Thank Your Parents Anyway, Despite these Twin Studies
Steve Stewart-Williams: "14 million twin pairs confirm: All traits are partially heritable; the home you grow up in has surprisingly little effect on how you turn out."
About the Creation of the Peer Review Process
Eric Weinstein: "If you screwed up covid this badly by getting inside of the Lancet and Nature. Peer review is this fake thing that supposedly stretches back to the founding of the Royal Society. And it's very clear from the scholarship around it that it comes out of the period between 1965 and 1975 initiated by the Medicare Act, predicated on the need for editors for the journal expansion, founded by Pergamon Press and Robert Maxwell. By 1975 there's a giant battle between the [National Science Foundation] NSF and both fiscal and cultural conservatives against something called “Man: A Course of Study” (MACOS), where peer review was born in a Utah clinic. [It] came out of the medical literature because the federal government in 1965 with The Medicare Act picked up the need to pay for so many medical procedures. They wanted to say "Why are we assigning this many medical procedures?" The doctors circled the wagons and said, "We will peer review each other." Then in night, by 1975 the NSF was under the microscope, and they used peer review as a self defense of last resort to say we will be reviewing each other, right? Peer review is a myth."
Our Demon Haunted World
Carl Sagan:
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)
AI: Exciting and Terrifying
I have personal knowledge that many lawyers and academics are in severe denial about how much AI is turning their professions upside down and inside out. Soon, everyone will be constantly using AI. It's going to quickly get quantum leaps better than it already is and, frankly, a lot of us don't add much value above and beyond the things AI can already do. This is exciting and terrifying.
The Disastrous Effect of US Trade Policy on the US Middle Class
I agree with David Sacks here. To see the disastrous effects of US trade policy on the US middle class, take a road trip through America's many decimated town and small cities.
BTW, a lot of the people who worked these middle class jobs were men. How are men doing in education and the job market now that many of these jobs no longer exist? Steve Stewart-Williams tells us in his article, "The Other Half: Six gender gaps we rarely talk about" Here are his conclusions:
- Young Women Now Often Out-Earn Young Men
- Boys Are Falling Behind at School
- Fewer Men Are Finishing College
- More Men Die on the Job
- Men’s Health Gets Less Funding
- Men Are More Likely to Take Their Own Lives