An aging population too. Young people commit more violence, use more substances, and get into more accidents. The Boomers still have massive influence on culture even though its not cool to market to them.

My understand that the decline of tobacco use, alcohol use, sex, and pregnancy among youth in the USA are well-established (but how many young US people are sharing naughty texts or photos when before the smartphone they would be making out?)

And isn’t the trans and nonbinary stuff a norm that teh yoofs are enthusiastically breaking while people over 50 fret?

Adam Mastroianni has the audacity to claim that people don’t seem to join phygs any more, gets clip art from Astral Codex Ten and hosts a vlog for Inkhaven guests https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-decline-of-deviance

Pepper

That post does sound like she thinks race and sex determine mathematical ability a la James Damore, Larry Summers, or Charles Murray and other backwards Americans.

Automattic has a budget for sponsoring events https://automattic.com/events/ but a web host based in San Francisco does not sponsor Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, and Gwern by accident.

I think she would be willing to learn how to cite things, not sure whether she wants to learn why just surveying people is not the best way to find the truth. Pretty sure that her interest in trans people is not purely scientific.

I’m not sure her work is any worse than the average psychology paper that ends up in a magazine rack, but I am not signing up for her Substack to see. And “no worse than the average psychology paper” is not high praise.

So pre-teen me reading the Biggles books with the gag about the pilot who tries to do ballistic calculations during a dogfight was saving me from being as stupid as a Californian?

Show them the RationalWiki page where Scott Alexander promised that he could only absorb the smart racism from crazy bloggers and ignore the stupid stuff, Elizabeth Sandifer warned him this was like drinking sewer water with just one filter, and then Alexander posted about how all of a sudden he was feeling more conservative and maybe the things he was reading were connected to that

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Alexander (also archive.is and other backups)

A Spider Robinson short story covers “is pederasty always wrong?” I think the topic was popular in American sci fi fandom in the late 20th century, Jerry Pournelle posted about it.

Yud is more comfortable using his position in the community to discourage people from taking LSD than discourage them from screwing much younger people or violating BDSM protocols. He has written many times about how he wanted to be treated as a credentialed adult when he was a precocious teenager, and about the roles he likes to take in BDSM play. He does not seem keen on the idea that a community’s norms around high-risk behaviour will attract or repulse people who you really do not want in your community, he is more comfortable with asking “is LSD generally harmful to the individual person who uses it?”

If I was the leader of a community which had to expel someone for plying people with narcotics, having sex with them underage, and pushing them into extreme BDSM scenarios, I would simply not post that each of those acts is OK sometimes and its not my business to investigate them.

Bloomberg names the person I am thinking of and mentions the first and third accusations

An obit for James Watson and his Dawkins- or Pinker-like path from a scientist to a bitter reactionary https://www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/james-watson-remembrance-from-dna-pioneer-to-pariah/

Sure, saying that about being in the wrong body was a dick move. You don’t have to accept all the theory to see that many people are in bodies that feel wrong to them, and many people are expected to present in ways that feel wrong to them. The quote implies that they should just try harder to perform the gender they were assigned at birth.

People who get angry about trans people and trans theory remind me of Dawkins and friends, because what starts as a factual/philosophical concern (there are probably no gods / the idea that people have a true gender inside them sounds mystical) gets twisted in a reactionary direction. I don’t have to understand why trans or nonbinary people feel the way they do to support them as they explore ways of being humans in the world.

I think that gender is a collection of roles in a specific society which people perform and have performed on them. Its not something which exists outside that context, any more than “being the king” exists outside of a legal system. Of the three statements on BlueSky, its the third (the statement about sterilizing children) which makes me think he has been consuming angry things about trans people online.

Grimes was married to Elon Musk and performs at events for ‘heretical truth-tellers’ sponsored by Peter Thiel

I think he is stating that people don’t have an invisible eternal Gender like a Christian thinks people have an invisible eternal Soul. I am a materialist so I don’t think either exists. Shazeer goes on to complain about “sterilizing children” which is a red flag of transphobia (ie. people who post a lot about that tend to have a screw loose).

signpost.news gives me error 500 but Ars Technica has an article on Woodard

Meanwhile he objects to people theorycrafting objections (Tessa’s dialogue about the midwit trap and an article for the Cato Institute called “Is that your true rejection?”) That is an issue in casual conversations, but professionals work through these possibilities in detail and make a case that they can be overcome. Those cases often include past experience completing similar projects as well as theory. A very important part of becoming a professional is learning to spot “that requires a perpetual motion machine,” “that implies P = NP,” “that requires assuming that the sources we have are a random sample of what once existed” and not getting lost in the details; another is becoming part of a community of practitioners who criticize each other.

The (Falun Gong mouthpiece) Epoch Times recently had a front-page story on Larry Sanger’s criticisms of Wikipedia.

eugenics

Yes, the bit about John von Neumann sounds like he is stuck in the 1990s: “there must be a gene for everything!” not today “wow genomes are vast interconnected systems and individual genes get turned on and off by environmental factors and interventions often have the reverse effect we expect.” Scott Alexander wrote an essay admiring the Hungarian physics geniuses and tutoring.