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Potatoes make you homosexual
Steak makes you a jew

Sounds about right

That’s cuz Brits are pasty pajeets||

Indo-European*

You and your pals buy me one of those fancy English pints if I ever come to England. If I get drunk, I’ll sing Hank Williams all night and give you a real American abroad experience (not some faggy white shitlib America, but the real open plains, steak and potatoes America).

Thorfinsson once called him “Thulean Fraud,” but maybe that was just the same person using different handles and ham-fistedly trying to make it look otherwise. I’ve seen that happen on other forums before.

We need some kind of NKVD investigation to determine the truth. I accuse both the Thulean and Thorfinsson of being wreckers.

There’s hoping Russia will win over Belarus in the end.

Unlike what is reported in the West, it won’t ‘swallow’ the country, i.e. it won’t be a full merge, and Belarus will likely keep its elites and a great degree of local autonomy, while also allowing Lukashenko to influence Russian policy.

The advantage if this happens is that no Maidan will be possible in Minsk because Russia will not allow it, since a closer union will most certainly include military bases and the harmonization of the police forces. Russian intel and new power in Belarus will also allow it to identify and remove traitors.

This is the optimistic outlook, and the US is aware.

Remember the recent leaked list of countries that were to be added to the US travel ban? Belarus was included. Well, it turns out it didn’t make it to the end because of “foreign policy considerations”, i.e. the US is committed to funding compradors in Belarus and preparing it for a future Maidan, so it has to play nice:

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is banning immigration from Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, and three other countries in an expansion of its policy blocking travel from seven other nations.

Under a proclamation signed Friday by President Trump, citizens from Nigeria, Eritrea, Myanmar and Kyrgyzstan won’t be allowed to apply for visas to immigrate to the U.S. The Trump administration said the policy was designed to tighten security for countries that don’t comply with the U.S. minimum security standards or cooperate to prevent illegal immigration.

Mr. Wolf said the administration had been weighing travel restrictions on several other countries, including Belarus, but dropped those countries from the list because they either complied with U.S. security demands ahead of the announcement or were taken off by other government agencies, who feared imposing bans on them would put other foreign-policy and national security goals at risk.

The fat Zionist shill Pompeo will be in Minsk in February to spread the message that the US stands with Belarusians against Russian aggression.

My predictions: while Lukashenko is alive, Belarus will not face a Maidan (he would resort to Russian help if that were to happen), and it may or may not integrate with Russia, a step in the direction of restoring Rus’, but after Lukashenko’s out, and if there’s no integration by then (as I said, it can go either way), you can rest assured that there will be several traitors ready for a putsch.

Japan map (ambiguous, but grammatically sound*)

“Japan map” sounds like pidgin or toparler petit nègre, as the French call it. If people want to sound like their “English no so good” then rock on. That goes for people who know no language other than English.

Always amazing that I have to come to unz to find anothe englishman speaking sense (outside of the hardcore pals for life thst I have bludgeoned into accepting my realtalk).

Funny you talk about emptying of the cities and now even suburbs into the surrounding countryside, as I type this on my way back from a night out in east London (with some wealthy hipster type friends who live there, back to my apartment in a semi-rural commuter village. I lived in London until 2 years ago, at which point I married and was faced with 2 prospects:
1) using our combined savings to buy a 1-room flat in zone 1 above a takeaway
2) buy a 3-bed house in zone 5-6 and my kids grow up in a world where it is normal for Europeans to be rare and exotic
3) move outside of London to preserve my sanity (still living in a 2-bed flat though, because i bought in a place so white you wouldn’t believe it)

I was driving through Uxbridge earlier today. It’s a shame, the housing stock is decent and up until even 20-25 years ago it would have been 90% European or British. Now it’s just another breeding ground for aspiring middle-class Indian software developers and the usual hijabis who are afforded an existence thanks to clannish money-pooling and government bennies

There’s something especially personal about receiving a letter with a real signature. I’m seriously thinking of emailing random requests to various Russian agencies just to get a pdf reply.

The UK is different to much of the rest of Europe in that the Town and Country planning act 1947 essentially put a collar around the growth of cities in the form of virtually immutable green belts and green field sites which could not be developed…forcing developers to build beyond the greenbelts (city fringes) and instead the 20 or so miles beyond the belt in small villages.

Its always a contrast to me that just 30 or so miles outside wealthy west German cities, you can find relatively cheap property in villages that essentially havent enlarged since the 1950s. This despite better and cheaper transport than comparable places in England. Virtually no villages in England that are commutable to any reasonably sized town are undisturbed since the 1950s, all have a housing estate or two tacked on in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s etc.

There was also an encouragement for the cities to not grow with the overspill programs, where entire ‘slum’ areas of the biggest cities would be emptied and razed. Their residents rehoused in either smaller ‘new towns’ or ‘expanded towns’ well outside the large cities.

There was also, due to the follies of the 60s and fondness of traditional architecture, a general dislike of high rise buildings until really the 21st century….Canary Wharf only going ahead due to its isolation from the rest of London, so density didnt start increasing until recently.

But such has been the level of immigration to England in the last 20 years, the Greenbelt is finally being built on, and even small towns like Woking are getting proposals for 35 floor tower blocks. I suspect over the next 20 years, UK cities will become as dense as German ones, albeit with a far browner, less European population.

Classic Karlin.

Not quite on topic but also not that far off.

The whereabouts of Putin’s “stolen billions” is finally revealed.

“How has Krasnoyarsk changed in the last 20 years”

Video Link

Probably, there are similar projects done for other Russian cities, as well.

I think the British value it even more than most Europeans to be honest. British people have traditionally been among the biggest buyers of dilapidated rural chateaus in France because they offer the opportunity to have a big rural property so cheap, vastly cheaper than a similar property would cost in the UK.

These sorts of rural properties are cheap because the French are generally speaking not interested in them, British people place a lot more value on these sorts of rural properties than the French do.

They see a western name and instinctively sense their inferiority.

Haha. You sound more and more like Thorfinsson with every passing day.

Speaking of maps of Russia, Sasha Trubetskoy has some nice ones on his website.

https://sashat.me/2018/03/27/life-expectancy-in-russia/

https://sashat.me/2017/04/23/development-in-russia/

I also like the one of murder rates across the regions over time (interactive, so you have to click the link to see it):
https://sashat.me/2018/09/03/russias-murder-rate-a-quiet-miracle/

Also, it’s “a series of Russian maps”, not “Russia maps”. Save the Pidgin English for when they thaw your cryogenically frozen brain in the 25th century.

Surely it’s “maps of Russia.” To my ears, the adjective-noun construction strongly suggests country oforigin rather than country ofdepiction.

Let’s try it with Japan:

map of Japan (map depicting Japan)
Japanese map (map from Japan)
Japan map (ambiguous, but grammatically sound*)

Interestingly, the noun-noun construction sounds more natural with cities — especially cities with adjectival forms.

map of Moscow (map depicting Moscow)
Muscovite map (map from Moscow)
Moscow map (ambiguous)

With Stockholm, which doesn’t have an adjectival form**, we get this:

map of Stockholm (map depicting Stockholm)
Stockholm map (map from or depicting Stockholm)

Which makes the noun-noun construction even more ambiguous.

* Japan functions as anoun adjunct here. As you would expect of a purebred Germanic tongue, this construction is commoner in Swedish than in English (Sverigekarta andkarta över Sverige are both in common use). As in English, we use the adjective-noun construction to suggest country of origin (svensk karta).

** Wikipedia suggests the adjectiveStockholmer, but I have never once heard that word (except as a demonym, obviously).

Kievs departure from Russia’s orbit has been the biggest demographic and economic disaster for the Ukraine in it’s history

2014-2015 was not worse than the early 1930s, World War 2, etc. lol. In recent history it certainly wasn’t worse than the 90s.

So much open space in the North.

I feel like Russia should be building underground cities to work out the kinks for when we do it on other planets. Or else genetically modifying people into Yeti-hybrids, so that they can walk outside in the cold without excursion suits.

Love of the countryside is mostly a European thing, I think. In other parts of the world, like Asia and Africa, where in the wild you will have a lot of venomous critters that will kill you, someone moving voluntarily from a town to the countryside will be seen as crazy.

True, although I think the British tendency to want to live in the countryside is quite unusual globally speaking. Rural living in most other countries is associated with peasantry and therefore considered undesirable.

It seems to me that the desire to live not in the city but in nature (but not as a peasant of course) is the most natural thing for a person. At least in Russia, this is a common ideal – buy house in the vicinity of the city where there is a forest / beach for swimming/garden around the house, and live in this house either all year or in the warm season.

For the wealthy, the ideal is the “flat in town” (London) and somewhere in the country or a country town. The Cotswolds is the favourite area.

The working middle classes used to favour the London suburbs, but mass immigration has destroyed that to a great extent. Places like Croydon, Bexley Heath and Ealing (formerly ‘Queen Of The Suburbs’) are no longer places of neat lawns and lace curtains, for raising an English family.

Croydon was a war zone during the 2011 riots, and an English pensioner was killed in Ealing for trying to put out a fire black youths had started.

https://londonist.com/2011/08/man-dies-following-attack-in-ealing-riots

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/9209179/Darrell-Desuze-jailed-for-eight-years-over-London-riots-killing.html

His killer’s been out for four years.

What does “Russians Xstan” imply? Is this a racial Slavic grouping or is this central Asians (racially Asian) with dual passports?

This is a racial Slavic grouping

What does “Russians Xstan” imply? Is this a racial Slavic grouping or is this central Asians (racially Asian) with dual passports?

True, although I think the British tendency to want to live in the countryside is quite unusual globally speaking. Rural living in most other countries is associated with peasantry and therefore considered undesirable.

I think Britain to a certain extent is demographically unusual in that the native poor, immigrants, etc here are likely to live in big council estates and tower blocks in the towns and cities, and the wealthier natives tend to live in semi-rural and rural areas.

All of those are still in Russia’s orbit with the exception of Kiev and Kharkov
And Kievs departure from Russia’s orbit has been the biggest demographic and economic disaster for the Ukraine in it’s history

Very typical of Russia. Theywill answer you, seriously and politely, with the eternal excuse that such and such is under construction — and, probably because it’s an official thing, be required to print out, sign, copy, and have notarized three times, an official response. Russians arehuge wasters of paper. Never seen anything like it.

English sections of websites, where they exist, are spotty at best. I’m always surprised that RZD actually works.

Any stats on immigration and the growth of people from the stans and caucuses?

I think you could use either – “Russian maps” could mean maps made in Russia, whereas “Russia maps” can only really mean maps OF Russia. Translated keys would be nice though.

Anatoly –“Russians are emigrating to bigger regional cities in general, while the countryside continues to empty out(this is a global phenomenon)“

Not really in the UK. Immigrants are filling the cities, while Native Brits are emptying out to the country. Rural towns everywhere in England and Wales are seeing new house building, mostly on fertile agricultural land. It’s not as if we need food…

The English countryside is becoming suburbanised as more and more people move there. Forty years ago, before the minority population had really grown, the most desireable houses were suburbs close to the cities, and country property was cheap. Not so now. Close to the cities means having electric gates and cameras.

But then England is the most densely populated major country in Europe (I think Luxembourg and Monaco might beat it, but Holland and Belgium don’t). A great chunk of the ‘British’ landmass is mountain or bleak moor (Wales and especially Scotland).

Any stats on immigration and the growth of people from the stans and caucuses?

Considering your amusingly demanding tone, I find it downright funny that they responded to you in a nice manner.

They see a western name and instinctively sense their inferiority.

Here in the states, unless you were a VIP, they’d just send you a blank bulk response.

Strange, my experiences of Swedish bureaucracy is much better. Americans are typically stereotyped as warm (to the point of it being false) whereas outsiders often claim we’re cold and introverted. I’ve always maintained that we are in fact very helpful people, but we’re just hard to get to know and dislike empty gestures and cold talk, which often gets misinterpreted as misanthropy among ‘warmer’ cultures.

Minsk, Tashkent and Baku remain in Russian orbit. Kiev exited it in 2014. “Russian orbit” is simply a collection of ex-Soviet territories, who are on friendly terms with the Kremlin.

BTW, Moscow’sofficialpopulation grew by 50% since the fall of communism. Actual population probably doubled.

3) In 1991, right before the end of the Soviet Union, five of its ten top ten cities were outside Russia’s current borders: Kiev, Kharkov, Tashkent, Minsk and Baku

And almost 30 years later all five of them are still located outside of Russia’s borders and still outside of Russia’s control. Russia aimed to get Kiev, Kharkiv, and Minsk back into its orbit over the last decade but failed in regards to all of these–at least so far.

One map I found interesting was the one showing population growth between 1926-2019 in the article about internal migration in Russia, it really shows how demographically devastated the regions around Moscow were by the 1930’s and 1940’s as well as the impact of Moscow pulling in people from the surrounding areas.

What made Riga much more attractive to settle in in the Tsarist era than cities such as Tallinn (then Reval), Vilnius, and Kaunaus (then Kovno) were?

Some thoughts:

1) From the map of all Russian cities, you can see that Northern Siberia is almost empty of people, but I already knew that

2) Cheeky for the city ranking to include Baku and Tbilisi among Russia’s cities between 1918 and 1921

3) In 1991, right before the end of the Soviet Union, five of its ten top ten cities were outside Russia’s current borders: Kiev, Kharkov, Tashkent, Minsk and Baku

4) Not much change in city rankings between 1991 and today

Considering your amusingly demanding tone, I find it downright funny that they responded to you in a nice manner.

Here in the states, unless you were a VIP, they’d just send you a blank bulk response.

…what’s happening is that Russians are emigrating to bigger regional cities in general, while the countryside continues to empty out (this is a global phenomenon).

Sad!

I’ve had years of cramped-up city life
Trapped like a duck in a pen
All I know is it’s a pity life
Can’t be simple again

Video Link
But itcan be simple again.

As someone who can’t read Russian, this blog post is more annoying than useful.

Also, it’s “a series of Russian maps”, not “Russia maps”. Save the Pidgin English for when they thaw your cryogenically frozen brain in the 25th century.

I notice that Russian data sites are still retarded and are not adapted for international use. Another sign of Russian stagnation/backwardness? Rosstat’s English/international site has been a hot mess for a long time, as well, so it seems to be a common disease. I wrote this to them a few days ago:

Hi! I am writing this to complain about the shocking lack of updates on your English website. Much of the data is either missing compared to the Russian version or outdated (the newest data I could find was published in 2018). Russia is a serious country so I expect statistics from Russia to be conducted seriously as well. Update the English website and bring it to parity with the Russian website. All the information on the Russian website should be published on the English version at the same time. This is the international standard. Please live up to it. Thank you, [redacted]

Got this in response:

It a scanned document, sent in pdf form, which I found weird and somewhat anachronistic (who does that in modern bureaucracies anymore?). Nevertheless, it seems Rosstat isfinally getting its shit together. Maybe that can inspire those guys as well.

OT: Dr. Thompson, I have run across what I think is an important methodological issue with some cases of how David Becker (and others, I believe) calculate average IQs for low scoring countries (here Nigeria) from papers presenting raw test score averages (here the SPM+). Could you please take a look at this comment and see whether I am mistaken or not?
https://www.unz.com/article/reply-to-lance-welton-why-do-blacks-outperform-whites-in-uk-schools/?showcomments#comment-3600494
And if you do not see a problem with my analysis, maybe you could pass it along to David Becker?

Thank you in advance!

P.S. In short, most of the conversion formulas for IQ tests have a limited valid range which does not cover much of the population IQ distribution for low scoring countries (in this example more than 20%). Averaging the raw test scores and then using the conversion of that raw average as an estimate of average IQ is flawed if the conversion formulas are invalid and extremely nonlinear (and most of Becker’s conversion formulas are cubics!) in a range where there are a significant number of people. This is probably more of an issue for estimating SDs than means, but both are affected.

And not only politics, there is climatology, indeed, even debates over IQ. Unless there is a (reproducible) experiment, we are in the domain of statistical modelling designed in Cambridge for testing plant growth with highly controlled environments. Apply that to people or deep geomorphic processes and the concepts start to break down.

I feel that most observational science is a case of seek and you shall find. I speak as a former market researcher during one phase of my life. It was always possible to find some way to make the client feel good.

Thank you for the book recommendation. I don’t supose it deal with my latest bugbear (Kalman filtering of temperature data since 1998) but less mathematical texts are always welcome on a five or 6 hour trip on a Cross Country train. Staring out of the window at Brexitland gets depressing. Places like Derby, Chesterfield, Sheffield, Wetherby, Leeds, York could be defined by what they made once. Now Yorkies come from Poland. It was the fault of oil (with some help from monetarism) not the EU but who wants to know the truth? There’s always a statistic to the contrary. Even so, Boris Johnson …? More Brandy.

The principle behind the Peters projection was that the Mercator projection was just an Eskimo plot to exaggerate the amount of land in the far north. Or some such drivel.

Imperialistic Siberians and Greenlanders.

My point is that it works better forus. The Third World has plenty of land, They don’t need ours.

And they don’t want it. They want ourmoney.

The principle behind the Peters projection was that the Mercator projection was just an Eskimo plot to exaggerate the amount of land in the far north. Or some such drivel.

I do note that many insist that a republic is not a democracy. Technically true, but those who insist on that refuse to recognize that a republic is an elite supported by an army.

But not a God.

🇬🇧🇦🇺🇳🇿🇵🇳🇲🇸🇩🇰🇳🇴🇫🇴🇸🇪🇻🇦🇸🇦🇧🇹🇯🇵

vs.

🇫🇷🇿🇦🇷🇺🇨🇳🇸🇨🇿🇼🇰🇿🇸🇴🇺🇸

אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט,

“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” — anonymous,via Max Weinreich

It’s also said that France is a monarchy with a president, while the UK is a republic with a queen.

Don’t miss its natural companion volume:

Remember when the “Peters projection” was all the rage among the politicallybien-pensant? Now you hardly ever hear of it. It makes the “North” look crowded and the “South” presumptuous.

Almost everyone steeps in a cesspool of illogic, one that they’ll defend violently against any effort to show just how absurd are their beliefs.

Few concepts illustrate this better than what most people might call political science. Democracy is, in actual studies of Poli Sci, a joke. Voters know quite literally LESS than nothing about the tens of thousands of policy questions to be addressed by various levels of government. The myth of the informed voter is as powerful as are the myths taught as history of the American Revolution.

Hans Hermann Hoppe wrote a brief synopsis of his book,Democracy, the God That Failed. The book title is a riff on an earlier book, written by communists disillusioned by the literally mountainous (as in mountains of corpses) evils of Mao’s China, Lenin’s (and then Stalin’s) USSR, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, etc., titled,The God That Failed. In it, they did what communists do best: claim that those unimaginable mass-murdering communists “just didn’t do it right, so it wasn’t really communism.”

I heartily recommend Hoppe’s book, but the synopsis is actually adequate all by itself. It shows just how absurd are several examples of what most people, including those who are very high IQ and sporting advanced degrees, believe.
https://mises.org/library/democratic-leviathan

Theory is indispensable in correctly interpreting history. History–the sequence of events unfolding in time–is “blind.” It reveals nothing about causes and effects. We may agree, for instance, that feudal Europe was poor, that monarchical Europe was wealthier, and that democratic Europe is wealthier still, or that nineteenth-century America with its low taxes and few regulations was poor, while contemporary America with its high taxes and many regulations is rich.

Yet was Europe poor because of feudalism, and did it grow richer because of monarchy and democracy? Or did Europe grow richer in spite of monarchy and democracy? Or are these phenomena unrelated? Likewise, we might ask whether contemporary America is wealthier because of higher taxes and more regulations or in spite of them. That is, would America be even more prosperous if taxes and regulations had remained at their nineteenth-century levels?

Historians qua historians cannot answer such questions, and no amount of statistical data manipulation can change this fact.Every sequence of empirical events is compatible with any of a number of rival, mutually incompatible interpretations. [Emphasis added]

If there’s really an interested God of creation, our existence is proof he has a wicked sense of humor. Taking a step back, watching humanity is like watching the antics on Monkey Island at the zoo. Reality must constantly be laughing its ass off at us.

“in a democracy, the scum rises to the top.”

I used to call that “the septic tank theory of management – the big chunks float to the top”.

As for the rest, I agree. As I have often pointed out, the large titled landowners in the UK, may not be nice people, but they understand that for the estate to be passed on, they have to be nice enough to gain other people’s trust. It’s long term planning at it’s best in the Anglo world now obsessed with short term gain. Going up the food chain to the monarch, historically, it was more important to gain the trust of the peasants, and to keep them reasonably satisfied to prevent uprisings.

I do note that many insist that a republic is not a democracy. Technically true, but those who insist on that refuse to recognize that a republic is an elite supported by an army. Given the founders wanted “a well regulated militia” and not a standing army, the US today, is a republic, but not true to the vision of the founders.

The British Pound is surging.

It used to be that the only elections that everyone assumed to be corrupt were (i) trade union elections, and (ii) local and general elections in constituencies with lots of Irish voters.

Alas, you may well prove right.

Could be. But if Boris actually does deliver something reasonably recognisable as Brexit there’s every chance the Deep State will be fuming.

Yes, but little chance he will.

The Great McGinty!

My point is both parties are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Deep State

Could be. But if Boris actually does deliver something reasonably recognisable as Brexit there’s every chance the Deep State will be fuming.

I suppose there is a chance that the Commie/Nazi party is owned by a Deep State – but which? Cuban? Venezuelan?

On this side of the pond our statistics bible is this book:

_Every_ “scientific study” uses it!

Those people who cast 50 votes might reasonably hope that they might make a difference once-in-a-lifetime. Even more those who cast 100.

My point is both parties are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Deep State…so it doesn’t matter how many times you vote.

Those people who cast 50 votes might reasonably hope that they might make a difference once-in-a-lifetime. Even more those who cast 100.

Electoral Behaviour: Lurking Factors and Visible Causes

The strangest behaviour of the electorate is that any of them believe their vote makes a difference.

the Tories are poised for another victory

How do you know that?

Pity elections pay no attention to past proven incompetence, malice & lies. Thus, the Tories are poised foranother victory…it really reinforces your faith in the wisdom of “people”

As I understand it, no serious school of political science credits voters with any agency at all. If this is remotely so, polling is just Kabuki Theater.

The approach of Public Choice Theory sheds some light on this, discussing “rational ignorance” as a voter strategy, the ubiquity of log-rolling in legislation and such.

Orwell’s book-within-a-book,The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism holds more insight into today’s political realm than any poll or statistical reduction of current events.

In the end, I believe it’s impossible to simultaneously have huge nation-states and political management of nearly 100% of every aspect of life. What emerges from this is constant warfare as innumerable factions attempt to force their peculiar vision on everyone for every question of life.

We sail toward a storm. At least in the USA, the chasm between people’s beliefs and preferences is now so wide and deep that sharing a single polity is increasingly a powder keg. I suspect the UK is no different, just much, much smaller.

The elite is not necessarily the aristocracy, and most times is not.

These days, it’s surely almost the polar opposite of a natural aristocracy. Nobel-Prize-Winning economist F.A. Hayek (author ofThe Road to Serfdom) wryly observed that, “in a democracy, the scum rises to the top.”

From Hoppe’s brief description of his book,Democracy: The God that Failed.
(https://mises.org/library/democratic-leviathan)

Theoretically speaking, the transition from monarchy to democracy involves no more or less than a hereditary monopoly “owner” (the prince or king) being replaced by temporary and interchangeable monopoly “caretakers” (presidents, prime ministers, and members of parliament). Both kings and presidents will produce bads, yet a king, because he “owns” the monopoly and may sell or bequeath it, will care about the repercussions of his actions on capital values.

As the owner of the capital stock on “his” territory, the king will be comparatively future-oriented. In order to preserve or enhance the value of his property, he will exploit only moderately and calculatingly. In contrast, a temporary and interchangeable democratic caretaker does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his advantage. He owns its current use but not its capital stock. This does not eliminate exploitation. Instead, it makes exploitation shortsighted (present-oriented) and uncalculated, i.e., carried out without regard for the value of the capital stock.

Nor is it an advantage of democracy that free entry into every state position exists (whereas under monarchy entry is restricted by the king’s discretion). To the contrary, only competition in the production of goods is a good thing. Competition in the production of bads is not good; in fact, it is sheer evil. Kings, coming into their position by virtue of birth, might be harmless dilettantes or decent men (and if they are “madmen,” they will be quickly restrained or if need be, killed, by close relatives concerned with the possessions of the dynasty).

In sharp contrast, the selection of government rulers by means of popular elections makes it essentially impossible for a harmless or decent person to ever rise to the top. Presidents and prime ministers come into their position as a result of their efficiency as morally uninhibited demagogues. Hence, democracy virtually assures that only dangerous men will rise to the top of government.

Welcome back, Doc. I was beginning to worry.

“the rational citizen has no need of opinion polls: they are not relevant to informed decision-making”: I beg to differ. In our seat the only likely winner is the candidate of either (i) the anti-semitic socialist party led by a sausage-dodger with a six letter surname, or (ii) The Illiberal Antidemocrats.

I reckon I must hold my nose and vote for the less repulsive option: either the Commie-Nazi or the Euro-Quisling. Now: could opinion polls alter my assessment of the possible winner? That is the question.

I can’t speak for the UK, but I have been popular for telephone polls for the last couple of years. I do not recall one that has asked multiple questions in one question. For example, on a scale of 1-5 do you support a named party’s platform of A, B, C, and D. I confuse the pollster by saying, you’ve asked me four questions. They still don’t understand that there are multiple possible answers if I do not support all, or none, of the 4 elements in the platform, so I tell them I have no answer.
I am fully aware that there are not a lot of people like me, and that most will answer positively even if they only support one of the 4. This also skews polls.
The British Parliamentary system was developed to keep power out of the public’s hands, and keep it in the hands of the elite. The elite is not necessarily the aristocracy, and most times is not.

The O.J. Simpson example seems to include data that conflicts with that in the diagram. The text reads “5 women in 100,000 are murdered,” whereas unless I’ve lost my faculties, the diagram seems to indicate 45 women in 100,000 murdered (5 of these by other than their partner).

Makes parsing the diagram a real challenge. The rest of the article was sounder, and all very interesting.

Frustratingto be unable to read thewholecaption under the graph.

Great article.

I was once wowed by Kahnemann et al but then realized one by one all these biases are highly adaptive. A 10% chance of one thing falling through isn’t 10% less utility, it’s a massive shift in all the other things that risk of uncertainty affects, monitoring costs, contigency planning etc. So we humans are very right to overweight the significance of rare risks on the order of 1-10%. Reliability matters.

While there are some useful implications of their work: decisions about life and death risks from cancers, nuclear power, etc. are better handled by knowledgeable fact-based analyses than our intuitions, those are largely obviously already.

Besides the idea that the peak intensity and the ending matter more than duration, very useful for designing an experience for oneself or others, nothing else remains useful out of their work really.

Considering all the financial turbulence over the last few years I think it is best not to mention all the nation scaled financial bailouts that have been necessary. So, I wouldn’t mention Greece (this one cost more than 300 billion euro), not Iceland, nor even America and its housing bubble (startlingly this cost every American $70,000–for a total of 2 trillion plus) and there are so many others.

Creating a built-in fiscal safety valve would likely receive substantial public support. Perhaps it could be tried first when the IMF is called in to help a nation in trouble. The double accounting method could be part of the package and might be imposed for 30 to 40 years after the crisis had resolved. Some nations might consider such a measure so restrictive that they might decide it to be in their self-interests not to allow financial meltdowns to occur. Yeah!

https://www.usdebtclock.org/world-debt-clock.html

res, thank you for replying!

Yes, I realized that there would be complications. Nonetheless, the potential benefits are so substantial that some governments might do their due diligence, though as you noted the multi-layered nature of the American political structure might make the idea more difficult to enact. Even now, there is a non-partisan component of government accounting (related to measuring deficits etc.), so it is not entirely far-fetched that the idea might find real world application.

Capital markets would give a rapid positive endorsement for those choosing this policy. The debt rating of an entire nation could be upgraded. Nations could have immediate windfalls in the billions of dollars. As it is now one never knows what way the political wind might blow from moment to moment. One party might win an election by 1% and then the entire fiscal landscape could shift. This introduces an overwhelming amount of uncertainty that ultimately capital markets require payment for. With the double book double entry accounting system I propose it would no longer matter that much who won the election: everyone would be held accountable for their fiscal choices. As I noted in my first post, one could easily identify political parties on the world stage today that would become unelectable under the plan. The tiresome game of bipolar government financing could finally end.

It would result in endless arguing about exceptions. For example, which parts of the TARP bailouts should count against Obama or Bush? And who defines the business cycle?

In the US there is the additional issue of the House/Senate/Presidency all being decided separately. How to assign parties when the control is split?

An appealing idea, but I can’t see how to make it work in practice.

Ever have an idea so good that you wonder why no one else had thought of it? I have.

Here it is. Most nations have political parties that can best be described as Spenders and another Savers. The Spenders create terrible fiscal messes that must then be corrected by responsible adults, the Savers. Why would we expect any other result? The game is structured on the basis of short term thinking in which there are few consequences for irresponsible behavior. Typically, the party that displays fiscal prudence must make difficult cost-cutting choices due to the moral and financial bankruptcy of the other party. Might there be another way to structure the game of government finance to avoid severe fiscal imbalances that have occurred from time to time? I think the answer is yes!

Why not keep a set of fiscal books for each party instead of only one for the entire nation? Rules would be put into place that would limit future spending ability of parties based upon the fiscal position in their own balances. For example if a government were to run up a large deficit, corrected for the business cycle, then their spending ability would be limited by statute after an election. Under such rules, it would become possible that if a political party created a large deficit that they would become essentially unelectable. Voters would know that voting for the Spending party would result in forced fiscal constraint.

Please comment about this idea!

Well, consider that the writers probably p-hacked away with some PC program they didn’t understand in the first place. Or perhaps the paper doesn’t replicate.

(Don’t get me started on statistics. It’s an awful field, made even worse by publish-or-perish.)

While we’re at it, let’s clear up this stubborn reign/rein foolishness once and for all.

Flounder works fine, and as you have seen it was the word intended by the author.

Super piece. It is interesting to observe that British Primary School children are taught to think about probability and outcomes of decision processes using tree diagrams. As early as Year Three, I seem to remember my children doing exercises about putting socks in a washing machine and estimating what colour came out next. I don’t know if such excellent background teaching shows up by the time they attend university. Some will still just think about socks.

On first reading I found Section 2.1 persuasive. Need I read it again?

Section 2.2 reveals a genuine bias: I can never make myself pay attention to an example couched in terms of a sport that I find terminally boring.

two widespread methodological shortcomings in the bias studies. First, the heuristics (availability, representativeness, affect) are never specified; since the 1970s, when they were first proposed, they have remained common-sense labels that lack formal models. Second, the heuristic is used to “explain” a bias after the fact, which is almost always possible given the vagueness of the label.

That’s them hit for six, where “them” = da bad guys.

“One of the most significant and irrefutable findings of behavioral psychologists is that people are overconfident in their judgments”

Pp 325-328 on framing seemed conclusive to me in supporting the diagnosis of overconfidence in the diagnosis of overconfidence. Good stuff, this: not just hit for six, but out of the ground and over the river.

Lastly, uncertainty contrasted with risk: Maynard Keynes was a very clever bugger; if he thought the distinction crucial then I suspect that it needs keen attention.

Risk Savvy Citizens: in addition to deprecating the omission of a necessary hyphen, I deplore the use of “savvy”. The word is far too vague – sometimes it seems to mean “shrewd”, and therefore refers to the exercise of a cognitive ability. At other times it seems to mean “well informed” and therefore refers to having received instruction in something or other. Such ambiguity is best avoided.

an article by the Deutsche Bank Research “Homo economicus – or more like Homer Simpson?” attributed the financial crisis to a list of 17 cognitive biases rather than the reckless practices and excessive fragility of banks and the financial system

Aha – crooks and damned fools can shuck off all responsibility by saying “Not my fault, it wuz them infernal biases. No moral agency here; no siree!”

Duty calls: I thought I might at least skim through the paper once. First observation:

In the book jacket copy of his biography on Kahneman and Tversky, Lewis (2017) states that they “are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms.”

I suppose the autopilot cars we are all promised might test this trend to destruction.

It is highly likely in the future that the DSM will have a category which will classify as a mental disorder people who oppose the LGBT agenda.

The left will use this new classification as an excuse to harass/imprison any person with an anti Gay position

One may recall that psychiatrists in the Soviet Union frequently put political dissents in mental hospitals

However to get to the point of 13 orders of magnitude lower than the wavelength of light used I just do not see how this is done.

Basically, it was very easy.
To get 13 orders of magnitude lower, just add more data.
Simply multiply the amount of data collected by 26 orders of magnitude. That did the trick.

That is why, at the end of the experiment, the world had changed a lot. Time travel was now a commodity; They only had to buy a ticket and returned to the twenty-first century. This explanation is so simple and obvious. Therefore, it says a lot about your state of mind that you preferred to indulge in some kind of unrealistic conspiracy theory.

Good that you wrote this comment.

Could it be that you expect psychiatrists in the past to be asrational as you are now?

Would the result have been any different, if members of a 1973 convention of physicists or surgeons would have been asked?

Thank you for this article. I find the information about the interpretation of statistical data very interesting.

My take on the background of the article is this:

Here we have a real scientist fighting the nonsense spreading from (neoclassical) economics into other realms of science/academia.

Behavioural economics is a sideline by-product of neoclassical micro-economic theory. It tries to cope with experimental data that is inconsistent with that theory.

Everything in neoclassical economics is a travesty. “Rational choice theory” and its application in “micro economics” is false from the ground up. It basically assumes that people are gobbling up resources without plan, meaning or relevant circumstances. Neoclassical micro economic theory is so false and illogical that I would not know where to start in a comment, so I should like to refer to a whole book about it:
Keen, Steve: “Debunking economics”.

As the theory is totally wrong it is really not surprising that countless experiments show that people do not behave the way neoclassical theory predicts. How do economists react to this? Of course they assume that people are “irrational” because they do not behave according to their studid theory. (Why would you ever change your basic theory because of some tedious facts?)

We live in a strange world in which such people have control over university faculties, journals, famous prizes. But at least we have some scientists who defend their area of knowledge against the spreading nonsense produced by economists.

The title of the 1st ed. of Keen’s book was “Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences” which was simply a perfect title.

but the claim that LIGO can detect a change in the length of the interferometer arms as small as 1/10,000 of the diameter of the proton – a claimed sensitivity of 10^-19 m

I have difficulty comprehending this level of sensitivity. While I workedd and built Michelson interferometers in my pervious incarnation I did not read papers on LIGOO interferometer and what tricks they have used. One way to increase sensitivity it to use multiple reflections which has been done in the past in precise measurements. Here is one possibility:

https://scholar.rose-hulman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=optics_grad_theses

However to get to the point of 13 orders of magnitude lower than the wavelength of light used I just do not see how this is done. Certainly it can’t be fringe counting but intensity measurements on the minute change of slopes of cosine function of intensity of two combined beams. To do so noise must be extremely low. Then other possibility is to use frequency modulation if laser light used could be modulated.

Anyway as I said I haven’t read papers on LIGO design and its detection system so all I can do is vaguely speculate that does not count for much. But certainly the sensitivity of displacement they claim is astounding.

An interesting article. However, I think that the only thing we have to know about how illogical psychiatry is this:

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) asked all members attending its convention to vote on whether they believed homosexuality to be a mental disorder. 5,854 psychiatrists voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM, and 3,810 to retain it.

The APA then compromised, removing homosexuality from the DSM but replacing it, in effect, with “sexual orientation disturbance” for people “in conflict with” their sexual orientation. Not until 1987 did homosexuality completely fall out of the DSM.

(sourcehttps://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/hide-and-seek/201509/when-homosexuality-stopped-being-mental-disorder)

The article makes no mention of the fact that no “new science” was brought to support the resolution.
It appears that the psychiatrists were voting based on feelings rather than science. Since that time, the now 50+ genders have been accepted as “normal” by the APA. My family has had members in multiple generations suffering from mental illness. None were “cured”. I know others with the same circumstances. How does one conclude that being repulsed by the prime directive of every living organism – reproduce yourself – is “normal”? That is not to say these people are horrible or evil, just not normal. How can someone, who thinks (s)he is a cat be mentally ill, but a grown man thinking he is a female child is not?

Long ago a lawyer acquaintance, referring to a specific judge, told me that the judge seemed to “make shit up as he was going along”. I have long held psychiatry fits that statement very well.

If doubts about LIGO are being discussed in public by specialists in the field, and even reported in the popular science press, it is unlikely that they will be swept under the carpet. The story will run and run, with analysis of multiple “astronomical events”, until the results are understood.

I am not a specialist in the field, but to me the most striking thing about LIGO is not the detection of gravity waves or even their astrophysical interpretation, but the claim that LIGO can detect a change in the length of the interferometer arms as small as 1/10,000 of the diameter of the proton – a claimed sensitivity of 10^-19 m, or a billionth of the diameter of a hydrogen atom; a ten-trillionth of the wavelength of the light being used. It is an engineeringtour de force that is little short of a miracle – if it is true. It is a good thing that another research group is doing a sanity check on the whole of LIGO.

Actually I think this is an example of an increasingly common genre of malapropism, where the writer gropes for the right word, finds one that is similar, and settles for that.

Isn’t that exactly what the original Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s play did?

1.Lack of rationality. Experiments have shown that people’s intuitions are systematically biased.

2.Stubbornness. Like visual illusions, biases are persistent and hardly corrigible by education.

3.Substantial costs. Biases may incur substantial welfare-relevant costs such as lower wealth, health, or happiness.

4.Biases justify governmental paternalism. To protect people from theirbiases, governments should “nudge” the public toward better behavior.

Well… the sad fact is that there’s nobody in the position to protect “governments” from their own biases, and “scientists” from theirs.

So, behind the smoke of all words and rationalisations, the law is unchanged: everyone strives to gain and exert as much power as possible over as many others as possible.
Most do that without writing papers to say it is right, others write papers, others books.
Anyway, the fundamental law would stay as it is even if all this writing labour was spared, wouldn’t it?
But then another fundamental law, the law of framing all one’s drives as moral andbeneffective comes into play… the papers and the books are useful, after all.

Excellent article.

OJ Simpson was not on trial for spousal abuse, but for the murder of his former partner.

Not really, as the case was presented to the jury, the trial was on the question of whether or not, out of the hundreds of LA police officers, there were some who could be described as racially biased. Probability being what it is, the jury made the “correct” decision.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%ADo_Pepe

Best to avoid clickbait.

This makes me very flustrated.

Regarding witnesses: When that jet crashed into Rockaway several years ago, a high percentage of witnesses said that they saw smoke before the crash. But there was actually no smoke. The witnesses were adjusting what they saw to conform to their past experience of seeing movie and newsreel footage of planes smoking in the air before a crash. Children actually make very good witnesses.

Regarding the chart. Missing, up there in the vicinity of cancer and heart disease. The third-leading cause of death. 250,000 per year, according to a 2016 Hopkins study. Medical negligence.

I think I have Bias Bias Bias.

Good article. 79% of gynaecologists fail a simple conditional probability test?! Many if not most medical research papers use advanced statistics. Medical doctors must read these papers to fully understand their field. So, if medical doctors don’t fully understand them, they are not properly doing their job. Those papers use mathematical expressions, not English. Converting them to another form of English, instead of using the mathematical expressions isn’t a solution.

A disposition (conveyance) of an awkwardly shaped chunk out of a vast estate contained reference to “the slither of ground bounded on or towards the north east and extending two hundred and twenty four metres or thereby along a chain link fence…” Not poor clients (either side) nor cheap lawyers. And who never erred?

Better than deliberately inserting “errors” to guarantee a stream of tidy up work (not unknown in the “professional” world) in future.

“…Gigerenzer points out that in this particular example, subjects are having to make their judgements without knowing a key fact: how many survive without surgery. …”

This one reminds of the false dichotomy. The patient has additional options! Like changing diet, and behaviours such as exercise, elimination of occupational stress , etc.

The statistical outcomes for a person change when the person changes their circumstances/conditions.

I like that