The Unz Review, run by Ron Unz, is a site of articles on politics, geopolitics, education, and race and IQ, from many contributors.
HN links it for contrarian political and geopolitical pieces, while commenters question its honesty and note its controversial content, including antisemitic material.
eradication of Malaria (1000 deaths daily, much more suffering and cost to society).
If great efforts are made to eradicate diseases in an area that has historically been subjected to various diseases such that the local population has adopted the reproduction strategy of having large amounts of offspring to counter premature deaths, but upon eradication/reduction of said diseases there is significant delay in the abatement of the overproduction strategy if it abates at all http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-worlds-most-important-graph/
if this population surge then expands beyond it's historical borders and causes mass societal disruption on a neighboring continent whose civilization has historically contributed great innovation and wealth to the world at large, and subsequently, said wealth and innovation contribution declines because of said societal disruption, do those who sought to eradicate the various diseases harbor some responsibility for the diminished prospects of the world at large?
Granted these are delicate questions but I believe their being asked has not just validity, but importance.
Certainly, simply ignoring pain, disease, and suffering is almost universally unpalatable.
But modifying one aspect of a complex system for what appears to be perfectly benevolent reasons, it is not at all surprising to find there could be downstream negative effects, negative enough to far outweigh whatever beneficent contribution you thought you were initially making. How do…
The problem with Raj Chetty’s 2013 work on social mobility was that it generates absurd results — West Virginia is a great place for social mobility, while Atlanta and Charlotte are terrible — because he refuses to intelligently consider race in his analysis.
Over the generations, the different races in America regress toward different means. So white kids growing up in almost all white West Virginia tend to do better than their parents because they are likely to get the heck out of supposedly high opportunity West Virginia (which you and me know is the worst place in White America), especially for places like Charlotte and Atlanta, which Chetty sees as black holes of low social mobility.
In contrast, Atlanta attracts affluent college graduate black families. Their kids tend to regress part way back toward the black mean, so it makes Atlanta look bad under Chetty’s methodology.
But in the real world, his results are close to 180 degrees backwards to wise advice: if you are white and young in West Virginia, hit the road; if you are black and looking for a community with a lot of black college graduates to be good role models for your kids, consider Atlanta’s suburbs.
As I explained on my blog in 2014:
Notice that according to Chetty West Virginia is an oasis of income mobility in the East, while nearby North Carolina is an abyss of stasis. Yet, lots of people raised in West Virginia who have something on the ball have moved to North Carolina to get ahead in life.
Since…
Peter Thiel is really a kind of philosopher - the venture capitalism is more of an outgrowth of something else than his primary focus. This is a person who reads widely, has big ideas and is consistently ahead of everybody else - his reputation is wholly deserved.
I've been following, causally at first, his ideas through books written about or by him, many hours of youtube videos and essays in and around the topics he talks about. It is difficult to distill this into a synopsis because although I can provide a TLDR it doesn't mean you'd get any predictive power of it.
I suggest doing your own homework and coming to your own conclusions. I think I'd give a lot for a photo of his bookshelves.
Here's a start.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/10/end-future-peter-thiel/
A common theme in Thiel's thought is that 'reality is often very different from the mainstream conception of it'. Ron Unz wrote this essay which gives body to this belief.
http://www.unz.com/runz/our-american-pravda/
Another theme is that humankind is highly mimetic - meaning they have a desire to be copying each other. This comes out of the philosophy of René Girard and you'll have to read something of his to fully understand where we're going with this.
https://woodybelangia.com/what-is-mimetic-theory/
Watch this if you only watch one video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw-rxtwhzcY
Peter Thiel is at the intersection of an unusually large number of obscure and strange topics, that's the reason…
>> China is based on communism
China is no longer about communism any more than the U.S. is about the Enlightenment. China today is about Gilded Age-type capitalism with a strain of collectivism running through it.
Every Chinese today is caught up in a mad scramble for personal enrichment, often at the expense of his fellow man. Most American Marxists would shrink back in horror at the capitalist fever that grips the average Chinese. Even most of those on America's political right do not have the stomach for the level of Gordon Gecko-ness that animates many Chinese. While many on the American right prefer to retreat to dens, family, and countryside, Chinese capitalists are busily trying to get rich any way they can (ethically or otherwise).
The Chinese Communist Party functions the same way Chinese government has functioned for thousands of years. Anyone can join, if he can pass the necessary tests. Passing tests to gain a coveted spot in the government has been a national priority since before Confucius's day, 2.5 millennia ago, and continues to be today.
China does not have legally enshrined freedom of speech. But at a societal level, the 'real' freedom of speech is greater than what I've experienced in America. In America, you must very carefully watch your words, lest you offend any of a number of easily offended groups. You won't go to jail for it (unlike certain parts of Western Europe - Germany and Britain, for instance), but you will lose friends and you may…
This is why it's so important to deliberately escape any filter bubbles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble) you may be in.
Pre-2015 reddit's r/all was a reasonable, if lazy way to do this. After their free speech bait & switch it became mostly useless for anything but entertainment and establishment/Democrat propaganda.
Here's a subset of my "daily" bookmark folder that at least attempts to do this for me when combined with honestly too heavy reddit/facebook usage:
* http://news.ycombinator.com/
* https://poal.co/
* http://slashdot.org/
* https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
* https://gab.com/
* https://www.unz.com/
* https://gettr.com/
Are some of them controversial? Of course, but that's the point. The wildly authoritarian left leaning sites that comprise big tech as a whole represent a single filter bubble. Staying in any particular bubble (right wing ones exist too) is a great way to turn yourself into a useful idiot/cultists/NPC.
Because the difficulty of tuning into a site that only leans in one direction isn't that you'll get biased news coverage, but whole entire stories are completely left out if they're bad for that side, and stories that are eventually found to be wildly incorrect, or even completely false issue only the quietest of correction edits while the untrue memes repeat ad infinite, but sites that lean the other way will ruthlessly correct their opponents.
The most important things to be reading are the things that are…
I'd never seen that before, that's excellent!
The original PDF is at https://www.unz.com/PDF/PERIODICAL/SaturdayRev-1968dec21/62/, which is includes a nice drawing of the student speaking with a building superintendent while holding a barometer, but to say more would be to spoil the punchline. Here is the text:
> Angels on a Pin
By ALEXANDER CALANDRA
SOME time ago, I received a call from a colleague who
asked if I would be the referee on the grading of an
examination question. He was about to give a student a
zero for his answer to a physics question, while the
student claimed he should receive a perfect score and
would if the system were not set up against the student.
The instructor and the student agreed to submit this to an
impartial arbiter, and I was selected.
I went to my colleague’s office and read the examination
question: “Show how it is possible to determine the height
of a tall building with the aid of a barometer.”
The student had answered: “Take the barometer to the
top of the building, attach a long rope to it, lower the
barometer to the street, and then bring it up, measuring
the length of the rope. The length of the rope is the height
of the building.”
I pointed out that the student really had a strong case
for full credit, since he had answered the question completely
and correctly. On the other hand, if full credit were
given, it could well contribute to a high grade for the student
in his physics course. A high grade is supposed to
certify…