Russia Blogging

My blogging career began on January 9, 2008, when I perceived an increasingly absurd discrepancy between Western media rhetoric about Russia, swinging between portraying it as a “weak,” “dying,” and “finished” country and doom-mongering about the Dark Lord Putin’s plans to subjugate Middle-Earth, oops, I mean Europe, and its rather mundane and mediocre reality.

As Will Rogers once said, “Russia is a country that no matter what you say about it, it’s true.” Today, this is truer than ever, a state of affairs enabled by an uninformed public, lazy journalistic cliques, and agenda-driven neocons. I decided to tackle the problem at its root, demolishing Western myths about Russia through a focus on translations of Russian language sources, verifiable statistics and opinion polls, and the application of a judicious comparative perspective (otherwise maligned as “whataboutism”).

One of my greatest successes was modeling and correctly predicting Russia’s demographic turnaround as early as 2008, when holding such a position made one a prime candidate for psychiatric institutionalization. I likewise presented a more realistic – or at the very least, data-informed – perspective on Russia’s comparative performance on human rights, corruption, and the economy.

But for all the epithets hurled at me as a “Russophile cretin,” “neo-Soviet reptile,” “and my personal favorite, “ein strammer Putinsoldat,” in those (majority of) cases where the data tended to portray Russia in a better than expected light,  the fact of the matter is that I have never shied from posting material that didn’t work out in Russia’s favor. For instance, I write what remains probably the the most comprehensive roundup of statistical evidence of electoral fraud in the 2011 Russian elections in the English language (that post was later cited by Freedom House, hardly the most pro-Putin organization).

Now that Russia and the US are in the depths of a New Cold War, in the wake of the neocon-backed coup in Ukraine and the consequent civil war and economic collapse in that unfortunate country – all developments that I, incidentally, had glumly predicted around the time of the West’s pro-Maidan euphoria in early 2014 – there has been no greater need for the sort of detailed, data-centered Russia analysis that I offer since the 1980s.

I returned to Russia in late 2016, literally fulfilling the “go back to Russia” advice of my most ardent critics.

HBD & IQ Blogging

Though I began as a Russia blogger, my interests ranged far and wide, and soon after I also ventured into topics such as human biodiversity (HBD), IQ research, and transhumanism. I wrote about the importance of national IQ to economic growth as early as 2008, and “came out” as a race realist in 2012, well before the Alt Right made it cool or prominent intellectuals such as Nicholas Wade and Garett Jones made them at least minimally “handshakeworthy.”

Since then, I have made several significant contributions to the debate, such as uncovering the (remarkably good) scores for mainland China in PISA 2009 and writing what is perhaps the most detailed popular account of the history of intelligence testing in Russia and the regional distribution of Russian IQ. In a 2013 survey of professional psychometricists (Heiner Rindermann et al.), my blog was acknowledged as one of the world’s best three sources for accurate IQ reporting.

Probably my most original contribution to this sphere is the theory of Apollo’s Ascent, which I hope to expand into a book one day. My basic thesis is that the historical rate of world technological growth can be approximated with by the numbers of literate “smart fractions” who could work on solving problems – but since problems tend to become harder over time, progress would inevitably slow down to a standstill whenever literacy and average IQ stagnated. Or to put it another way, this project will fuse Charles Murray’s insights on the centrality of IQ to social and economic success within the US, and Garrett Jones’ analogous observations as concerns international development, and extend it into the deep past as well as the 21st century.

Here are two articles from the past year I which I outline the main ideas of the book:

• Introduction to Apollo’s Ascent
• The Ancient Greeks Weren’t All Geniuses

This is a very largescale and ambitious overtaking, but understanding the role intelligence plays in economic and technological progress – and stagnation – has never been more vital in light of current developments in CRISPR and the genetics of IQ that will make “test tube” eugenics feasible in as little as a decade, as well as mounting concerns over the prospect of AI “superintelligence.”

Journalism

Although I don’t consider myself a journalist as such, over the years I have written for or been republished/translated at a number of venues: Al Jazeera, Voice of Russia (archive), Russia Insider, The Duran, Inosmi (S/O, DR).

Future Plans

As of the time of writing I have three major long-term goals.

(1) Foremost priority is to start publishing books.

In order of priority, they are:

• Dark Lord of the Kremlin: A summary of and a capstone to my Russia watching career. [political science]
• Dark Equilibrium: Book length version of this essay. [futurism]
• Frozen Embers: The Earth falls out of the Sun’s orbit. [sci-fi]
• Apollo’s Ascent: Book length version of this essay. [economic history; history of technology]

(2) Figure out how to make passably good videos and start putting some of my longer and more interesting essays into this format.

(3) Start doing more serious academic research in psychometrics, at least once I get my Russia book out of the way.

ROGPR

Apart from occasional appearances at outside podcasts such as The Stark Truth, I am a regular participant at the ROGPR (Russian Occupation Government PR) Russian language podcast with Kirill Nesterov and @pigdog.

Here is our YouTube channel.

We talk about Russian realities from an IQ/HBD-realistic perspective.

We are also a human rights organization and the official podcast of United Russia.

/pol/: “The only legitimately alt-right HBD-concious Russians that I know of are in Anatoly Karlin’s circle… he and a few other Russians do a autistic alt-right shitposting podcast.”

I maintain a Russian language blog at akarlin.ru.