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Cake day: October 6th, 2025

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  • How did you reach the conclusion that they’re “heavily correlated”? From the studies you posted, I’m seeing effect sizes of r ≈ 0.2, which is usually considered a weak correlation. A change in one variable explains only about 4% of variance in the other.

    An effect of this magnitude is, I suspect, consistent with left wing beliefs/ideology being transmitted at universities, whose population has already passed a selection filter on intelligence.


  • Euthanized by taxation can’t work. Even if you pull it off, the wealth simply leaves and reinvests in a less restrictive country. Capital flight. Race to the bottom.

    Overcoming capital would mean the victims of capitalism—all of us—coordinating on the scale at which capital operates: the global scale. We can’t even agree at national scales.

    Worse, capital owns the communications infrastructure and controls which messages get amplified and which dampened. They can actively manipulate our “common knowledge”, our sense of what everyone else takes for granted. They can, and do maneuver us into two mutually antagonistic factions, each convinced of their moral righteousness, their justified hatred of the other half of the population.

    To actually defeat capital and institute a better, stable, fair system, we’d need to first reconcile with the arbitrary political faction we’ve been trained to hate. Then we’d have a shot at globally coordinating in a world where the five richest men in earth own media networks.

    It’s a hard problem.












  • Then why does people’s preference for spicy food correlate to local food pathogen prevalence?

    See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9586227/

    To elaborate a little further. “Just not eating” something is a modern luxury. For most of our history, you ate everything that was available or (someone, usually your youngest kids first) starved. The argument isn’t that spices cover the taste of rotten food, but that they actually kill the pathogens that make humans sick, making more food edible for longer. This is a spill over from these plants’ long evolutionary arms race with phytotoxins. Cultures in places with high food pathogen prevalence, where spicing makes a real difference to survival, develop a preference for spicy food, despite their initially aversive taste. Cultures in cold climates with few food pathogens don’t.



  • What?

    Government funded and administered health care systems being a form of risk pooling and insurance are not controversial ideas. These are standard definitions.

    I’m not sure where you’re getting these ideas. Why would taxpayer paid services not be a form of risk pooling? There are hundreds of countries around the world with government run health systems, or government funded and privately run systems, or private-public partnerships in various forms. Pooling taxpayer money to fund health care for those individuals unlucky enough to need it absolutely does make it insurance.

    I recommend reading the Wikipedia pages on “universal health care” and “health insurance” if you’d like to start learning about these topics.

    I’m an academic statistician who discusses risk and related concepts with experts every day…


  • I mean, I agree with the first part fully, but I think what you mean is that we shouldn’t have for-profit corporate run insurance.

    Any socialised health care is a form of insurance—a way for us to pool the risk of large bad events, so that everyone (or a lot of people) pays a little so that a few people aren’t totally destroyed by the catastrophe. The alternative to having insurance is that we let people die when rare but really bad things happen. We absolutely should have insurance, but we should all share the cost equally, or the rich should pay more, rather than a few people massively profiting from running the enterprise.

    But, however we run it, we’ll need to treat dental differently from medical because of what I said in my first comment