Coleman Hughes

Today is the day! My first book, "The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America," is now out in fine bookstores everywhere! The Audiobook is read by yours truly! penguinrandomhouse.com/books/671726/t…

Chess is a really atypical profession. When we watch chess, we don't just care about the objective quality of the moves: we care about them having been decided by a human. By contrast, when we hire a doctor or an accountant we typically just care about the output.

The inequality causes crime narrative is activist science. 43 studies. 1,341 estimates. Half the data never published. Corrected effect: near zero. Inequality doesn’t drive crime.

A famous study found that Black babies have higher survival rates if attended by Black than White doctors. But a re-analysis of the data shows the effect disappears after accounting for the fact that low birth weight babies more often see White doctors. [Link below.]

Modern slavery still exists—particularly in Mali and Mauritania—where it is officially illegal but continues in practice. Historian @JustinMarozzi says estimates of the number of enslaved people ranges from the thousands to possibly as many as a million. But the true figure may never be known, and the governments of these countries “would prefer it be kept that way.”

Sure, it's possible Tucker was spied on by the CIA and referred for some sort of criminal prosecution, in some sort of elaborate double-agent plot. It's also possible that he's not accurately perceiving reality, since he also claims demons are attacking him and Pizzagate is real

The Forgotten History of Slavery in the Islamic World | Conversations with Coleman @coldxman Boeiend gesprek met Justin Marozzi youtu.be/FhKoDtkWr0E?si…

50% of all relationship advice on Reddit is “leave.” 15 years of data, 52 million comments, and the trend line only goes one direction. A researcher filtered r/relationship_advice down to 1,166,592 quality comments and tracked what people actually recommend. In 2010, “End Relationship” sat around 30%. By 2025, it’s approaching 50%. “Communicate” dropped from 22% to 14%. “Compromise” collapsed from 7% to 3%. “Give Space” fell from 25% to 13%. Every category that requires patience lost ground every single year. The one category growing faster than “leave” is “Seek Therapy,” which went from 1% to 6%. The subreddit is slowly learning to say “this is above my pay grade.” Train a model on this dataset and it would absolutely tell people to break up. The training data is 50% “leave” and climbing. The model wouldn’t be broken. It would be accurately reflecting what 52 million commenters actually believe about your relationship. A 50% prior that you should leave, a 14% prior that you should talk about it, and a 6% prior that you need a professional. That’s not LLM psychosis. That’s the median human opinion on your relationship, backed by the largest advice dataset ever assembled.

“Great game, great player, great career, but everybody who watched that game knows that the end of that game wasn’t really basketball.” @DannyParkins reacts to Bam scoring 83 points in win vs. Wizards:

Well well how the turns have tabled

Ex-Trump National Security Advisor Nadia Schadlow: “Congress does not have a constitutional role in the declaration of war.” @ezraklein: *READS HER THE CONSTITUTION* 🤔

CALIFORNIA HOSPICE FRAUD: There's a stretch in Los Angeles with 500 registered hospice companies within just three miles of each other. And 89 in a single building. But when we visited, we found empty offices, piled-up mail, and phone lines dead. Watch CBS News' exclusive investigation into the fraud that's costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. #losangeles #la

Though LLMs often hallucinate blends of plausible snippets, they don't generally don't ratify conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, scurrilous rumors, and other staples of social media, but generally push toward rational and objective conclusions, and even change minds in positive directions. Dan Williams suggests that's because the corporate incentives are different - useful, reality-based intelligence vs virality and engagement - and because their polite sycophancy doesn't turn users off unwelcome truths. | How AI Will Reshape Public Opinion open.substack.com/pub/conspicuou…

The @FDD's @mdubowitz: Waiting until Iran is on the verge of a nuclear weapon before acting militarily would have been “foolish.” “The idea that we are going to wait until the Iranians are on the one-yard line before stopping them from going into the end zone means you have an enormous faith in the ability of any intelligence community to detect the exact time that Iran will break out. We obviously would never take that kind of risk because if you get it wrong, Iran has nuclear weapons, and then it’s game over.”

“Israel has given America an historic opportunity to confront the Islamic Republic of Iran which has been at war with America — and killed and maimed thousands of Americans.” “We should send Israel a thank you note. Happy to translate it into Hebrew.” My chat with @coldxman

These headlines are astonishing. And it's worth asking why nothing like this emerged in 1990 or 1993 or 1996 or 2000 or 2005 or 2006? The answers tell us a lot about what's wrong with the way international community's approach to Arab-Israeli diplomacy is so fatally flawed. 1/8

Yuval Levin: “The experience of working in government actually made me less cynical about politics and less prone to believe in conspiracy theories, because what you realize when you work in government is that it's just human beings all the way down. Conspiracies are just implausible.” “It can't be that, hundreds of people in the upper reaches of the government would keep this terrible secret and have this six step plan in which the American public is just a stooge. Nobody could manage that. These people don't know what they're doing tomorrow, and they don't know how to deal with the stresses they're facing right now.”

The arguments about Iran are so polarised that no one wants to admit that several things are true at once: You'd be a fool not to have serious reservations about the idea of a regime change war, especially in the Middle East. You'd also be a fool to allow terrorist-funding lunatics to develop nuclear weapons. Neither the people condemning these strikes, nor the people cheering them on know how this is going to work out. So far, Trump Administration interventions have been extraordinarily successful in achieving valid objectives within a highly limited scope. The strikes on Iran during the 12 day war achieved destruction of several nuclear facilities. The Venezuela operation decapitated the hostile regime and replaced Maduro with a non-hostile leader. Both also achieved significant "don't fuck with us" deterrence globally. However, it is not remotely clear at this moment in time whether something similar can be achieved in Iran. I understand and fully empathise with the people who think regime change is not going to work in Iran and you'll end up with the same as what you had or worse. And I understand just as much the people who celebrate an evil dictator being killed and Iran's nuclear and military assets being degraded further. The thing we do not know, and the thing that will determine whether this has all been worth it, is what the future leadership of Iran will look like. This seems to me to be the biggest risk Donald Trump has taken at any time in his first or second term. If it pays off, the reward both domestically and globally will be huge. If it doesn't and things go south, it could derail his Presidency and define his legacy like Iraq did for Blair and Bush. Very few people have any idea which of these scenarios is more likely and one thing is for sure: none of them are talking about it on social media because they're all sitting in command bunkers, not on X. I hope the people of Iran are released from living under tyranny. I hope the peoples of the Middle East can live in peace. I hope the takeaway for any would-be terrorist is the realisation that October 7 might not have been such a good idea. I hope that with the Middle East stabilised, the US can turn its attentions to the theatres that really matters to the security of the West: Russia and China. Whether any of that happens remains to be seen and it seems the hardest thing for anyone to do is to not express an opinion before the smoke has cleared.

It’s cool that Salman Rushdie has outlived 2 Ayatollahs.

Recruiting talented officers has been a struggle for police departments following Defund the Police and BLM in 2020—a reality that makes our cities far less safe. Economist @JenniferDoleac: There is “lots and lots of evidence” that increased police presence curbs crime rates. “Hiring more police officers, just on average, reduces crime. Especially violent crime.”