It’s a Zoomer’s Market

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on August 15, 2021

Like them, hate them, or consider them genderfluid TikToking herbivores, but one thing the zoomers undoubtedly get right is that they know the value of their labor and aren’t afraid to spell out their conditions to seething boomers.

Isn’t this, like, the free market at work? Why would a supposed “libertarian” have a problem with this?

The combination of Corona gibs, forced savings (fewer vacations, dining out, etc.), and zoomers being much more financially literate relative to previous generations means they have lots of cash at their disposal. Safety net = more room to negotiate –> employee’s market.

It’s also very good for the economy. Can’t find someone to “stand there and ensure safety on a 1 lane dirt road” for a pittance? Well, perhaps such a joke job shouldn’t exist in the first place>?

The post-Corona economy sort of strikes as something of a preview of what UBI would be like. Greater productivity. Labor gets much more negotiating power. Sign on bonuses, once the preserve of highly skilled and sought after technical workers, are now being offered by some McDonald’s outlets. Billionaires might have become richer, but so did most everyone with investments outside gold and fiat. In tech, remote work has become the norm. Shitty employers offering shit jobs whine about the “entitled” ingrates who are driving them out of business.

Meanwhile, as I half suspected would happen at the outset of the pandemic, most everyone else wins.

 

Grey Skies Ahead for Life Extension

This about Futurism, tagged , , , was written by for on August 13, 2021

The Woke “Canceling” of Aubrey de Grey Portends Nothing Good either for Life Extension, or for Women in Science

The field of Radical Life Extension has been going from strength. Over the past two years, timelines have moved sharply up, after having stagnated for the first decade and a half since Aubrey de Grey introduced his comprehensive anti-aging theoretical framework Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), which later become an institution of the same name.

This was both confirmed and reinforced by a flood of venture capital into gerontology and senolytics startups; as of 2018-19, smart money is finally interested. Even more recently, the crypto boom has massively enriched its early adopters, who tend to be highly heterodox and contrarian in their views and skew towards libertarianism and transhumanism. This has translated into massive donations towards longevity research. After years of subsisting on $5M/year, a single crypto airdrop from Richard Heart ($HEX) has netted a cool $28M for SENS. Vitalik Buterin personally donated some of his dogcoins. Another group of people in the field created VitaDAO ($VITA), a decentralized autonomous organization to fund anti-aging research through decentralized voting while making money for its hodlers through the patents and IP it accumulates. Its current market cap is $20M.

In short, this space is suddenly and unexpected swimming in a lot of money. And with new money comes drama and hubris.

(h/t Roko for the meme).

Several days ago, a couple of female researchers – namely, Celine Halioua and Laura Deming – made sexual harassment accusations against Aubrey de Grey.

More specifically, Deming says that he send her an inappropriate work email when she was 17 (“told me in writing that he had an ‘adventurous love life’ and that it had ‘always felt quite jarring’ not to let conversations with me stray in that direction given that ‘[he] could treat [me] as an equal on every other level’”), while Halioua made the even more serious allegation that Aubrey hit on her all night at a SENS dinner while plying her with alcohol and suggesting that she should sleep with attending SENS donors so that they would give Aubrey de Grey more money.

On his part, Aubrey de Grey denies the allegations apart from the email, which he has admitted was “ill-advised.”

For what it’s worth, I don’t know de Grey personally, only having ever met him once and fleetingly at that, but he always struck me as an eccentric but endearing English nerd who likes his cider and proving obscure mathematical theorems in his spare time away from seeking the Philosopher’s Stone. One of the most endearing Anglo archetypes, completed by the Gandalf-like beard. Based on the “evidence” – a single quote from an email nine years ago that was mildly inappropriate and certainly ill-advised, but one which can’t even be unambiguously interpreted as a come on – I think it’s much likelier that de Grey simply tends to be awkward in interactions with women as opposed to being a “sexual predator” and/or a rambunctious lothario like Cuomo. But it is precisely the former whom women despise at the hindbrain level. In this case, so much so as to level hyperbolic, near Epstein-tier insinuations against de Grey (“sexual harassment & abuse, including against minors”). In light of this, I hope it’s not too imprudent to note that Halioua has previously blogged about an anonymous harasser who she claims ended her academic career at Oxford, saying that “I see pieces of my harasser in other men.”

Now I’m not saying their accusations are false. However, as I have pointed out in my previous commentary, I would guess that there is less sexual harassment in the Rationalism/H+/Radical Life Extension community – a high IQ community overwhelmingly concentrated in high IQ, civilized countries – than almost anywhere else across time, space, and class. Ironically, it’s those very same features that make this community some of the most obsessed with the topic. That, together with the specifics of this case, suggest to me that it is very likely  that the accusations are substantially and perhaps entirely ungrounded.

Nor is this just my take as a representative of toxic masculinity. At least two women in the life extension community who have frequently interacted with de Grey in a professional setting – incidentally, and perhaps tellingly, both from Russia – have expressed skepticism over Halioua’s claims. Daria Khaltourina, a polymath cliodynamicist and anti-aging researcher, said that Aubrey de Grey never behaved in an appropriate fashion either to her nor to other women that she could observe in comments to a public Russian transhumanist group. In a lengthier comment on Facebook, she said she found the sex-for-SENS-cash allegations particularly incredible: “Also, I find it very hard to believe this particular piece of Celine Halioua “He told me that I was a ‘glorious woman’ and that as a glorious woman I had a responsibility to have sex with the SENS donors in attendance so they would give money to him”. Like really? Recollecting the donors of SENS, they are mostly not this type of people at all. This must have been misunderstanding. I heard no rumor like this particular claim from the Russian H+ community, and we contact with SENS a lot, a lot of H+ women too.”

Anastasia Egorova, who is a co-founder of Open Longevity, laughed it off more boisterously: “Going back to talking about sex with a person you work with. Or even work for. You know how many times I was openly invited to a threesome by a sponsor? Well, not that many, just two. You know what I did? I giggled and was flattered and had an awesome story to tell to my friends.” On a separate note, this is a big part of what I like about Russia, and Eastern Europe generally – this kind of humane, light-hearted liberalism without sexual complexes still exists there, as it did in the US during the 2000s, before it was airbrushed out of existence by that weird neo-Puritan cult that some call the Great Awokening. Egorova also doesn’t pull her punches in questioning the pair’s motives: “Am I ok with sexual harassment? Of course not! But was this the case? Were they harassed or just felt harassed? Or conveniently remembered these stories just after SENS raised $28M to ride this trend? “Hey girl, you know what, I think we forgot to be offended”. And please, let’s not forget the girls are competing for the same funding.“

Again, these are not my words. They are the words of two women, in a country where Wokeism has made fewer inroads than in the West, who know Aubrey de Grey quite well and have interacted with hundreds of men and women in that community. (There may be more testimonies, I wasn’t looking actively). Now even if we categorically accept the #MeToo directive to always and unquestioningly “believe women”, why exactly privilege Halioua and Deming over Khaltourina and Egorova? That said, I consider it very good that it is prominent women in H+ who have taken the lead in raising questions over Halioua’s and Deming’s claims, cutting the ground from actual misogynists who are more interested in stirring up hate and conflict between men and women as opposed to human progress. (I would further note the irony that those misogynists would find good situational allies with Western SJWs who would dismiss their voices as the “internalized misogyny” of Putin’s Russia).

Another point that some commenters have made is that it is not impossible that there are really baser motives at play here. From VitaDAO’s Discord:

Hours after the scandal broke, VitaDAO had removed Aubrey de Grey from its list of Contributors and Partners. Controversially, it was an internal team decision without a vote on the matter on either the blockchain or even its own forum/Discord. This would seem to sort of nullify the entire point of a DAO, with its utopian promise of decentralized decision-making (a cynic might say that it just revealed itself as yet another centralized institution in crypto wrappings). Although the decision was almost certainly primarily driven by the desire to avoid a PR backlash, the timing will mean that residual suspicions about more “pecuniary” motives will remain (indeed, they are widely discussed in the Russian H+ community).

Moreover, as I pointed out to them on Twitter, investors will now be warier of investing long-term into something that folds so quickly to mob pressure. Personally speaking, $VITA is my one coin where I’m unironically “in it for the tech.” Said tech involves not dying this century. It doesn’t listening to Dr. Robin DiAngelo’s future lectures on how life extension will immortalize white supremacy and perpetuate systems of oppression against women and POC. To the extent that DAOs are meant to guard against this, it is not the most auspicious start.

One final point. Aubrey de Grey is a polymath genius who has provisioned original mathematical proofs in graph theory in his spare time from making fundamental contributions to the life sciences. Although he is 58 years old, and people tend to become less productive with age, his inventiveness is such that he might still have many productive results ahead of him – at least if he doesn’t have to waste his time, energy, and emotions on the fallout from his “canceling”. Halioua’s academic pedigree is… somewhat less impressive. Her company specializes in rapamycin trials with dogs, something that is neither new nor particularly innovative. Now certainly no reasonable and fair-minded person would claim that this entitles men such as de Grey to sexually harass women, nor to automatically dismiss claims of such against them. But given the context of the context of the accusations (why after 9 years? conveniently when this sphere is finally flush with money); given that at least two women have stated that Aubrey never even hinted at such behavior in their interactions with them or with other women that they observed; given that the one piece of evidence that has been provided – an email from nearly a decade ago that is a bit edgy but far too ambiguous to even tell if it was flirtatious – is being weaponized to insinuate that de Grey harassed not just women, but minors at that; most of all, given that Halioua has made the truly remarkable and blatantly self-serving claim that “every dollar that goes to Aubrey holds back the field” and actually makes them “complacent in the sexual harassment of minors”:

… why, exactly, are these accusations being taken at face value against not just any man, but the one man who has probably done more than any other to increase the chances that those who live to 2050, also live to 2150?

It’s certainly not a good sign, that’s for sure.

I have previously pointed out that SJWs have already largely destroyed Effective Altruism, up to the point that one of its intellectual fathers, Robin Hanson, was “canceled” from a German EA event in 2020 (whereas four years earlier I did not receive trouble for trollishly parading about in a MAGA hat at one of their conferences in Berkeley). Unfortunately, I think this vulnerability to SJW subversion is highly acute and indeed innate to the Rationalism spehere. Most of them are highly virtuous people, which makes them unusually susceptible to psychopathic virtue maximizers. As a friend wrote to me in an email sometime in the late 2010s, “I think this is how movements like EA die – not with a bang, or with a whimper, but with a sloshing sound from all the cash and normie status being poured into the feeding trough. Still, it makes for entertaining reading.” From a utilitarian perspective, it will be a tragedy of truly unfathomable proportions if rent-seeking entryists, smelling cash and sinecures, are allowed to repeat their hit on the Radical Life Extension community.

The upside, such as it is, is that it will at least make for entertaining reading on your deathbed.

Rainbow Ascendant

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on August 13, 2021

I mentioned this Ipsos poll on global attitudes to LGBT in a previous Open Thread, but it really deserves a separate post on account of its significance.

I think it demonstrates three things:

  1. LGBT rights (as in marriage and adoption) have become universalized beyond their Western core, with the Rest sliding into line soon after Red America gave up on opposing it about a decade ago.
  2. This is spearheaded by the younger generations.
  3. PR, or propaganda, works both ways. There has obviously been a huge and increasingly state-directed push for LGBT from the US. But countries that legally discouraged it have become “frozen” so far as attitudes are concerned.

Here’s the graph of countries that now support gay marriage.

Notably, there are solid majorities everywhere for it outside Russia and Malaysia in the polled countries. Turkey is 50/50. The V4, including PiS-ruled Poland, support it. So do China and India, the two most populous countries.

So one might say that this is literally “GloboHomo”, i.e. culturally hegemonic. That is, just as the “gay marriage” culture war was “lost” in America from around 2010, the same is true of the world as a whole c.2020. Again, see China and India.

Whereas Russia made the anti-LGBT campaign the central lynchpin of Putin’s “conservative turn” around the late 2000s, it did not play much of a role in more authoritarian China (except perhaps very recently). Its very telling that in the absence of state repression (via propaganda), it has “won” by default.

And for that matter even in Russia trends might have recently reversed (maybe, the linked poll has a low sample… need to wait for more polls).

This would also tend to support the “LGBT as fad” thesis.

Curiously, there’s no difference between gay marriage support and gay adoption support (at least with the exception of Russia and Poland).

Another curious observation is that levels of support for LGBT rights correlates with how gay you are on average. Not a clean correlation by any means, e.g. Malaysia is very high, and India is at the very top. Brazil doesn’t surprise me, I recall reading coming across older polls which showed that more of them identified as homosexual or bisexual than the 3% of Americans, before the zoomers broke the charts.

LOL at Russia being literally the straightest country in this sample. One is tempted to conclude that Milonov and Yarovaya were correct about everything.

On that note.

It’s quite stunning. Only 57% of American zoomers identify as totally heterosexual, versus 95% of boomers. There can only be one explanation for such a rapid change in historical time. Genetic explanations of homosexuality are not very convincing as it is (they impose extremely large reproductive costs), but even that aside, there is no way that this could have happened in a couple of generations. Cultural fad is the most succinct explanation.

The main thing that remains to be seen is how “deep” it is and to what extent it impacts on the TFR. The rapid decline in Anglo TFR over the past half decade might hint at the answer, though I suppose there are many factors involved.

And as we can see here this is a global phenomenon. Just 68% of zoomers globally are total heterosexuals versus 87% of boomers. The Americans were actually less gay than the global average at one point but the change has been more rapid.

So what could this be tied to? Well, in countries that are less gay and have less support for gay marriage/adoption, they also tend to be more against pro-LGBT signaling.

They know of fewer people who are gay. This is both a function of gay behavior being more taboo, but also, as per above, there also being fewer gays and more of a closet effect.

There’s also unsurprisingly much less support for things like corporate signaling with rainbow flags and the like.

More of them would prefer that they “stay in the closet” so far as their personal lives are concerned.

PS. This isn’t meant to be a gay-bashing post. I’m primarily interested in how things work and in any case the ~3% of the population that is gay by default has contributed to civilization above its population share (Turing, Tchaikovsky, etc.). But these more recent developments do seem quite significant and with so many zoomers and millennials starting to identify as non-hetero, might provide at least part of the explanation for the sharp falls in TFR observed across some countries in the past 5 years (in the Anglosphere in particular). In the long run, it might not be so relevant, as people more susceptible to such fads will have fewer children.

 

Open Thread 160

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on August 12, 2021

  • Emil Kirkegaard: The ‘Hereditarians bad people’ objection. On the recent spat between Cathy Young vs. Charles Murray, Steve Sailer, and other hereditarians. Ended with Steve being blocked by Cathy.

  • Hungary has become an object in the culture war. Their demographic problems long predate Orban, who was actually more successful on the economy than on the former (at least to date). They are not going to get rich by taking in immigrants. The US tends to attract much higher quality immigrants (or at least an elite “smart fraction” subset that punches way above its weight) that will simply never come to Hungary because it is banally poorer than the US and does not have world-renowned institutions/companies to attract them (as @whyvert points out). Basically, my take is that there’s limited the “lessons: that the US and Hungary can exchange are highly limited.

  • Global Times: “Lithuania is a crazy, tiny country full of geopolitical fears. Its strategy is to cling to the US as tightly as possible. Lithuania will eventually pay the price for its evil deed of breaking international rules.“

* Banerjee, I. et al. (2021). Reading Race: AI Recognises Patient’s Racial Identity In Medical Images. In arXiv [cs.CV]. Twitter summary: “We performed many experiments to work out how it does this, but couldn’t pin it down. This is the most ridiculous figure I have ever seen. AI can detect race from images filtered so heavily they are just blank grey squares! …Hi everyone. This thread has been swamped by racists. I’m probably gonna miss your replies, but I’ll still be here in a few days when they move on or you can reach out through other channels.”

India in the Olympics

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on August 2, 2021

It’s fascinating to think that what is now a solidly lower-middle income country with a population that is on the cusp of overtaking’s China’s has just two medals in the Olympics so far.

It’s a bit less surprising when one considers that the average Indian man might only be about as strong as the average Icelandic woman…

But anyhow.

The other really interesting feature is how even within India a small proportion of states contribute almost all their medal winners. For instance, 30% of the Indian Olympic team comes from Haryana and Punjab, two states with 4% of India’s population.

Moreover, even from within those states, there are areas of strong concentration.

 

Although it’s tempting to ascribe this to vegetarianism, the problem is that most of the South and East do eat chicken whereas both Punjab and Haryana are very vegetarian.

https://twitter.com/ZolbarSakusun/status/1419327245034958853

Looking at the leaderboard, India is right below Mongolia (population: 3 million), which at three medals has one more than India despite a 500x lower population. All three of them are in judo. The Mongols also dominate sumo wrestling in Japan (126 million).

Open Thread 159

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on July 31, 2021

Rosatom HQ.

  • RIP. Sam Dickson: William H. Regnery II: A Hero’s Life. A Hero’s Death.  I intersected with him in Moscow in 2018 at the end of a transit of the Trans-Siberian with a friend. Too little to get a know a person, but my impressions were positive, FWIW. On a non-political tone, He remarked that he had visited Moscow three times, once towards the end of the Soviet era, the second time around 2010, and the third time now. Each time it had gotten better. He said that he had been in London about 20 times and that it had progressively degraded since he first visited in the 1960s. In 2018, he felt it had overtaken it in quality and by a large margin.

* Lo, Y.-H., Cheng et al. (2020). Detecting genetic ancestry and adaptation in the Taiwanese Han people. Molecular Biology and Evolution. Spoiler: Admixture happened before the Chinese emigrated to Taiwan.

(1) The Georgian Orthodox Church is autocephalous from Moscow, (2) all polls show Georgians more homophobic than Russians, (3) Georgian nationalists don’t exactly like Russia, LOL.

But it is still Putler & Russia who are repressing their gays.

41% of Ukrainians Agree They and Russians Are One People

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on July 28, 2021

These are the results of a recent poll from Rating Group. 41% agree with Putin’s position, 55% disagree. Not bad, considering there’s now been a generation’s worth of state svidomy narratives.

But possibly the most startling result (and certainly one that I didn’t expect is there there’s essentially zero difference across age groups. 44% of 18-29 y/o’s agree to 42% of 60+ y/o’s, despite declining numbers of self-identifying Russians in younger age groups.

Otherwise, the regional and political party breakdowns are not surprising. Solid majorities in the South and East, amongst adherents of the UOC-MP, and the expected opposition parties (Opposition Bloc, Party of Shariy, etc.) consider Ukrainians and Russians to be one people. Even so, the fact that even in Western Ukraine, 22% agree with this, as do 10% of Greek-Catholics, 12% of nationalist Svoboda supporters, and 10% of European Solidarity voters, was mildly interesting; it is curious and significant that such people even exist.

Cultural Autonomy in Film

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on July 24, 2021

Chinese protectionism/censorship (they only allow 34 Hollywood movies a year) has helped incubate a domestic film industry. As Richard Hanania points out, citing a study by James McMahon, that as of now, 9 out of 10 of the highest grossing films in Chinese history are domestic, all released in the last few years.

State censors require that all films in China, both of domestic and foreign origin, adhere to “the principles of the Chinese Constitution and maintain social morality” (O’Connor & Armstrong, 2015, p. 9). These standards are maintained through the prohibition of certain images and scenes that depict “demons or supernaturalism, crime or any other illicit or illegal actions within China’s borders, disparagement of the People’s Liberation Army and police, and anything that could be perceived as anti-China–including merely damaging Chinese sites or monuments.

Something like Leviathan (2014), a depressive/cynical-for-the-sake-of-it movie with Russophobic undertones, wouldn’t have been made (or at least screened) in China and that’s probably a good thing for the Chinese.

That said, another curious finding from the author James McMahon, although it is not in the paper, is that Russia – along with India and China – has the least intersection with American cultural consumption. That is, they have the lowest correlations between films that do well in the US box office and in their own.

This seems to largely be a map of cultural closeness to the US. Australia, Britain, New Zealand, and South Africa are all in the top 5 closest countries to the US.

I suspect that the distance between the US and Russia might even start to further increase with the increasingly heavy-handed promotion of “Woke” themes in American cinema.

Open Thread 158

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on July 16, 2021

Time for something more stereotypical.

  • The AK. About a couple of months ago the National Bolsheviks (“Other Russia”) had me round to their “bunker” for a podcast. It’s now been released, you can listen to it here. (Obviously only in Russian).

Alt Right columnist Tobias Langdon “featured me” as a Jew besmirching the noble Anglo at Counter-Currents.

This is not some dark new age of cancel culture, however, it’s just a return to normality. Those who grew up in the late 20th century were living in a highly unusual time, one that could never be sustained, a sexual and cultural revolution that began in 1963 or 1968. But it has ended and, as all revolutionaries must do after storming the Bastille, they have built Bastilles of their own. The new order has brought in numerous methods used by the old order to exert control — not just censorship, but word taboo and rituals which everyone is forced to go along with, or at least not openly criticise. You might call it the new intolerance, or woke extremism, but all societies need the policing of social norms.

No one would satirise the transgender movement today; no one would dare point fun at BLM, or Pride month; no one would dare joke about George Floyd, because like the publishers of Gay Times in 1977, they might face jail for blasphemy.  Instead leading satirist Sacha Baron Cohen makes a living making jokes at the expense of the little people. Indeed the only satire made now pokes fun at the old establishment, like punching the corpse of a once-ferocious zoo animal, or the people who still hold the old beliefs; the elderly, the less educated, the rural and provincial. The powerless.

This is one of the best meta-pieces on the Great Awokening to date IMO.

The report – “No 32-04 vd” – is classified as secret. It says Trump is the “most promising candidate” from the Kremlin’s point of view. The word in Russian is perspektivny.

There is a brief psychological assessment of Trump, who is described as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”.

There is also apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat, or potentially compromising material, on the future president, collected – the document says – from Trump’s earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory”.

#ThatHappened. /s Actually, I strongly suspect it might have been a troll job. Anyhow, as Aaron Mate points out, even the likes of Maddow aren’t touching it with a ten foot pole.

Kirkegaard with a blast from the past (2019): South Africa’s Decline Is Worst Among Nations Not at War, Model Shows. I wonder if there’s some demographic tipping point at which it implodes.

  • AFGHANISTAN. Zadran, S. K., Ilyas, M., & Dawari, S. (2021). Genetic variants associated with diseases in Afghan population. Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine, 9(5), e1608. Holtz: “In Afghanistan, the prevalence of cousin marriages is estimated to be 46.2%. The prevalent type of cousin marriage is first cousin marriage (27.8%), followed by double first cousin marriage (6.9%), second cousin (5.8%), and third cousin (3.9%).” Sailer noted this, and the implications for the chances of US success in Afghanistan, two decades ago. 😐

  • Video of Taliban taking over a gym. Disclose TV: “UK will work with the Taliban if they take power in Afghanistan, says the British Defense Minister.”

  • CORONA. Yuri Deigin – Get vaccinated! It could help you, like, not die… It’s pretty funny observing the hostile responses to it. Basically, what I think happened is that many anti-China right-wingers followed him after Wade propped him as the originator of the “biolab escape” theory, under the impression he was some kind of anti-China propagandist. This is not the case, to their chagrin.

Incidentally, I have largely refrained from opining on ivermectin. It did strike me as this year’s hydroxychloroquine (not suppressed, works to some extent in some cases, neither the silver bullet nor the snake oil of rightoid and soyjak imagination, respectively), but it’s not something I wanted to actively research. But happily, Deigin – compiled some several studies which shows it as “either ineffective or very mildly effective.”

Richard Hanania: “Latest conservative grift is to buy a $120 Chinese phone, preload it with conservative apps, rename it the “Freedom Phone,” and sell it for $500.”

While Freedom Phone’s founder has failed to include basic details about its device, he did line up a massive ad campaign among conservative influencers. Along with Owens, Stone, D’Souza, and Alexander, the Freedom Phone has also been backed by a number of other figures popular on the right, including Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, journalist John Solomon, and Students for Trump cofounder Ryan Fournier.

OTOH, who can blame them? There’s a reason these influencers have made it and you haven’t. My observation is the more you scam rightoids, the more they respect you for it.

  • FINANCE (NFA). Three companies of note have listed in recent weeks: Transferwise (now just Wise) (~$13B), a very easy to use service for international money transfers; 23andme (~$4B), which needs no introduction; and the European Medical Center (~$1B), a private chain of about a dozen high-end clinics in Moscow. I suspect all of them will do quite well. I was actually slightly surprised that 23andme mc is so low, the genomic data it has accumulated should be a goldmine for pharma companies.

Innovative Immigrants. But Which Ones?

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on July 14, 2021

America’s ability to draw high quality human capital from abroad is one of the lynchpins of its economic strengths and probably goes some ways to explaining why it’s GDP per capita is significantly higher than would might be predicted from its national IQ.

Alexander Kruel recently had a Twitter thread about precisely which groups of immigrants contribute to that innovation:

From The Demographics of Innovation in the United States (page 26-27).

Nothing surprising there. But it’s spelled out just in case:

Then it cites the composition of the US Math Olympiad team. The International Math Olympiad has indeed long become a Chinese vs. Chinese-American contest.

Similarly “Oriental” picture in Canada.

Now the underrepresentation of NAM (non-Asian minority) immigrant achievement is something that’s in the “those who know, know” category, to be surreptitiously noticed if not publicly acknowledged .

But there’s a much more obscure but also rather important, and arguably more interesting, HBD observation to be teased out from behind these three examples.

Any suggestions?