Links to Consider

winning recommendations from two commenters; Dan Klein and Mike Munger on tyranny; the Zvi on timing your vaccine;

George Francis writes,

Currently, the global average IQ is around 85 and by the end of the century, it will be 74.

…In Francis and Kirkegaard (forthcoming) we estimate that each national IQ point is associated with a 7.8% increase in GDP per capita. We also estimate the economic effects of dysgenics in that paper slightly differently, but with similar results. Let’s imagine the world is one country with an average IQ of 74 in 2100 and an average IQ of 85 as of 2020. The maths works out as a difference of logs at [exp((74-85)*7.8%) -1] = -58%. The effect of this dysgenic decline will be to cut GDP in half! And of course, that doesn’t even begin to consider the intangible factors GDP doesn’t necessarily include - low crime, social trust, science, culture and the arts. 

Have a nice day. The commenter who posted this link was a co-winner of the contest I put up on September 6.

Francis’ co-author Emil Kirkegaard writes,

one might wonder if all this psychology test talk can be verified by some external approach. What if we just looked at what men and women actually talk about in private? This has been done too, with amusing results:

…We see that the male topics include politics, war/sports/gaming/weapons/death/killing, swearing, music (especially metal/rock), work/science, metals. Women's topics are much more mundane. There's a lot of expression of emotions, especially positive. There's a lot of family talk shown by all the terms of human relationships (sister, daughter, nephew, brother, boyfriend etc.). Of interests, the main thing we see is food (cooking), and some shopping. In fact, it is surprisingly devoid of any abstract interests, I am surprised there are not more words related to clothing and child-rearing.

Overall we see that results are consistent across studies that men and women are interested in and talk about quite different things. It's amazing to live in a society that often pretends these differences are not real.

The other co-winning commenter recommended eugyppius, writing

at an early formative stage [in the pandemic], adherents of containment ideology engaged in open advocacy and polemic on behalf of their desired measures. They were met with counter-arguments and scepticism, and they changed their own rationalisations and ultimately their own beliefs to be less refutable and more robust to the invective of opponents. One of the main things they did to achieve this, was insist on ever lower standards of acceptable risk when it comes to viral pathogens. Another thing they did, was insist on the enormous efficacy of their proposed interventions. So, because of [Grandma] and the immunocompromised and Long Covid, masking is never too much to ask, and masking is super effective at preventing all kinds of bad outcomes. This indeed granted the containment ideologues some measure of rhetorical victory in the moment, but it also reframed the purpose of masking so totally, that it became hard to understand why you shouldn’t mask literally all the time, every flu season, even in a hypothetical world where SARS-2 has been eradicated.

My emphasis.

Daniel Klein and Michael C. Munger write,

Between 1850 and 1930, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire turned into tyrannies. Since the year 2000, there has been a massive increase in the number of people living under tyranny, with fully 80 percent of the world’s population living in countries that Freedom House classifies as not having “free” government systems. In fact, as of 2021, 58 countries, with 38 percent of the world’s population, are now classified as full-on “not free” systems, having collapsed into tyranny.

…The people who advocate the seizing of control of the government often do it for (what they see as) the best reasons: achieving the good society. One function of liberalism is to call out, and oppose, the governmentalizing of social affairs, even when it is done with the hope of putting the “right” people in charge.

Zvi Mowshowitz writes,

I would consider it reasonable to attempt to ‘time’ the booster to match plans to visit vulnerable others and/or wait until a larger wave was coming. Note that if a large wave does come there is a good chance it will be a new strain.

On a different topic, he points to analysis that says that plastic bags are environmentally friendly.