But for now, you have to pay in BTC or ETH. I’ll add other cryptos if there’s enough request.

It also has dark mode:

There’s a comment section too:

I made this website because I don’t like the direction Substack is going. It started out by promising to revive the intellectual blogging scene, then became rife with terrible engagement farming slop newsletters, and is now trying to expand to short form. Its trajectory is negative and generally the ability for a good new writer to grow on Substack has been nil since 2024 at least.

So please check out sociobiology.org as well as its brother site hbdforum.net.

I liked mid-form content internet forums. I think they’re a great space to think and interact with intelligent people. Unlike a blog, a forum is a community, and should have a low effort-barrier to posting, although good forums have a high talent-barrier. That means bright people who don’t want to “build an audience” can post interesting ideas and get them seen by other smart people who are interested in discussion. On Substack, where content is likewise medium form, you mainly pander to an audience, which takes in and does not give back. Without a lot of pandering, nobody sees your writings.

There are always young people out there who are very intelligent, and have interesting things to write, but who don’t want to pander to audiences with slop. If such a young person is interested in HBD, then HBDForum is a great place for them.

I’m going to try to replace my Discord with HBDForum. I have a number of reasons why. The first is that Discord supports medium form content, but the organization promotes shortform, and I don’t like how servers are walled gardens. At the bottom of HBDForum is a live chat and a voice chat feature.

These effectively replace those draws to Discord which classic forums don’t have. Another reason I wanted to do this is that Discord is Orwellian spyware. Discord’s spying practices should be illegal. Sadly, they are popular among boomers and government officials. On Discord, even DMs aren’t private. Discord is always reading your DMs with hired moderators and AI. If a DM is construed to possibly possess illegal content, Discord actively violates your privacy by using its extensive IP logs to forward all of your information to your respective government.

HBD Forum is not intended to be a place for content which is illegal in the United States. However, Europe has stricter “hate speech” laws which could potentially criminalizes some HBD discussions, like race differences in intelligence. HBDForum is hosted in the United States and logs nothing it doesn’t need. I don’t even have it set up to log IP, so proving that someone is posting from the EU is not possible. There are no data retention laws for web forums in the United States, so this is perfectly legal. Logging IP is taken for granted but I’ve never built a website that does it. It’s not default behavior. Any website that does it is essentially malicious spyware.

I hope that younger people realize the goodness of strict, HIPAA like privacy laws that minimize what data internet enterprises are allowed to retain, what type of content they are allowed to let AI or humans read without permission (should only be public content), and what they are allowed to show to any 3rd party, including the government, without any legal order. Boomers conceptualize the internet as a public place that you visit momentarily, and see privacy as like wearing a ski mask to a shopping mall. Younger people use the internet as an extension of their home. A private Discord server is a chat with friends in your kitchen. It’s not a speech on a soapbox on the sidewalk of a busy downtown area. Nobody should ever have a politically incorrect opinion stated to their close friends in their home broadcast to the world.

I made this website in about 24 hours. It was very easy. I used GPT Codex 5.3. It’s not purely vibe-coded slop because I have enough web-dev experience to audit the code and fine-tune it. I’m like a senior engineer and GPT is currently like a really fast junior engineer. I made all of the architectural decisions and an AI skid would have probably made something 200% more sloppier due to taking whatever GPT first gives it But AI is now so good at web dev I’m convinced it’s not a long-term career option any more. There will be people employed in web infrastructure, but they will probably do 10 people’s jobs as of ~2025 for about $100,000 per year in 2026 dollars. I, personally, could probably replace 5 people right now with a good LLM and the firm I work for would have the same level of productivity as of a year or two ago. Productivity is instead going up, which is why that hasn’t happened, but that increase probably won’t absorb all of the LLM boost. That happened for no new technologies like this: cotton gin, calculator, internet, etc. Rather, smart people will have to learn something else besides JavaScript.

I see that as a hugely positive thing. I always thought the idea of a really bright person pooping out web code as ugly. I am glad that it is clear that this will not be the preponderance of my future career. I am glad I can spin up in 24 hours what took a team of millenials 1000 man hours back in 2017. I think smart people will be okay and the proletariat-ressentiment fantasy of smart people digging ditches alongside them or beneath them won’t come to fruition. Smart people are always okay because smart people learn quickly and are better workers. But the question right now is what will smart people do that LLMs can’t do?

One obvious answer is robotics. LLMs are restricted to the digital world. We need to build humanoid bodies for them so they can do embodied tasks we currently rely on functionally illiterate people, who are really egotistical and demand significant control of the political system, for. I think there will be a robotics businesses boom and a lot of web engineers will go there. A lot of the remainder will stay in the web world to “pilot” the LLMs and make the responsible decisions. They will be needed for at least 10 years in the web world because of all of the missing web software; there’s still a ton to be built and LLMs won’t be self-sufficient by definition until the whole economy is automated. There’s a lot of work to be done making sure literally everything informatic is done through a really premium website and producing robots that can automate embodied labor. For one, every government administration in the world needs to be significantly digitized. Every government still uses paper or 00s jank pages for their bureaucracies. My present firm will probably not lay off anyone in tech for at least 5 years because it’s the same there. There’s a ton that needs to be rebuilt from scratch by competent LLMs drivers and a lot that needs to be created for the first time.

I would also like to see more serious science, although I’m not sure if that can happen naturally. Freeing up high IQ people means there are more people available for research, but a lot of research is not profitable. We’ll need a massive expansion of academic research roles, but I’m sure the blessed People will resist this, because they’re narcissists who hate Faustian science and love boosting funding to socialism & People’s safety organizations like old age pensions, schools, secret police, airport security, and so on. Maybe AI will lead to a huge economic boom and there will be money laying around? If it increases the pie it should, once all of the Trump drama is finally over.

The research I mentioned is only important if it’s math-driven. Like physics, quantitative sociobiology (including statistical genetics), machine learning theory, and so on. So the three frontiers I’m seeing are robotics, technical computer infrastructure, and hopefully mathematical science.

Anyway, I would love to discuss this further on hbdforum.net! Please join us.

I thought I would give a summarized table of contents for my articles from the last 3 years. Then maybe I’ll make this a yearly post hereafter. Then at any point in time, the table of content of my writings will just be the sequence of these posts.

Where does leftism come from?

The first thematic sequence, dating back to 2023, addresses the origins of leftism. It includes debates and critiques of non-scientific theories of leftism, as well as my own model building. I ultimately decide that we must use the scientific method of mathematical sciences to satisfactorily answer the question. I create a mathematical model of evolutionary pressure on quantitative traits and treat leftism as a normally distributed psychometric. I provide quantitative evidence fitting the model that leftism’s modern increase was the result of collapsing selection pressures and the resulting accumulation of de novo mutations in the gene pool. This hypothesis was subsequently discussed and critiqued by the broader HBD sphere. I addressed their points and found most of them unsatisfactory; it ended with me concluding that I have about 95% confidence in the theory being true, and 4% confidence in it being closely related to the Flynn effect and increases in height and brain mass (basically, physical, potentially epigenetic and brain-related changes to improved nutrition and other features of modernity, inducing behavioral changes), and amending the theory to include evidence for “Social Epistasis Amplification,” meaning the social change is amplified by memetic effects (which are downstream of evolutionary and non-memetic pressures) by a factor of 25% to 75%.

Here are the articles:

Positive, model building

• Decline in Conservatism Between Generations Correlates Highly with Potential Signals of Mutational Load (2023)

Cross-sectional data indicates inconclusively that de-novo mutations are accumulating, and leftism appears more where more indicators of DNMs are.

• How to compute selection pressures (2023)

• Selection pressures on IQ, leftism, and other traits (2023)

• How to compute mutational pressure (2023)

Deriving some equations for the mathematical evolutionary pressure of quantitative traits model. I now try to avoid explicit equations on Substack. It seemed easy enough to me, but if you are making explicit equations, it should be published in a journal somewhere or folded into a technical white-paper or manuscript. That’s just how the bell curve is.

• Why can’t it be genes? (2023)

• Why can’t leftism be genes? (2023)

• Leftism has happened before (2023)

Accessible discussion of anti-hereditarian bias, fallacies which preclude evolutionary hypotheses to social change, and why you feel like the mutational load hypothesis is wrong, but it’s probably not and you’re just biased against hereditarianism and are engaging in one of the heuristic fallacies I debunk here.

• Evidence for a Paternal Age Effect on Leftism* (2023)

Asterisk indicates scientific article, not a blog article. This article uses a binary leftism metric and finds what I predicted.

• Extinction of the Dark Elves (2024)

Popular application of mutational load theory, addressing population decline since the 19th century and what that means for smart and based people (dark elves) who exist today in lesser numbers.

• Estimating Mutational Pressure on IQ through the Effect of De Novo Mutations in the Exome on Intellectual Disability (2024)

Analyzing direct molecular genetic evidence for mutational load theory.

• A New, Near-Gaussian Measurement of Leftism Shows the Paternal Age Effect Replicates* (2024)

Replicating the previous article with a better, normally distributed continuous measure of leftism.

• What is leftism? (2025)

Discussing why you should treat leftism like a highly heritable, normally distributed, psychometric trait, contra ideas that you need to break it down into “deeper personality factors” and so on (this is just circular political blank slatism).

• Chinese Rice Farms and “Culture” (2025), Evolution explains regional differences in China best (2025)

Fast evolution and Chinese rice farms.

• The Eugenic Origins of Modernity (2024)

Discussing how IQ eugenics created modern science and the industrial revolution.

Criticism of other writers

• Review of “The Origins of Woke” (2023)

Hanania’s theory is what I call the historical legalism theory of Woke. He seems to think laws have a significant random component, and this component shapes society for a long time. In other words, the US Civil Rights act just passed randomly, and laws are powerful, so this caused us to be woke in other contexts. The problem with this is that laws don’t pass randomly, they aren’t enforced randomly, and they don’t evade repeal randomly. All of these things depend on the underlying sentiments of the population. The law is made for man and not man for the law.

• Why Moldbug was wrong about leftism (2024)

Moldbug thinks leftism memetically evolved from Christianity. Basically, the genome and the underlying sentiments of people stayed the same, but modern governments set up an environment where woke people did better than non-woke people due to separation of church and state. Moldbug seems to think “separation of church and state” was an exogenous shock, similar to Hanania on the Civil Rights Act. I just cleaned up his incoherent argument a lot for him, but even this fails all the empirical tests, so it is wrong. You can see this in the person of Moldbug; the man clearly has instincts which weren’t common in the 18th century, like no aversion to homosexuality (quoted in the article). Aversion to homosexuality is instinctual and related to general disgust sensitivity, it’s not learned. Clearly, people changed on a fundamental level and this changed their social norms.

• Why Biology and Math are Key: Commenting on Keith Woods vs Academic Agent, 2024 (2024)

Addressing two YouTubers. One thinks Woke is some kind of conspiracy theory for the elite to profit off of the masses, the other thinks it’s all ideas.

• Birth Order: Mutational Load or Environment? (2024)

Critiquing Cremeiux’s birth order environmentalism. While he showed some good evidence for an environmental component in birth order effects, he downplayed the genetic component too much.

• Werner Zagrebbi and the Origins of Woke (2024)

Moldbug’s intern wrote something fashionable among the bay area crowd going on about “positive feedback loops.” It sounds smart, but he wouldn’t engage with my science. Apparently, I’m not widely read enough among his target audience, and meritocratic discourse is just some BS from 19th century Anglo science. Discourse today must be democratic, which means you must pander to the crowd to get a spot. I believe it was written at the time that my resistance to this is considered “autistic” by the cool people. That offended me at the time, but it’s kind of cool to watch the masses be consistently wrong about something. You just need to monetize your open secret and you’re golden! I am really only constitutionally interested in meritocratic spaces.

• Contra Seb Jensen on Mutational Load (2025)

Responding to a gish-gallop of criticisms that didn’t really hit the theory.

• Re Cofnas: Facts and Logic About Woke (2025)

Responding to Cofnas’s knowledge-model of wokeism. He thinks it’s just people who seriously believe HBD isn’t true.

• Why I am not a Conflict or Mistake Theorist (2025)

Why Scott Alexander’s conflict-mistake dichotomy falls apart under actual logical examination, and how to replace it with my scientific theory.

Who has power?

The next sequence develops my rejection of meaningful “elite theory.” I now believe we live in a peasant democracy and this causes the government to suffer from the moral and intellectual shortcomings of the median person, which are vast. I believe that “elite theory” is possible, and that there is some meaningfully defined conglomerate of a Fighter class and an Elite class which can rule over people, but that Western instances of these classes are genetically democratic, so they give out power to the peasants, thereby failing to rule properly.

• A Theory of Democracy (2024)

Political science usually treats democracy as stemming from a combination of ideas and supposedly exogenous institutions. Basically, books and constitutions. Both are kind of magic and without a book telling people why they should write a democratic constitution, they’ll just be monarchists, and without a well-designed constitution which magically induces everyone to follow it, democracies can fail for trivial, shallow reasons. This is obviously stupid and it would seem that the best theory of democracy is just genes: both high IQ and a certain temperament found among white people are the best predictors of democracy. Books and constitutions don’t matter. The UK has a monarch and no constitution and nobody reads old enlightenment books, but it has the right kind of white people, so it has a stable democracy, for example. Meanwhile, the best constitution hand-crafted by Americans plus the best Arabic translation of Locke airdropped over Iraq will never make it a good democracy.

• America’s elite is mostly a meritocracy (2024)

Shows America’s elite is not very nepotistic and is closely related to the demos.

• Was Moldbug Right about the Cathedral? (2024)

Debunking Moldbug’s theory of academic sovereignty.

• Elites don’t control public opinion (2024)

Quantifying elite theory and testing my mathematical model.

• Elite theory chapter of QSB manuscript* (2024)

Scientific explication of my theory.

What is culture?

Discussing the abuse of the word culture in popular and scientific writing, the problems with mainstream models of cultural evolution, and building my own model.

• The rise and fall of “cultural evolution” (2023)

The problems with cultural evolution as a concept and its roots in academic Marxist activism.

• Memetics theory chapter of QSB manuscript* (2024)

My new model of memetics which posits that ideas which influence behavior are many, and changes in the average behavioral effect of ideas are downstream of non-memetic forces. They therefore have an amplifying effect on non-memetic forces, which precede memetic forces.

• Reply to “Genes, culture, and scientific racism” (2024)

Replying to a new article by one of the very old originators, Feldman, of the cultural evolution idea, exposing how his sources are garbage and offer no empirical support for his premises. Nevertheless, you hear about cultural evolution a lot more than biological evolution of social traits. That’s memetic, but it’s downstream of people like the author existing in greater number than people like me, something which wasn’t always the case.

• Does “Cultural” Transmission Bias Twin Studies? (2024)

Why twin studies aren’t biased by “culture” and how they debunk culture theories.

Eugenics

Why we should have a classical eugenics program. I believe eugenics is the only solution to present social problems, since they were caused by dysgenics.

• Are We Smart Enough for Eugenics? (2025)

Discussing why classical eugenics did not take off (only eugenic people like it an dysgenics overwhelmed us first).

• What’s Wrong with Classical Eugenics? (2025)

Discussing ethical objections to classical eugenics (intelligence is good, being unintelligent sucks, so it’s a moral imperative to do a humane classical eugenics program).

• Can we afford classical eugenics? (2025)

Discussing the cost of a eugenics program.

Fertility and Marriage

• A look at Roman marriage ages (2025)

Original application of an ML method to derive the Roman age at first marriage distribution. Mean around 16 for girls, and 21 for males. The vast majority of girls married in their teen decade between 10 and 19 years of age. The majority of age gaps must have been between 2 and 8 years since most males married between 15 and 25. People frequently deny that antiquity was like this and habitually try to up the actually age at which people married to be closer to modern norms, because for some median people today consider teenage marriage to be extremely offensive, kind of like racism in academia.

• The possible origins of the Modern Western European Marriage Pattern (2025)

Discussing how the ancient pattern faded. It lasted to 1600 AD in Western Europe, contrary to claims that North-western Europeans always married late. Over the next 350 years, the rest of the world caught up, and then the West began a second transition to an even later marriage pattern — instead of marriage in the mid-twenties, it now occurs in the thirties. I allege that the first transition must have been caused by something very similar to the cause of leftism today. Perhaps mutational load, or perhaps some kind of epigenetic change.

• The Fertility Crisis and the Postmodern Marriage Pattern in Germany (2025)

Using Germany as a model white country with very little late 20th century migration, I examine their fertility statistics and show that the transition to 30s marriage is caused by a preceding change in desired number of offspring. In other words, something perturbed the minds of Germans first, and they marriage habits followed to conform to their new desires. This sounds like some kind of psychometric evolution, coinciding with modern leftism. Note also that the MWEMP from the 1600s coincided with early modern leftism: the rejection of medieval monarchy and religion.

Against academic philosophy

• Why “Philosophy” is Invalid (2023)

• The Sleeping Beauty Problem (2025)

What I do could be called philosophy. Any clean division of it from math and science is wrong and done because academic philosophers don’t want to actually put effort into studying anything. Math and science give us much more powerful ways of knowing things than the academic philosopher’s method, which produces nonsense. I see the root cause of their method being bad but still used as lack of aptitude to master math and science. Imagining an infinitely intelligent philosopher, he would be a master of math and science and it would heavily inform his thoughts on all subjects. You can see in the Sleeping Beauty Problem that most academic philosophers struggle with relatively basic probability theory, and this leads to dumb discourses where probability theory is a central topic.

Teenage phone use

• Review of “The Anxious Generation” (2024)

• National Phone Bans in School Are a Bad Idea (2025)

• Some 15 year olds are adults (2025)

• Jonathan Haidt Doesn’t Care about Smart Kids (2025)

Banning me from the internet at 15 would have seriously messed up my life, but there’s a demagogue peddling crap statistics to push privacy violating age verification laws to ban under-16s from most of the internet worldwide. This is extremely obnoxious behavior which panders to the lowest people at the expense of the smartest. Intelligence is a lot more important than age so, while proles intuit that they got better at making decisions between 15 and 30, bright 15 year olds still beat dumb 30 year olds on basically every metric, which should seriously make any decent person question a law that unpersons every 15 year old, instead of, say, unpersoning everyone under 95 IQ in the same way instead.

Economic genocide of elite whites by Asians

• The severity of Asian Tech Immigration (2023)

Tech is so non-white that if you removed all of them from America, the media legacy American tech worker would make $91,000 more per year given a constant elasticity derivative (as you remove foreign workers, the elasticity stays the same).

• The Narcissism of Asian Immigrants (2026)

Discussing how entitled Asian immigrants act in the USA. Created several talking points on the topic: China is a shit hole and no whites want to move there, Asians claim math contests make them superior to whites despite this fact, their IQs and SATs are inflated by a huge amount by studying, which breaks tests. See How much do intelligence and g correlate?

• Thoughts on Prestige Universities and Alternatives (2026)

Entitled immigrants think that grinding their way into DEI shit hole schools that have trademarks to the names of now defunct 20th century prestige colleges makes them superior to smart whites. I discuss how to build a university that keeps them out by merit and which smart, based whites want to attend.

Future directions

I would like to make the Asian sequence more rigorous since they do seem to clog up all of the job pipelines at the expense of elite young white men. One idea of how to do this is to examine their IQ scores more closely; I would like to show that their fluid intelligence with white levels of training is lower than white levels. I believe their countries suck because they are dumber than whites on average, and they evolved to selfishly grind indicators really hard to exploit ability measures, in their own countries. Now we are dealing with the ruination of our own educated class in white countries by unbridled Asian migration. The other topics seem played out. I would like to start writing about finance and money soon; I’m working through quantitative finance books for a foundation. Stuff like the evolution of money and finance, how HBD fits in, how humans are evolved to do it, group vs individual evolution in the emergence of modern asset markets, theories of memetics and how they operate on pricing.

Nonetheless, I was mass-rejected everywhere except for Stanford’s early action round. My parents made more than $200,000 per year, so I received no financial aid. They wanted $70,000 per year, but my parents made less than $500,000 per year, like most parents who make more than $200,000 per year, so we could not afford that. Obviously, the structure of their financial aid was meant to cut out the white upper middle class, the main source of talent ready to enter the upper class, due to favorable Mendelian segregation.

How Prestige University DEI Radicalized Me

Really, all I wanted was an affordable, meritocratic university where I would have been surrounded by peers, where peer is defined as a like-minded person, equal in ability. DEI had seriously perturbed my entry into places that historically fulfilled this description, but more than that, it had already destroyed the places themselves. I understood that even if I attended, it would not be the experience I was looking for. Not only would I have six-figure debt, I would be surrounded by non-peers. Most of the students there would be dumber than me, selected for traits I look down on: striver background, non-white race, lack of a social life, and commitment to the soulless grind.

I would have been a minority on my own campus. An extreme minority. The 32% white chunk from the chart above isn’t even fully white, a huge amount of it is Jewish or other non-American ethnicities, while I’m a real legacy American and a Christian. They’re not really a member of my race, and they don’t even worship the same God as me. Why would I even go when the place was already in ruins? Why go into debt for that?

It was upon realizing this that I went from idealistic libertarianism to understanding my homeland had been under attack for quite some time. I became a far-right authoritarian who would support any attempt to reverse what had happened here, no matter how contrary to the liberty of those who were at fault it would be. They were waging a war on my race and class; they spoils of their victories went to those who had nothing but hate for us and everything we had built. Mainly it was the races which were predisposed to Communism: hispanics of the Cuban and Venezuelan variety, Chinese communists, afro-Marxists, Jews, of the type who had led the Bolshevik revolution and written down the doctrine, and even a lot of Slavic imports; there are a bizarre number of Slavs among the international and white demographics, far more than the general “anti-whiteness” of admissions and the national IQs of Slavic countries would predict. The reason why is that they are a Communist race.

And by Communist I mean primitive Communism. Marxism is a temporary instantiation of this evolutionary strategy. Communist races are more hive-like, less intelligent and inventive but individual members are more prone to striving. There is a faux-groupishness really rooted in Godlessness and selfishness. They worship the group in place of God but treat their totem like the Pharisees treated God. They secretly hate their group and wish to get one over on it, but would never blaspheme it in public because they fear its retribution. A Christian loves God with all of his heart, mind, and soul, on the other hand, per the words of Christ (see Mark 12).

This is why if you talk to one of these people, they will resist any open criticism or attack on the system, but focus on exploits that actually work to get one over on it. Appear to worship the system, and cheat on your application in a way that gets Blessings from the System, and you are “successful” and “high status” in the eyes of the communist. It’s the same in China or the USSR with advancing through the Party. And it’s the same in prehistoric, feminine hunter-gatherer tribes. Only the fool openly criticizes the Tribe (like Christ did), the Party, or the Prestige Universities. For what is mightier than these? The Striver Man throws the chicken over his back in public while muttering his empty phrases and advances as a result.

What is being selected for?

Prestige universities still select for above-average capable people, but they now select for the lowest possible type of person among capable people. These people have no morals, no hobbies, and no life. Personally, I hate being around people like that, and at my own firm I would trash prestige university applications from young people in favor of people who attended white universities who demonstrate intelligence on par with HYPSM, through SATs, GPA, and chosen major.

People who lie and game the system are lowly, and this is reflected clearly in their demographics.

They are so lowly, narcissistic, and socially unaware, that they call their boarding school (universities are nothing more than upper secondary boarding schools for adolescents aged 18 to ~21, the classical modern age of adulthood) “pedigree.” Yeah no. The heir apparent to the Dukedom of Norfolk has pedigree. You are a low born communist, probably Chinese peasant and do not have pedigree.

It’s insane to come into a white country and say you have pedigree because you have a fake piece of paper from a historically white school you gutted with your coethnics.

While a white upper-middle class legacy American lacks English aristocratic peerage, he still has superior pedigree to any Chinese immigrant. The proof is that everyone wants to live in the places we build, and we have to keep them out, and nobody wants to live in the places Chinese people build.

You can see that with my blog. All of my ideas create places that experience massive immigration demand from people who can’t upkeep them. Nobody actually likes striving ; I would gut it and the economy would be better for it. That’s how it was 100 years ago in the places where my people lived, and everyone wanted to move in.

And you see this with the schools. White people don’t want to go to HYPSM anymore. I rejected the offer. So did everyone else I know. We don’t like the culture or the demographics. Sadly, our alternatives are too filled with random white people, and are not exclusive enough, but we prefer to be at the top of that over the complete mess that is a HYPSM campus.

What should be selected for?

If we keep doing boarding schools for 18-21 year olds, we should probably build new ones that select for the right kind of high capacity person. Race is a major indicator here; people discuss how race-blind admissions will lead to the campus filling with Chinese people. What if we just do reverse DEI and select for legacy American names first? The only problem with this is that the federal government might not take too kindly to it. But if we keep the MAGA revolution going, that could change.

We should also design our own entrance exam. Ideally, we want to make prepping for HYPSM and prepping for our schools two separate things, so Chinese people have to pick one. We should use our own science, psychometrics (invented by English men of pedigree and maintained through the dark times by people like that) to make the tests difficult to prep for. One way to do this is that we aim to measure g; we rotate the type of g measure we use every year, force in person test taking, and refuse to release past exam questions. Many HYPSM rabble still don’t understand how this works or that it’s possible. They just know how to game the system, they don’t get the principals that underlie it or how to build a better one. Great; let them stay ignorant, we want to exclude them.

Faculty hiring is important. We need to take a radically exclusive and visionary approach. Faculty demographics should resemble 19th century Cambridge; we must be vigilant about race, background, and ideology. Any statement of 20th or 21st century leftist ideology is a black mark, as is any association with legacy institutions like HYPSM, as well as any deviation from our ideal racial and class background. A nincompoop like Chris Rufo would immediately go about hiring old leftist Jews with far too much time spent in the current system who have the occasional contrarian opinion, and would be shocked to find that the project fails because it can’t distinguish itself positively from the rest of the system.

It will help immensely to axe most departments. In the beginning we will only have mathematics, physics, statistics, sociobiology, engineering, computer science, and a single, small humanities department which is directed by the sociobiologists. Our dogma will be evolutionary hereditarianism; the null hypothesis is that man is an animal who obeys evolved instinct. His behavior and his evolution can be described mathematically. Humanities can only be understood in this framework. Disagreement with the null hypothesis that is not based on firm evidence leads to cancellation; you can go be a baseless blank-slatist at HYPSM if you like. Evidence that challenges the ethos of the null hypothesis is subjected to severe doubt and scrutiny, because our prior is so contrary to it, like how HYPSM reacts to evidence against blank slatism.

We keep the undesirable student away by our curriculum. Every student will learn a healthy portion of mathematics, physics, and sociobiology. This will keep 120 IQ people who grinded their way up to a 140 IQ score out, because the school will be too challenging for them. They need to major in something fake at HYPSM.

This may filter out girls which is an issue. I propose having a boy’s and a girl’s college. This would ensure a good sex ratio while keeping away the undesirable who adhere to dogmatic gender equality ideology.

All that is left is the economics. To start such a university, we require seed funding, and ideally some based firms who will recruit out of the university. This will attract boys who are aligned with the ideals and see it as a good place to begin a career, and successful boys will attract high quality girls who want to date and marry the boys. Every single male graduate will be well educated in STEM and sociobiological humanities, a very desirable combination. Hopefully, most will also be married or engaged. The secret to our campus culture will be dating. If this can be pulled off, we will outbreed HYPSM rabble, and the prestige of our university will explode, because boys and girls will see it as a place not only to prepare for the economy, but also to find love.

This combination of mating and education as well as selection on true pedigree will produce extremely desirable employees and leaders, since marriage changes men and makes them harder workers.

As for how to induce a good dating culture, I have secrets on that as well. First, we require effective physical education of males so that all of them are in good shape. Second, we attempt to induce an age gap between the girl median and the boy median.

An average age gap of 0 is not optimal for a dating culture. It means girls have less attraction to boys who entered as the same time as them, but their older classmates are less able to commit because they will leave sooner. Considered alone, the girl group could frankly be at the normal secondary level while the boy group would be normal university age. In modern parlance that means we run a large girl’s high school alongside an all male university. This would further justify a curriculum difference, although the high school could be accelerated such that the girls graduate with bachelor’s degrees in feminine subjects to conform with the current credentialist system. Perhaps in the upper years they take courses from the faculty of the lower departments at the university.

This would set our median age gap at 4, and give us a range of 1 to 8. Sadly, at the upper end, this could become illegal in every US state. The minimum age of consent is 16 generally, with close-in-age exemptions up to 5 years extending down to 14 year olds. That means our youngest girls with our oldest boys could lead to rabble interference with our dating culture design. To fix this, we either take enough power to design our own law on this issue, or we compromise and build the school in a polity where the age of consent is 16, and we have a minimum entry age of 16 for girls, inducing a ~2 year median age gap with a range of -2 to 6, considering that they stay 4 years. The girls can be granted high school diplomas in their first year and then study for 3 year bachelor’s degrees.

Clearly with enough seed funding, this system can be designed and will become highly superior to the present one. The main limitation is lack of human capital; due to dysgenics, we may not have enough people to fill such a system. Indeed, that may be why our old system degenerated to its present state. If we lack enough human capital, it may be better to attack the university system as a whole. There is no point to degrees now that we have the internet.

We could simply induce a Republican congress to pass an act forbidding education discrimination in hiring. Rather, recruiters must discriminate on job-relevant skill. Their pseudo-pedigree has now become illegal and the demand for their shithole universities where everyone wants to jump out a window just lost all of its substance. You recruit from “targets”? Sued & destroyed. We find out you filter for brand name universities on resumes? Sued & destroyed. We don’t like the lack of SEC representation in your firm? Sued & destroyed. With enough MAGA power, we can accomplish this. It’s DEI for state school grads.

Thus, striving and grinding is selfish and defective. But Asians seem to think it actually makes them superior. More than that, they seem to think they’re entitled to speak European languages on Twitter and live in white countries even though these are not their languages, their letters, their countries, their internet, or their website. More than that, they think they get to steal these things and then become the arbiters of status in the white world.

White people built everything the Asian narcissist uses to prop himself up. White people invented his oh-so-esteemed HYPSM “pedigree”. There are no good schools in China. White people invented the letters he uses to express his narcissism on Twitter. His people invented boxy characters which you will find on the Chinese internet. White people invented the website he posts on to tell white people how much better he is than them. Asians copied it and did it worse. Even their little narcissistic peasant ideology is copied from white people. Marx spoke German.

Now let’s view some examples of Asian immigrant narcissism.

Garry Tan obtusely misses the point that striving is selfish, defective, and that if you set whites and Asians at equal levels of strive, whites will outperform. It’s just that whites strive less because they have more cooperative genes. Whites don’t believe Asians are too good, we believe they are cheaters and meta-cheaters and they exploit our system too much. If we believed they are too good, we would move to Asia. Rather, it’s Asians who move to white countries, thus proving by revealed preference that Asians know that whites are better than them, and they narcissistically lie about it to get ahead.

And this is very common behavior in Asia actually. It’s related to “face-saving” behavior. Asians are generally two-faced and deceitful when it comes to talking about reputation. They will do anything for good reputation and they are very cruel to people who do not go along with conventional reputation systems. I know this from learning about Japanese people. What is worse is that Japanese people are the whitest Asians. We are largely dealing with Chinese people whose country is much shittier than Japan and whose behavior is far worse. Most Japanese people would agree with whites on this fact.

Garry Tan should go back to China if he hates white people so much. He won’t because he needs white people to grift at Y-combinator. Only white people are tolerant and open enough to allow a grift like his and to supply original start up ideas for him to grift off of. The CCP would have arrested him for crimes against the proletariat and in other Asian countries he would get no startups because they have none, due to being too busy grinding Contest Math in Hagwon.

Diane Yap’s comment is a bit less gregarious but still a lot less than what any Asian in the US should say, which is that “I’m so glad to be here, I love white people, and I’m sorry we strive so much. We should do better to assimilate. We really want to boost the economy here and help make America out-compete Communist China, because we love Western and American values so much more than Communism and Confucianism.”

The fact is that Yap’s second sentence is incorrect. Asian grinding inflates their SAT scores by at least 150 points. An Asian 1570 is like a white 1420, while a white 1570 is like an Asian USAMO higher-performer. This isn’t affirmative action, it’s measurement invariance with respect to race on g. Asians have a lower intercept in the function that maps signal to g. They have a lower intercept because more signal means less g than whites. That’s because the cheat to get the signal, either explicitly by cheating on a test, or implicitly by preparing much harder than any white.

If you ban grinding, it’s probable that rank order within race won’t change. But rank order between race will change. Asians would only compose about 10% of a meritocratic Harvard class, instead of >50%. Their mean SAT scores would fall below whites. We know this because we know whites have more innate intelligence due to more unfalsifiable signals thereof, like Nobel prizes, inventions, and strong national economies. Where English IQ is set to 100, the ungrinded Chinese IQ is likely 95 to 97. With grinding they score between 100 and 102.

The narcissistic immigrant here first feels entitled to define good school in a country that is not his, while his country has no good schools (China), and then use his own definition to insult me. The narcissism is unbelievable. A foreigner coming in to the country of me and my ancestors and speaking at me, determining what the status hierarchy of my own country will be, as if he had full authority, and in such a way as to put himself at the top. He, a foreigner, on top of his host country, by his own decree. Truly delusional narcissism. Imagine a white person acting like this in Japan.

Good schools are wherever smart whites go, by the way. That means southern colleges now. I got into Stanford, but I did not want to live in San Fransisco, and attend a diverse university. They also wanted $70k/yr because my parents make six figures. The college savings they generously stored for me were one quarter of the four year tuition cost. Needless to say, they could not afford to shell out $210k over three years on top of other expenses, and I couldn’t stomach six figure debt. Not when I had a full-ride scholarship to a well-ranked public university in a conservative Southern state. Stanford is for brown people and poor people. In other words, it’s low status. A minority are legacy rich people. That they would prefer to be around a campus that is 75% brown and poor instead of finding people like me who come from the upper middle class, who are smarter than their parents due to Mendelian segregation, and are therefore well-bred entrants to the upper class, marks them as stupid, degenerate, and ripe for downfall. Many are noticing just how dumb the old Caucasian wealthy class is, compared to the new crop of Zoomer online geniuses. In the end, intelligence will win, and these silly grifters will find their late 20th century windfalls (which they can never explain how they got or why they deserve them) depleted, and they will be back where they belong.

I would like to end on a statement that I don’t hate Asians. I even have some Asian friends! I have no black friends, probably because of intelligence assortment in social relationships. I enjoy a lot of Asian culture. I believe the world on net would be worse off without Asians. However, none of that implies that an unlimited number Asians need to have full political rights in a historically white country. Maybe a minority of Asians could integrate, ideally by interbreeding, instead of forming an isolated ethnic fifth column. But there would obviously be a limit to how many can do that, unless whites want to become significantly Asian genetically. And I do not support an enfranchised foreign race within my own borders, any more than Asians want huge, powerful white populations in their countries (they don’t allow us to do that).

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10. Early marriage is more natural

For all of human history, people married early. See here for a data review on this. Some think that this means that delayed marriage is an improvement; on the contrary, social practices need to be optimized when there is widespread poverty. Robin Hanson has been accessibly blogging on this since at least 2024. My scientific work agrees with his sketches. As an early marriage practitioner, I can confirm my wife and I are very happy with our decision to not delay marriage into our 30s.

9. Early marriage is more romantic

Early marriage means less sexual experience upon marriage, ideally even virginity. This is obviously more romantic than marrying with a large body count. Your spouse becomes your first love, not just the last in a trail of heartbreaks. Most romance stories are also between young people under the age of 25. People under this age might feel romantic love more passionately than older people.

8. Early marriage is more beautiful ; breakups and celibacy are ugly

Early marriage means less breakups and less celibacy throughout life, as well as less sex outside of marriage. Breakups are ugly and immoral, most people are not designed for celibacy and finding it extremely frustrating, and the only alternative is sex outside of marriage, which is risky, unloving, and gross. Thus, early marriage increases the amount of beauty in the world by decreasing the amount of ugliness.

7. Early marriage prevents wasting time dating or being sexually frustrated

Dating is hellish and I feel bad when I see dating discourse. By being early married, I know I will never date again, and that there are no downsides to this. I don’t have to be celibate, and I don’t have to miss out on having a family, because I am married for life. If you had contemporary dating culture, you should support early marriage.

6. Early marriage improves the TFR

Dropping the average age of marriage by 10 years would increase the TFR above replacement, by about 1 extra baby per couple, according to an econometric causal-inference study. The increase is modest due to the presence of family planning, but it’s still positive. If you are pronatalist, there is no downside to advocating for more early marriage. It has a lot more positive spillover effects while being cheaper than the main alternative that pronatalists have to early marriage, which is promoting IVF for very late couples.

5. Early marriage cultivates life-long love better

There are no causal inference studies I’ve found that find the effect of age on divorce risk, although cross-section data usually gives a U shape which shows marriage in your 20s is better than marriage in your 30s. Lyman Stone found that among people where early marriage is normal, the best outcomes were when marrying under the age of 25. Marrying over 30 was associated with poorer marriage quality.

4. Early marriage lets you have kids earlier which makes it easier

Say you have to have a certain number of kids. Do you want to be 45 waking up at night to feed them as babies, or 25? Do you want to attend their high school graduation when you are nearing 60, or 40? Kids take a lot of energy, so being in your 20s and 30s is better for coping with it. You will also see more of your grandchildren, the earlier you have kids. There are biological analogues to this; pregnancy is easier in younger women, and sperm has less mutations in younger men. Babies born to parents in their 20s are slightly healthier than babies born to parents in their 30s and older.

3. Early marriage is a better motive for a strong career

It’s important to not have wicked motives for making money. Single people who don’t want to make the world better who chase money likely have wicked motives for it. This is ugly. If you have a family, however, supporting your family is a good motive for chasing money. If many people are not wickedly greedy, you might even expect that marriage causes men to pursue more money, which boosts the economy in a system where most of the money to be made is through positive-sum interactions. Indeed, Cremieux has showed data indicating this. Even if the games are neutral-sum, it has the side effect of taking money from wicked greedy people, like Sam Bankman-Fried, and giving it to less wicked men who will use it in part to reproduce, which could be consider eugenic or a socially-positive evolutionary pressure.

2. Early marriage prevents STDs

Arguably a huge reason why marriage evolved, and evolved to be early, STDs are a huge problem and usually kill you without modern medicine. Treating STDs is a huge sunk-cost as well. More early marriage means lower healthcare costs and healthier people. Easy win!

1. Early marriage is what God intended ; it improves the Culture

Religion (Christianity but also other major world religions) promotes early marriage for a reason. Thinking in a more secular way, I’ve already listed 9 spillover effects of early marriage. I’m sure there are broader, unexpected effects as well. Radical feminism would probably recede in the public space. The demographic pyramid would be less tilted towards the elderly. This has downstream effects on the community. Things begin to be more family oriented, child-friendly, etc. All of this seems positive to me.

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To answer this question, we have to conceptualize intelligence well. Specifically, we need to know what it’s not, and see if something that is not intelligence causes differences in g-factor scores. One thing that impacts g estimates that is not intelligence is measurement error, but we’ll assume that is minimal, as the reliability of an average of several long g measures (for example multiple g scores extracted from WAIS trials, where each score has a reliability of around 0.90) approaches 1.

Is there anything in a perfectly reliable g measure, like an average of many g scores based on WAIS, that is not intelligence? I think there is. There are many people out there who claim IQs that don’t seem to match an accurate qualitative assessment of their intellectual output. Some of it is exaggeration (self-reported IQs only correlate with measured IQs around 0.30, and online people frequently lie about having taken real tests when they throw out a number), some of it is reliability, but some of it is probably that their g scores are really just inflated relative to their actual intelligence, because they come from backgrounds where people train for the test much more than average.

And there is evidence that training for the test works. One study found that merely taking the WAIS two weeks ago boosts a subsequent FSIQ score by 6 points. For people who train hard and who are at least average, the effect is even bigger.

If 1% of people come from a culture of test training, and are scored on normie norms, their IQs can easily be inflated by 20 points. This won’t show up in reliability corrections; they can take tests again and again, and keep scoring 20 points too high. This would produce people who clearly think at the 125 IQ level, claiming to have scores in the 140s or even higher (but reliability analysis reduces their claims into the 130s or 140s, which is still higher than their real intelligence). I believe there are many such people on X and Substack.

Based on this data, I’m guessing practicing accounts for 20% of g variance with intelligence being the other 80%. That means intelligence and g would correlate at around 0.90. This seems broadly consistent with Arthur Jensen’s correlations between g-loadings and neural measures. It also means the correlation between practicing and g is about .45, or 6.75 IQ points per practice SD. Someone from a culture that is in the top percent of practicing should therefore have 15 to 20 points subtracted from their g score, to estimate their intelligence. This is consistent with the data from the figure above.

Additionally, there’s evidence differences in schooling, motivation, and need for cognition have small effects on g scores, usually around 5% of variance. That would sum to 15% of variance if they are all independent, a good chunk of our hypothesis.

I have also noticed that a lot of sketchy IQ claims come from people with “verbal tilts”. This may be because their training regime is verbal-focused. For example, the schooling and religious catechism of some over-training cultures emphasize verbal abilities while largely neglecting 3D shape rotating skills. When people from these cultures train, it should produce a tilt. Perhaps their spatial IQ scores are therefore better intelligence measures, despite having lower g-loading. They have lower g-loading, because g is in part training, and not loading on training reduces g-loading.

If this estimate is right, it should have application to the intelligence estimates of public figures. Once the g posterior is deduced from observed scores, one must mix in a prior for how much they trained. For many figures there is strong evidence of excessive training; for example, entering the SMPY, especially on math, at age 12, indicates humongous targeted training. Even 160 IQ 12 year olds don’t deduce high school math from first principles; they have to learn it from books, and even at 160 IQ many preteens would rather spend their time doing things that are more fun. Therefore, having gone through the books is a massive training effect, probably over 2 SD, and one could subtract 13.5 IQ points from the estimated IQs of SMPY participants based on this. Importantly, it’s probable that this would have to be done even from a highly reliable adult g-score, since the training effect actually changes their g, but not their intelligence.

Even a neutral prior for how much someone training introduces regression to the mean and uncertainty. 20% of variance in IQ means intelligence will tend to vary about 6.7 points around someone’s g scores, and a 0.90 correlation between intelligence and g means g scores shrink to the intelligence mean by 1.5 points. So, if someone has robust g scores of 140, using a neutral prior for their practice amount leads to an intelligence posterior for that person with a mean of 138.5 and a standard deviation of 6.7. That means there is a 1 in 50 chance their intelligence is really under 125, and a 15% chance it is really under 131. Alternatively, there is a 15% chance it is over 145 and a 2% chance it is over 151. This might help make sense of why there seem to be people who differ a lot in apparent intelligence even at similar g-score levels. For example, Richard Feynman claimed an IQ score of around 125, but his intelligence could have been in the mid to high 130s, even if that score was honestly reported. If it was unreliable then even the 140s are very possible. At the same time, a lot of people claiming 125 will come off a lot dumber than Feynman; their intelligence level can easily be under 119 given robust g scores of 125. This might lead to a 10 or 20 point intelligence gap between Feynman and someone else claiming the same g score, which seems to be the case in reality.

VOSS: Tell me about yourself. What grade are you in?

STUDENT: I’m currently in 11th grade.

VOSS: And how old are you?

STUDENT: 15.

VOSS: You are young for your grade level, aren’t you?

STUDENT: Yes, I have a tested IQ of 141. Last year, I scored a 1540 on the SAT. I skipped two grades, 2nd and 7th, because of being bored in class.

VOSS: So as a top student, what is your experience with the phone ban?

STUDENT: It’s terrible. For two reasons. The first is that the majority of my friends are online. The second is that I used it to learn more, and now I can’t do that in school, where you’re supposed to be learning.

VOSS: You think Jonathan Haidt was instrumental in this ban?

STUDENT: Yes, his name comes up a lot when I argue with people about it.

VOSS: So what would he say about your objections? Starting with, all your friends are online. Maybe he would say school isn’t the place for those friends.

STUDENT: He wouldn’t say that. I read his book, and he thinks school is for “socialization” as much as he thinks it’s for learning.

VOSS: Maybe he would say you should be friends with the people around you more instead, as a substitute? Maybe that’s better for the alleged “anxiety of the generation?”

STUDENT: Well, that’s paternalistic and presumptuous on his part to say the least. Who is he to know what makes me happy?

VOSS: It is paternalist, isn’t it? But he thinks he’s a genius psychologist or something, and that your age group deserves paternalism. He thinks you’re a child.

STUDENT: But that’s not really true and he’s not my parent anyway.

VOSS: He arrogantly thinks he knows better than you and your parents. As well as other experts like myself and Christopher Ferguson.

STUDENT: I think he’s a narcissist.

VOSS: He’s a demagogue whipping up a mob. He thinks because more than 50.0 percent of rabble agree with this inane ideas, he gets to lord over the dissenters. Do you know the definition of a demagogue?

STUDENT: A dictator in a democracy?

VOSS: It’s “a political leader who seeks support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument.”

STUDENT: Sounds like Haidt. His book had no reason in it. Just a bunch of misleading charts.

VOSS: I agree completely. You’re a reader of mine, correct? As I’m sure you’ve read from me, the causal impact of phones on teenage mental health is controversial. It might only be negative for girls.

STUDENT: I remember your article.

VOSS: And furthermore, even if Haidt’s effects are real, they’re just ATEs: average treatment effects. But he knows nothing about effect variance. It’s possible the effect on you of taking away your phone could be strongly negative, while being positive for the average person. In fact, there is evidence of this. Let me send you a chart.

VOSS: It shows a homogeneity test for studies of teenage screen time and mental health outcomes. The null hypothesis is that the true effect of every study is the same. All of them fail the test, i.e. the null hypothesis is rejected. That can be caused by different things, but one cause is that the samples vary in important characteristics that correlate with Treatment Effect of phones on mental health. I suspect smart people actually gain from phones, while it might harm dumb people. If some samples have higher mean IQ because they are taken from schools of different SES (school mean IQs tend to differ much more than mere sampling would cause, people assort non-randomly on IQ geographically), that will cause the true effect of the study to differ from the true effect of a study on a low SES school. And the I^2 is the variance explained by true effect variance. You can see it’s above 90% for many of the measures. That’s huge. The ATE in this literature is almost meaningless.

STUDENT: So, what you’re saying is, we don’t know how a phone will impact an individual? It could make him happier or sadder?

VOSS: Yes. IQ test: when there is massive effect heterogeneity, should there be policy heterogeneity or policy uniformity? That is, if cigarrettes cure cancer for half of people, and cause it for the other half, should you ban cigarrettes, make everyone smoke them, or let cigarette use vary?

STUDENT: Obviously you should let it vary.

VOSS: Congratulations, you’re 15 and smarter than Jonathan Haidt and his gaggle of sycophantic supporters. Now let’s get back to the negative impact on you from Haidt’s intolerance for variance. Why might phones be good for you and bad for some others? Why are you not better off without your online friends?

STUDENT: My friends online are more like me. I can talk about intellectual things with them. I can’t do that with the people at my school. Talking to them gets boring.

VOSS: People tend to assort in friendship. Smart people want smart friends. Haidt making you be friends with the people that happen to be your age and live around you is like if I forced him to be friends with average people instead of other intellectuals and people that work at the heavily endowed neoliberal foundations like MacArthur as well as the universities he has had appointments at.

STUDENT: You’re making me get really mad at him.

VOSS: You should get mad. What do you think a good punishment for his specific demagoguery would be?

STUDENT: He should be without of all his money and positions for 3 years and forced to be friends with average people at a boring job where he can’t use his phone. He should be banned from social media entirely during that time like the laws in Australia.

VOSS: Exactly. This is what he recommends for others. As a narcissist he believes those others are beneath him because of their age. But many of those are above him, because they are more moral and more intelligent than him. If Haidt would submit to his own ideas, instead of yapping on X like he is above all 15 year olds, which he would have purged from such platforms with insane anti-privacy laws, with no regard for their specific abilities and desires, then I would respect him a lot more.

STUDENT: Haidt has seriously ruined this school year for me.

VOSS: But he would say it’s for the “greater good.” I’m sure that’s how he copes.

STUDENT: It might make some girls less obsessed with their bodies, girls who have terrible parents who don’t regulate their phone usage. But the harms are much bigger.

VOSS: I imagine miserable 130+ IQ young men who can’t access superior educational content could have very negative ramifications.

STUDENT: Exactly, I used to supplement my classes with all kinds of information. MIT Opencourseware lectures, books, YouTube stuff. I taught myself linear algebra from Strang’s amazing course last year. My school doesn’t have a linear algebra class, obviously.

VOSS: No high school does as far as I know. I’ve never heard of one. I think Haidt would say surely you are learning enough in school. Is that not true?

STUDENT: It’s not. Even in my classes, material is skipped, and there are better lectures online. The idea that my local teacher would be the best among the options I have with the internet is stupid. I’m taking AP Calculus BC and my teacher plays Khan Academy videos because she is uncomfortable with teaching infinite series and convergence and stuff like that. I’d prefer the MIT Opencourseware content but I can’t watch it at school anymore. Last year I would have and my learning would have been better. But my teacher can’t override the phone ban for anyone.

VOSS: I used to do that in school too. I taught myself a lot of computer science in high school. My high school only had AP CS which is not that good. When I got to university I already had mastered OOP and data structures and algorithms and was pretty good on operating systems. A lot of this was by coding on my personal laptop watching Youtube lectures. So a huge part of CS the core curriculum was redundant for me by the time I went to university. I would also read HBD material. For example the Mismeasure of Man, I read and critiqued that in school and I read Arthur Jensen’s Educability and Group Differences. And I’d read many papers. On top of that I read papers and books cited in my first book which I began writing when I was in 11th grade. If you think I sound distracted, I graduated as valedictorian with an associates degree worth of university credits and an IB diploma. And my high school had very very good resources, for example enough dual credit courses to do that in high school, which is often not the case. To this day I use the skills I self-taught at school, which I could only do having unregulated access to the internet through a phone or laptop. Are you allowed a laptop?

STUDENT: No, obviously not. You can watch Youtube Shorts and TikTok on a laptop.

VOSS: Do you feel that the phone ban is holding back your education? What about others?

STUDENT: Definitely. And my few irl friends feel the same. They are very intelligent.

VOSS: So what will you do, spend another year and a half there or try to graduate early?

STUDENT: It’s a difficult situation. If I drop out or graduate early I’ll lose my National Merit Scholarship. I’ve looked into transferring to an online program. In addition my family is talking with the school administrators to work something out where I can attend online or for partial days while taking courses at a local university campus. For example I may take AP Literature and AP Government at the high school, and Calculus 3, ODEs and physics at the college.

VOSS: So the escape options are obnoxious and costly?

STUDENT: Yes, and my irl social life is dependent on the school. I play two sports, cross country and track, and I won’t be able to do those next year if I don’t stay enrolled at this school. But I’d like to set a state record. There’s a chance I’ll be good enough to next year.

VOSS: Well it sounds like this moral panic has harmed you. I can’t think of any more questions. Thank you for your time.

STUDENT: You’re welcome.

VOSS: I’ll say one last thing before we stop: I don’t think all of this is one man’s fault. Many people have bad experiences with phones. Haidt has given those people a voice. But if he thinks what he has done is a morally positive thing, he’s gravely mistaken. At best he is doing this because it pays, in attention, status, and money. And that’s greed. It’s greed to not care about what is good, because you have the rewards of popularity to make up for the good. One last thing: do you and your friends think Jonathan Haidt cares about smart teenagers?

STUDENT: No. Definitely not.

I concluded the interview with that closing statement.

Sapolsky writes:

This chapter’s key fact is that the final brain region to fully mature
(in terms of synapse number, myelination, and metabolism) is the frontal
cortex, not going fully online until the mid-twenties.

For this he cites R. Knickmeyer et al. 2008: “A Structural MRI Study of Human Brain Development from Birth to 2 Years”. Bizarrely, Jay Giedd and friends did something perfectly analogous to this in 2005 in their pamphlet to prevent teen pregnancy (activists!)

In my book, I showed that this claim was false and based on a citation that refers to infants:

The actual data shows that myelination continues into the 40s for most parts of the brain. Below, GCC, Ant CR, and Ant IC are in the frontal lobe area:

Here’s another with multiple myelin measures and scatterplots so you can see how development after the age of 20 really relates to aging after the age of 60 in magnitude:

FL is frontal lobe and as you see there is no line drawn in the mid twenties. From my book, the teenage slope is not noticeably larger than the 20-something slope. The brain is mostly developed at 15 and myelinates into the 40s.

Back to Sapolsky:

This has two screamingly important implications. First, no part of the
adult brain is more shaped by adolescence than the frontal cortex.

The occipital lobe has more development from 20 to 40 than the frontal lobe on the MWF measurement. I guess adolescent vision isn’t working yet? Adolescent eyes, a work in progress?

Second, nothing about adolescence can be understood outside the context of delayed frontocortical maturation

An embarrassingly overconfident thing to say when your basis is nothing of substance.

we’ve just explained why adolescents are so frustrating, great, asinine, impulsive, inspiring, destructive, self-destructive, selfless, selfish, impossible, and world changing.

I wrote my book as a teenager, but now I’m in my mid-twenties, and I can say that both in my teenaged experience, and my present experience, these stereotypes are completely ridiculous.

Think about this—
adolescence and early adulthood are the times when someone is most likely to kill, be killed, leave home forever, invent an art form, help overthrow a
dictator, ethnically cleanse a village, devote themselves to the needy, become addicted, marry outside their group, transform physics, have hideous fashion taste, break their neck recreationally, commit their life to God, mug an old lady, or be convinced that all of history has converged to make this moment the most consequential, the most fraught with peril and promise, the most demanding that they get involved and make a difference. In other words, it’s the time of life of maximal risk taking, novelty seeking, and affiliation with peers. All because of that immature frontal cortex.

I feel like most of these fit my present age group better than teenagers? It seems like he’s just describing things elderly people don’t have (vitality, energy, testosterone), falsely correlating them with the frontal lobe, and the arbitrarily claiming teenagers are defined that way. But this is a better way to describe people aged 21 to 35. In fact, a lot of age-crime curves, basically ones that are not from the USA between 1970 and 1999, show that 20-somethings are actually more violent than teenagers.

People that are not elderly have higher vril, probably due to sex hormones, reproductive instinct, and less physical ageing (hard to be violent when you have an enlarged prostate and need a back surgery and you’re always tired). This applies hopefully to healthy people until as late as the age of 40. I know this is hard to understand with the backwards American population period. Everyone now is old. We’re dominated by old people.

Once you understand that, you can ask about teenagers, (i.e. “adolescents”) specifically. In what ways are they unique when compared to other people who are not elderly? The answer is that they are not that unique, but insofar as they are, they are just more childish. Not violent, or risk-taking, or domineering, or zealous, but more like 9 year olds than they will be in 5 more years. Specifically they seem to like to play more, they are weaker, they are smaller along most horizontal measurements even after they stop growing vertically, and they are more fearful of things like the dark and in general. This makes sense because they are just the age group in between 20-somethings and little children. However, after the age of 14 or 15 they are closer to 20-somethings than children of an equal age-distance because puberty development (ages 11 to 15 usually) involves a sigmoid function.

It’s like walking up a steep hill for 5 miles or on flat terrain for 5 miles. Which is harder?

Back to Sapolsky, he goes on to discuss gray matter. He repeats the misconceptions I debunk in my book, namely that pruning somehow hits a critical point during the teens or 20s. Rather, pruning continues into old age.

In the next section, he writes:

In the foothills of the Sierras are California Caverns, a cave system that
leads, after an initial narrow, twisting 30-foot descent down a hole, to an
abrupt 180-foot drop (now navigable by rappelling). The Park Service has
found skeletons at the bottom dating back centuries, explorers who took one step too far in the gloom. And the skeletons are always those of adolescents.

I thought, hey, everyone gets in accidents, so adolescent overrepresentation is maybe plausible, but saying that all the skeletons were adolescent sounds wrong. Most modern dead cavers are young men. Sure enough, there were 11 people founds, 9 adults and 2 children. 1 was a 12-15 year old girl.

I will stop here for now because it doesn’t seem like he’s even trying to be accurate. If you don’t want to miss a part 2, make sure you subscribe:

You get this screen. The reason given is the Online Safety Act. Wikipedia states:

The Online Safety Act 2023^[1][2][3] (OSA) (c. 50) is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to regulate online content. It was passed on 26 October 2023 and gives the relevant secretary of state the power to designate, suppress, and record a w…

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• 70: mentally retarded, if wild then savage and incapable of social organization beyond a small clan, can’t pass fractions at school

• 85: doesn’t believe in stories, tactile. Can’t pass algebra 1

• 100: can’t pass calc 1, C tier in algebra 1, sees world through feelings, things they can touch only. believes in stories and myths

• 115: can’t pass real analysis, C tier in calc 1, sees the world through stories. Believes in abstract principles as feelings. Capable of designing rigid protocols for institutions

• 130: sees the world through data. can get at least C/B average in an undergrad math degree. Capable of considering broad unexpected outcomes of feelings based principles.

• 145: sees the world through mathematical models which produce data. capable of contributing at the highest level to knowledge. Can design a state with complex laws that always change based on circumstance and can implement a eugenics program because he understands the necessary math.

We can see from this that it would be nice to know what kind of math ability, ethics, and social organization people of different intelligence levels are capable of. As of yet, IQ only means moderate correlation with some life outcomes like SES. Being able to say “people under 120 IQ can’t do a bachelor’s degree in mathematics” or something similar would be a real game changer. I suspect something like this is true; I see a lot of people who just can’t math at all.

We can tentatively check how calibrated these numbers are. In the Chicago Public School system, 21% failed Algebra 1, but the system was 40% black, so it’s plausible the mean IQ of the students is under 100; our model predicts 21% failure if the mean CPS student IQ is 97 with a standard deviation of 15. So we’re pretty close.

As for 100 IQ people being C-tier in Algebra 1, about 40% of students who take Algebra 1 in 8th grade repeat it, even though only about 20% fail it. And ostensibly, people who take it in 8th grade tend to be a little smarter than average, so 40% makes sense given that people under 100 IQ can only get to a thin understanding of Algebra 1.

For calculus, 35% of people who attempt it in high school in the US fail. But only about 20% attempt to take it in high school. So a decent estimate is that 13% can pass calc 1 in high school, which is close to what I put above (15% of people are above 115 IQ). It seems about 25% of people with university diplomas have passed a calculus class, and about 50% of people get a university diploma, so that’s 12.5% of people. In other words, Calculus filters >85% of people.

Only about 4% of people get a 5 on AP calculus in high school, it’s likely if you can’t do this easily you won’t be good enough at high level mathematics. So that’s roughly people of a minimum IQ of 127. Perhaps at 130 IQ one could get a B average pretty easily in an undergraduate math program.

These numbers may make it looks like less people have pre-requisite intelligence to understand certain math topics than they actually do, since they implicitly assume that all success cleavages in math are due to an intelligence threshold. If work ethic, for instance, effects math performance too, there will be failures who could understand it if they worked harder, and there will be successful people who would not understand it if they worked an average amount. However, these numbers can be interpreted as showing what percent of people are smart enough to grasp a topic, holding their other traits fixed. In some sense, being lazy is an extended stupidity, because lazy people will never think hard with what raw brain power they may have, and therefore will never produce anything really intellectually interesting.

It would be interesting to model thresholds. For example, individual math topics could be interpreted in the IRT framework to have latent discrimination and difficulty. In Item Response Theory (IRT), difficulty is the ability level where someone has a 50% chance of answering correctly (midpoint of the curve), showing how hard an item is, while discrimination (the slope) shows how well the item separates high-ability from low-ability individuals. In other words, high discrimination topics are impassable to people under the steep threshold, while low discrimination topics may vary in difficulty (ie, people over some threshold learn it much faster), but are more amenable to repeat attempts (since, for example, a beneath-threshold person might have a 20% chance of “getting it right”, whereas if the discrimination were very high, they would have a .1% chance).

Discrimination aside, integral solving problems probably have a difficulty somewhere around 115 IQ, quadratic equation problems have a difficulty around 100 IQ, abstract theorem proving problems might have a difficulty near 130 IQ. Sadly it would cost a lot of money to run a large scale study comparing IQ test performance to realized math performance. Maybe an epic based billionaire could fund it?

Stop posting math and start blogging: lose subscribers.

There is no respect for the writer. The cultural determinists told me otherwise, which is part of why I started writing. Actually writers are like burger restaurants, if they change the formula or people get tired of the menu people go eat something else. How is their appetite determined? Genetics. Therefore culture and ideas are genetically determined, and the writer serves the reader. The reader/listener/watcher is never “brainwashed.”

Where are all the Korean and German 29 year old billionaires? Maybe with something a little more g loaded than a gambling platform? The answer is that the American economy is becoming one big gyp-joint in which the biggest gyp-joint gets all the fake money. Kian Saghedi’s gyp-joint, Nucleus, recently unshockingly ousted for being a scammer, comes to mind.

You could tell Nucleus was gyp-joint, as I did in 2023, because 20 year old college drop outs from money-hungry cultures are not good statistical geneticists. The prior odds were high, knowing the “founder” is a 20 year old Iranian with a high school diploma, that Nucleus would be a get rich quick scam, and not a cutting edge genomics company. That’s because statistical genetics is like physics and actually requires knowledge and intelligence and subject experience to be good at, unlike making shitty gambling platforms.

Herasight is not a gyp-joint and predictably, it’s less funded than the shitty gyp-joint, and it’s actually run by white and Asian 145 IQ quantitative academics. In a serious economy all new companies worth anything would be run by such people, but the story of the 21st century American economy so far is make a shitty gyp-joint app and get a bunch of money you didn’t earn. It takes very little skill so it seems to select for a relatively low intelligence threshold, say 115 or 120 IQ, and maybe energy, specifically energy directed at scamming and not doing good cutting edge research and science. So, in other words, it’s probably worse than a random lottery, shit-head assholes who have high levels of the sin of greed are disproportionately propped up for making a mockery of the US economy.

This happens because the US pöbel are dumb and love a good gyp-joint. They might even see themselves as a future gyp-joint founder. But they know they’ll never be a Wernher von Braun or a Nikola Tesla, so why elevate such people? To elevate such people would require virtues like foresight and humility. But it seems those are in short supply and we’re stuck with mass greed and narcissism.

They also love a good lie. It seems honesty is in short supply too. Nucleus appears to have lied about their product efficacy. Kalshi lies by claiming it’s not a gambling platform. Instead they say something, which sounds super gay: it’s a heckin hivemind for predicting the futurino!!!!!! It’s to incentivize deep research into world events!!! It’s a prediction market!

But the frontpage is all sports gambling and predicting coinflips which are impervious to deep research, such as the winner of the next US presidential election.

I would like to finish by just saying that this is all very ugly and I wish these people would stop turning the US economy into one giant scam. I think them getting free money is bad and these “founders” ought to work real jobs or not be in the West. The US is not your “free money glitch.” I’d also like to say I’m disappointed in the pöbel who vote for this and consume this crap. Honestly you could probably justify investigating Nucleus for fraud and Kalshi for racketeering under the current letter of the law, but that doesn’t mean it will happen. Everyone is too busy worrying about a dead guy getting some massages from teenagers 25 years ago to go after companies that might be causing large-scale economic damage. That is, Nucleus predatorily takes from IVF couples to deliver an inferior product, by way of stealing R&D and advertising resources from better firms, through scammy and unethical competitive practices like backdoor networking and lying about product performance. Kalshi is a casino and it takes energy but never gives back. I don’t believe the world will improve because of “prediction markets” anymore than it improves by opening a new casino. So it’s an enrichment scheme for its founders who are not exactly wise, virtuous leaders deserving of billions of dollars. They’ll be wasting and harmfully spending all of that money just like George Soros.

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In a free market of ideas, does the truth win out or does something stupid and emotionally appealing win out? I think obviously in most cases it’s the latter. And that’s why discourse is disappointing. Discourse is not meritocratic. It’s democratic.

I was originally drawn to internet discourse by the idea that if I had the smartest, truest ideas, they would inevitably win out and dominate all of the stupid and superficially appealing ideas. That kinda works are you build a niche audience at first that likes things like HBD. Then if you keep going the payoff curve starts going down and even dips below zero. The ideas get too complex and emotionally unappealing to go anywhere even if they’re correct.

You begin to see the boundaries of the box every writer is in. That box is the democracy of the market. Cater or perish. But the market can’t accommodate very high levels intellectual skill. At some point I started mainly reading quantitative textbooks and academic articles, after wishing substack had more math on it. Guess what the popularity of those texts are? They’re barely read of course.

Where do you go with good quantitative, logical, and inferential skills to be rewarded for merit? It’s not Substack. Maybe academia, but the pay is low and PhDs are a hazing scheme. Maybe quantitative finance? Society really does a bad job at allocating and rewarding intellectual skill.

The discourse around my last article was flaccid. Changing everyone’s minds with one article I guess is fantastical, but it would be nice to change a few important minds in my “political camp”. The guy I responded to came into the comment section but there was no energy. Not hating on him, just how it is. It’s an everyone thing.

It’s like that on every topic too. It’s like that on all substacks. All blogs. Everywhere. It’s pretty easy to see why this is: the IQ distribution and opportunity cost. When you have a smart, cutting edge idea, if it’s hard to understand, it better benefit you personally, otherwise it’s worthless, cuz it ain’t spreading anywhere.

Before we begin, I want to make a few remarks on this topic. I believe this is the most taboo topic in the USA. Many people think anti-semitism and racism are more taboo in the United States, but this is not true if you do not weight the topics by intelligence. It is true that among university professors, racism and anti-semitism are more taboo than the age of consent and even “hard” pedophilia issues. For example, academia published a paper in a pretty nice journal which argued that child molestation is not actually traumatic to children. The paper was then denounced by the politicians in both chambers of US Congress (it is interesting to consider what this means regarding the role of expertise in social science, and social science in politics). In contrast, the American demos regularly elects racists to their Congress and other offices, who are then denounced by academia. Academia does not allow race and intelligence research to go in nice journals, and there is constant harassment from liars on this topic from inside academia. But I can pretty easily cite Mankind Quarterly at a Republican Party event without stirring up any outrage.

In taboo topics, outrage is often fueled by misconception. For example, on the race issue, leftists often allege that race realists are genocidal. This is supposed to whip up outrage among more centrist types. It’s of course not true. Likewise, on this topic, trolls like to allege things like obsession with salacious topics, intentions to harm young people, tendency toward marital infidelity, and so on. I will forestall this by pointing out that I have a large corpus of writings which revolve around questioning social norms from the perspective of a naturally socially conservative sociobiologist, so nobody can seriously entertain the idea that I occasionally write on this topic due to a mere lascivious predilection. Rather, I am happily married, and believe both adultery and divorce are serious sins, so at this point the topic only has concrete relevance to my future children. It is only of abstract interest to me personally. But as an abstract topic, it is obviously well suited to be analyzed by me, since current norms are not those of an ideal socially conservative society, and reproductive norms specifically are of special importance to sociobiology, which studies men as animals who evolve through a continuous cycle of death and selective sexual replication.

More concretely, questioning the status quo is baked into my thought and writing. I therefore find status quo defense to be quite boring. It is pretty obvious that the status quo could be improved. The interesting question is how and why. By merely defending the status quo, SA fails to offer an ideal to critique. He does not try to defend the status quo as ideal, merely as good enough. Good enough is a low bar, and such a low bar preempts higher thought.

What, then, is my ideal solution to the age of consent problem? The general issue in the United States is that the there is a complicated patchwork of relatively high ages with a lot of exceptions and oddities spread throughout the country. This almost looks like it was designed for so-called “brown-ops”, in other words confusing men into accidentally violating these laws. This is added to by the fact that in many US states, age of consent laws are bizarrely prosecuted under strict liability — this means a 17 and 364 day old’s handler can show you a fake ID showing she is 19, and you can prove this in court, but you get convicted anyway. And then on top of that, you’re 1 day over the speed limit, so what happens? Do you get convicted of a misdemeanor? Pay a fine? Decide to be more skeptical of teenaged girls? Quit fornicating in the land of fornication? No, your epic win with the “bros” (hey guys, I totally BANGED this HOT 19 year old!) turns into you getting convicted of a sex-offender felony and do at least 1 year in jail, often more. The person’s friends switch to “ew, she was actually 17 and 364 days old? You sick fuck! I hope you get sodomized by a black man in jail! By the way, I believe I am sexually moral. I hope I get laid at the club tonight by a hot 19 year old!”

Obviously there’s a lot of room for injustice in this status quo any way you look at it. From a purely technical point of view, a massive improvement would be a national age of consent of 18, with reasonable exceptions like the abolition of the clownishly unjust strict liability standard. You could also do something like, make it a misdemeanor on your first offense if she was 16 or 17, perhaps only if you are within 10 years of age, so that no 23 year old men who are told by society that banging an 18 year old is an epic win are sent to prison forever for knowingly banging a 17 and 364 year old in a moment of horny drunkenness. I believe as long as the female victim in this case attests that she is not traumatized by her consensual sex she likely sought out with a popular, slightly older young man, it would be enough to put the man on probation and make him take a class on how to fornicate ethically in the democracy of the United States of America, where the sovereign, overweight 100-IQ People in all their wisdom have voted that their 17 year old and 364 day old daughters are agencyless children. If the man does it twice knowingly, obviously he was not just unlucky, and it is much more just to go back to the old penalties.

I can already anticipate that many Americans would call this scheme wildly lenient on dangerous pedophiles, which is funny because it’s incredibly strict by the standards of the rest of the West.

A more normal national standard would use a dividing line somewhere between 14 and 16, not 17 or 18. As a sociobiologist I find this to be far more educated and in line with history and human development, but at least a line of 18 with reasonable penalties would work much better than the current standard due to being less arbitrary and schizophrenic.

If we are to be stuck with socially liberally attitudes towards sex and relationship, I believe the US should simply adopt the laws of my country, or my wife’s country, which are Germany and France respectively. This is because other than being schizophrenic and doing injustice through its arbitrary complexity, US law mainly exists to persecute college kids who have relationships with high school girls. Germans and French do not prosecute the majority of cases the US prosecutes, because they do not persecute such relationships. Based on knowledge of historical marriages (eg usually between a mid-teens girl and an early-twenties man), I am strongly biased towards believing that these relationships are natural, positive, romantic, and loving the majority of the time, and that the state must prove that there is abuse in a particular case before interfering. This should not be hard to do in a rich surveillance state with very little clannism! Ironically, hard and high lines of 18 are more suited to places like Algeria, which doesn’t have it or doesn’t enforce it, where a relationship between a 15 year old and a 21 year old means the poorly fed 15 year old drops out of school and has a premature baby (as her body is probably as developed as a well-fed western 13 year old), thus keeping the economy behind and the population fragile. In the US it means Stacy’s boyfriend is a frat boy at a local college instead of some kid on the high school football team. That’s all it means. They probably love each other more than they would if they were the same age, because people evolved to have 3-6 year age gaps in marriage. Many girls evolved to be attracted not to old men, and not to boys exactly their age, but to slightly older young men. This is why high school same-aged relationships never last, they’re not natural.

And this is what you see if you look at the data. The median People’s Republic of the United States of America age of consent case is a 15 year old girl and a 19 year old boy. That’s because it’s real rape if the girl doesn’t consent. Girls actually don’t normally consent to being an adulterous 40 year old man’s side piece, even if their brains are only 15 or 16. American age of consent laws, in substance (ie factoring out the schizophrenia), are largely a war on young love, which is why most of the online people who complain about it are single males aged 16 to 23. It’s not 43 year old girldads who want to cheat on their wives with a 17 year old. I think they are perfectly fine with 19 and 20 year olds for that purpose. It’s young men who are tired of having their natural dating pool arbitrarily restricted.

All of this said, I’m a social conservative, so I have a policy idea that is more ideal than the French or German model: minimum age of marriage of 14 or 15, but a much higher age of consent. It could be 21, or even just no sex before marriage. I would prefer it to be above 18 because most girls would not be married by 18, and I do not like it when 18 year olds start OnlyFans and ruin themselves for marriage. Girls ought to be saved for marriage at least until 21, perhaps even 25. Also ban or seriously discourage divorce, and ban adultery. Adultery ought to be at least as illegal as statutory rape. It produces a very real victim, which is the spouse that was cheated on. It is absurd that adultery is tolerated in the Proletariat States but they pretend to have some alternative sexual morality. Totally schizophrenic.

I asked for my wife’s input on this idea and she said that she thinks men might try to do serial monogamy with teens under increasingly large age gaps, and thought a 10 year age gap rule would fix this. I support that idea. Whether it be a general 10 year age gap rule, some kind of increasing gap as a function of age, or a 10 year age gap rule when the girl is under the age of consent (eg 21 or 25), I believe that is rational. One thing is that I would permit separation in some circumstances but ban divorce, which means you may leave your spouse but you cannot re-marry ever, since marriage is a life-long contract whether or not you are living together. This would automatically protect maidens from serial monogamy without any explicit age-gap rule. Also, of course, I think parents should have the right to sign off on their daughter’s marriage, unless this is overruled by the government in the case of the parents being unfit because they are behaviorally disordered in some way, or the girl is orphaned. This way teenage girls can’t just elope with a random man that her parents don’t even know.

I will point out that this model is the model of Europe until the last 50 or so years. See Canon Law 1083 of the Catholic Church:

Can. 1083 §1. A man before he has completed his sixteenth year of age and a woman before she has completed her fourteenth year of age cannot enter into a valid marriage.

And on parental consent and divorce, Can. 1071 §1.

Except in a case of necessity, a person is not to assist without the permission of the local ordinary at:

1/ a marriage of transients;

2/ a marriage which cannot be recognized or celebrated according to the norm of civil law;

3/ a marriage of a person who is bound by natural obligations toward another party or children arising from a previous union;

4/ a marriage of a person who has notoriously rejected the Catholic faith;

5/ a marriage of a person who is under a censure;

6/ a marriage of a minor child when the parents are unaware or reasonably opposed;

7/ a marriage to be entered into through a proxy as mentioned in can. 1105.

So, under my ideal, you can be prosecuted for fornication, but you know it will happen because we have abolished fornication culture generally. In exchange for taking away your fornication culture, I will provide you with a wife, and young men will be free to have a pretty open courting pool as young as in their late teens. It is completely up to bachelors, maidens, and their families as to whether they want to marry very young, or delay marriage. I just know some people will be happy marrying young, and this is 100% okay, historically normal, romantic, and it’s not the place of an uncultured and impure demos to violently interfere with the affairs of these families, which are entirely Christian and within the norms of all societies everywhere until radical feminism and LGBT got a little too much say-so 50 years ago in the intermittently totalitarian peasant democracy of the United States.

Philosophically, what are we doing with this new ideal? The way I see it, it takes freedom away from the unvirtuous and gives it to the virtuous. In the one-size-fits-all democracy, modern American age of consent laws exist to protect the lower ends of the demos from the negative consequences of their bad behavior, without really addressing the bad behavior. They live a risky, harmful, r-selected fornicative lifestyle, which apparently the younger members among them cannot handle. As soon as you go back to the fundamentals of marriage, then the laws of human history make perfect sense. You can see the American schizophrenia model as a form of socialism which taxes the morally pure, eg the 18 year old who would like to marry a freshman girl he goes to school with, to protect, for a couple of years, the “town bicycle” as they call them, who more often than not comes from a low class home of criminals and undesirables, from the men of her own class. The French or German model bites the bullet and throws the low end under the bus. My way, I think, is more fair, and history showed it emerged in societies with little room for inefficiency. A bad war or a famine could wipe out some of these societies. And in that furnace of selection pressure they evolved my ideal norms. I think they might be the best! Chesterton’s fence.

Responding to Sectionalism Archive

With my positive vision laid out, let me end by directly addressing some of what SA wrote.

Argument 1: “Men are naturally sexually attracted to underage girls, so the Age of Consent is anti-male!”

It is true that studies have shown that most men are attracted to teenage girls, and cannot consistently differentiate between teenagers below and above the age of consent. However, this heightened sexual response is predicated on the men being unaware of the true age of the woman.

Access to invisible information can change whether someone finds something attractive. Many men have attractive siblings, but would likely be turned off if they knew this individual was their sibling, because we have been conditioned both by nature and by society to find incest to be disgusting. Furthermore, there are a small minority of transvestites who actually do pass as the opposite sex, but most heterosexual men could not bring themselves to be aroused by them if they were given the knowledge of the inner mannishness of that person. So, it would be more accurate to say that men are attracted to neotenous-looking adults, which is kind of a nothingburger. It is already well-known that women have more neotenous traits than men, but if you believe these features are worth selecting for then you obviously should support high ages of consent, because it would be impossible to select for the retention of youthful features if you’re selecting people who aren’t actually fully developed.

19 year old boys are attracted to 15 year old girls, and age of consent laws primarily exist to persecute these relationships. I agree that older men are not very attracted to 15 year old girls; this is actually a reason to return to traditionalism, as I laid out above. The study SA cited had a sample of males with mean age 34 years old, and a standard deviation of 12 years. If you consult the graphs above, these men are a small minority of American age of consent prosecutions, which again, indicates that SA is correct for this age group, they have very low revealed preferences for teenaged girls and seem to prefer women over 20 or 21.

Argument 2: “The brain is finished developing at [insert age below 18], so that’s when the age of consent should be!”

What is not mentioned about this argument is that, while the increase in intelligence and judgment from 16 to 20 is insignificant, the increase in intelligence between 12 and 16 is quite dramatic. The average 14 year old is around 0.5 SDs dumber than the average 16 year old, and the average 12 year old is a full SD dumber.

The age of 16 is only an average age at which mental maturity is reached, so it’s likely that some people reach mental maturity later than 16, and some reach it earlier. However, mental maturity should be treated as an unknown variable, because there’s no real way to measure it before it is complete. Because of this, if you believe it is very important to not have sexual relations with people before they are at the peak of their biological intelligence, you should consider raising the age of consent some years above that. This is one of the great flaws in the arguments that AoC skeptics make — they assume that, because the variance is so great in maturation, we should use the lower tail of the variance as the standard for maturity. This is ridiculous and runs contrary to what is normal in safety measures, which is using the upper tail of the variance as the standard for maturity.

First, this is an intelligent use of the data. I think he’s correct about it (he is sourcing it from my chart, after all, so he can’t be right without me having been wrong). However, my gut response relates to what I bolded at the bottom; this is a bad faith criticism unless you are also a radical eugenicist. If the minimum age of marriage in my traditionalism scheme needs to by higher due to 7 points of IQ development, then people under 93 IQ should be totally banned from marrying and reproducing. In theory, if this measure can be shown to be eugenic without serious blow back on the economy, I would support it, and change the minimum age of marriage to a minimum IQ of marriage of 100. Perhaps also with a minimum reproductive development standard.

It’s not just intelligence that determines ability to consent, either. The main reason that people under 16 cannot consent is due to the ways in which we legally restrict U-16s. They cannot drive. They can only work so much. They cannot live on their own. Because of this, there is no possible relationship between a grown adult and a 13, 14, or 15 year old that can be considered on equal footing.

A 19 year old and a 15 year old can bond over their shared lack of alcohol rights in the US. Remember, we’re not talking about a 15 year old and a 45 year old here, that is very rare in practice and not at all representative of what age of consent laws do, which is persecute males aged 15 to 20 for dating teenaged girls that are not more or less exactly their own age. The misconception-stereotype of a massive age gap can be addressed easily with keyhole solutions, such as the 10 year age gap idea I outlined in my trad proposal.

Also, these critiques apply to 14 and 15 year olds, but not 16 or 17 year olds. So you could obviate them in my trad plan by making the minimum age of marriage 16, instead of 14. The raw difference here is very tiny, so I find it not worth thinking about too much — perhaps you could run some natural experiments to see which is more ideal. That is, is the immaturity gap between 14 and 16 much more important than the restriction of young mens’ courting pool? It could be. Maybe 15 or 16 is a better minimum age of marriage, that means the girl is high school aged. You could also lower the driving age slightly if you made the minimum age of marriage 15.

We’re talking about young females here, not males, and their IQs seem to be developed by around 15. But in general I find these critiques basically impotent regarding my trad proposal if you make the minimum age of marriage 15. Courting takes time anyway, and probably wouldn’t be done before 14, so 17 or 18 year old boys could still court a 14 year old and marry with her parent’s permission the next year, if that is what they want.

Secondly, one can accept that quid pro quo is fake and gay, and that power dynamics are necessary goods, in which case relationships with minors are bad because it subverts the authority of the parents.

Under my trad scheme, parents would be expected to know their daughter’s suitor and give their consent, at least until she is 21, which was the historical norm in the US.

Argument 3: “The Age of Consent is modern and doesn’t correspond to history. Large age gaps used to be historically common, and young marriages were normal for women”.

I feel my ideal is consistent with what he writes in here already. He seems to have decades-sized age gaps in mind when he says large, but those were never historically normal. Rather, 3-7 years was historically normal. He discusses some average ages of marriage, but averages are not minimums. Historical minimums were all lower than 14-16; the Catholic Church minimum is modern; before modernity (eg medieval times) the Church minimum was 12 for girls; Anglo common law was the same. So my suggestions here are very modern and high and have female development in mind.

He offers one counter-example:

We know from Caesar and Tacitus that this was also the case for the Germanic tribes during antiquity. According the Caesar, it was considered disgraceful for men and women alike to have lost their virginity before the age of 20. So, in that case even the minimum age was quite high.

On this specifically, if you read Hopkins 1965, he discusses how this was likely untrue; I don’t think it was Caesar who wrote this, but Tacitus, and it was during an exhortation on chastity. So it was one of those cases where ancients made up something mythic to demonstrate a point, it was not true.

Societies with low average marriage ages are usually more dysfunctional. One of the great findings of John Hajnal was that non-Western societies, particularly in the Indo-Islamic and Southeast Asian world, had quite low ages of female marriage. The average was often below 15. Meanwhile, an integral element of the Western European Marriage Pattern was relatively late marriages.

This may be true regarding child marriage, but not teen marriage. Causality is lacking here as well. I propose it runs backwards; poor societies can’t mess around; only the richest one on Earth, which is ruled democratically by a gaggle of simpletons, can afford to have retarded laws on something like marriage (eg persecute many young couples, but legalize adultery, promote divorce, and delay marriage until near infertility).

People ought to be free to delay their own marriages, but not those of others. If delayed marriages are really favorable, then people will evolve to delay marriage. People did not evolve to delay marriage so much, though, so it’s more likely a lot of the persecution of teenaged couples is done out of Hamiltonian spite.

Argument 4: “The Age of Consent is anti-male. It was invented by feminist hags to deny men access to beautiful babes”

There is one environment where it is pretty easy for men to get a girlfriend though, and that’s high school. If the age of consent was lowered, then high schoolers would suddenly have to also compete with older men for these teenage girls, effectively destroying the prospect of young love and ensuring the tyranny of the old over the young.

It’s college students that high school boys would be competing with, not older men. High school boys are usually not fit for marriage and they know it, and girls know it. They should be free to have exactly same aged relationships if they want, but in a free romantic market most relationships will show 3-7 year age gaps.

It’s not even easy to get a girlfriend in high school, because the girls are not attracted to boys, who are developmentally behind. Thus, high school relationships are strained and quid-pro-quo. The boy must offer entertainment and popularity, because he is not even attractive to the girl. If you ever wondered why all the girls around you in high school seemed like lesbians, just try dating an 18 year old when you are 23. She will actually like you for being you! It’s like magic! Never go against nature.

Letting high school boys go to town on captive girls is a great way to ruin a bunch of virgins and get no marriages, which is exactly what happens in American high schools. They prosecute college students if they date high school girls, but let high school boys do what ever they want.

The United States is a soyciety where it’s a felony to date a high school girl if you’re of normal bachelor age (19-22), but yet a majority of high school girls graduate with their hymen missing. They do not marry the same aged boy that they aren’t even attracted to. It’s schizophrenic and depraved.

If you believe in the goodness of young love, you must also believe in the necessity of a high age of consent. This is the only way in which young love can be normal. There is no going back to young love if you are a grown man, and this is obvious if you think about it for a second. What makes being young so great isn’t how the world treats you, it is the way everything feels so incredibly fresh and new. It’s an internal phenomenon. The amount of joy that grown men could extract from a relationship with a teenager does not compare to the amount of joy lost by the teenager whose crush he stole.

He might have 45 year old men in mind, but yes, 20 year old males can feel young love. In fact, they feel it more than 16 year old males.

There is no way that a 14 year old boy could compete with some 20 year old man with a job and a car, even if he would in actuality be more compatible with a girl of his age.

Boy/girl comparison factor is probably 3 years, so a 14 year old boy is like an 11 year old girl, and a 17 year old boy is like a 14 year old girl. There’s no girl for 14 year old boys to date in nature, as they usually don’t want to date little pre-teens. Sorry, I don’t make the rules. And what’s the correlation between age and compatibility anyway? It would seem couples with 3-7 year age gaps are the most compatible, so there you go.

Argument 5: “Women hit the wall after 23/Fertility/whatever”

The wall isn’t real, but if two people want a cornerstone marriage instead of a capstone marriage, that’s their right.

Argument 6: The Age of Consent is Arbitrary, and changes from country to country. Women are already fertile after Menarche!

Female fecundity actually probably peaks at 20. Teenage marriage is more about romance, liberty, fidelity, monogamy, and intimacy, than it is about fertility or maturity. The earlier you get married, the more the marriage is really a life-long promise. Sure you can have some kids after marrying in your 30s, but it’s going to be less romantic, intimate, and monogamous, as the same coupling in the teens. You missed each other’s youth and there were probably other relationships in that time. Note that nobody who is for the status quo even wants chaste teens; they just want a closed-circuit high school fornication culture. It’s nasty. My solution either makes teens get married, or it makes them chaste. Either way you get more monogamous and intimate marriages.

I believe the persistence of low ages of consent in Europe is due to the desire to protect men who unwittingly slept with underage women. The reason American ages of consent developed to be higher is due to the increased reliance on cars in America compared to Europe. The need for a car to get from place to place greatly reduced the ability for young adults to interact with people below 16 in the US, which makes stories of accidental violations of the age of consent much more suspicious. Europeans just walk everywhere, or bike everywhere, or take the train. I could be wrong about this, but if I recall correctly Europeans also had historically lower legal drinking ages. Younger people were able to invade alcoholic spaces, while in America they would be unwelcome.

I think the American age of consents are higher because of religiosity. Age of consent laws were all originally chastity laws that only applied to unmarried girls. Americans were more religious and about the Christian virtue, so they had more serious laws than Europe, where, eg, in Hitler’s Reich the law was 14. The girls could be married under the age of consent and this always excepted them. The laws also did not even cover boys. These laws were inherited by the crazy leftists, who find them useful for persecuting young men now, even though that’s the opposite of their original intent.

Obviously, the law should promote people having long-term, monogamous relationships for the sake of social stability, and emphasizing low ages of consent does the exact opposite. People aren’t getting married to 14 year olds. I don’t care what Isekai fantasy land you have conjured up in your head where you believe this will be the case. Parents no longer need to consider it for the reasons they did in the past, and so they won’t. There is literally zero benefit to marrying your daughter off at 14. I imagine that if such people did get married to a teenager, they wouldn’t even be happy. Teenagers are really quite devilish in their attitudes.

14 would be either the bare minimum or even under the minimum, only suitable for courting by a teenaged boy, in my proposal. That said, all of my relatives except my parents go married as teens. My parents started dating as teens. Both my grandmothers were 16 when they married. So no this is not “Isekai world”. In fact, teen marriage is not even illegal now, it’s just heavily taboo to try it, but the laws as written are actually the chastity laws with a bunch of holes poked in them. I know several people who married between 16 and 19 from my high school. They’re all happy. I also know a guy who got charged with statutory rape for sleeping with a 9th grader at a mixer. He was a high school senior, 19 year old, as he had started school a year late. The girl had snuck in and her parents later complained. She’s where you could predict now.

So in essence, I would like to get rid of all the schizophrenia in the laws, prevent raising the minimum marriage age, discourage premarital sex and encourage traditional romantic norms.

The only thing that would result from lowering the age of consent is a bunch of teenagers getting taken advantage of by men only interested in sex, which provides no fulfillment for anyone involved. You may respond with “okay, but let the punishment fit the crime”, and I can’t say I’m particularly concerned about that. In medieval times, non-violent thieves received the same penalty as murderers if they stole enough stuff, and we’re better off for it today. People need to forget about “punishment”. The prison system exists to cordon problematic people off from the rest of society, not retribution or rehabilitation.

This is cruel, completely out of place if you’re not for more general, Galton style eugenics, and potentially wrong, as a lot of people persecuted by statutory rape laws are sexually successful frat boys. If you’re one of those jock-pilled guys, you think jocks all only date girls exactly their age? No, they are exactly the guys who get caught up in the age of consent laws. You know, white, popular, handsome 20 year old Rugby players that are always invited to the parties. Age of consent laws are abstract to anime rightists because you have to get consensual sex for it to matter at all to oneself personally. Something to think about.

To conclude, I would say my thoughts on age of consent can be decomposed into two dimensions: being against pöbel sadism, and being for the promotion of marriage and traditional values. The age of consent ought not to be a vehicle for pöbel sadism, and it ought to promote marriage and discourage fornication.

I ended up finding an alternative formula, but it yields the same results as Frisell 2012, which per my simulation actually produced a correct formula. Sadly, my formula is less efficient, i.e. it appears to produce noisier estimates. It is also only asymptotically unbiased in number of points per cluster, while theirs is unbiased. For now I’m just putting it up on github here.

Plugging in the data from the Herasight paper for the UK Biobank, I found a Frisell corection of 1.33. It looks like they used about 1.28. Using 1.33 would give .472 instead of .456. The confidence intervals overlap enough that this doesn’t matter.

I’m quite confident their correction factor is not flawed in any practical way.

Here is their about page:

Who are we?

Jack Despain Zhou is the writer behind the newsletter Tracing Woodgrains, known primarily for his coverage of the FAA’s hiring scandal, admin abuse at Wikipedia, and his writing on the education system. He currently attends law school. Previously, he worked as producer for the podcast Blocked and Reported and served as an Airborne Chinese Language Analyst in the United States Air Force. He has been passionate about education reform since childhood. He is on temporary leave from the Center for Educational Progress.

Lillian Tara is a recent graduate of Harvard Graduate School of Education. She worked at several think tanks and managed two nonprofit programs prior to CEP, where she looks forward to bringing a much-needed shift towards excellence in America’s educational culture.

Thomas Briggs is a recent law school graduate from UCLA, a former philosophy grad student, and a stubborn optimist about American education.

Monsieur Despain has written us an article on his education philosophy. TLDR: he supports acceleration and tracking but is timorous when it comes to critiquing the structure of education. By the structure of education, I mean the entire social construct of funding, credentialism, physical institutions, and age discrimination. I am not timorous about these things; consequently, I have said that funding should be slashed, most school should be remote, diplomas should be abolished, high schools should be sold off and shut down, and age discrimination laws should be totally overhauled to support a new mode of life for young people, which is beyond early 20th century socialist-progressive educational ideas.

Maybe I’m just some crazy dreamer. You can hardly convince voting pöbel to not ban basic algebra in middle schools. Being a pragmatist on the frontlines therefore means spending your time trying to convince pöbel to allow 8th graders, and maybe even 7th graders (if you’re feeling especially radical and bold), to study quadratic equations. Doesn’t this feel like an uphill battle for basically no reward though? It’s like fighting an enemy in armor, and you keep swinging at his steel fortifications. You land a lot more hits, but it does little damage. Maybe if you are lucky you will give him a small fracture. My strategy is harder, but it involves aiming at the heart. If I can get between the armor, I 1-hit KO him, and he’ll never bother me again.

I think maybe the Center for Educational Progress doesn’t see the tactical mistake they’re making, because they’re not informed on the background anatomy and theory required to understand the difference between these strategies. They think the opponent is their friend. They think as they swing, he can be convinced to join their side. They think there is no gap in the armor, and also that he’s immortal anyway, and a heart blow won’t destroy him. They think he’s a necessary defender of the people, and that the best they could ever do is make him sore anyway.

All of this is wrong: the education system is outdated and needs to be retired. Completely. Like, in a way Curtis Yarvin would be proud of. And to understand why and what should replace it, you need to be an expert on human intelligence and development, and be pretty well-versed in the modern economy and what it needs. Nobody at the Center satisfies these requirements, which is why their proposals will always be half, or quarter-measures. Or even eight-measures.

Consider the following:

Just a 1 SD 4th grader [115 IQ], a member of the top 15%, is predicted to be able to skip 15/4 = 3.75 grades. This is roughly 8th grade level work in 4th grade. By extension, such students could begin high-school level work at the age of 11, and college-level work by the age of 15.

It is true that a 130 IQ person can easily skip 5 or 6 grades. That’s about 1 in every 50 people in a 100 IQ country. This is something that may shock some people, as it is rarely done, due to the aforementioned structural issues, as well as the whitoid tendency to treat school as a social club. How will my daughter be the prom queen if she’s 10 years old in high school? How will my son be a good football player if he’s 11 years old in high school? How will they have any social life with same-age peers when they are expected to be friends with the people they sit in class with, instead of with people from non-school activities or the non-school community (church, the neighborhood, etc)? Then there’s all the age laws and extra-judicial age discrimination backing up the system. Scholarships are often tied to age. I could have gotten a bachelor’s by the age of 18, 4 years early for America (which is vastly underperforming my IQ, because my parents failed to accelerate me beyond age-graded honors classes when I was under 13, due to the aforementioned Ameritard/whitoid reasoning patterns), but scholarships and acceptances to “good schools” are dependent on age, explicitly or implicitly. I ended up taking a full-ride scholarship tied to a national exam you can only take if you are registered at an official school in the 11th grade. So you can’t do an online high school diploma at home quickly, get it, and then take the test, they have an arbitrary age-grading requirement that means the test takers are almost always 15-17 years old and haven’t started university, unless they plan in advance and get in good with the administration of some registered school. And you’re only allowed to start university a year and a half after the exam, you can’t leave the high school! So everyone will be 17-19 when starting university. The only reason they have this requirement is to put down people who want to skip the bullshit. If you look, this logic is everywhere and going to university early usually means going to a bad one for a lot of money relative to what a 130+ IQ student should be paying (nothing).

Then there’s ageism during university. Structure influenced by decision to stay in school longer. I should have been able to go to university at 14 or before and do whatever I wanted there. Have a driver’s license (just make it a skills + IQ test), party, whatever. 140 IQ 14 year olds don’t need to be held to the same standard as 95 IQ 14 year olds. One is smarter than pöbel adults by leagues and the other is still many IQ points dumber than their high school teachers plus they have very little crystalized knowledge.

Then there’s ageism after university. An Indian girl who was graduating from my high school at the age of 15 wanted to be a physician. A great career for a smart, motivated, Indian woman. I overheard one of our teachers tell her that she should take a gap year, think about getting a master’s degree, etc, definitely don’t graduate from university in 3 years, which would have been easy for her because she already had a lot of credits and so on, because medical school admissions officers hate applicants under the age of 21. Even if they have completed the pre-med requirements with great grades, high MCAT scores, all of that, they often reject them and make them wait, because they think they’re “too immature”! This is retarded on its face because in most countries people study to become medical doctors in undergrad and not in a post-undergrad setting. In other words, they start at 17 or 18. My review of brain science confirmed these guildist nincompoops are wrong, which is not shocking when they are best known for iatrogenesis, guarding their bloated salaries by inducing artificial scarcity of healthcare practitioners through overrequiring licensing and inducing artificial scarcity of said licenses, and reinventing basic integral calculus because they are math illiterate in ways dangerous for their patients.

These issues seriously perturb at least 10% of students. This girl’s IQ was likely in the 120s from knowing her scores and so on. The 1-or-2 year math tracking acceleration with early graduation the Center advocates for was already in place at my high school and really only serves the 60th-75th IQ percentile. What does their math education matter for anyway? None of them go on to do anything quantitative professionally. So it’s almost a completely pointless policy.

And how do you suppose, without structural reforms, you actually serve the top 10%? My high school was really upper cut, as much as it gets outside of NYC and SF magnet schools. They could not find enough talent to teach anything beyond basic calculus. The calculus teacher really tried, and was really good, but she talked about how it was really hard for her. For example, she talked about how she really struggled to grokk basic ODEs, which there is a chapter on in the Stewart book, even after doing it for years. Easiest class I ever took. There’s literally no way I could have studied what I needed in that school if I had been appropriately accelerated. No way at all. You have to have a university with PhD holders teaching or the whole school thing is just pointless, it becomes entirely online. In other words, you’ve got to have little kids at high school, or they just skip it and study that stuff at their elementary/middle school (same thing really, all the buildings are the same), and then they go to a university in their early teens. And you can’t have this without the structural reform I discussed.

And we haven’t even mentioned all of the time wasting they do too. So many fake classes that have nothing to do with reality or higher knowledge. And they’re all “required”. To deal with this you’ve got to destroy command economy diplomas where the State orders up so many graduates per year in X, Y, and Z classes designed by the pöbel politburo in Washington and the state capitol, and then the government workers produce those graduates for the State on the assembly line. The only alternative is an educational market economy where students and their families determine individually what they think is important to study this year. But really implementing this destroys the whole school system because it implies early university access, infinite acceleration possibilities, and completely decimates any rationale behind physical high schools and so on, where probably 80 or 90% of courses will immediately lose all demand.

All of this is to say that I support the Center for Educational Progress in theory, but their measures are not likely to really lead to any improvement. I haven’t seen anything fully backwards come out of them though, which is a huge improvement over other education groups, who mainly exist to promote “equality” and raise teacher salaries. The one thing I might disagree with is I have seen some of them say here and there that their approach is okay, because smarter students should “learn more” but spend the same amount of time in school. This is both dysgenic and economically misguided. Future scholars should learn more; Future professionals should learn about the same in school, and start work quicker. That way the smarter marry younger and have more kids. Not every 130+ IQ person should be a professor. Most smart people stop at the bachelor’s level or after a very particular professional degree for a reason. It’s all they want and all they need. Smart people who want to code should get their CS diploma at the age of 16. Smart people who want to do finance should get their math & finance diploma at the age of 16. Smart people who want to be a veterinarian should finish veterinarian school at the age of 20, or even before. Then they should marry young, by 21, before dumber people are even done with college, if they go. That way, the smarter have bigger families and the dumber have smaller families. Future professors can indeed stay in school longer, forever even, which is in fact what professors do. Although they should be getting paid for it by 18 if they are really smart.

One final note is that I did reach out to Monsieur Despain some months ago on X to discuss these ideas, and he completely blew me off. Maybe he’s just busy with law school (which he would have completed at 20 if I had my system), but it didn’t give off the vibe that these guys are open to learning something new from someone who has areas of expertise which are relevant and which they don’t possess. Maybe that’s not the case, but even without that interaction my prior was 95% it would be like that, since it’s human nature, especially among rationalist adjacent types. Rationalists want to be smart, and nice, and people who really put themselves out there want to gain status. Well, if my ideas are unpopular, because they seem to be mean to the bottom 70% of people, then they’re bad for being nice and gaining broad status. If they’re based on advanced expertise that rationalists usually lack, they also make them feel dumb. So they’re just complete kryptonite, on top of institutional status seekers mostly not being interested in ideas to begin with. It’s sad.

I analyzed the ethnicity of the recipients as well as the project types in this spreadsheet here. As you can see in the pie chart above, the English are really punching above their weight. Where are all the Germans? Basically all of these English people were in the UK and the USA, which houses about 200 million Anglos collectively. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland collectively have about 95 million German speakers. If you throw in French speakers in the low countries, Switzerland, and France, you get 170 million French or German speaking Hajnaloids.

So these people got wrecked even though only 20% of the prizes went to legacy Americans. Maybe it would pay for them to invest in better internet infrastructure (ich schaue die Deutschen an) and English speaking skills (je regarde les Français). Or maybe the English are uniquely smart. Or maybe they’re uniquely terrible.

There would have been no fair-skinned bantu-maxxers in this funding round if it weren’t for Angloids!

In contrast, Jews are really concerned with reducing infection. Maybe their increased neuroticism?

When Jews colonize a place, they actually get rid of the locals. When Angloids colonize a place, they create more locals, then get pushed out, then say sorry, then import hundreds of millions of locals into their own countries! Angloids are epic bantumaxxers.

Anyway, enough on ethnicity. Here’s what’s being funded. I’d say at least 35% of the projects are a waste of time. That is, bantumaxxing, veganism, and alignment. Let me explain why.

The donations to bantumaxxing and veganism are motivated by a naive utlitarianism. It goes something like this: there are feel good qualia, and there are bad feel qualia. Even some of the very lowest of animals have qualia. Qualia apparently stops around shrimp because we got a shrimp welfare project, but at the same time there’s a screw-worm genocide project. So I guess screw-worms don’t have bad-feel, or they don’t matter because they’re hecking bad.

The hypocritical, vibes-based way in which badfeel and goodfeel is ranked and evaluated in different species aside, this moral system is deeply unwise. There’s a basic moral lesson taught to children by the Bible, Greek fables, and so on, that delayed gratification is good. Scott Alexander’s utilitarianism is a fancy, altruistic looking failure of the marshmallow test. It rejects a basic moral axiom of higher man, that goodfeel is not good and badfeel is not bad. Goodfeel and badfeel are a morality compass for criminals and other low types of men, little children, and animals. Higher men are beyond pleasure and pain.

Rather, good things include beauty, strength, virtue, and God. Not all populations of replicators possess these things in equal abundance. What’s more beautiful and virtuous, a world where we promote the reproduction of people with the highest civic worth and help subsaharan Africa maintain their population at something like 10 million bantus total, or a world where we ignore the reproduction of high civic worth people and create 2 billion subsaharan Africans? Obviously the former is better, but Scott Alexander funds the latter.

The same goes to veganism. Even Hitler was sympathetic to animal welfare. But would he have sacrificed his Reich for it? No. Veganism is currently a opportunity cost which distracts from eugenics. The horrors of factory farms are primarily driven by maximizing low quality human life. There are way too many low IQ people who basically just eat, work, shit, fuck, sleep, and repeat. They all want to eat factory farmed torture food because they have no empathy. Their cognitive skills are not refined enough to have the level of empathy Scott Alexander knows to be beautiful. If you fund eugenics, the veganism issue will solve itself. First the impetus for factory farming will disappear. Then the new geniuses of the Earth will invent new vegan food production methods, like lab-grown meat that is better than natural grassfed meat.

Now for alignment, this is less of an ethical issue and more of a reality check issue. Scott Alexander’s views on AI are delusional. That’s probably why he wasted over $160,000 on alignment. It could have been worse. It probably should have been worse. Maybe his priors are updating in a more realistic direction. He only threw $5k at a really delulu project, one about feeding an LLM stories to prevent a grey goo apocalypse (lol). The rest were more down to Earth political schemes. One was trying to make sure GPT 7 won’t have normal academic researcher biases (these are leftist, so if they’re good at this it means they’ll make an auto-research with no anti-hereditarian bias, which is good). A couple were about influencing governments to take action on alignment. I still think these are pretty silly. It looks to me like the rate of LLM improvement is diminishing rather rapidly. GPT 5 was a major let-down compared to what Bay Area AI Messiah people were predicting. It basically proved their faith in AI is fake.

If you were born in 1950, you basically grow old watching the first computers turn into HD streaming machines and become integrated into almost all facets of life. But it really did take 75 years. I think with AI we’re going to see major shake-ups in entertainment, education, remote medicine, and some white-collar jobs over the course of the next 25 years. We’ll also probably get self-driving cars within this time. I actually don’t think we’ll see it do much original research during this time. In the 25 years after that, maybe it will start to be able to do some types of iterative research autonomously with minimum error. By that time, I’ll be an old man. I doubt it will extend my life much.

So what kind of future do we want for ourselves? Underwhelming AI? Maybe around my expected death date it will finally start to produce a little bit of research humans can’t understand? Is that good or bad? Shouldn’t we try to keep up with AI? If we do eugenics alongside AI, we’ll accelerate the rate of AI development while minimizing its ability to outpace human intelligence.

Right now they’re trying to align a plagiarism machine with an underlying IQ of an ant. Waste of time, you could be advocating for increasing the mean IQ this generation by 20 points, if only you were brave enough.

The rest of the categories are potentially weakly eugenic. Meta-science is probably the best. After that I’m partial to work on infection, although I don’t know what that will do to selection pressures on immune systems and against mutations. It could be dysgenic, although a lot of infections humans have now are just annoying but kill almost no one. Pollution, space, and bioweapons are good, I suppose, because a ruined Earth with no humans on it can’t be very eugenic. Forecasting seems silly but it might be money for above-average IQ people.

The education category isn’t terrible, it’s money for acceleration. This could be in favor of eugenics depending on how it’s done. I’m planning on writing an article on this soon, so subscribe if you don’t want to miss it: