West Hunt

The stagnation of growth isn't unique to the US. All developed countries have stagnated [1], with little regard to government politics and policies. [1] https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/the-great-stagnation/

Actually most of the world, that has gotten rid of royalty, seems to be doing its best to bring back at least some of the trappings; for example, http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/presidential-transportation/

> Cows (like all large animals) can be dangerous. This is something I don't understand about "go swimming with whales" sales pitches. Swimming with whales sounds incredibly dangerous. They are so much larger than you that simply being nearby while they move around can easily kill you. Occasionally I have stepped on a snail. From a snail's point of view, I am actually benevolent - I specifically seek to avoid stepping on snails and will go to considerable extra effort to achieve that goal, because they're gross. But I'm not always checking every step I take for snails. If you're a snail, my benevolent attitude towards you is worth much less than a prudent amount of distance. Cows are much worse, because it's not uncommon that they will intentionally try to kill you. Winning a fight with a cow is no more plausible than a snail defeating me in combat. My dad told me a story of exploring up a streambed in his childhood. At some point he climbed up the bank and found that he was in a meadow with some free-range cows. He got very excited, because they were doing something unusual - most of them had gathered into a big group with a couple circling around the group. His first thought was "Wow! This is just like on TV, when a herd defends itself from predators!" And his second thought was "wait a minute, I eat cows..." ---- Henry Harpending wrote an excellent piece about his experience hunting a buffalo, available here:…

from Feb, 2019: Who is Slate Star Codex? - A thread https://twitter.com/TLDRSlateStar/status/1100867507194396673 Slate Star Codex is one of the biggest dangers to people (esp marginalized groups) who want to use the internet without being abused. TLDR is that Slate Star Codex is a blog that promotes platforming white supremacists and the like, whips up frenzies about the dangers of feminism, and serves as a vector for promoting the work of white supremacists Ever wonder why Twitter is a "nazi haven"? Reddit a cesspool of hate? Well one of the reasons is that people working at this companies read and follow the precepts of Slate Star Codex. Slate Star Codex is the blog of a guy named Scott who got his start blogging in the "rationalist" community. Slate Star Codex is basically Tucker Carlson for "smart" dudes in tech. The only difference is Scott buries his ideology in mountains of text and disclaimers. His typical rhetorical technique is "I love the gays/hate racists/am not a conservative BUT" The BUT is usually "this racist/sexist/etc. Has some points and we should hear them out." Unsurprisingly, he's cultivated a community where racists/sexists/etc. Are VERY comfortable. In the comments and on a slatestarcodex reddit. Now I know he didn't create the subreddit, but he approved of it and he was a moderator there. And when things went wrong with a popular thread called "the culture wars thread" he wrote a long blog post about what a tragedy it was. Now I am a…

Human biology is a rather robust system. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/01/09/survival-of-the-flattest/ >"Let's change this very, very large, very, very old system that we don't really understand by just tweaking this one value that we're pretty sure does X ... and put it back into production. What could possibly go wrong?" In a good number of cases, what some nucleotide does is pretty obvious. There is a safer approach that can also result in very good ends. Embryo selection (what was in the Gattaca film). You make up 20 embryos in the lab, sequence all of them, pick the best one according to a set of criteria. Estimated IQ gain is in the range of 10 IIRc per generation. Chinese are planning to do this - if they pull it off, inside 2 generations they'd have better human capital than Ashkenazi Jews (.2% of world population, 30%+ of physics Nobels, due to average verbal IQ of 115. That really skews distribution in the high-end...)

Steve Hsu: http://infoproc.blogspot.com Example post title: "Preimplantation genetic diagnosis and screening using next generation sequencing" Razib Khan: http://www.unz.com/gnxp/ Example post title: "Most Horse Lineages Are in Heaven" Gregory Cochran: http://westhunt.wordpress.com/ Example post: "It is easier to develop a phobia about snakes than electricity or carbon monoxide, probably because we have built in neurological mechanism that confer that propensity. Likely most animals have a similar propensity to develop a fear of fire: or it might come automatically. If there was such a fear-of-fire mechanism, we have lost it: and dogs have as well. If this is correct, one could learn about this hypothetical mechanism by comparing dogs and wolves." --- These are heavily biased towards population genetics and quantitative genetics. Would appreciate suggestions for blogs of smart people writing about molecular biology.

No it doesn't https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/03/21/y-chromosome-crash/

An acute crisis requires a different mindset. When you shut down half of your economy, introduce curfew, try to keep people in their homes, and plenty of people are also dying, you're not at war but it's not quite peacetime either. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2021/04/06/scientists-against-time/

Here's a blog post from February 6 by Greg Cochran, one of the people mentioned. Looks pretty good in retrospect https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/strategy-not-the-flu/

anthropologist greg cochran has made the same point: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/08/18/ptsd/ then again, from what we can tell about the premodern world it seems much more violent than what we are accustomed to.

"rate of boiling off of young Amish each generation might act like truncation selection in favor being Amish, whatever that might be" https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/02/07/inferring-an-aq/ https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/draft-of-paper-about-amish/ “[T]he difference in mean AQ [‘amishness’] between young Amish men and their non-Amish neighbors is about 2.8 standard deviations. In the IQ world this would correspond to a group different of 42 points. In the stature world this would correspond to a height difference of about 8 inches.”

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/09/04/guns-germs-and-steel-revisit… There are also a ton of good critiques on /r/history, /r/askhistorians, and /r/anthropology. I can't remember which I've read. Ones like this are typical: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8nr7xd/thoughts_on_gun…

What a strange meandering article. The author seems almost to be seeking confusion. Since she quotes Cordelia Fine approvingly, here's an amusing review from a slightly different perspective: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/03/20/old-t-rex/

Substitute "genius" with "scientific racist" and "facts" with "unsubstantiated claims about race and sex," and you've got the rest right. Not everybody is interested in racist/anti-semetic canards[1][2] and claims about gay viruses[3]. [1]: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/the-son-also-rises/ [2]: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/08/live-not-by-lies/ [3]: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/depths-of-madness/

> Do we allow a bunch of 6'5" mega-geniuses with blonde hair, blue eyes, and all the right genotypes to take over society? We will. Quoting from https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/typos/ "What would a spelling-checked person, one with no genetic typos, be like? Since no such person has ever existed, we have to speculate. I figure that kind of guy would win the decathlon, steal your shirt and your girl -- and you still couldn't help liking him."

Greg Cochran, an expert geneticist who wrote 'The 10,000 Year Explosion' has a different view. 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3310KWlDXg (especially the Q&A which is dominated by epigenetics). 2) This explains it in text -> https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/epigenetics/

here's some interesting speculation on this topic: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/a-three-hour-tour/ Basically there's genetic (Y chromosome) and linguistic evidence suggesting an infusion of Indian immigration (~5000 years ago so maybe a distinct event from this). One plausible explanation is that some Dravidian seafarers crash-landed in Australia and got absorbed by the local population. From their perspective it probably would have felt like sinking into savagery.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/07/09/our-dumb-world/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate

"Is the primary sex ratio the same in all human populations at all times?" At least the secondary sex ratio naturally varies in human populations, being lowest in African's and somewhat higher in most others, see [0] and many other references. Meiotic drive can effect which embryo's survive [1] & [2]. It's an intragenomic conflict where one copy of a gene is passed on to offspring more than the expected 50%. [0] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr53/nvsr53_20.pdf. [1] https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/a-common-variant-linked-to-c… [2] http://www.unz.com/gnxp/human-uniqueness-is-not-unique/

>I focused on lessons I had learned reading Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s book “On Killing,” Dave Grossman reportedly cites someone named S. L. A. Marshall who made the claim that only a small percentage of infantry ever fired their weapons, to support the idea that most people have some natural reluctance to kill in battle. I just want to point out that there is zero evidence for this claim: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/12/28/shoot-to-kill/

Greg Cochran has been making that argument for some time now. Here's his take on the issue: http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/07/03/rasmus-nielsen/

A scenario: http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/a-three-hour-tour/

Calories. Cheese has only about 60% the calories of a starting volume of milk. [1] Plus, animals can graze on land you can't farm, and they're very portable. [1] http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/the-indo-european-advantage/

This has been known for at least a decade. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/a-three-hour-tour/ >Here’s a scenario. A ship from some Indian civilization about 4000 years ago [maybe Indus] loses its way and ends up crashing on the shore of Arnhem Land. Like most ships, its crew is all male. They survive the landing, and end up warring with a local tribe. Eventually, they kill off most of the men and annex the sobbing women. The new tribe has 5x higher carrying capacity, essentially due to better technology, and they’re militarily superior as well – better weapons and tactics. They expand and expand, picking up more and more old Australian genes as they do so. Not as an empire – they’re too simple for that – but the tribes that descend from them keep winning. They speak the ancestor of the Macro-Pama-Nyungan languages, which originates as a mix between their old-Dravidian language (from the men) and some local Australian tongue (from the women). >One funny thing about this scenario: the sailors lose almost all of their civilization, and probably thought they were descending into savagery. On the other hand, the locals probably thought of the castaways as incredibly advanced, magicians or gods. They were both right.

This "Black people as a whole have more genetic diversity" is a technically correct but entirely irrelevant fact, a staple of popular disinformation on this topic. It is trotted out to lead laymen to a number of incorrect assumptions: a) that it's meaningless to speak of Africans (or specifically of members of the largest African populations) as belonging to a race; b) that raw Fst measures suggest some tribe X is "genetically more similar" to Europeans than it is to tribe Y and therefore is expected to be more phenotypically similar and c) that it's unproductive to discuss those Africans as having some specific average for some trait. It relies on equally irrelevant examples, like the difference in height between Pygmies and the Tutsi (although both sides of the debate are aware that Pygmies belong to a wholly separate "race"; the point of this maneuver is to make laymen assume that "racists" do not recognize this trite fact, and laugh at their lack of nuance). Genetic diversity is not the measure of non-belonging to a race, nor some quotient by which variance of every phenotypic trait is multiplied or something, and in this context it refers to neutral genetic variation, which is higher in Sub-Saharan Africans (and very high in a tiny, unrepresentative subgroup – Khoisan, not Bantu) than in other continental groups, due to their ancestors not having gone through some ancient bottlenecks. Interesting for anthropology and history – tracing of migrations and such; not very…

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/forty-days/ > One of the many interesting aspects of how the US dealt with the AIDS epidemic is what we didn’t do – in particular, quarantine. Probably you need a decent test before quarantine is practical, but we had ELISA by 1985 and a better Western Blot test by 1987. > There was popular support for a quarantine. > But the public health experts generally opined that such a quarantine would not work. > Of course, they were wrong. Cuba instituted a rigorous quarantine. They mandated antiviral treatment for pregnant women and mandated C-sections for those that were HIV-positive. People positive for any venereal disease were tested for HIV as well. HIV-infected people must provide the names of all sexual partners for the past sic months. > Compulsory quarantining was relaxed in 1994, but all those testing positive have to go to a sanatorium for 8 weeks of thorough education on the disease. People who leave after 8 weeks and engage in unsafe sex undergo permanent quarantine. > Cuba did pretty well: the per-capita death toll was 35 times lower than in the US. > Cuba had some advantages: the epidemic hit them at least five years later than it did the US (first observed Cuban case in 1986, first noticed cases in the US in 1981). That meant they were readier when they encountered the virus. You’d think that because of the epidemic’s late start in Cuba, there would have been a shorter interval without the effective protease…

I would not forget that he was co-founder of China's missile program too. And given how many Chinese-Americans turn out to be passing secrets to China, it's pretty disingenuous to go 'oh, he only worked for them because the US mistreated him!' He would be far from the first person whose loyalties turned out to lie where you would expect them to lie. Let them go home? This issue has come up before. The Feds locked up H. S. Tsien [Qian Xuesen] back in the 50s because they thought he was pro-Chinese and would aid the Chinese rocket program. When they finally let him go, that’s exactly what he did. There have been many cases in which key individuals have been allowed to go home and fight with their homies, due to chivalry or some other form of stupidity. in 1861, the Feds let many officers go home and fight for the Confederacy. Radomir Putnik, chief of the Serbian general staff, was taking the waters in Austria when the First World War broke out. They let him go home – were they ever sorry! Gernot Zippe, an Austrian POW in a Siberian camp, built a workable centrifuge for separating isotopes. Yet, to my lasting surprise, the Soviets let him go in 1956. He became the Johnny Appleseed of nuclear proliferation [along with Eisenhower - Atoms for Peace]. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/who-can-you-trust/

I'm not an expert, just an interested layperson, but from what I read, I am starting to wonder whether cancer cures might be more basic than we realize, we're just not looking at the right things. The example that keeps coming to mind is HPV - it can cause cervical cancer etc. And, since there is an immunization for HPV, the disease is preventable, and to the extent it is the "only" cause of certain cancers, would also prevent those cancers. So is HPV the "only" virus which causes cancer? Seems unlikely. I just don't know how much research is focused on bacterial or viral origins. Maybe it is not glamorous or mysterious enough to justify funding. The 2005 nobel in physiology went to Barry Marshal for discovering that stomach ulcers, long a mystery, were caused by Helicobacter pylori bacteria. And in fairness to history, he wasn't even the first person to discover it, just the most recent person in western society. http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/low-hanging-fruit/