Whyvert
38.6K posts
Whyvert
@whyvert
Inquisitive and harmless wyvern. Interested in human nature and patterns of history. Otherwise known as Paul Cossins.
Canada Katılım Haziran 2014
1.4K Takip Edilen33.9K Takipçiler
It is not widely-known that, in early life, Ezra Pound had a life-changing accident involving a beaver.
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@d_foubert Building it required a huge number of barrels of gunpowder to blast through the rock
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France 🇫🇷 was pissed off at Spain 🇪🇸 and the stupid Habsburgs, so it took matters into its own hands and made its own Gibraltar.
The Canal du Midi, built in the 1660s–1680s, pushed the frontier of civil engineering—locks, aqueducts, and, crucially, a complex water-supply system (reservoirs like Saint-Ferréol) to keep a summit canal fed.
Economically, it never quite justified its cost. Tolls were high, traffic seasonal, and by the 19th century railways undercut it decisively. The canal solved a strategic problem that did not translate into sustained commercial dominance.
But as statecraft, it is hard to dispute. The same administrative machine that built fortresses and armies also built infrastructure at continental scale—planning, financing, and executing across decades.
The Canal du Midi is less a profit story than a demonstration of French capacity to reshape geography to serve policy.
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Whyvert retweetledi
Using public data on first names, one can figure out how fast the population replacement is happening in France despite the ban on informative statistics. Selected results.
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@marcportermagee Is she now out of academia? If so, would you say the mechanism for filtering out the wrong people may have worked in this one case?
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A few years later she was denied tenure at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
chronicle.com/article/alice-…
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Over the past decade, there has been a big push to clean up the social sciences by insisting on transparency.
This story, from 2015, really sticks in my mind.
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Whyvert retweetledi
@prestoninperson @FoxfordComics Yes, although New Zealand wasn't that good for their tropical crops
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@whyvert @FoxfordComics the answer is that most polynesian crops don’t grow well in most of australia, and that would make it very difficult for the polynesians to stake out a successful stable settlement in a foreign land already populated by well-adapted natives. maybe it would’ve happened eventually
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Always hilarious to me that China and India didn't even know this massive continent in their backyard. And then some English dude from the other side of the world just came along and yoinked it.
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@_alice_evans It should become feasible to train an LLM on the original ethnographies and thus avoid these problems with the later secondary coding.
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The Standard Cross Cultural Sample - a major data source for many academic papers - gives the Ashanti the maximum score for "female power".
But if you actually read the primary sources, you realise that this society could actually be very coercive.
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@KayTiKal @BrankoMilan That is a worthy and realistic goal. Completely agree.
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@whyvert @BrankoMilan Officially ~40 African countries with GDP per capita (ppp) higher than Haiti. Even after removing the likes of Seychelles and Oil exporters there are so many doing better. Understanding why and what can be done about it could improve the lives of millions. Thanks.
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An excellent post by Carl-Henri Prophete
(Haiti should be one of the most interesting countries to study: its decline from relative prosperity, early independence, and high land ownership to poverty and export of labor is a great study case in what went wrong.)
My Totally Accurate Model of What Happened to Haiti
substack.com/home/post/p-19…
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Whyvert retweetledi
@KayTiKal @BrankoMilan National IQ predicts Haiti would do a bit than better than Africa when it had a higher IQ mulatto elite. It did.
National IQ predicts Haiti's severe brain drain (partly due to Papa Doc's noirisme) would cause it to do about the same as Africa now. It does.
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The IQ explanations say nothing about why Haiti is doing worse than Benin or why there wasn't a big income gap between Haiti and many countries in the region until early 20th century. Also, foreign aid to Haiti has steadily declined since 2014. But I do appreciate the calm, measured tone with which you explain how 12 million people are living on handouts and crime.
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@profmarkcollard Well, what about this?
x.com/i/status/11937…
Whyvert@whyvert
This archaeologist is unhappy with archaeogenetics and its discoveries about the Yamnaya/Aryans -"throwback" "essentialist" "problematic" -not "critical and nuanced" -"an appealingly simple narrative of a past shaped by virile young men going out to conquer" 😱😱
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"Some of our archaeologist co-authors were just really distressed."
I'm pretty skeptical about this claim. Seems like hype to me. I've had a lot of conversations with fellow archaeologists since the aDNA 'revolution. I've also sat through innumerable archaeological talks over the same time period. And 'distressed' is not a word I'd use to describe the archaeological community's reactions to the findings of aDNA research. Mostly, the responses have been along the lines of "that's really cool." The negative reactions have mainly focused on aDNA researchers lack of familiarity with debates in archaeology. Oh, and, ironically, the hyping of findings.
Dwarkesh Patel@dwarkesh_sp
David Reich on how much ancient DNA evidence has overturned so much consensus thinking how ancient cultures spread. "It wasn't peaceful, it wasn't friendly, it wasn't nice. Some of our archaeologist co-authors were just really distressed."
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Whyvert retweetledi
To the extent development economics even needs to exist as a field, it should be concerned above all else with "how do we exterminate the Communists and adjacent groups."
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@JGPN877 @FoxfordComics I will venture to say the total area of inhabitable land in Australia is much larger that that in all the islands the Polynesians settled
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@whyvert @FoxfordComics What's weird about it? The islands were more inhabitable.
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In our work on Malthusian Migrations @RWacziarg we have a counterfactual with *half a billion* Frenchmen on earth today. Not precisely estimated, biased, etc. But that’s the order of magnitude.
Jesus is right. It is possible to ask, and try to answer, the big questions.
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde@JesusFerna7026
A fundamental lesson from my posts these last two weeks on modernization, industrial policy, and development is that development economics should be about understanding why South Korea got rich but Bolivia did not. The current field has largely given up on that question. Sharply identified RCTs on small micro programs are a fine way to publish in the AER and get tenure at a fancy university, but a profession that knows everything about microfinance impact evaluations and almost nothing about industrialization has misallocated its own intellectual capital on a pretty heroic scale. Four images of Seoul:
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@Fullantho @arctotherium42 Yes, though fewer Catholic Italians and Germans would go to LATAM and instead go to the French Mediterranean
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@arctotherium42 @whyvert I think many of them would have ended up in Latin America
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Visions of BasedWorld. Algeria, and probably chunks of Southern Africa would be French in this case. Probably not the Americas though, since France lost Quebec before the demographic transition anyways, and I don't think this would change the outcome of Napoleonic naval wars.
Guillaume Blanc@gguillaumeblanc
In our work on Malthusian Migrations @RWacziarg we have a counterfactual with *half a billion* Frenchmen on earth today. Not precisely estimated, biased, etc. But that’s the order of magnitude. Jesus is right. It is possible to ask, and try to answer, the big questions.
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@whyvert French Southern Mediterranean (probably with nontrivial leavening from Spaniards/Italians, as historically) would solve a lot of problems today... truly a new Roman Empire.
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@arctotherium42 Quite possible they colonize the coastal Levant too. Lebanon, Palestine, Gaza.
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Now that I think about it, there would probably be significant French colonies in Russia too; the Russian state actively courted and got Western European immigration and this would be strengthened by a Franco-Russian entente if it happened.
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Transgender Homicides in Britain, 2000-2025: Victims and Perpetrators.
Homicide is rare. Only about a dozen trans victims and a dozen perps over 25 years.
Seems like the media made a huge noise over one victim and largely ignored other victims and all perps. Typical.
Ray Blanchard@BlanchardPhD
Transgender Homicides in Britain, 2000-2025: Victims and Perpetrators Biggs, Michael and North, Ace, Transgender Homicides in Britain, 2000-2025: Victims and Perpetrators (April 03, 2026).
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@gguillaumeblanc @RWacziarg Algeria probably becomes and stays French
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