Alex

The Chinese Communist Revolution consolidated its power by taking land from the elite. In the following generation, the previous elite once again reclaimed their social advantage. This is not an isolated phenomenon: A Thread on the persistence of status 🧵

Zooming in on post-2000 shows a similar trend, but with administrators seeing the most growth.

Schools have become “thicker” institutions. Enrollment growth has been outpaced by teachers and support staff, and far outpaced by principals and aides.

Clearly, they are very useful for many, though it's more the boost to your motivation/work persistence that makes them effective, just see Erdös!

The reality of nutropics: -They are not general; you won't see broad cognitive improvement. -There are real effects in some domains with meaningful effect sizes. -Still, these are not massive effect sizes

@SashaGusevPosts @AraucariaArauc1 @Midwest_expat Thanks for walking back your claim, though in general I think quote-tweeting eagerness is fine; it made particularly little sense here.

@AraucariaArauc1 @Midwest_expat @notcomplex_ My point is that many people (including smart people) believe that common polygenic traits can be permanently eliminated from the population with just a few generations of selection -- and this belief is grossly incorrect.

Incredible, a geneticist is claiming that traits cannot be bred out, but it's been done! See here how in one strain they bred in High Oil Content in the kernels then managed to reverse the selection and breed it out.

They also didn't agree on their answers, even if they got them wrong; in other words, there doesn't seem to be much of a process here. clearerthinking.org/post/can-astro…

152 astrologers were given a multiple-choice test of their abilities; over half thought that they would get most questions right, and a quarter thought they would get 75% or better. Instead, they performed indistinguishably from guessing.

In the classroom, IQ is correlated with disruptiveness, and boys are more disruptive than girls; so, high-IQ boys are about as disruptive as average girls.

Reminder that environmentalism barely exists outside the West. Not only are these countries responsible for nearly all of the world's plastic pollution, but in the poorest countries, more than half of all plastic waste becomes pollution.

This is from the The Illinois Long-Term Selection Experiment, a well known study: biointeractive.org/sites/default/…

Lifetime Incarceration Rates have gone down a good amount, though it's still especially high for Black men. The percentage of them imprisoned by age 20 is just shy of the lifetime rate for White men.

@Ben_Alfred_ To what degree do these items of concern affect the main results?

I’m glad you brought this to my attention: what I thought to be the most thorough meta-analysis on how intelligence relates to personality in fact borders on academic dishonesty. The associations are either buoyed up or entirely driven by a single dataset: the PTLS.

Overall intelligence is mostly associated with good things or neutral things—the reverse is rare. Source: doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2…

A few other interesting associations with general mental ability are: -Routine seeking (r= -0.13) -Machiavellianism (r = 0.01) -Self-control (r = 0.01) -Rugged individualism (r = 0.11) -Interpersonal sensitivity (r =.20) -Locus of control (r = 0.23) -Self-esteem (r=0.25)

This is the most detailed study on personality and intelligence ever done: First, the Big Five: Neuroticism is robustly associated with lower intelligence, particularly processing speed and quantitative ability.

Better neurons make people smarter. Specifically, it is the length and complexity of the dendrites that have the strongest associations.

It's astonishing how much a Private Attorney can matter: For drunk drivers just above the legal limit, they get cases dismissed about 3x as often; for higher blood alcohol, it is still substantial.