Forward: “Is Jordan Peterson Enabling Jew Hatred?”

Posted on May 13, 2018 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: “To illustrate their thesis, the Forward put together a montage of photos from Wikipedia of Hitler and Peterson: proof!”

COMMENTS AT STEVE SAILER:

* I’ve read the piece that Peterson wrote that was partly quoted here. He does a back of the envelope calculation based on the idea that if white Americans have 100 IQ, and genius IQ is 145, that’s three standard deviations, and so about 1 in 1000 (99.9 percentile) is somewhere on the “genius” scale. Multiply that by 200 million white people and you get about 200,000 white people geniuses.

For Ashkenazi Jews, assume a 115 IQ as average. To get to 145 IQ, that’s only 2 standard deviations, about 97.6 percentile, so about 2.4 Ashkenazi Jews in 100 have a genius IQ. There are about six million American Jews, and if you assume they’re all Ashkenazi, that’s about 140,000 Jews with genius IQs.

If you recall stats that show things like 40 percent of American billionaires are Jews, the above back of the envelope calculation shows that’s about what you’d expect. That is, if the “You’re so smart, how come you’re not rich?” wisecrack is true.

Anyway, everyone on campus wants a piece of Peterson, because he states the truth as he sees it and lets the chips fall where they may. So, since he puts a psychometric foundation under Jewish achievement (rather than worldwide cabals), now he’s apparently an anti-semite, along with an anti-feminist, an anti-marxist, an anti-PC activist, etc. etc.

* This article finds Jews have higher levels of “social effectiveness” even when controlling for IQ.

Co-author Woodley of Menie is the guy who has the most pessimistic take on dysgenic fertility and thinks Victorians had much higher genotypical IQs.

* Peterson has a large audience now and by merely mentioning and talking about Jews, even if it’s in neutral or positive terms, he’s pointing them out, distinguishing them, which tends to unsettle many Jews.

* Peterson has decades of experience giving engaging classroom lectures and knows how to speak. And he leveraged that to become a self-made YouTube phenomenon, and then translated that into a best-selling book, sold-out personal appearances, and one of the top Patreon accounts.

What’s more, Peterson did all of this by weaving a patch for the hole elites tore out of the moral fabric of society.

Reasonable people can nit-pick the patch he came up with, question his erudition, and talk about how he’s strayed out of his lane, etc., but I think resentment explains a big part of the reaction. What Peterson is attempting — moral/psychological therapy on a mass scale, as opposed to watered down self-help bromides — is a rare thing to pull off. Maybe the last person who did was Viktor Frankl.

* That article has a lot of innuendo, without actually saying that Peterson is wrong about anything. I get the impression that truth is not the main concern of the Jews who are quoted.

* It’s savaged in its own comments. An example from a Jay Rosen:

“I am a Jew. I volunteered during the Yom Kippur War. No one defends the Jews more than I do. This article is idiotic and contemptible. It make me lose respect for the Forward and have no respect for Feldman. I have listened to hundreds of hours of Jordan Peterson and never found anything, either directly or indirectly, that was in any way antisemitic. This is a stupid and malicious article. It should be retracted, taken down and The Forward should make a formal first page retraction for its slanderous libel. No one could be a stronger enemy of fascism and evil than Peterson, or be a more effective critic. Shame on you.”

* I think the Official Narrative is that Jews in the USA are an oppressed and powerless minority who are no more intelligent than anyone else? But that the main thing is that non Jews must never ever discuss Jews, even to praise them, as this smacks of Hitler. And you must never discuss the Narrative either, you just have to know what it is.

AFAICT, Jewish success in the USA is due to a mix of:

1. high IQ (similar median IQ to that of upper middle class non-Jewish white groups), particularly high verbal ability,
2. high drive/pushiness, and
3. relatively high in-group preference (similar to that of the ‘men with gold chains’ ethnic groups).

There are plenty of other ethnic groups with relatively high in group preference, but they tend to be either lower median IQ, or small in number.
Upper middle class non-Jewish whites have a similar median IQ, but typically lower drive, lower pushiness, less verbal felicity, and either no in-group preference, or negative in-group preference – ie they will discriminate against other members of their ethny.

* I read this article at The Forward, then all the comments, which numbered 62 at the time.

Every single one of them defended Peterson and denounced the author and magazine. Those posting comments are presumably mostly Jewish.

Not one made an attempt to defend the thesis of the article or agree that Peterson might really be anti-Semitic.

A few years back “the knockout game” was a thing. It was, or at least was portrayed, as a game whereby young blacks would sucker-punch whites or Asians, often female or elderly, on the street, to great hilarity.

It was for the most part covered little in the MSM, except for a brief period when some NYC whites who happened to be Jewish got knocked out. Then for a little while it was discussed as a dangerous manifestation of anti-Semitism.

Apparently the multiple whites and Asians attacked in previous months were of zero interest to the MSM. Only if Jews were attached did they care. Despite the fairly obvious fact that no evidence was provided in the stories that Jews in question were attacked for being Jews, since, after all, how would the attackers have known? Perhaps they were just playing the game with whites and the victim turned out to be Jewish, which in NYC is statistically not all that unlikely.

* “Jewish berserkers,” namely fanatic Jewish-activist types. Their wild, ferocious attacks on any individual or institution suspected of being less than friendly toward Jews tend to drastically discourage most people from scrutinizing or investigating Jewish behavior, while often taking quiet actions to avoid the risk of such explosions.

* I’ve interacted a couple times with New York Jewish lawyers, and been struck by their incredible level of verbal aggression, they really come in with all guns blazing in a way that easily overwhelms a WASP type like me, we just shut down.

* I like SJWs Always Lie, thought his Rapid Puppies (and Scalzi-baiting) antics were amusing and am glad that he has made a go of Castalia House.

On the other hand he’s often a tiresome braggart: his high IQ, how he is a better fantasy novelist than George R.R. Martin (a generally obnoxious liberal, but touched by the fire of the gods nonetheless), how he’s going to write a literary novel on par with Murakami. (The latter two are completely delusional.)

In reality, he has written a song the ended up on the Mortal Combat soundtrack, designed a couple reasonably successful video games, had a syndicated web column, written a pretty good book on contemporary politics and started a reasonably successful small press. It’s the kind of career you would expect from really smart, immensely hardworking guy who utterly lacks any trace of genius.

What’s extra weird about this current jihad against the “utterly dishonest” Jordan Peterson is that it was provoked by Peterson’s claim that Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of 115 when in fact it looks like their average IQ is more like 110. Let the heavens fall!

* Jordan Peterson is interesting for the same reason James Damore is interesting. Both of them are willing to openly discuss the rotten nature of feminism in an intelligent and truthful manner. It is something that we hardly hear in this culture though it is desperately needed which is the reason people are shocked. It is certainly not because of their attractive looks.

Tucker Carlson invited both of these guys on his show for the same reason. Men and whites are the last two identity groups to awaken and there is a massive upside potential to build an audience. He is doing the same thing with whites, and his show is wildly successful because of it. With both identity groups being the last frontier for marketers and politicians and I am sure this does not make some people happy. In fact, they are many of the ones who are most aware of the potential and fear it the most.

Just as it has been said that Trump was the only guy in the room to pick up the $100 bill on the floor (immigration) we are waiting for someone to do the same with same thing with men’s issues. The fact that there are people who are ‘concerned’ should not be surprising.

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Frame Game Radio On The End Of Civilization (5-10-18)

Posted on May 10, 2018 by Luke Ford

Frame Game Radio joins and then Fahad Game Radio provides the Iraqi Shia perspective.

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The Next War On Israel (5-9-18)

Posted on May 9, 2018 by Luke Ford

From an interview with Israeli military expert Martin Van Creveld:

There seems to be a fear about a large scale conflict; militarily, what do you think that Israel could put in place?

With its vital infrastructure—power plants, fuel depots, factories, and the like—exposed to precision-guided missiles launched by Hezbolla Syria and possibly Iran, Israel will find itself in a difficult situation. As well as doing its best to protect these assets by means of its highly-developed surface-to air missile system, it will mount air- and missile attacks on enemy air defenses, missile launching sites, and infrastructure targets (one Israeli officer has recently warned that, should Hezbollah get involve in a war with Israel, the latter would bomb Lebanon back into the Stone Age). One can also expect Israeli commando raids against military targets which, for one reason or another, cannot be tackled by airpower on its own.

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The Case For Podcasts

Posted on May 9, 2018 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: I don’t have the patience to listen to talk when I could be reading.

Comments:

* No offense, but since you are a Baby Boomer, I feel compelled to ask: were you aware that you can download podcasts on your smartphone, allowing you to listen to them while you’re doing some otherwise dreary and time consuming task like commuting, walking, doing dishes, et cetera?

Because I share your preference for reading over audio when possible, but I think the reason that podcasts are so popular among what Tyler Cowen calls “infovores” is that they’re a way to get extra information when you’re doing something that’s boring but you can’t read a book while you do it.

* I have a job where I can listen to podcasts all day long. Then I walk to the gym (takes 50 minutes), lift weights, walk back home, all while listening to podcasts. I also listen while walking the dog, doing housework, working in the yard, etc. And then there’s bluetooth in the car for more listening. That’s a lot of hours of podcasts in a typical day. Much more efficient for me than reading.

* I check in regularly at Vox Day’s site as he often has interesting things to say, but his current all-out assault on Jordan Peterson displays some of the flaws in his own personality: his compulsion to indulge in petty squabbles and need to constantly assert his own preeminence.

* I have to imagine that Professor Peterson’s public reach is an order or two of magnitude above Vox’s, which I suspect is a source of jealously and frustration for Mr. Beale.

* Unfortunately, in one his genuinely more illuminating recent posts, he explained how the only person who never really failed him was Tolkien, but Tolkien is dead, so he’s not going to give personal advice. Vox obviously reads Sailer, so if he reads this I urge him to seriously consider whether he has gone off track. Ditch all of the petty squabbles and self-assertion. You’re doing good. You don’t need that stuff.

* I enjoy reading him, but he seems unhinged. Like Roissy (apologies, as you are probably on this thread, and you have made some intelligent posts that I have commented on), he is obsessed with proving that everyone who opposes him is a gamma male and everyone who agrees with him is an alpha.

I also find his habit of calling Trump “the God Emperor” a bit weird.

* On the PUA scene, the alpha is the guy who gets to bang a reasonably attractive drunk woman after the bar closes, but he may in all other aspects of his life be a loser. When I worked at a large ad agency there were two good-looking young guys who did very well with the ladies. However, they were at the bottom of the totem pole in the corporate hierarchy. No one took their opinions seriously. So they were alpha in one domain and nothing much in the other.

* I think that there is a rational but unspoken reason for women to object to pick up artists. For most of human history if a woman wanted to identify a man who could take care of her children, self confident behaviour around other men was probably the best tell. There were well built men who were slaves, men with genetically good looks who were young and powerless, men who had all the outer appearences of success but whose position was insecure and so could not afford to act confidently as they might annoy other men who they were dependant on.

Self confidence was the best single measure of how well a man could take care of you, if a man acted this way around other men and did not have the power to back it up he would quickly be put in his place.

In a modern, urban, law abiding state where people meet and may not see each other again there is now little danger for the even the least powerful to behave convincingly confidently in public and this can be consciously learnt by PUAs. Many women still have an irrational attraction for this behaviour, the way a cat cannot control itself in chasing a laser pointer.

Posted in Alt Right, Vox Day | Comments Off on The Case For Podcasts

JTA: This Jewish lawmaker wanted to keep Chinese immigrants out. Should a park be named after him?

Posted on May 9, 2018 by Luke Ford

From JTA:

The elder Kahn, a Republican from San Francisco who served 12 terms in Congress between 1899 and his death in 1924, championed an extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1902 prohibiting immigration by Chinese laborers.

While doing so, he approvingly read to Congress excerpts from a travel writer’s 1853 journey to the Far East, describing the Chinese as “morally, the most debased people on the face of the [E]arth.” Kahn personally endorsed these views, stating they are “undoubtedly equally applicable to any Chinese community in our country.”

A tremendously influential legislator, Kahn was successful in getting the votes for the act’s extension, which made Chinese immigration permanently illegal and legally enshrined anti-Chinese sentiment until its repeal in 1943…

What is certainly true is that the anti-Chinese immigration stand was the party line of the day. And, say Bay Area Jewish historians, virulently anti-Chinese sentiment was also par for the course among Kahn’s fellow German Jewish gentry of San Francisco…

“They were a civilizing influence on a kind of boomtown of young men running wild,” said Fred Rosenbaum, the founder of Berkeley-based Lehrhaus Judaica and the author of many books about San Francisco Jewry. “But they did have a giant blind spot. And that had to do with anti-Asian racism. They really were leading participants in the persecution of the Chinese in California.”

Added historian and author Ava Kahn (no relation to Julius): “Julius Kahn was one of the few Congresspeople who was against a literacy test for immigrants. So he was not anti-immigrant. He was anti-Asian immigrant.”

So was Jacob Voorsanger, the famed rabbi of the city’s Congregation Emanu-El (and founder of the local Jewish newspaper that became J.), who described the Chinese as a “non-assimilative race” who were “unable to mix with caucasians” in the pages of J.’s predecessor, the Emanu-El.

Levi Strauss summarily dismissed 180 Chinese workers from his famous blue jeans factory after thugs targeted the Chinese in 1877 riots. Adolph Sutro, a social liberal, one of the city’s greatest industrialists and philanthropists, and, in 1894, the first Jew to be elected mayor of a major U.S. city, boasted about having never hired “a chinaman.” He wrote that “the very worst emigrants from Europe are a hundred times more desirable than these Asiatics.”

Rosenbaum’s research has revealed that Jewish communities on the East Coast and in the Midwest, where there were few Chinese, were confused and horrified at San Francisco Jews’ peculiar animus — which, to be fair, they shared with much of the city’s white establishment. Many worried that the fanatical drive to limit Asian immigration would eventually boomerang on Jews — and, with the Immigration Act of 1924, it did: Jews from much of Europe were barred from entry, intensifying the magnitude of the Holocaust.

Posted in China, Jews, San Francisco | Comments Off on JTA: This Jewish lawmaker wanted to keep Chinese immigrants out. Should a park be named after him?

Overcoming The Poverty Mindset

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Luke Ford

The disease of under-earning.

Posted in Addiction | Comments Off on Overcoming The Poverty Mindset

I Ran So Far Away, I Just Ran (5-7-18)

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Luke Ford

MP3

Comments:

* I’ve been thinking a lot about “the modern world.” It does seem to be inevitable IF you accept that every individual is clawing his way to the top of the reward pile… and that hyper literacy and hyper numeracy are most deserving of reward. On those premises, something like Dubai Healthcare City will eventually emerge… but what if we had a different sense of “merit?” Could we build other kinds of mature civilizations?

So yes Jews will dominate in this sort of world. But… why is this the world we build? Is this the world god wants us to build? Is this the kingdom of heaven? If Jews will dominate modern society, why do they never turn the corner and make something better…? Do you think of Los Angeles as the best of all possible worlds?

And then I’d also like this discussion: why do Jews oppose usury among other Jews? (Answer: something like: it’s bad cuz exploitative & unnatural) — but then why not oppose it among out-group? Answer: because fuck the out-group mwhaha…

You should try varying your titles to pull in new crowds. Loyal base established—they’ll stay. Try “What is the alt-Left” or “Social Justice and the Torah” LoL maybe idk

Also you should do some Torah Talks with Kaiter. His not distinguishing much between Christian monotheism and Jewish monotheism… we can’t let that go!

Do you feel a dynamic when you’re streaming where, if you give off “positive energy,” then the chat reciprocates? I’ve been feeling this, and I can’t tell if I dislike it or not…

Like when I listen to your self-help streams, they aren’t really my speed. I mean, I’m interested in your story & happy that things have been looking up for you, but it isn’t really hitting my sweet spot lately… but I just wonder if this is another element of the e-personality. Goes like this: if you give off negative vibes, then the chat will be negative to you, and that stings… as a result, streamers will tend to keep it positive, because they seek positive affirmation from the chat.

But this worries me. It might be an incentive to white-wash the truth with happy slogans in an effort to elicit the happy feedback from the chat?

Anyway, man. I love how well your streams are doing! What you were saying last night about how a couple years ago you didn’t feel confident enough to put your face out there and do the video… but how now you’ve got better confidence. That’s huge!

One other thing: Kaiter’s claim that “people often hear the use of big words as ‘showing off,’ but listeners should simply say, ‘what does that word mean?’ ” — this could be interesting turf for talking about rhetoric and persuasion and messaging and optics. It reminds me of Hemingway’s reply to Faulkner: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really thing that big emotions come from big words?” Faulkner had accused Hemingway of never using words that would send a reader to a dictionary, but I think Hemingway’s reply is the winner.

Because if you frequently send your listener to a dictionary, they will start to *feel* their own lack of verbal acumen, and it becomes almost abusive at some point… it’s status jockeying to say “rebarbative” when you can say “prickly,” isn’t it? It’s not populist! I don’t like it! haha

But I do like Kaiter. Keep having him on.

* I never realized how fucked up I was till I started listening to Luke explaining all of his early and current life altering negative conditions. Thanks Luke.

* Hail Kaiter, the Luke Ford show’s very own “Le Chateau Autiste”…

* Can anyone give me a TL;DR regarding why Greg doesn’t feel comfortable around Richard? All I’ve seen here are his comments calling Richard a megalomaniac, etc. I’m sure there’s a back story here and/or a catalyst that I don’t know about. This was news to me.

* It seems risky to take as an assumption that we should place faith in full time scholars alone to engage in radical skepticism about publications for the highly intelligent general public. Especially for a text that has different practical utilities for different racial groups. CofC has many errors, but it also brings up crucial points that many people in the general public are unaware of whether they take interest in the alt-right or not. Factors that impact them in ways they were unaware of. CofC is an inherently racial text. The ethnicity of the reader does matter, because the text does have different racial implications for different people on the basis of race. Moreover, Cofnos’ Jewish ethnicity should not be regarded as irrelevant when considering the metaethics of his paper. It bares contextual significance due to the nature of the topic matter in CofC—Jewish intellectual movements and their influence on western culture. His race shouldn’t be seen as a purely determining factor, but it should be worth keeping in mind.

* The alt right fell for what I’m calling “the valor trap.” Manliness as a virtue is taken too far and becomes a vice. It’s taking the bait. It lost the ‘monkey zen’ part and became territorial and mirroring the left in purity spiraling.

* Proud of you luke. Really well conducted interview [with Greg Johnson]. I Think you actually are unique in that you actually know what the altright is all about. Which makes me wander why your are on such friendly terms with them. You really don’t have the excuse of ignorance! Is it masochism?

* You have a great thing on the show though. You’re fostering a really important atmosphere where alt right followers can be exposed to people and ideas they would never check out in their echo chamber and you are also really humanizing the alt right and showing their vulnerability, which is equally important. You should write a book on the subject. Would be a great way to counterpart the current discourse on both sides of the fence….

You have a knack of attracting really wise and uniquely and deeply wounded people. To be totally honest, even sitting in the chat, I feel a real sense of camaraderie amongst everyone, though perhaps I am projecting that?

I am looking forward to the frame game episode on Thursday. He’s great. I had dinner with a jewish friend last night. He’s totally based and we spent the evening railing against AIPAC and the ADL. I sent him to frame game’s channel. Gave me some hope!

Greg Cochran writes:

IN a recent conversation, Steven Pinker suggests that some students become radicalized when they find that there truths that are unsayable on campus. He gave some examples.

!. Capitalism is just plain better than communism

2. Men and women do not have identical life priorities, tastes and interests, or exactly the same sexuality.

3. Different ethnic groups have different crime rates

4. The great majority of suicidal terrorists are Islamic.

Deep stuff.

Seems to that this is an incomplete list. I call for suggestions from the audience: more such truths, more details, etc. With a little work we’ll provide one-stop shopping.

COMMENTS:

* Intelligence differences between ethnic groups have been repeatedly measured.

* We are not really on the cusp of ecological, resource depletion and malthusian catastrophes of at least 10 different flavours.

* Christianity is objectively more moral than Islam. First world countries, i.e., Christian countries are objectively more moral than the all others.

That’s why the immigration flow is overwhelmingly AWAY from non-Christian countries into Christian countries.

Posted in Gregory Cochran | Comments Off on I Ran So Far Away, I Just Ran (5-7-18)

How the white power movement uses cell-style terrorism

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Luke Ford

Amazon: Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

The white power movement in America wants a revolution. It has declared all-out war against the federal government and its agents, and has carried out—with military precision—an escalating campaign of terror against the American public. Its soldiers are not lone wolves but are highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview of white supremacy, anticommunism, and apocalypse. In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew gives us the first full history of the movement that consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War and made tragic headlines in the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.

Returning to an America ripped apart by a war that, in their view, they were not allowed to win, a small but driven group of veterans, active-duty personnel, and civilian supporters concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. They unified people from a variety of militant groups, including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, and white separatists. The white power movement operated with discipline and clarity, undertaking assassinations, mercenary soldiering, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking. Its command structure gave women a prominent place in brokering intergroup alliances and giving birth to future recruits.

Belew’s disturbing history reveals how war cannot be contained in time and space. In its wake, grievances intensify and violence becomes a logical course of action for some. Bring the War Home argues for awareness of the heightened potential for paramilitarism in a present defined by ongoing war.

Excerpts:

* Duke advanced a new public image of the Klan, one that was better-educated and genteel. He gave witty talk-show interviews wearing a suit and tie, claiming to be not racist but “racialist,” and advocating separatism rather than violence. His Klan advocated not for the denial of minority rights, he explained, but for the right of Klansmen to associate only with whites. Duke explained that people of color weren’t the enemy but merely childlike dupes of Jews and, especially, communists. Racism, although still a major motivating force of KKKK members, slipped behind the veil of Duke’s softened language. He and his associates attempted to appeal to the mainstream in the New Right, where libertarian ideas of choice and coercion had found traction. They also spoke to a centrist silent majority that mobilized around contemporary issues such as busing and housing segregation. Although this group discussed such issues through ideas of consumerism and meritocracy—for instance, arguing that their hard work and success should allow them to maintain their property values through neighborhood segregation and opposing school integration through busing—they accorded with white supremacist political goals.11 Public interviews, mainstream outreach, and political campaigns represented only one arena of Klan strategy. Even as they presented a softened public front, the same activists built an underground of violent, overtly racist activity utterly at odds with many of their public statements. They constructed a paramilitary infrastructure and expanded their membership through violent training and action.

* Klan paramilitary camps attempted to duplicate both the indoctrination and the violence of the experience of army boot camp…

Posted in Nationalism | Comments Off on How the white power movement uses cell-style terrorism

Signal To Noise

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Luke Ford

Gregory Cochran writes:

Can you dismiss an argument because the originator is a bad person? Obviously not. But if the originator lies a lot, or simply doesn’t know jack about anything, the probability that the argument is worth anything can be low, so that it might not be among the first 100,000 things on your must-read list.

I mean, it’s perfectly possible to have a valid mathematical theorem emerge from Johnson noise, but what are the odds?

Comments:

* Pinker’s old article on Kevin MacDonald makes this argument. Basically “I have limited time and don’t owe anyone a hearing, and MacDonald gives many indications of not being worth my time.” Nathan Cofnas revisited that argument recently and said Pinker might have been right then, but that MacDonald is still being talked about so maybe now is worth giving a hearing to.

* Greg’s (and all ours really) time is the constraint. Every minute he spends listening to a nut (even a brilliant nut) is a minute he didn’t spend listening to a brilliant non-nut.

* Dismissing the opinions of a liar or evil person is prudent. It is not that they are incapable of saying something useful. It is that their dishonestly and evilness makes the search for truth more difficult in the generality. Whatever they can add to the stock of human knowledge or your stock of knowledge, is outweighed by the cost.

* Vox Day on Greg Cochran: I looked at it. I also read his paper “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence”. He is better informed than I am concerning the genetic details. I am without question smarter than he is and would easily destroy him on the subject.

* Greg Cochran: The neat thing is that if you look at the correlates, stuff like income and college graduation rates and Nobel prizes etc, everything else you can think fits an average IQ of about 112. Perhaps they’re faking it – if so, doing a good job.

I’ve looked at all the IQ studies. I have no reason to think it’s any lower for actual Ashkenazi Jews in Israel.

I don’t think Flynn-effect changes are real. Math abilities aren’t changing much.

* Looking at the correlates as a reality check is sensible, but the same correlates do not reflect all that well upon Israeli born Jews. Israel is a pretty good chess country overall, but this is almost entirely due to Soviet immigrants. The top Israeli born Ashkenazi player is Avital Boruchovsky, who is 467th globally. They’ve got four native born science Nobelists (all in chemistry) and one Fields Medalist, which is very good but not overwhelmingly so.

This is all of a way of saying that Israelis seem to have a level of achievement in line with their mediocre PISA results. I don’t think Lynn’s estimate of a 103 IQ is too far off for Israeli Ashkenazi, which makes it more likely that American Jews are 0.5 standard deviations above the mean as opposed to 1. This is about what you’d expect from the GSS surveys that show their vocabulary scores to be roughly equal with that of Episcopalians, although their incomes are much higher.

Kevin MacDonald once estimated that Jewish Verbal IQ was 125, which was so stupid that I didn’t bother to read him any further. It is possible to overpraise these people.

* Detecting BS in yourself is definitely harder and less fun than detecting it in others.

I think a really good first step to that is to ask yourself, when you’re just sure something must be true because it just has to be, how you’d know if it were false. How would the world look different? What evidence would you expect to see? What observations or experiments would disprove it.

Just as with some one else’s dumbass innumerate story or moral panic, if you just try looking for some numbers and engaging System 2 instead of System 1 (thinking things through logically, writing down logical statements and arguments and equations), you can often find fuzzy thinking that you were accepting.

The other thing I can recommend is to try to find smart people with intellectual integrity who disagree with your basic worldview, and read what they have to say. Even when they’re wrong, they’re likely to teach you something.

PODCASTS:

* There are quite a few YouTubers with decent subscriber counts (10k to 50k) who openly engage in wrongthink but never appear on camera and manage not to get doxxed. The guys from the very popular The Right Stuff podcast only got identified when they pissed off a guy in their own circle – someone trusted who’d known their identities from the beginning – who doxxed them as revenge.

The guy who was alleged to have doxed the others were Ghoul. A panel member who got doxed himself after showing his face in videos. When that happened one of the leftie sites that published his info also published emails alleging he had offered the others’ info in exchange for taking his own down. Which is probably how that rumor got started

The version that seems most plausible to me is that, the TRS people got doxed through having really poor operational security and that the allegations of one of their own betraying them were antifa disinfo to cause infighting.

They were all friends on public facebook accounts (doing cheeky stuff like listing standard poolco as employer), had one of their own show his face in youtube videos, pseudonyms with identifiable info (mike enoch being pretty similar to mike peinovich), prior history writing under their real name in the libertarian sphere, having personal email on early archived versions of their web page for paypal donations, some of them having usernames that were connected with their IRL identity on other boards. And having poorly screened meetups and going to conferences. So them being exposed really was inevitable once they got popular.

* Listen to Cochran and Company, watch disasters. Avalanches, flash floods, tidal waves, planes crashing into explosions, sprinkle in idiots painfully hurting themselves, be eclectic. Brain salad for the ears, youtube junk food for the eyes.

* Seriously though multitasking is what bright folks on the internet are doing all the time. Listening to music, reading, whatever. For years I was accused of being impatient when listening to people present ideas. What was really happening was reading spoiled me. I can read the same information 5 times as fast as I can listen to it. I thought blogging heads was a good idea but they screwed it up by have dolts explain science and having bar room bullshitters babble on about politics from their ideological standpoint. Find interesting people and talk way. The listeners will decide what if anything they multitask on. Might I suggest providing links to more detailed information if the listener is so interested.

* The podcast haters gonna hate but I am lucky enough to be able to work and listen which is much more efficient than work and read. In fact it’s not possible to read a transcript and do my work they are mutually exclusive. I’m not alone here either. I know several manual labor guys out there that consume large quantities of audio books while driving a forklift or something else. You can pretty easily get a transcript but it’s much harder to get good quality audio. I smell some new killer app in this domain. You’re welcome.

* I use a silly name on twitter, Facebook and other sites as my place of employment is a ‘political organization’ that isn’t supposed to be a political organization. I found out the hard way when I was told by my supervisor that my posts on Facebook were not appropriate for an employee even though nowhere in my profile does it say where I work. I ‘unfriended’ everyone I work with, but my wife has an ‘open page’ and so I don’t say or do anything there. My nom de guerre is easy to figure out with a quick search, but few bother. It’s funny to see right-wing people flip because I use the word ‘comrade’ and progressives follow me because of my twitter ‘profile’. It’s an interesting window into personal bias and shows that everyone has one, even me. Hey, I only have a few more years to work and then I can say what I want.

Posted in Gregory Cochran, IQ, Jews | Comments Off on Signal To Noise

David Reich’s New Book

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Luke Ford

Greg Cochran writes about David Reich’s new book:

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.

He doesn’t just slander, he lies. He says “most stereotypes will be disproved.” Want to bet? Most stereotypes are true – true everywhere. In what country do the Chinese disproportionately fill up the special ed classes? If we we’re talking cognition and personality, the behavioral geneticists keep finding that A. genetics matters, and B. The usual suspects, like family environment, don’t matter much.

There may be a few exceptions to ” what you see is what you get”, and understanding them might be very valuable: if some pop appeared to have a lot on the ball ( genetically) but isn’t doing well, there might be another cheap, simple solution, like iodine supplementation. And there will be differences that are fairly subtle and not much noticed, say in liver enzymes or the immune system, that might be highly relevant to disease prevention and treatment.

Reich’s position is that we don’t know anything until someone (him !) has analyzed it with modern genomic techniques. That’s ridiculous. Reich found that on average, given similar diets, northern Europeans are about a standard deviation taller than southern Europeans. But I already knew that, well before Reich was born. Seneca knew it: Tacitus knew it. There’s a reason the Byzantines hired plenty of Scandihoovians (including 7-footer Harold Hardrada) into the Varangian Guard. Mark Twain knew that Ashkenazi Jews were smart: he didn’t need IQ tests or GWAS for that.

COMMENTS:

* If you looked at the people of medieval Europe anyone could immediately see the differences between the gentry and the peasants. The son of the Lord of the Manor grew up eating meat and fresh vegetables. While the peasant’s son ate gruel and had no toys in his crib. The noble was tall, healthy and smart. The peasant was short,sickly and stupid. Peasants were reviled by the people at court and they were right to do so. Better fed and nurtured people were indeed better people.

* Steve Sailer: By the way, making the Olympics 100m dash men’s finals is not solely a West African thing: a South African sprinter finished 5th in 2016 and back in the 1990s, Frankie Fredericks of Namibia in southwestern Africa won silver medals twice. Everybody who has made one of the eight finalist slots in the last nine Olympics has been, as far as I know, at least half-Sub-Saharan by ancestry

It is true that East African highlander countries like Kenya and Ethiopia that produce a lot of longer distance medalists have not made the finals in the 100m (although Kenyans have medaled in distances as short as 400m).

* SS: But who brings you up has a lot of effect on what religion you follow, what cuisine type you like, a lot of your cultural attitudes and customs, what kind of small businesses you might go into, what ethnicity you identify with…

* SS: Lots of people care about traits other than IQ and personality. Who brings you up, for example, will have a big impact on your class-related behaviors. In Britain, for example, you are unlikely to grow up to speak with a Public School Accent unless your parents are the type who want to pay Public School (i.e., private schools like Eton) tuition.

Similarly, who brings you up likely matters for which sports you pursue.

* SS: My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,
I am a most superior person.
My cheeks are pink, my hair is sleek,
I dine at Blenheim twice a week.

I just learned that these are a genre: the Balliol Rhyme:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balliol_rhyme

* What’s remarkable about Samoans is not that many are fat — lots of peoples are pretty fat these days — but how many are extremely strong, NFL strong. Samoans are vastly over-represented in both pro American football and in pro rugby.

* SS: Germans got really fat from about 1955-1965 or so. It was likely a reaction to the lean years after the war. But after awhile they stopped eating so much more than other Europeans.

* Jayman: In the case of the effects of family environment, the matter is not “absence of evidence.”; there is evidence of absence. Namely, the shared environment component of behavioral genetic studies routinely comes out to insignificant to plain old zero when we look at adults. People who grew up together are no more similar than people who grew up apart, when you take genetics into account.

* I think Greg is mostly talking about heritability estimates from twin studies. A very common finding from these is that the component of variation due to family environment is negligible. (Jayman explicitly mentions this.)

In other words, if you ask “why are people so different with respect to trait X?”, the answer usually is not “because they were raised in different households.” Usually it’s “because they have different genes, plus some residual random effects that we don’t understand.”

Does this mean you can’t have an effect on your child? No. I could depress my kid’s IQ long term, no problem (lead flakes for breakfast). So why doesn’t this contribute to phenotypic variance in IQ in the twin studies? Because lead poisoning is very rare in the US, so it contributes virtually nothing to the differences observed between people. (Raising IQ is a lot harder. I don’t know of any intervention that would do it, long term.)

Nor do these results prove that some new method doesn’t have an effect. If there is some new parenting or teaching method out there that does in fact boost IQ or conscientiousness, but it’s very rare, then it will again contribute approximately 0 to the shared environmental variance. That’s why you need to test particular treatments with randomized studies. (My impression is that nothing has really stuck.)

Question: do adoptees to rich families do better than adoptees to poor families? I’ve seen studies that go both ways.

* Old joke: An economist, a physicist, and a mathematician are taking a train to Scotland. As they cross the border, they see a black cow. “Look, ” says the economist, “the cows in Scotland are black.” “How imprecise,” says the physicist. “All that we can really say is that there is one black cow in Scotland.” “Actually,” says the mathematician, “all that we can really say is that there is one cow in Scotland, and one side of it is black.”

* Tom Wolfe writes somewhere, it’s risky to be ahead of one’s time, even if by just 10 minutes.

* Flynn effect addresses phenotype, not genotype. The genetic raw materials available are getting worse, but we’re helped by the fact that most people e.g. no longer are iodide deficient or starve during critical periods of brain development. Environmental factors mask the dysgenic trend.

I don’t remember seeing many aborigines with hobbies.

Greg Cochran writes:

Graur says “For selection to operate and counteract the effects of random genetic drift, the effective population size should be large.” Well, it would be nice if the effective population size were large, but that is by no means necessary. German Shepherds were created in the 1890s, by interbreeding several breeds of dogs ( and wolves !), followed by selection for desired traits. That didn’t require tens or hundreds of thousands of dogs. Thoroughbreds are the fastest horses in existence: their effective population size is around 100. Dachshunds are smaller than they were in the 1970s – but then everybody knows they’re contrary enough to violate the laws of genetics. Born that way, probably.

I could go on – and on, and on. Every example we have of selection on domesticates is a counterexample to what Grauer is saying here. No farmer he. Does he think that some ancient geneticist corralled a million aurochsen in order to breed the domesticated cow?

…Graur is making a very basic mistake: he is perfectly happy making an argument to which there are many counterexamples. They don’t bother him. Even one counterexample should bother you. As I said, every domesticate is a counterexample to what he’s saying. We know of many genetically caused differences between human populations, such as height, skin color, disease resistance, ability to efficiently utilize certain foods, tolerate high altitude, low temperatures, high levels of arsenic, etc etc. By ‘we’ I mean anyone who can read. Some of those genetic differences are caused by new forms of one or a few genes (like sickle-cell), others by small shifts in the frequency of many alleles that influence the trait.

* Smarter men father about the same, smart women less. The net trend is negative: that’s been known for maybe 60 years. Suspected for at least 90.

* I’ve been reading a tome in which the author says that many of the groups we think of as races are fairly recent formations (a few thousand years ago). Europeans are a mix of three groups ( hunter-gatherers, Anatolian early farmers, and Indo-Europeans off the steppe) that were originally about as genetically distant from each other as Germans and Chinese today. He seems to think that somehow invalidates thinking of Europeans today as a race. Or maybe he’s just blowing smoke. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter at all. Europeans would be what they are, act as they do, be as different and as similar to each other as they are, if they’d been manufactured ( to the right spec) in a test tube 6022 years ago. The same is true for everyone else: Amerindians are mostly a mix of Sibermen and Chinesians (quite a long time ago), but although that is interesting, it hardly means that “Amerindian” isn’t a real category.

* Richard Lynn has an article out claiming that men have a 0.5 standard deviation edge in general knowledge. That fits with what I’ve seen, for example in terms of basic science knowledge. Or back in my College Bowl salad days: I ran into many teams, and very few of the top scorers were women. By ‘very few” I mean 1.

Posted in Aborigines, Africa, Evolution, Genetics | Comments Off on David Reich’s New Book