Neil 🇬🇧

@AlexGodofsky People are worried about Chinese billionaire children securing citizenship this way. Wouldn't it be beneficial to America to add billionaires to the population?

Re: birth tourism: these are parents sufficiently conscientious that they go to great inconvenience to secure an advantage for their unborn child 18 years in the future. This sort of low-discount-rate parent is likely to produce a child who is a large net positive for America.

@romanhelmetguy @theHirad @pegobry_en The US is able to vassalize these countries without an occupying military because it allows them to have the illusion they aren't vassals. They impose a tax on them via the dollars reserve status and US universities being the destination for many elites.

@theHirad @pegobry_en If you were our vassal and that was our strategy we would’ve just made you use the US dollar internally. Instead you created the euro. Do you understand the problem with your reasoning?

Europe is a vassal of the American Empire. Sure we don’t tax it or levy troops from it. Sure it imports more from China than from us. Sure it created its own currency to bypass ours. Sure it won’t let our military use its airspace. But Europe is a vassal of the American Empire.

@elonmusk What about the electoral college?

Yes, the “silent” filibuster is an outright corruption of democracy, a denial of the will of a supermajority of the people

@sporadica The US has three options 1.) Leverage it's soft power to form anti China US lead coalition 2.) Cripple China before it surpasses the US 3.) Rapidly grow its own population

@sporadica This is why it's so important the US doesn't isolate its European allies. In the not too distant future China will fully Industrialize its rural provinces and have 3x the US population. They will make 3x the planes and have 3x the soldiers.

funny thing is, having studied IR, there’s a whole IR doctrine called ‘realism’ that is just this but for some reason in the last 30 years, IR professors and scholars everywhere have been trying EVERYTHING they can to come up with alternative theories but it’ll always just be this

@apralky League is probably the most difficult competitive multiplayer getting to a high rank is genuinely impressive imo

SBF’s League of Legends thing is actually pretty interesting. We know that Sam played a lot of the game. Here’s a screenshot from 2021 showing ~800 games in a single season (one year), which is a lot, anecdotally speaking. Each game lasts about 45 minutes, so that’s roughly 2 hours a day, every day, for a year. Sam also used to tweet frequently about the game (including about how much he played). Despite this, as you might be aware, he had an abysmally low ranking -- around mid-Bronze at the time. His username was known, so there’s not much uncertainty around this. Mid-Bronze corresponds to being lower than about 75% of all ranked players (probably charitable) -- which includes many casuals, as well as plenty of children who play the game. It used to take, if I recall correctly, roughly 10 games to get ranked in a season. Sam had nearly a thousand. So we know that Sam played a lot and seemed to care about getting better (direct quote: “I know I've said its name enough to imply I'm good at it, but I'm really not. It's actually embarrassing how little I've grown at it”.), but still fluctuated around the 25th percentile. This is fairly surprising to me, because League is decently g-loaded, and all of his other credentials imply he has meaningfully high general intelligence (Jane Street, MIT physics/math, 99.5th percentile as a reasonable base case for consensus?) If you’ve played the game, or MOBAs in general, you can probably tell that it’s decently g-loaded. The one peer-reviewed study that exists on this finds about a ~0.44 correlation between experienced League of Legends Elo and fluid intelligence (think matrix-based IQ tests). Here are some comparables so you can intuit whether that’s meaningful: > SAT ~0.82 > High school grades ~0.54 > Educational-context math achievement ~0.41 > Youth chess ~0.32 > Unranked chess ~0.32 > Ranked chess ~0.14 > Adult chess ~0.11 These numbers aren’t strictly comparable (different samples/corrections etc.), but they’re OK for intuition. So intelligence is roughly as predictive of League rank as of classroom math achievement, and quite a bit more than in any mainstream chess sample. Now, this is just one study with a sample of 56, and we’re doing serious hand-waving, so maybe that estimate is a bit off, but let’s assume for now that it’s broadly right (it doesn’t *sound* very wrong). What are the odds that someone with ~99.5th percentile fluid intelligence ends up at the 25th percentile in a game 0.44 correlated with fluid intelligence? With some naive assumptions -- roughly 2%. In that case, we should plausibly be able to find a non–cognitive-capacity source of the large residual, but I can’t really think of anything obvious. I think he played on the Japanese server, which would mean he’d have higher latency than normal, but I’ve played on comparable latencies and seen many do the same -- it usually doesn’t meaningfully move rank away from the normal counterfactual. Set aside some of the statistics for a second and move away from precision -- given all the uncertainty -- and think of a hypothetical with comparable but more intuitive tasks with similar loadings. Imagine a future MIT/JS guy who perpetually ranks at the 25th percentile in his average high school math class despite putting in effort, or one who spends hundreds of hours a year on chess and still ranks in the bottom 25 percent of a cohort (which should be less surprising given the meaningfully lower loadings). How surprised would you be? Actually, very? Maybe he had really bad motor skills? That seems unlikely for a trader, I’ve gotten tested on motor skills before in interviews. He seemed to consistently play only a few champions (characters), a lot of people underperform because they jump around too much, so that doesn’t explain it either. Some emotional/personality extremes, issues with frustration, etc.? Probably the most plausible ex post. But it would have to have been pretty bad -- the guy is bad at chess because he’s too emotional? That’s pretty bad. Something still feels off, and I assume we’re probably overweighing his g -- paired with tiger parent pedigree (2 Stanford Law profs, elite prep school) inflating the other meritocracy signals, this is probably a fair update.

@TheeDrGroyper This post highlights the beauty of assimilating foreign influences only to land up praising a flag that literally says "Beware of foreign influence'

The beauty about Catholicism is that it has always embraced what “isn’t” Christian/Catholic and made it Christian: -The Christmas Tree (originally pagan) -Mistletoe (pagan) -Wedding rings (pagan) -Bridal veils (pegan) -Incense (pagan) -Priestly Vestments (pagan) -Caroling (pagan) -Days of the week (pagan) -Months of the year (pagan) -Saying “bless you” (originally pagan, until Pope Gregory I adopted it into Christianity) And so many more. People seething over this flag are ngmi

@rickspanglish @isaiah_bb You won't believe the lyrics of the song they are listening to

@isaiah_bb Hmm maybe they aren’t actual Nazis… crazy i know

It sounds crazy, but there’s something genuinely beautiful to me about how diverse our Nazis are. There’s only one white guy in the bunch. Half their staff are racist Jews. It’s truly American. Like Starship Troopers.

@dpmlol @drewlevin get his ass

most pentakills in 1 game ⚡️

Met a guy conservatively worth $500m today. Gave me his card.

@apralky This was always going to be the outcome

if the price of dismantling our admittedly corrupt expert consensus is having to endure a ceaseless barrage of 2std sub-median IQ slopulist weedguy rhetoric from every crevice of mass media then please take me back I'll put on the mask and eat the bugs or whatever

@BharatRamamurti It's funny how "Supreme leader" is actually an insult. On paper it sounds the most prestigious but in reality it mocks the fact the government is so backwards and tyrannical.

For some Thanksgiving dinner discussion fodder, I ranked the 20 most powerful political offices in the world:

@TrueSlazac Every morning I wake up and thank God our opponents are retards

“The future belongs to the counter-enlightenment” is an excellent bit The largest European state where the monarch has any meaningful power is Liechtenstein

@awawawhoami When I was young I thought mom and pop shops were places orphans went to get parents

> go to "mom and pop" shop > look inside > my parents don't work there

@apralky This is the most over the top way of explaining the nature vs nurture argument

there exists a prevalent normie model of intelligence whereby everyone is born with equal points and you level up by consuming units of boomerslop scattered at fixed spawn points across the terrain RPG style

@HubPointless You gotta make a what if England won the 100 years war video I'll do anything.

Hundreds Years War lasted 15. I don’t care about France

*plays as England* *immediately begins sabotaging Scotland*

@Globalstats11 I've been drinking South African tap water my whole life

Safe Tap Water Around the World

Time to take you for one last dance, old friend.

@owenbroadcast This is just pie sound changes at play you can find similar "coincidences" in other language families. This is still a very cool phenomenon.

it has previously been observed that the word for “night” in many languages is N plus their word for “eight”, no one seems to be clear why. my guess is it is from the planetary hours, a system used way far back, assigning hours to the classical planets - there are seven of them.

@moultano My hungry ass thought this was a sub with cream cheese

Cacao pods have a delicious fruit around the seeds, but we basically only use it as food for the fermentation that adds flavor to the final chocolate.