Trump-Proofing Is Anti-Democratic

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

The same people who argue that Donald Trump represents a mortal threat to democracy are also doing everything they can to Trump-proof and render the election of Donald Trump as meaningless as possible.

Christopher Caldwell writes:

European diplomats and their advisors boasted of how they planned to “Trump-proof” the international order, starting with aid to the Ukrainian war effort. On one hand, European leaders were recognizing the immovable democratic reality that the present-day Republican Party represents: none failed to swear loyalty to the Trumpian proposition that Europe ought to pay more for its defense. On the other hand, they continued to cast Trumpism as a “threat to democracy,” albeit one that could be neutralized with the help of a few political tricks. They proposed a $100-billion five-year funding plan for the Ukrainian war effort, shifted authority over the arms-contributing nations from the U.S. to NATO itself, and declared Ukraine’s path to NATO membership “irreversible.”

Even in the best of circumstances, “Trump-proofing” would appear to be a counterproductive strategy. Leaders do not get to lay out the policies of their elected successors. Were NATO to reconfigure itself in such a way as to stymie the verdicts of American democracy, it would alienate many more Americans from the alliance than President Trump has thus far managed to. And the roll-out was poorly timed. A few days after the summit, a gunman in Butler, Pennsylvania, would try to Trump-proof the West in his own way: by sending the former president to kingdom come.

But Europeans are less worried than one would think by that kind of threat to democracy. Wrapped up in a collection of American-style arguments over corruption and populism and ethnic strife, they have adopted a style of politics that a decade ago seemed unique to the United States: mixing up domestic and foreign policy, constitutionalizing policy differences, suppressing dissent over dubious experimental policies, failing to distinguish between loyal opposition and treason, refusing to surrender power when they surrender power…

In an extraordinary essay published in Le Figaro in mid-July, the political philosopher Pierre Manent described a situation in which the rhetoric of “defending democracy” was itself becoming a threat to democracy. The excommunication of the National Rally creates a powerful governing tool for the political class, “a means of social and moral control that it uses to undermine the sincerity and the freedom of the civic conversation.”

In a functioning democracy, Manent points out, voters choose between competing visions for the community. But in today’s hyper-moralized democracy the choice is between “the legitimate community and those excluded from the legitimate community.” The ruse is self-defeating. If one party to the elections is illegitimate, then the government is, too: We didn’t vote to install it, voters will say, but to exclude the alternative. That is why the National Rally has been able to attract voters without ever having developed a coherent plan for governing. The establishment’s attempt to delegitimize the main party of the French working class has boomeranged back on the establishment itself.

…the most truculent members of NATO tend to be the most lightly armed. Between them, he notes, the Baltic states—Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—have fewer than 50,000 soldiers and not a single main battle tank.

Pierre Manent wrote first for Le Figaro and then had his essay translated into English:

Perhaps the dissolution of the National Assembly, along with its consequences, will turn out to be the “extrinsic accident” that, according to Machiavelli, requires cities to “become aware of themselves” and to refound themselves. In the confusion and the lightning flash of this summer, a light has been lit: we must return home. Salvation will not come from “Europe,” which withdraws as soon as an emergency knocks on the door, and still less from the people-humanity that finds unity and energy only in hatred. Salvation will come only from “us,” from the French people governing ourselves according to the representative republic, the regime whose authority our higher courts have time and again obscured and whose functioning they have hindered. No one will come to our aid if we do not want to govern ourselves.

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The New York Times Displays Contradictory Attitudes Towards IQ

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

When IQ scores advance the New York Ties left-wing agenda, it promotes the value of IQ scores. When IQ scores undercut the New York Times agenda, it casts doubt on the validity of IQ scores.

If you optimize for truth, you don’t operate like the New York Times.

If you enter “iq most replicable social science” (without quotes) into Google today, you get this as the first answer (generated by its AI):

According to current research, IQ testing is considered one of the most replicable findings in the social sciences, meaning that studies on intelligence consistently produce similar results when replicated across different populations and research teams, even amidst the broader “replication crisis” within social science research.

Key points about IQ and replicability:
High consistency:
Studies on IQ tend to show a high degree of consistency in their findings, particularly when using standardized intelligence tests.
Strong correlations:
IQ scores are demonstrably correlated with various life outcomes like educational attainment and occupational status, further supporting their reliability.
Twin studies:
Research using twin studies has provided evidence for a significant genetic component to intelligence, adding to the understanding of IQ’s stability.

The first academic article suggested by Google is from the Journal of Intelligence, published Nov. 19, 2020:

Despite intelligence research being among the most replicable bodies of empirical findings—a Rosetta stone across the social sciences—the communication of intelligence research with non-intelligence researchers and the public remains a challenge, especially given ongoing public controversies throughout the history of the field. Hunt argued that “we have a communication problem.” This article is a call for intelligence researchers to consider communication at multiple levels—communication with other intelligence researchers, communication with non-intelligence researchers, and communication with the public, defined here as policymakers, practitioners, students, and general readers. It discusses ongoing tensions between academic freedom and social responsibility and provides suggestions for thinking about communication and effective research translation and implementation of intelligence research from the frameworks of science and policy research communication. It concludes with some recommendations for effective communication and stresses the importance of incentivizing more scholars to responsibly seek to educate and engage with multiple publics about the science of intelligence.

The research on intelligence, from a purely scientific perspective, is among the most robust literatures in all of the social sciences (Arvey et al. 1994; Carroll 1997; Deary 2020; Jensen 1998; Neisser et al. 1996). At least within the community of researchers around the world who openly acknowledge this enormous body of evidence accumulated to date, then, whether intelligence or cognitive abilities are measurable and have real world consequences is not, at least in my view, the most crucial debate. Of course, there remain healthy disagreements in the field about various aspects of intelligence, and we still have much to learn about intelligence and how it might be most fruitfully applied. Yet, intelligence researchers often find themselves facing many people outside of the field (including the general public) holding strong misconceptions or even distorting the facts about intelligence. Thus, this article seeks to build from Hunt’s (2009) point that the field has a communication problem as a way of expanding the list of challenges or problems that intelligence researchers face in conducting scientific inquiry and stressing that communication has been a neglected topic for the field.

Because intelligence research is multidisciplinary and the construct—especially when conceptualized and measured as general intelligence or g—can be considered a Rosetta stone across the social sciences (Jensen 1998, 2006), it (should) have influence in numerous other fields. Some fields, such as industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology (e.g., Schmidt and Hunter 2004; Kuncel et al. 2004), are one step removed from intelligence research but have incorporated it into their discipline and training (they just call it general mental ability, or GMA). Other fields, such as gifted education, are somewhat accepting of intelligence as a core aspect, but still it remains a minority perspective (e.g., Thompson and Oehlert 2010; Wai and Worrell 2015; Warne 2015). On the flipside, there are other fields, such as epidemiology (e.g., Gottfredson 2004) and education (e.g., Wai et al. 2018) in which there has simply been little to no integration of intelligence research at all, and even strong resistance or just open absence of acknowledgment throughout history (e.g., Maranto and Wai 2020). In the field of psychology, beyond the I/O subdiscipline, it does not appear that intelligence research is really fully accepted as indicated by the number of jobs in traditional psychology, education, or other departments who employ intelligence researchers. Moving outside psychology to the broader social sciences or other areas of science does not necessarily show intelligence research being integrated strongly in a systematic way. One indicator intelligence research is not well accepted by mainstream psychology is the relatively low number of faculty positions, at least in the U.S., recruiting for intelligence as a specialty (e.g., in the U.S. the Psychology Job Wiki (psychjobsearch.wikidot.com), throughout recent years in particular, almost uniformly does not have any positions explicitly asking for intelligence as a specialty). Additionally, though not typically seen this way by intelligence researchers, the lack of accuracy of how intelligence research is represented in general psychology textbooks (Warne et al. 2018) is another indicator of mainstream acceptance within the field of psychology broadly. However, more systematic research on the representation of intelligence as mainstream in psychology has also not yet been conducted and would be useful information.

The history of intelligence research has been simultaneously filled with enormous empirical advancement alongside a number of resurfacing public controversies (see Jensen 1969; Gottfredson 2010a; Herrnstein and Murray 1994; see Carl and Woodley 2019; Rindermann et al. 2020 for recent reviews). Some intelligence researchers have argued that given how intelligence research has the potential to be misused due to its complicated and sometimes unfortunate history, that it is crucial to be careful about how such research is conducted and disseminated (e.g., Martschenko et al. 2019). This type of concern about the history of intelligence research may have even prompted the Journal of Intelligence (2020) editors to openly state on their “aims” page that certain types of research questions, as determined at the discretion of the editors, will not be accepted: “The journal will not consider manuscripts that present results or conclusions with mixed language, with misleading wording or with insufficient supporting data that may therefore lead to or enhance political controversies; and the editors will judge whether that is the case.” Haier’s (2020) editorial stance in Intelligence states that “Our responsibility is to publish the best quality studies we can to elucidate all aspects of human intelligence research. In our view, publishing empirical data, along with clear explanations of what the data mean and what they do not mean, is the only basis for reasoned discussions about what intelligence is and why it is important.”

Thus, there is debate within the field of intelligence itself on what are acceptable topics to conduct research on and what are not and what should even be communicated. Some intelligence researchers believe that all questions should be openly pursued and communicated (e.g., Carl and Woodley 2019; Jensen 1998). Other researchers have noted that certain questions in intelligence research are a bit like playing with fire (e.g., Hunt and Lubinski 2005; Martschenko et al. 2019; Sternberg 2005). It is clear that intelligence research often comes under attack for reasons that have nothing to do with the integrity of the science, but more to do with the possible social implications and misuse when it comes to policy (Martschenko et al. 2019)…

At a time when psychology and the broader social sciences are struggling with a replication crisis (Open Science Collaboration 2015), the research on intelligence and its implications for society is among the most replicable domains across the social and behavioral sciences. Thus, the fact that intelligence as a field remains under fire at present for identical issues as those that continue to resurface across the decades suggests that Hunt (2009) is correct, we very likely have a communication problem. The goal of this short piece has been to provide a framework to think about communication of intelligence research at multiple levels, and how that might shed some light on the historical issue of intelligence not being well integrated into other academic disciplines and also not well understood or accepted by the general public. As a field, it is true that our first priority should be to ensure that we seek to build our scientific understanding of intelligence, but this does not preclude the need to ensure the institutional and public support for new researchers to be able to pursue intelligence research for their careers. For example, we need mainstream psychology, education, or other departments to hire and support the next generation of intelligence researchers, which comes from adjacent more mainstream fields (e.g., social/personality, developmental, health, educational, quantitative, I/O, cognitive) accepting the current empirical findings from intelligence and not being turned off by the public and academic controversies.

Steve Sailer writes:

One of the most controversial things Donald Trump ever said was to suggest that, judging by the state of their respective countries, Norwegians would tend to make better immigrants than Haitians.

Now another Trump is in trouble over Haiti.

From the New York Times’ news section:

Donald Trump Jr. Piles On With Racist Comments About Haitians

After former President Donald J. Trump spread debunked claims that immigrants from Haiti were eating pets, his son cast more aspersions on Haitian immigrants.

By Simon J. Levien

Sept. 14, 2024, 1:54 p.m. ET

Amid fallout from Donald J. Trump’s debunked claim about immigrants from Haiti stealing and eating people’s pets in a small Ohio city, the former president’s oldest son weighed in with his own aspersions on Haitians.

Donald Trump Jr. suggested on Thursday that Haitian immigrants were less intelligent than people from other countries, and claimed that there was demographic evidence to back this up. He provided none.

“You look at Haiti, you look at the demographic makeup, you look at the average I.Q. — if you import the third world into your country, you’re going to become the third world,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with Charlie Kirk on Real America’s Voice, a conservative broadcasting network. “That’s just basic. It’s not racist. It’s just fact.”

Claims inherently linking race, nationality and intelligence have long played a role in scientific racism, which uses pseudoscience to try to justify false claims of racial inferiority or superiority. And intelligence quotient testing, a commonly used measure of intelligence, has long been criticized as unreliable. …

The National Haitian American Elected Officials Network, a nonpartisan group for Haitian American politicians, rejected Mr. Trump’s comments about Haitians and intelligence.

“That is so sad,” said Mary Estimé-Irvin, the group’s chairwoman. “The campaign is desperate.”

The New York Times adds: “Donald Trump Jr. has emerged as a key campaign surrogate for his father. They have both advanced the false claim that Haitian migrants are stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio.”

How do they know that is false?

Here are three New York Times articles about lead and low IQ:

C.D.C. Lowers Recommended Lead-Level Limits in Children

High lead levels in young children have been found to affect cognitive development and may lead to a lower I.Q.

One in Three Children Have Unacceptably High Lead Levels, Study Says

Nicholas Rees, a policy specialist on climate and environment at UNICEF and one of the study’s co-authors, said the consequences are dire.

“When you’re talking about a third of the world’s children, you’re talking about a potential loss of learning opportunities, an impact on future wages, you’re talking about a tremendous burden on society,” he said.

Lead-Poisoning Harm Held to Be Partly Reversible

Performance on standardized tests for cognitive development improved significantly six months after the children were treated to reduce the levels of lead in their blood and their homes were cleaned to reduce their exposure, the study found.

I found many New York Times articles about low IQ scores can help murderers escape the death penalty, including the following three:

On Death Row With Low I.Q., and New Hope for a Reprieve

His intellectual disability was even obvious to a Florida judge, who found him “mentally retarded” and took him off death row 18 years after his original sentence.

I.Q. Cutoff Ruling May Spare Some Inmates on Death Row

MIAMI — A Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday throwing out Florida’s strict I.Q. cutoff in death penalty cases could increase the number of inmates exempt from execution because they are deemed mentally disabled, legal experts said Wednesday.

Low I.Q. and the Death Penalty

The Supreme Court will be asked today to decide ”whether the execution of mentally retarded individuals convicted of capital crimes violates the Eighth Amendment.” The case involves Daryl Atkins, who was sentenced to die in Virginia for a 1996 murder and kidnapping. Mr. Atkins has an I.Q. score of 59, below the score of 70 that is commonly used to identify mental retardation.

When it becomes a tool for murderers to avoid the death penalty, invoking retardation is cool.

If low IQ is so bad that people suffering from it are not fully responsible for their actions, then why would you want to import people with low IQs?

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‘Everyone is numbing out’

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

If you have strong bonds, if you have children, I don’t believe you are numbing out and I don’t believe you lack meaning and I don’t believe you have the following problems.

What kind of person with children to support practices quiet quitting?

Catherine Shannon wrote:

Life has gotten very chaotic incredibly quickly. It has become increasingly difficult to parse anything from the static. People started coping with this lack of meaning through a kind of ironic detachment (which is very much still around), but it has matured into a pervasive cultural apathy, a permeating numbness. This isn’t nihilism per se. (Even nihilists have a sincere belief system; they just sincerely believe that life is meaningless.) What we’re dealing with is worse than nihilism. People are checking out of life in their 20s and 30s without reaching any profound conclusions about the point of it all.

“People are so worn down,” my friend told me on a recent phone call. She’s right: there’s a real lack of palpable ambition and vitality these days, a stunning lack of life force in the world. Another friend told me that “this has been going on for so long that people wouldn’t know meaning if it walked up and bit them in the ass.” It’s true—so many of the things that once gave the average person’s life real meaning are now treated with sarcasm and contempt: college is a waste of money, work is a waste of your life, getting married is just a piece of paper, having kids is a nightmare, family is a burden, hobbies are merely quaint, earnestly expressing yourself is cringe, leaving the house is exhausting, religion is for idiots, the list goes on. If you allow yourself to internalize this perspective, eventually everything becomes a dumb joke.

We’re so saturated in this environment that people are not only numbing out, they’re kind of making a spectacle of it: from TikTok’s “quiet quitting” trend to Vetements entire “ironic” aesthetic. You know it’s bad when the corporations get on board. The detachment is so widespread that most companies don’t even have the genuine confidence to market their own products. Everything is delivered with a wink from one eye and an eye-roll from the other. We live in a mud puddle of memes, ironic hot takes, and self-conscious self-reference.

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How to Make the Most of Your 20s

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

Catherine Shannon wrote:

…when dating, there’s a subtle way to communicate to men that their best behavior is necessary with you. And it’s certainly not overtly stating, “I am a high-value woman.” It’s a combination of social grace, elegance, and discretion. There’s an ideal attitude, and it’s hard to define, but it encompasses kindness, intelligence, good will, a sense of humor, sensitive understanding, and self-respect. Women with this attitude turn heads in every room they enter. People really do treat you the way you treat yourself, and the people who sense that they won’t be able to easily manipulate you will run the other way. This is a good thing.

Generally speaking, do the harder, less fashionable thing.

I’m not saying you need to be a contrarian (though that’s arguably fashionable these days). What I mean is that the harder, more thorough, less popular path is usually worth it. There are basically no shortcuts in life, and you’ll only waste your time and energy looking for them.

Work on your manners and social graces.

When someone has excellent manners, people don’t actually notice the manners, they notice the person. Some manners are obvious—saying please, thank you, and excuse me, covering your mouth while you cough, not chewing with your mouth open, respecting others’ personal space. But exceptional manners are harder to define, and the shading of behavior is subtle. For instance, the lost art of conversation.

…Try not to engage in purely attention-seeking, ultimately embarrassing behavior. And don’t divulge every aspect of your personal life on social media. Strangers who don’t know you are incapable of actually caring about you. If you need help, reach out to the people who know you in real life. Remember: discretion is extremely attractive. It is seldom wise to tell all.

Take great care with your living space.

Your surroundings certainly elevate your mood, but you don’t have to have a huge apartment and a ton of money to create a beautiful home.

…Reading is the main way to expand your mind as an adult. Media consumption simply does not cut it. If you want to separate yourself intellectually from your peers, develop serious interests and passions, feel calmer and more collected, have deeper, more interesting conversations, and rarely feel bored—you have to read.

…Meaningful work looks different to everyone, and it’s worth trying to figure out what you personally find meaningful.

…Your day job can also fuel your creative pursuits, especially if you’re a writer. No one talks about this enough. You need to meet some characters and have some real life experiences. Too much writing these days is “writers writing about being writers.” In order to write, you need to have lived.

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Optimization Will Not Save You

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

Magdalene J. Taylor wrote:

Huberman is one of many people aligned in the contemporary cult of optimization. Bryan Johnson is another poster child of the movement, as is much of the SF tech scene writ large. Most of these types are undergoing this optimization on smaller scales than Huberman or Johnson, but the mentality remains the same. Here are people who won’t drink not because they have any particular problem with it but because the data their Oura ring gathers suggests they sleep 7 percent better on nights they don’t, therefore allowing them to answer emails twenty seconds more quickly. Here are people avoiding coffee half an hour before meeting with their personal trainer who charges as much as a mortgage because they don’t want to reward their brain with a dopamine boost that could become habitual, concerning themselves with the precise receptors through which caffeine and dopamine interact.

It’s boring. It’s exhausting. It’s not sexy. It might not even be healthy.

One thing I’ve wondered about the Huberman story is what would have happened if he applied this same optimization mentality to his dating life. It’s possible that he did — perhaps he was only able to juggle six women at a time without them knowing about each other (at least temporarily) because he enforced this same routine of rigidity and calculation to romance. It’s also possible that he only managed all of this through sheer luck and some solid lies. One can imagine how this type of optimization could be applied to dating more honestly, but with similarly unsexy results: a common thread in several of the major polyamory stories as of late has been how packed everyone involved’s Google Calendar is. Surely plenty of people pursuing ethical non-monogamy see themselves as romantically more productive, more detailed and more modernized than the rest of us in a way that mirrors the Huberman health methods.

Regardless, the point remains that optimization will not necessarily fulfill us in the way we’re looking for. It will not stop of from behaving in self-destructive ways (which, I think, Huberman ultimately was), nor will it fill in the emotional gaps that have led us searching for solutions in the first place. It probably will help us sleep a little better, help us feel a little better, help us look a little better, and that all absolutely is worth something. All of that does count toward our broader happiness. But to treat it as our guiding philosophy leaves us empty. There is no telos to it beyond productivity and conspicuous spending.

It all begs the question, what exactly are our bodies for? For whom are we achieving this “peak” physical form? When will that “peak” even be reached? It isn’t just that we’re enhancing our bodies to yield more labor in order to make our employers wealthier, though that’s probably true, too, but rather that it feels like we’ve turned our bodies into projects so that we simply have something to do, something to define ourselves by. In some cases, it might even just be so that we have new things to buy. Spending our money on supplements and gym memberships gives us a sense of purpose. I’m not trying to critique health as some sort of capitalist psyop — the reality is likely the opposite. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be hot and fit. Those are things I want, too. But the point of this brand of optimization does not seem to be that we ought to enjoy the bounties of our healthy bodies. Rather, it is rigidity for rigidity’s sake.

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