Timothy Bates
10.4K posts
@timothycbates
Researching intelligence, conscientiousness, moral foundations & human attainment. Lots of individual differences & genetics
Gold is crashing. Silver is crashing. Stocks are crashing. Crude Oil is rising. So where is the money flowing? I have the answer to that: -> Cows. The cattle index has outperformed the broader market. Silicon Valley and Peter Thiel have poured billions into cow-related startups. Markets are rotating to Cows as the biggest hedge against uncertainty. Because while you don't know how Trump will react to new situations? You know how cows do: They say Moo and Eat Grass. Markets might be telling us, that Cows are the greatest hedge against uncertainty.
It’s 2am again, my favourite time, and as always reality is still staring me in the face 🧐
This is a man who has been haunted since childhood and built a billion dollar company as a side effect of trying to make the haunting stop.
Sequoia's @carl_eschenbach on the founder traits that matter most when scaling a company: "One of the things I absolutely look for is self-awareness in founders, and are they honest about what they’re good at? Because a lot of these founders are just incredibly intelligent human beings, and sometimes they think they can do everything. Do they have the self-awareness to say, 'I need to go get other people as part of the company to help me scale so I can focus on what I’m really good at?'" "There are attributes and characteristics of people that I look for that are way beyond the intelligence side of the equation. You can’t teach grit. You can’t teach drive. You can’t teach a great attitude. You can’t teach determination." "All of those are things that are innate and part of people, and you want to see that in these founders. When you find someone who has that passion, drive, desire, and relentless ability to fight through challenges, issues, and opportunities — and then they have the intellectual horsepower on the other side — when that comes together, that’s a beautiful thing."
Pierre Thiriar—a Justice on the Court of Appeal in Antwerp—wants me in handcuffs "When he states that genetic variants influencing intelligence may be unevenly distributed across populations and that this can explain differences in cognitive performance, this constitutes not merely a neutral hypothesis, but the empirical basis for a hierarchical view of human nature....the boundaries of Article 21 have been manifestly crossed." "Belgian case law has made it clear that packaging a discourse as 'scientific', 'philosophical', or 'critical' does not prevent it from being punishable when it objectively incites discrimination or propagates ideas of racial superiority."
Having high standards in a field doesn't *feel* like having high standards. It feels like everyone else has bafflingly low standards and almost no one is even trying.
Robert Trivers' family has confirmed the death at age 83 of the great Darwinian theorist, which was first reported Saturday evening by Steve Stewart-Williams.
A few years ago I recorded an episode of my podcast Forbidden Territory for @UGent (in Dutch) about the heritability of IQ. We also touched on the third rail of racial differences. Why? Because I believe academics should be free to investigate even the most “dangerous ideas.” My guest, Han van der Maas (a renowned IQ researcher at the University of Amsterdam), explained that individual IQ differences are highly heritable, but that he does not believe in differences between racial groups. His statistical and methodological arguments (e.g. Simpson paradox) convinced me at the time. Still, he hedged his bets: it remains possible that future evidence might show racial differences. And researchers should be free to investigate that hypothesis. Forty-five colleagues from my former philosophy department apparently think otherwise. They are urging the rector to fire @nathancofnas because he claims that the IQ gap between racial groups (such as whites and blacks in the US — differences that are themselves not disputed) may have partly genetic causes, rather than purely social ones like marginalization or discrimination. They label this “pseudoscience and racism.” I understand why many people are shocked by Cofnas’s claims. But this clearly falls within the scope of academic freedom. For years, the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan was taught and researched at my department — a complete pseudoscience. Dozens of theses and PhDs were written about it, all scientifically worthless. No one batted an eye. Unlike my colleagues, I published several papers explaining why (Lacanian) psychoanalysis is pseudoscientific (drive.google.com/file/d/0B_K-qt…). Yet I never demanded that my colleagues be fired. None of the signatories have any peer-reviewed publications on IQ or genetics. I have a letter recommending Cofnas' work on IQ from the editor-in-chief of the prestigious journal Intelligence. Even if the hypothesis of racial IQ differences could be shown to belong to the realm of pseudoscience, that still would not justify dismissal. If @UGent caves in to this demand, it will be another blow to academic freedom at my alma mater — following the new rector’s illiberal statements suggesting that researchers questioning the safety of vaccines or the Gaza “genocide” are “crossing a line that must not be crossed.” Such calls for dismissal from people without any expertise are also strategically unwise, as they only fuel “red-pilling.” When academics appear determined to suppress a dangerous idea at all costs, people understandably get suspicious: "What are they trying to hide?" And so trust in academia erodes further. youtube.com/watch?v=YHhbWm…
This is wild. theaustralian.com.au/business/techn…
