adults. I could believe it. But I’m not sure it’s true in my case. One might estimate total adult knowledge in terms of BS equivalents…

Age-related IQ decline is reduced markedly after adjustment for the Flynn effect: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/20349385/
Twenty-year-olds outperform 70-year-olds by as much as 2.3 standard deviations (35 IQ points) on subtests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS). We show that most of the difference can be attributed to an intergenerational rise in IQ known as the Flynn effect.

...

For these verbal subtests, the Flynn effect masked a modest increase in ability as individuals grow older.

Predictors of ageing-related decline across multiple cognitive functions: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616302707
Cognitive ageing is likely a process with few large-effect predictors

A strong link between speed of visual discrimination and cognitive ageing: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4123160/
Results showed a moderate correlation (r = 0.460) between inspection time performance and intelligence, and a strong correlation between change in inspection time and change in intelligence from 70 to 76 (r = 0.779). These results support the processing speed theory of cognitive ageing. They go beyond cross-sectional correlation to show that cognitive change is accompanied by changes in basic visual information processing as we age.

To address this challenge, we focus our attention on the peculiar movement of satisfaction in the financial domain of life, which is measured by standardizing financial satisfaction by overall life satisfaction, and perform regression analyses using World and European Integrated Values Survey. The results show that the negative impact of having an additional child on satisfaction becomes particularly greater in the financial domain as income increases and total fertility rate (TFR) decreases. The results also indicate that having children offers a sense of financial security to the elderly in high TFR countries while this is not the case in lower TFR countries. These results support the general idea that the heavier financial burden of having children is a major cause of fertility decline and provide policy implications to find a way out of extremely low fertility.

resulting paper:
Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification: http://evp.sagepub.com/content/13/1/147470491501300114.full.pdf
- Henry Harpending
Genetics and the Historical Decline of Violence?: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/genetics-and-the-historical-decline-of-violence/
In the present case we need a response of 1/28 of a standard deviation per generation. Assuming an additive heritability of 0.5 (the true value is probably 0.8 or so from literature on the heritability of aggressive behavior in children) the selective differential must be about 1/14 or .07 standard deviations per generation. In terms of IQ this would correspond to a one point IQ advantage of parents over the population average and in terms of stature parents with a mean stature 0.2 inches greater than the population average. This would occur if the most homicidal 1.5% of the population were to fail to reproduce each generation.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/politically-incorrect-paper-of-the-day-death-penalty-eugenics.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maid_Freed_from_the_Gallows

Spoiling for a fight: https://aeon.co/essays/why-has-england-lost-its-medieval-taste-for-violence
https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/914315865109041154
The author of this article seems unaware of the possibility that there could be selection for less violent traits in a population

Behavioral genetics and the judicial system: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/10/22/behavioral-genetics-and-the-judicial-system/
I have no reason to believe that this was planned. If you look at the trend today, you might get the impression that the powers that be are actively trying to increase the fitness of assholes, but I doubt if that is the case. Sure, that’s the effect, but they don’t know enough to do it on purpose.

For example, when the Supremes decided that being sufficiently stupid is a get-out-of-execution card, they weren’t thinking about long-term biological implications. I doubt if they ever do, or can.

A thought experiment: in the light of behavioral genetics, what should you do when it’s clear that one of a pair of identical twins has committed a truly heinous crime – but you don’t know which one?

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/10/22/behavioral-genetics-and-the-judicial-system/#comment-96980
Even modern societies need violent men. Who is going to wage war if soldiers going to refuse to shoot and/or quickly develop PTSD?
--
I can think of people that might describe: people like Paddy Mayne, perhaps. But in general, it is possible to find whole countries that produce excellent soldiers and are at the same time internally very peaceful and orderly.

As for PTSD, funny how there used to be high-intensity wars where it wasn’t much of a problem.

Criminal offending as part of an alternative reproductive strategy: Investigating evolutionary hypotheses using Swedish total population data: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263281358_Criminal_offending_as_part_of_an_alternative_reproductive_strategy_Investigating_evolutionary_hypotheses_using_Swedish_total_population_data
- criminals have higher reproductive fitness in Sweden
- not limited to men, so maybe just stems from impulsiveness

Exploring the genetic correlations of antisocial behavior and life history traits: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/08/23/247411
Our genetic correlation analyses demonstrate that alleles associated with higher reproductive output (number of children ever born, rg=0.50, p=.0065) were positively correlated with alleles associated with antisocial behavior, whereas alleles associated with more delayed reproductive onset (age of first birth, rg=-.64, p=.0008) were negatively associated with alleles linked to antisocial behavior.

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/5tlovw/criminal_offending_as_part_of_an_alternative/
nice: http://www.newschannel5.com/news/inmates-given-reduced-jail-time-if-they-get-a-vasectomy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell

Are per-incident rape-pregnancy rates higher than per-incident consensual pregnancy rates?: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-003-1014-0
Our analysis suggests that per-incident rape-pregnancy rates exceed per-incident consensual pregnancy rates by a sizable margin, even before adjusting for the use of relevant forms of birth control. Possible explanations for this phenomenon are discussed, as are its implications to ongoing debates over the ultimate causes of rape.

https://twitter.com/Neoabsolutism/status/877188094201548801
High-low versus the middle is so pervasive, and so explanatory, it is astounding. We have a genuine law of social organisation.
https://twitter.com/ad_captandum/status/854724390763626496
Solzhenitsyn on the Gulags and the lumpenproletariat: https://twitter.com/TheIllegit/status/883797665128919040
https://archive.is/QoZKC

Raise the Crime Rate: https://nplusonemag.com/issue-13/politics/raise-the-crime-rate/

turnstile jumping/fair cheating in DC Metro:
https://www.nbcwashington.com/investigations/Metro-Fare-Evasion-Could-Be-Decriminalized-Under-New-DC-Council-Bill-433855543.html
http://baconsrebellion.com/thats-end-donald-trump-turnstile-jumping-edition/

https://medium.com/@icelevel/whos-left-mariame-26ed2237ada6
"What about bad people? What about racists?"
I don't answer those questions anymore.
https://twitter.com/NoamJStein/status/946422138231185408
https://archive.is/dm4mV

People who want to do anything except confront evil men: http://www.isegoria.net/2018/03/people-who-want-to-do-anything-except-confront-evil-men/
This really is a matter of chickens coming home to roost. There has been a tension since the 60’s about what we want police to do. We no longer have fit men with a strong capacity for violence occupying the majority of patrol cars in this country. What we have been slipping towards for decades are a mass of armed social workers with a small force of violent proficient SWAT guys who are supposed to save the day when bad things really, really need to happen but are never there when you really need them.

...

Finally, our society needs to adjust its attitudes towards violence. There is the recently coined term “pro-social violence” which is used to describe “lawful, moral violence in the service of good.” We need to restore the idea that when violent things happen to bad people, it’s OK and society is better as a whole.

Unlike actual fertility, fertility intentions are often found to be positively correlated with education. The literature explaining this paradox is scarce.

by Woodley, didn't notice that earlier, hmm...

height (+), infant head circumference (+), some biomolecular stuff, female hip size (+), male BMI (-), age of menarche (+, !!), and birth weight (+)

Strong selection in the recent past can cause allele frequencies to change significantly. Consider two different SNPs, which today have equal minor allele frequency (for simplicity, let this be equal to one half). Assume that one SNP was subject to strong recent selection, and another (neutral) has had approximately zero effect on fitness. The advantageous version of the first SNP was less common in the far past, and rose in frequency recently (e.g., over the last 2k years). In contrast, the two versions of the neutral SNP have been present in roughly the same proportion (up to fluctuations) for a long time. Consequently, in the total past breeding population (i.e., going back tens of thousands of years) there have been many more copies of the neutral alleles (and the chunks of DNA surrounding them) than of the positively selected allele. Each of the chunks of DNA around the SNPs we are considering is subject to a roughly constant rate of mutation.

Looking at the current population, one would then expect a larger variety of mutations in the DNA region surrounding the neutral allele (both versions) than near the favored selected allele (which was rarer in the population until very recently, and whose surrounding region had fewer chances to accumulate mutations). By comparing the difference in local mutational diversity between the two versions of the neutral allele (should be zero modulo fluctuations, for the case MAF = 0.5), and between the (+) and (-) versions of the selected allele (nonzero, due to relative change in frequency), one obtains a sensitive signal for recent selection. See figure at bottom for more detail. In the paper what I call mutational diversity is measured by looking at distance distribution of singletons, which are rare variants found in only one individual in the sample under study.

The 2,000 year selection of the British: http://www.unz.com/gnxp/the-2000-year-selection-of-the-british/

Detection of human adaptation during the past 2,000 years: http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/07/052084

The key idea is that recent selection distorts the ancestral genealogy of sampled haplotypes at a selected site. In particular, the terminal (tip) branches of the genealogy tend to be shorter for the favored allele than for the disfavored allele, and hence, haplotypes carrying the favored allele will tend to carry fewer singleton mutations (Fig. 1A-C and SOM).

To capture this effect, we use the sum of distances to the nearest singleton in each direction from a test SNP as a summary statistic (Fig. 1D).

Figure 1. Illustration of the SDS method.

Figure 2. Properties of SDS.

Based on a recent model of European demography [25], we estimate that the mean tip length for a neutral sample of 3,000 individuals is 75 generations, or roughly 2,000 years (Fig. 2A). Since SDS aims to measure changes in tip lengths of the genealogy, we conjectured that it would be most likely to detect selection approximately within this timeframe.

Indeed, in simulated sweep models with samples of 3,000 individuals (Fig. 2B,C and fig. S2), we find that SDS focuses specifically on very recent time scales, and has equal power for hard and soft sweeps within this timeframe. At individual loci, SDS is powered to detect ~2% selection over 100 generations. Moreover, SDS has essentially no power to detect older selection events that stopped >100 generations before the present. In contrast, a commonly-used test for hard sweeps, iHS [12], integrates signal over much longer timescales (>1,000 generations), has no specificity to the more recent history, and has essentially no power for the soft sweep scenarios.

Catching evolution in the act with the Singleton Density Score: http://www.molecularecologist.com/2016/05/catching-evolution-in-the-act-with-the-singleton-density-score/
The Singleton Density Score (SDS) is a measure based on the idea that changes in allele frequencies induced by recent selection can be observed in a sample’s genealogy as differences in the branch length distribution.

You don’t need a weatherman: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/05/08/you-dont-need-a-weatherman/
You can do a million cool things with this method. Since the effective time scale goes inversely with sample size, you could look at evolution in England over the past 1000 years or the past 500. Differencing, over the period 1-1000 AD. Since you can look at polygenic traits, you can see whether the alleles favoring higher IQs have increased or decreased in frequency over various stretches of time. You can see if Greg Clark’s proposed mechanism really happened. You can (soon) tell if creeping Pinkerization is genetic, or partly genetic.

You could probably find out if the Middle Easterners really have gotten slower, and when it happened.

Looking at IQ alleles, you could not only show whether the Ashkenazi Jews really are biologically smarter but if so, when it happened, which would give you strong hints as to how it happened.

We know that IQ-favoring alleles are going down (slowly) right now (not counting immigration, which of course drastically speeds it up). Soon we will know if this was true while Russia was under the Mongol yoke – we’ll know how smart Periclean Athenians were and when that boost occurred. And so on. And on!

...

“The pace has been so rapid that humans have changed significantly in body and mind over recorded history."

bicameral mind: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/05/08/you-dont-need-a-weatherman/#comment-78934

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/05/08/you-dont-need-a-weatherman/#comment-78939
Chinese, Koreans, Japanese and Ashkenazi Jews all have high levels of myopia. Australian Aborigines have almost none, I think.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/05/08/you-dont-need-a-weatherman/#comment-79094
I expect that the fall of all great empires is based on long term dysgenic trends. There is no logical reason why so many empires and civilizations throughout history could grow so big and then not simply keep growing, except for dysgenics.
--
I can think of about twenty other possible explanations off the top of my head, but dysgenics is a possible cause.
--
I agree with DataExplorer. The largest factor in the decay of civilizations is dysgenics. The discussion by R. A. Fisher 1930 p. 193 is very cogent on this matter. Soon we will know for sure.
--
Sometimes it can be rapid. Assume that the upper classes are mostly urban, and somewhat sharper than average. Then the Mongols arrive.