Different interest groups don’t bargain over the budget, they just add to it

Source: Forbes

(Note that I am a little cautious of any graph labeled total gov’t spending, due to it being a pain in the butt to add up the budgets of every city, county, and other municipality in the entire country over many years, but I think the graph may be accurate.)

So this graph came from a Forbes article, “Lessons From the Decades Long Upward March of Government Spending,” which notes that:

For me, the most notable fact about this chart is that the growth of government spending has been remarkably steady. The trend over the last 83 years has been for government spending to rise by 0.24 percent of GDP per year, and the correlation is strong: a linear regression on this trend has an R-squared value of 0.72, meaning that time explains most of the movement in government spending.

In other words, mission creep. If you’re clever, you might start to wonder what will happen if this trend keeps going. If you’re really clever, you might figure out that in 1847, the US must have had negative government spending.

Or maybe there’s more than just mission creep going on.
Here’s a graph of federal spending vs. GDP since 1791:

Wow. Spending pre-WWI looks radically different than spending post-WWII, and I don’t think it’s just the difference between GNP and GDP.

The graph ends at 2011, but 2015’s total gov’t spending is estimated at 6.2 trillion dollars, or 35% of GDP. (Though I’m wondering if that shouldn’t be 39%; someone take a look and tell me why they aren’t adding the 3% for debt. For that matter, they don’t seem to have Social Security listed, and SS is like 24% of the budget so that’s kind of huge if they left it out.) Federal spending seems to be at 21 or 24% of GDP. Obviously these are all estimates.

Prior to WWI, non-wartime government spending was practically flat. Spending as percent of GDP did remain elevated after the Civil war and even after the small bump of the War of 1812, but in both cases it gradually fell back toward pre-war levels, perhaps as much due to gradual economic recovery/growth as budget cuts. Immediately after WWI, it looks like the same process has begun, but then it doesn’t.

Let’s explore some possible reasons why:

1. Cold War Spending

Maintaining a nuclear arsenal plus a lot of aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and tanks costs a lot more than just trusting your citizens to bring their own guns to the next skirmish.

(“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”)

Defense spending is about 13% of the Federal budget, and 5% of total GDP, which is a bigger % than the entire Federal budget for the entire 1800s except for the Civil War.

The Cold War acts a lot like previous wars, but takes a lot longer.

 

2. The Income Tax

While there were some, shall we say, mini-income taxes proposed or passed to fund wars in the 1800s, the system really got going with the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913. Look back at the graph; other than the effects of wars ending, (including the Cold War,) spending as % of GDP has been steadily on the increase ever since.

Prior to 1913, the Federal government got most of its money from tariffs, customs, and certain sales taxes. The Income Tax obviously made it much, much easier to increase tax revenues, regardless of the reason. One may wonder about the wisdom behind such a move:

During the two decades following the expiration of the Civil War income tax, the Greenback movement, the Labor Reform Party, the Populist Party, the Democratic Party and many others called for a graduated income tax.^[6]

The Socialist Labor Party advocated a graduated income tax in 1887.^[7] The Populist Party “demand[ed] a graduated income tax” in its 1892 platform.^[8] The Democratic Party, led by William Jennings Bryan, advocated the income tax law passed in 1894,^[9] and proposed an income tax in its 1908 platform.^[10]

“The federal income tax was strongly favored in the South, and it was moderately supported in the eastern North Central states, but it was strongly opposed in the Far West and the Northeastern States (with the exception of New Jersey).^[14] The tax was derided as “un-Democratic, inquisitorial, and wrong in principle.”^{[15]” source: Wikipedia} 

Looks like poor farmers and laborers wanted to increase taxes on the wealthy and get rid of taxes that fell on themselves. The government decided to go along with the scheme because hey, free money. So you I guess you have the socialists to thank for your nukes.

Interestingly, William Jennings Bryan, one of the populist popularizers of the idea of the income tax as a means of freeing the people from the shackles of the gold standard, (“You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!“) was an anti-Darwinist who lobbied for (and got) state laws banning the teaching of evolution in public schools and represented the prosecution in the Scopes Trial in 1925. According to the Wikipedia, he opposed evolution not only on the regular religious grounds, but also because he feared its use as an weapon of war, ie the Social Darwinism being promoted by the Germans.

The US officially switched to fiat money in 1976, well into our long rise.

Anyway, here’s a graph showing the prominent role of income taxes in the Federal Budget:

If the Federal government were still limited to customs and excise taxes, this would be a much smaller pie.

 

3. The Federal Reserve

Like the Income Tax, the Federal Reserve Bank of the US was founded in 1913–boy was Woodrow Wilson busy. It purpose was to stabilize the banking industry and prevent bank runs from wrecking the economy, and I believe it serves as one of the major lenders to the US government, letting them spend more than they take in.

I am basically  ambivalent on questions like, “Is the Fed a good thing?” or “Should we allow fractional reserve banking?” until I know more, but I am a little sympathetic toward the Fed just because QE is one of the few things anyone in government has actually done to try to fix the economy.

Here’s a graph for you, showing the growth of deficit spending:

 

4. Suffrage

The percent of Americans who are legally allowed to vote and actually do so has increased from <5% in the late 1700s to almost 45% today. (Wikipedia)

Back in the 1700s/early 1800s, only free adult males who owned property were allowed to vote; the laws were set by state and so varied a bit–in some places property owning women could vote, for example; ethnicity was probably a concern here and there.

The first major expansion of the franchise occurred between 1792 and 1856, as the property requirements were repealed state-by-state. Looks like several states abolished theirs around 1820, including NY and AL. (Actually, looks like Alabama entered the Union around them with no property requirement to start with.)

I’m guessing the 1866 dip is due to disenfranchisement of Southerners due to the Civil War.

Racial restrictions on voting were removed in 1869. The black vote does not represent a very large expansion in suffrage just because black men were a relatively small % of the overall population at the time and the KKK and other groups were effectively preventing them, especially by the early 1900s, from voting.

The biggest single jump in the graph begins around 1920, when women were allowed to vote–an expansion that more than doubled the size of the voting population.

Since then, there have been a few small expansions–the elimination of poll taxes and other impediments to voting; the voting age switched from 21 to 18, etc.

Overall, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that women seem to prefer spending on social welfare projects, and men prefer spending on armies.

You might think that different interest groups would argue over the budget until they come to a reasonable compromise, or that one year Democrats would pass all of their ideas, and then a Republican administration would come along, repeal it all, and pass their own agenda.

But this doesn’t happen; it’s been over 40 years since Roe vs. Wade, and Republicans still haven’t gotten rid of it.

Once one side passes a spending program, it’s virtually guaranteed to stay.

 

5. Modern Mass-Media

As I have discussed before, recent (ie, in the past 100 or so years) technological advances have created a completely novel memetic environment. For almost the entirety of human history, people got almost all of the information about the world around them from the people around them, principally their parents, grandparents, and tribal/village elders. Information passed vertically in this way I refer to as “meme mitochondria,” due to their similarity to the mitochondrial DNA passed down from mother to child.

Since the invention of the printing press, and increasingly since radio, TV, and the internet, people have gotten more and more of their information about the world from these sources. Information thus passed horizontally I call “meme viruses,” due to the similarity with the horizontal spread of conventional viruses. (I’d call them “viral memes,” but that name’s taken.)

I theorize that evolution selects for meme mitochondria that maximize the chances of their own reproduction, that is, since they are passed largely from parent to child, they are ideas that encourage high natality, personal survival, and loyalty to family and tribe. Meme mitochondria do not need to encourage any kind of loyalty to people outside one’s tribe or protect their lives in any way.

Meme viruses, being spread horizontally, succeed by promoting the common good of the group, but do not need to promote the welfare of the individual, nor natality.

Modern mass communication technologies, therefore, have created a completely evolutionarily novel selective environment in which horizontal meme transmission has become dominant over vertical transmission for the first time in all of human history, which may in turn cause people to demand radically different things of their governments, like social welfare spending or legalized gay marriage.

 

6. Longer Life Expectancies

The single biggest expense in the government budget is old people:

At the state and local level, pensions become a big deal.

Here’s a different graph:

Source: Policy Basics “Where tax dollars go“

Anyway, Social Security is the single largest item in the Federal budget at 24%, and pensions and Medicare add quite a bit more–overall, I wouldn’t be surprised if old people received a full half of government budget dollars.

“But wait,” I hear you saying, “Social Security is totally special and not a real government expenditure because I paid into it and therefore it’s something I’m entitled to but totally not an entitlement.”

Well, no. Not really. Sorry, but Social Security is a ponzi scheme. You don’t pay into it and then get your own money back out. The money you put in now goes to pay retirees right now. When you retire in the future, future workers will pay for you.

The whole system was thought up during a time of expanding population growth, when there were plenty of new workers around to pay for old workers to retire. As growth has tapered off, this system has become less viable.

There was actually a Supreme Court case in which the court decided that Social Security is not, in fact, an entitlement.

By the way, “not an entitlement” means “there is no guarantee you will get this because you are not entitled to it.” If the government decides that it just can’t afford to fund Social Security anymore, well, then you just won’t get Social Security anymore.

(Yes, I have had some very annoying discussions with people who complain about the evils of “entitlements” while defending their right to never, ever have their Social Security cheques cut.)

Medicine and hygiene being what they were back in the 1800s, there were just fewer old people around. Even if they’d had Social Security back then, it would have been a much smaller program.

 

Changes in the composition of the budget over the past 50 years:

Of course, there was a war going on in 1964, but it still shows just how much Social Security and related programs have expanded over the decades.

I have a two more graphs that might be of interest:

Grey bars mark recessions

Interesting how local spending crashed between 1933 and 1945 as Federal spending took off.

 

I always look at people funny when they complain that proposed government program X or Y is socialist. “We’re already socialist,” I tell them. When government spending is 25% of the entire nation’s GDP (and I’m not sure if that even includes Social Security,) you are already living in a socialist country. If the theory that politics is really just people arguing over the budget is correct, then as the budget becomes an increasingly large percent of GDP, then I expect the political discourse to only become more heated and nastier as people’s entire livelihoods become increasingly dependent on whether or not they qualify for a government handout or program of some sort.

Finally, the Forbes article also notes:

Most importantly, trends on entitlements look a lot more unfavorable than they did in 1992. Baby boom retirements will continue to push Social Security spending upward, by about a percentage point of GDP over the next 25 years. Medicare costs actually aren’t growing as fast as they did in the early 1990s, but they are starting off a larger base, making medical inflation a more significant fiscal problem than it used to be.

I don’t think the upward trend can continue forever.

 

Things from the internet

Things from around the internet, without much commentary:

(I found these for sale at Toys R Us. Why is Toys R Us trying to market football-themed snuggies to grown women? No, none of their ads show snuggies being worn/used by men. Do you know what women do not like? Football. Don’t fuck with that, Toys R Us. It’s one of the few things I’ve got in common with most other women.)

(EvolutionistX supports no particular political candidates at this point, but does find the ways other people go about displaying and discussing their political preferences interesting.)

 

Some thoughts for homeschooling parents

You can’t build up immunity to a disease by never experiencing it.

I hear a lot of people around these parts vowing to homeschool their kids because of this that or the other public schools are doing–usually something related to modern liberal politics. They’re afraid of their kids learning about gay marriage, or social justice, or something similar, so they decide that the solution is just to keep the kids at home where they can learn without the agenda.

Now, to be clear, I have nothing against homeschooling–all of the evidence and studies I’ve seen on the subject indicate that it is a perfectly fine way to educate a kid, so long as the parents are mentally healthy, not-abusive, etc. If you happen to live in an area where there aren’t a lot of other people around, then you might want to consider conventional schools just because your neighborhood makes it difficult to associate with other humans, but otherwise, I see homeschooling as just another method of educating a kid. If your goal is merely to provide your kid with the best education possible, this post is not for you.

However, if your goal in homeschooling is to prevent your kid from learning about broad social trends, political ideologies, or ideas you don’t like, anecdotal evidence suggests you will fail.

Your kid will grow up, they will leave the house, and then they will learn about all of the stuff everyone else believes. If everyone out there believes X, and your kid is even remotely neurologically normal, then your kid will learn about X and start believing it.

Remember, the vast majority of normal people pick up their ideas and beliefs from the other people around them. This is not a bug. This is a very important ability. Other people are treasure troves of useful information about how to stay alive and not die. Imitating others is how you learned to talk, which things are good to eat, and how to behave in new situations. If you’re standing near a road with your friend, and they suddenly jump back, it’s in your interest to jump back, too.

Inability to properly imitate others is extremely problematic and one of the basic symptoms of autism.

So, like I said, if your kids are remotely normal, they will pick up the values of the dominant culture upon exposure. And then they will decide that you were a looney nutcase.

I’m going to talk about the personal experiences of 5 people I know who were homeschooled by conservative Christians. I’m not cherry-picking; they are all the homeschooled people I know.

One went to Bible college, got pregnant, dropped out, and got married. This person still professes Christian faith, but believes far more in materialism.

The second dropped out of college, became a die-hard SJW, and changed genders. I doubt they are still Christian, and they regard their parents’ faith as a cult.

Third completed college, but has become a die-hard SJW. Has a very dim view of conservative Christianity. No children.

Fourth became an atheist liberal who believes in gay marriage and abortion.

Fifth became a die-hard SJW who hates conservative Christianity, thinks their parents were culty, and makes pornography.

If you want an in-depth look at how this happens, I recommend the webcomic Dumbing of Age.

What happened?

In all of these cases, the parents homeschooled to keep their kids isolated from certain ideas, ideologies, or behaviors. The kids graduated with very little experience of the world. They did not have a thorough understanding of how the world works, the philosophies out there, and why, exactly, their parents disagreed.

As a result, when exposed to the meme-viruses of the world, they get infected. They have no defenses.

In my experience, the vast majority of conservatives cannot articulate a coherent explanation for their beliefs, and do not attempt to explain their underlying reasoning to their kids. Many of them, I suspect, simply believe as they do because of habit, convenience, or because everyone else in their area does. Liberalism, by contrast, has put a lot of effort into making arguments against conservative beliefs.

For example, let’s take gay marriage. Common conservative arguments against gay marriage are “Ew! Gay people are gross!” “God says homosexuality is a sin,” and “The purpose of marriage is to make children.”

Liberals have all sorts of counter-arguments, like, “Ellen DeGeneres isn’t icky,” “Separation of Church and State,” and “But we let infertile people get married.”

In short, if it is really important to you that your kid think gay marriage is a bad idea, you’d better have a better, more coherent argument than that. Same for everything else in your memeplex/ideology/worldview–up to and including the existence of god. You might think your proof for the existence of god is pretty solid, but most of the people your kids will be associating with will probably think rather little of your proofs.

If you can’t explain your ideology and rigorously support it, showing your kids that your explanations of how the world works is better than the dominant ones, then you’d be better off just letting your kid go to public school and then doing your best to defend any objections to the curriculum when they come up. Your kids might think you’re kind of weird (just as I thought my parents were kind of weird in the early 90s for defending the use of aerosols/CFCs and not being concerned about the hole in the ozone layer), but they won’t hate you or think you’re a loon.

Adulterations in the Feed

It’s no secret that sperm counts have been dropping like rocks over the past 70 years or so (though the trend may have recently leveled out.)

” Sperm counts in the 1940s were typically well above 100m sperm cells per millilitre, but Professor Skakkebaek found they have dropped to an average of about 60m per ml. Other studies found that between 15 and 20 per cent of young men now find themselves with sperm counts of less than 20m per ml, which is technically defined as abnormal.” — from The Independent, “Out for the count: Why levels of sperm in men are falling“

While environmental effects (like smoking,) have effects on sperm counts in adults, these appear to be basically small or short-lasting. The biggest, longest-lasting effects on sperm counts appears to be the unterine environment where the future-low-sperm-count-male’s testicles were developing. Improper fetal testicle development => low sperm count for life. Eg,

“A man who smokes typically reduces his sperm count by a modest 15 per cent or so, which is probably reversible if he quits. However, a man whose mother smoked during pregnancy has a fairly dramatic decrease in sperm counts of up to 40 per cent – which also tends to be irreversible.”

What elsecould make a uterine environment hostile to testicular development?

How about too much estrogen?

I’ve posted before about Diethylstilbestrol, (or DES,)  is a synthetic nonsteroidal estrogen. Between 1940 and 1971, DES was given in large quantities to pregnant women to prevent miscarriages. Unfortunately, it turns out that pumping babies full of unnaturally high levels of estrogen might be bad for them–DES was discontinued as a medication for pregnant women because it gave their daughters cancer, (an actual epigenetic effect) and the sons appear to have high rates of transgender, transexual and intersex conditions.

Quoting the Wikipedia:

“In the 1970s and early 1980s, studies published on prenatally DES-exposed males investigated increased risk of testicular cancer, infertility and urogenital abnormalities in development, such as cryptorchidism and hypospadias.^[38][39]

“… The American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) has documented that prenatal DES exposure in males is positively linked to a condition known as hypogonadism (low testosterone levels) that may require treatment with testosterone replacement therapy.^[43]

“… Research on DES sons has explored the long-standing question of whether prenatal exposure to DES in males may include sexual and gender-related behavioral effects and also intersex conditions. Dr. Scott Kerlin, a major DES researcher and founder of the DES Sons International Research Network in 1999, has documented for the past 16 years a high prevalence of individuals with confirmed prenatal DES exposure who self-identify as male-to-female transsexual, transgender, or have intersex conditions, and many individuals who report a history of experiencing difficulties with gender dysphoria.^{[45][46][47][48]}

“… Various neurological changes occur after prenatal exposure of embryonic males to DES and other estrogenic endocrine disrupters. Animals that exhibited these structural neurological changes were also shown to demonstrate various gender-related behavioral changes (so-called “feminization of males”). Several published studies in the medical literature on psychoneuroendocrinology have examined the hypothesis that prenatal exposure to estrogens (including DES) may cause significant developmental impact on sexual differentiation of the brain, and on subsequent behavioral and gender identity development in exposed males and females.”

Here is an excerpt from a paper, published in, I think, the early 40s.

Since the image quality is low, I’ve done my best to type it up for you:

“Experimental Intersexuality: The Effects of Combined Estrogens and Androgens on the Emryonic Sexual Development of the Rat

“RR. Greene, M. W. Rurrill and A. C. Ivy

“Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago, Illinois

“In previous publications the authors have reported and described in detail the effects of large doses of sex hormones on the embryonic sexual development of the rat. Androgens, when administered to the pregnant female, cause a masculinization of the female embryos (Greene, Burrill and Ivy, ’38, ’39 a). The female type of differentiation of most sexual structures is inhibited and a male type of differentiation of those structures is stimulated. Administered estrogens cause a femininization of the male embryos (Greene, Burrill and Ivy, ’38, ’40) in that they inhibit the masculine type of differentiation of some sexual structures and, instead, cause a female type of differentiation.

“…The experimental demonstration that estrogens do have a profound effect…”

What are external sources of estrogens in modern life?

Birth control pills. I know FTM trans folks birth control pills for the hormones in them. (They are often cheaper and easier to get than hormones specifically prescribed for trans folks, especially if you have a female friend.)

Can those hormones stick around in a mother’s body even after she discontinues taking the pills?

Fat and estrogen appear to be correlated:

“Other conditions that cause low estrogen levels in younger women include excessive exercise, eating disorders and too little body fat.” (source)

“Excess estrogen in the body causes weight gain around the abdomen and upper thighs. … Weight gain caused by estrogen starts a vicious cycle. Excessive body fat produces the aromatase enzyme that synthesizes estrogen, thus creating more estrogen in the body, which then promotes additional weight gain, and so on, says Hofmekler.” (source)

“Researchers have found a correlation between estrogen and weight, particularly during menopause, when estrogen levels drop, but weight tends to rise. But since fat cells can produce estrogen, the issue facing researchers is how to target the estrogen receptors that will boost energy and manage hunger and not contribute to menopause-related weight gain.” (source)

“For postmenopausal women, estrogen levels increase with increasing BMI, presumably because conversion of androgens to estrogen in adipose tissue is a primary source of estrogen…” (source)

Since Americans have been getting fatter over the past century, I’d expect estrogen levels to be up, but I’ve found no studies on the subject so far. (Also, the Wikipedia claims there’s no evidence that birth control pills make people fat.)

However, I have found quite a bit of evidence that giving synthetic estrogen to animals makes them fatter:

(Stilbosol is another name for DES, as you may note in the ad’s upper right hand corner.)

Since the picture quality is bad, I’ll try to type it up for you:

Ralph:

“Ralph has been feeding cattle in New York state for 20 years. He runs 300 head a year through his feed lot, buying mountain (?) calves at 400 pounds and finishing them to about 1,000 pounds.  …

“”I lean very heavily on college tests and they’re in favor of Stilbosol. The first time we tried it, back in 1955, I noticed a very definite improvement in appetite.

“”Stilbosol is a ‘must’ in our feeding operations. It has added to our profit. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be using it.””

Dan:

“We bring our cattle into the lots around 600 pounds. Feed for about 150 days. … We feed to all weights (950 to 1150 pounds) and take a little chance from time to time and feed t heavier weights,” Dan stated.

“We get about 2.75 lbs. daily gain. And I figure Stilbosol accounts for (unreadable) to 1/2 lb. of that daily gain. …

“Does Stilbosol make us money? There’s no doubt about it! Stilbosol has revolutionized the cattle business. I guess it’s the only good break through in the last ten years.”

Bill:

“”I tested Stilbosol. Took a bunch of 315 Montana yearlings and split them up. One group was actually lighter than the other. The only change I made in their rations was the addition of Stilbosol. The lighter group received Stilbosol. I figured that the lot fed Stilbosol gained over 1 1/2 lb. per day more than the lot which had no Stilbosol.

“”With all the competition, a man can’t afford to pas up anything that will lower his cost of grain. Stilbosol is one of them.””

John:

“We were trying to find the cheapest, most efficient ration. One group of calves received a ration containing Stilbosol. Another received a similar ration without Stilbosol. The group receiving Stilbosol had a feed conversion of (I can’t tell the number, but it’s clearly a single digit followed by .4). The group receiving no Stilbosol had a feed conversion of 10.35. The Stilbosol group gained 2.49 pounds per day. The group that did not receive Stilbosol gained 2.13 pounds per day.

“With Stilbosol, we figure our cost of grain to be substantially lower than similar rations without Stilbosol.) “

Four farmers wouldn’t lie to us, would they?

Interestingly, eating large quantities of beef while pregnant was one of the things that The Independent article (linked at the top) noted was correlated with low sperm counts years down the road in the all-grown-up-fetuses.

Of course, people who eat more beef may just weigh more, or have some other factors besides adulterations in the cattle feed.

DES was also put in chicken feed, for the exact same reasons as cattle feed, until it came out that DES causes cancer in humans. It was discontinued as a feed additive in the late 70s.

These days, I don’t know what–if anything–they’re using to finish cattle, but we may note that the vast majority of cattle are still finished in feedlots where they get much fatter than they would naturally. (That is, by wandering around eating grass like they normally do.) Feedlot cattle are, to put it bluntly, unnaturally fat.

Now I’m going to do a little math. The Independent article was published in 2010, and states that the article on falling sperm rates was published 19 years prior, or in 1991. The study therefore compared men in the 1940s to men in the 1980s and 1990. Men in the 1940s were fetuses before the age of feedlots, birth control pills, DES, or DES-fed cattle and chicken. Young(ish) men in 1990, by contrast, were born between 1950 and 1970–all within the era of feedlots, BCPs, DES, and DES-fed cattle and chicken.

If it is true that sperm counts have stabilized since the 90s, that is a point potentially in favor of my theory, since after the 70s, DES was basically gone.

This is all me speculating out loud, of course.

 

 

 

Once a political position becomes fashionable, it has already won

Edit: I feel like this post is badly written and doesn’t get its point across. As soon as I finish the post I’m working on right now, I’m going to try to fix it. My apologies for any confusion and delay.

I observed a decade or so ago that support for gay marriage had become very popular among the young and fashionable. At that point, I stopped worrying about the issue, on the assumption that support would soon tip 50%.

I never expected trans people to get much popular support, simply because there are so few of them. Facebook and Twitter have proven me wrong, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the issue fell off people’s radar screens. Trans folk are still considered pretty ‘weird’ by a lot of people.

“Feminism” and “Critical Race Theory” had become quite popular on the internet and among the cool people (at least, by my standards of cool), and have only become more prominent.

Racial issues I expect to continue being fairly high-profile, while feminist issues will remain largely in the background (by which I mean that no one stages large street protests over murdered women.)

Illegal immigration seems like an issue with high potential to become the next big popular thing, especially since it can ride on anti-racism’s coat tails and increasing numbers of young people in this country are people whose families immigrated from Mexico in the first place.

What do you think? What will be the next big thing?

 

On an unrelated note, I just realized that the “pus” in platypus is from the Greek for foot, eg, octopus, not from Latin, so the plural platypi is pseudo-Latin. I’d go with “platypodes”, since podes is the plural of pus, but then no one would have any idea what I’m saying.

Communism’s Death Toll: Bug or Feature?

In your garden-variety discussions of communism verses everything else, someone generally brings up the 85 to 100 million deaths attributed to communist regimes, and of course someone else responds that this is, as it were, merely a bug; a flaw due to having incorrectly implemented Marx’s ideas.

But after one too many death threats from a self-described Marxist (over, if I recall correctly, whether or not Rachel Dolezal is a terrible racist or was just trying to be helpful,) I thought to myself, “You know, what if the whole killing-all-your-enemies thing is really more of a feature than a bug?”

Of course, “Let’s kill lots of people!” tends not to be the greatest rallying cry for polite society, but it is hardly a secret that a great many political regimes have killed lots of people.

Just talk to anyone whose grandparents happen to be German about WWII, and you’ll probably hear a spiel along the lines of “The Hitler Youth just meant a hot meal in a time when people were hungry. Grandpa didn’t really want to invade Poland or kill all the Jews or any of that stuff.”

It’s as though all of these guys mysteriously disappeared:

 

Here’s a theory: most of these people were actually totally on board with the kill-the-enemies agenda.

 

Now, to be honest, most of the people I know personally who call themselves Communists are really nice people who aren’t interested in killing anyone. But some of them I’m not so sure of, and some I’ve met, I’m quite sure would happily ship their enemies off to Siberia. All the while swearing, of course, that they were just in it for the stew.

Communist Party of Great Britain at London May Day march, 2008

As for the original communists, the ones advocating “class warfare,” killing their enemies was probably the entire point.

This post wouldn’t be complete without hipster Stalin:

Thoughts?

Species of Exit: The Sentinelese, the world’s most isolated people

North Sentinel Island

Map showing location of North Sentinel Island (red) relative to the rest of the Andaman Islands

Map showing the distance between the Andaman Islands (small islands south of Myanmar) and land.

The Sentinelese appear to have split off from the rest of humanity approximately 48,500 years ago, and aside from occasional contact with other members of the Andaman islands, have remained isolated ever since.

People have occasionally landed on or near Sentinel island, but the islanders have all resisted contact, generally by shooting arrows at anyone who gets too close. Even National Geographic hasn’t got any pictures of them–when they tried to make a documentary on the island, armed with gifts, they had to retreat after the director took an arrow in the thigh. The last guys whose boat accidentally drifted onto their beach got killed and buried in shallow graves on the beach.

North Sentinel Island is technically owned by India, but India has given up trying to make peaceful contact, and it would probably look bad to just bomb the place.

So what do we know about the Sentinelese?

Obviously not a whole lot, since most of what we know of them has been observed from a distance.

The whole island is about the size of Manhattan, and probably inhabited by 40-500 people. They’re generally characterized as Negritos, a term used for the shorter than average but taller than Pygmies, dark-skinned people of the Andaman Islands and certain groups in the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia. The term is only descriptive; different Negrito tribes may not be related to each other at all. (I promised I’d get around to the Negritos eventually.)

Aside from stuff that has randomly washed up on their island or was given to them by folks trying to make contact, they have only stone tools and, according to the Wikipedia, appear not to have fire.

But a little more research suggests that Wikipedia may just be wrong on this point; during the search for the lost Malaysian jetliner, smoke was observed rising from North Sentinele, which implies that the people there probably do have fire.

At any rate, we do know that they have bows and arrows, boats, and spears.

When National Geographic tried to make contact, they left a plastic toy car, coconuts, a live pig, a doll, and aluminum cookware on the beach before getting shot at. After they retreated, they observed the Sentinelese shoot and bury the pig (not eat it?) and, if the Wikipedia is accurate, shoot and bury the doll. They took the coconuts and pans; no word of the car’s fate.

In 1970, a group of Indian anthropologists that came near the island had a decidedly strange incident:

Quite a few discarded their weapons and gestured to us to throw the fish. The women came out of the shade to watch our antics… A few men came and picked up the fish. They appeared to be gratified, but there did not seem to be much softening to their hostile attitude… They all began shouting some incomprehensible words. We shouted back and gestured to indicate that we wanted to be friends. The tension did not ease. At this moment, a strange thing happened — a woman paired off with a warrior and sat on the sand in a passionate embrace. This act was being repeated by other women, each claiming a warrior for herself, a sort of community mating, as it were. Thus did the militant group diminish. This continued for quite some time and when the tempo of this frenzied dance of desire abated, the couples retired into the shade of the jungle. However, some warriors were still on guard. We got close to the shore and threw some more fish which were immediately retrieved by a few youngsters. It was well past noon and we headed back to the ship…

Virtually nothing is known about the Sentinelese language, though it is speculated that it is related to the Onge language of the Andaman islands. However, attempts at using the Onge as translators have failed, as the Onge themselves cannot understand a word of Sentinelese.

A British expedition in the 1880s that got a decent look at the island claimed that, of all the nearby groups, Sentinelese culture most closely resembled Onge culture, so it is still possible that the languages are related, albeit distantly.

Since much more is known about the Onge, I’m going to speak briefly about them:

Onge man collecting honey, Andaman Islands

The Onge are marked in blue on the map above; today they live chiefly on Little Andaman Island in the south, but in the past they ranged further north, closer to to the Sentinelese. Contact with the outside world has reduced their population from almost 700 people (1900) to about 100. (There may well have been >700 people before 1900, that’s just the first date I have numbers for.) Strangely, the Onge appear to be the world’s least fertile people, with 40% of couples suffering infertility. Wikipedia estimates their Net Reproductive Rate (similar to TFR, but only looks at daughters) at 0.91, which is below replacement, however, their population appears to have held steady for the past 30 years, so perhaps the problem is working itself out.

Why such infertility? The most obvious guesses (IMO) are some sort of environmental poison/effect; some sort of diseased-induced infertility, like gonorrheal scaring (please note that I have no idea if any of the Onge have ever had gonorrhea, but it is a common cause of infertility;) or a side effect of inbreeding/lack of genetic diversity following their extreme population collapse.

The article Malnutrition and high childhood mortality among the Onge tribe of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands suggests that the real cause of the low NRR is high childhood mortality due to malnutrition/insufficient food, probably due to loss of their traditional hunting/gathering grounds.

Genetically, the Onge appear to have been isolated for an extremely long time. They all share the same mitochondrial DNA, haplotype M32, which is not found anywhere outside of the Andaman Islands. (The larger umbrella-group M, to which all M-varieties belong, is one of the world’s most wide-spread lineages, emerging either shortly before the Out of Africa event, or shortly after it, but is most reliably concentrated in Asia, with several ancient lineages in India.)

The Onge language is related to the languages of some of the other tribes in the Andaman Islands, and speculated to be part of the greater Austronesian language family. (Considering that the whole Indo-European language family is about, what, 4-6,000 years old, I am a little skeptical of our ability to reconstruct too much about a language that may have diverged 40,000+ years ago.)

Onge Y-DNA belongs to Haplogroup D-M174, which emerged in Asia about 60,000 years ago and isn’t found outside of Asia. It is found today among Tibetans, the Ainu, and the Andaman Islanders, suggesting that these people are all (at least partially) descended from a common source that split off from other humans around 60,000 years ago, or just after the OoA (relatively speaking.) D-M174 is also found in small amounts in China and central/east Asia.

The Ainu, IIRC, also have a particular tooth shape that is commonly found in Melanesia, but not outside of it, and a small amount (about 15%, I think,) of Siberian DNA. And, of course, we now have evidence of Melanesian DNA showing up in the Amazon rainforest, not to mention the curious concentration of archaic Denisovan admixture in Melanesians, despite the only Denisovan remains we’ve found so far coming from Russia. However, it appears that there is no Denisovan DNA in the Andaman Islanders, so maybe they split off before the Denisovan admixture advent.

The sum of the evidence suggests a single band of people, perhaps most closely resembling the Negritos, spread 60,000 years ago along the coast of southern Asia and spread far into the interior, reaching at least as far as Tibet, the Andaman Islands, and northern Japan, and possibly even crossing the Bering Strait and down to the tip of South America. (Since Melanesians do not appear to have ever spread to Polynesia, I suspect they did not boat straight across the Pacific, but maybe we just haven’t yet found Melanesian remains in Polynesia.)

Over the ensuing millenia, later population waves, like the Polynesians and the common ancestors of east Asians like the Han and the Japanese, migrated into the area, leaving only a few isolated remnants of Haplogroup D-M174 in far-flung, difficult to reach places like the Andaman islands, the Himalayan Plateau, and the coldest parts of Japan. Likewise, Melanesian DNA in the New World seems to have best survived in one of its harshest, most difficult to penetrate habitats: the rain forest.

This all gets back to my theory of genetic survival at the fringes, (discussed here,) which I hope to devote a full post to soon. The history of the world is the group with better tech conquering the group with worse tech, and then getting conquered in turn by a group with even better tech.

The island of Taiwan illustrates this well; the most recent immigration wave happened in 1949, when the ROC lost their war with the PRC and evacuated 2 million of their people to Taiwan, a nation of 6 million at the time. Taiwan had previously (temporarily) been conquered by the Japanese, and before that, by other Chinese people, who began arriving around 1300. They’ve been gradually defeating/replacing the aboriginal Taiwanese, who are now a very small population, and the aboriginal Taiwanese themselves have legends about having wiped out a negrito-like people who predated their arrival, but I consider such legends only potentially true. Each group got conquered by the next group with better tech.

A couple more pictures of Andaman Islanders:

Onge mother and child, Wikipedia

 

Andamanese Couple, Wikipedia

Anyway, back to the Sentinelese.

The available evidence suggests that they split off from the rest of the human population ages upon ages ago, and have been effectively isolated from everyone but their immediate neighbors ever since. Though technically their island is considered part of India, as a practical matter, they govern themselves. They have managed to retain their independent status for so long by living on a tiny, hard-to-reach island and enforcing a strict immigration policy of killing anyone who shows up on their beach.

Given that the Sentinelese would probably all die of the common cold if they ever did let foreigners onto their island, their policy is not unreasonable. You wouldn’t want to let some plague-bearing foreigner kill you with their germs, either. Unfortunately, the disease situation is unlikely to reverse itself; their population is just too small to withstand contact with the outside world. Too-long isolation in such a tiny place has cut them off from all the technological progress of the past 40,000 to 60,000 years, and their population is too small to develop much tech internally. To be fair, their strategy has worked so far. But now they’re stuck, maintaining their tiny island against the odds until someone decides to show up with guns and do some logging, fishing, or whatever they feel like, at which point there’s a good chance they’ll be wiped out.

Long term, total isolation is a policy with very low survival odds.

After some thought, the best option I can think of for the Sentinelese, other than continuing as they are and hoping for the best (after all, the rest of the world could destroy itself in a nuclear holocaust and leave them behind to continue doing their thing for the next 40,000 years,) is to expand their numbers and send excess people to the other Andaman Islands. Sure, most of those people would probably get colds and die, and if not the colds, alcohol’s a likely culprit, but as long as they keep exporting people, eventually some of them will survive, and create a breeding population/intermix with the other Andamanese until they have the numbers/immunity to interact with the outside world.

Table of Contents

Edit: Hopefully done! Please let me know if you notice any bad links.

With 200+ posts, managing the archives gets a little unwieldy. So I have attempted to make a table of contents thus far, grouped broadly by category. If you have any ideas for better ways to organize this (or notice any errors), I’d be happy to hear them.

Memes, Religion, and Morality

“Meme theory” posits that we can understand the spread of ideas by comparing them to viruses. These posts begin by looking at the way different environments/technologies influence the evolution of different kinds of memes, influencing morality and religion.

Mitochondrial Memes (part 1), Memetic Separatism => Ethnicity (part 2 of the meme posts), Memes and Transmission Pathways, Memes are Genes, Ten Commandments of the Constitution, That time Germany literally infected Russia with Memes

The Genetics of Altruism, I Suck at Holidays, Survival of the Moral-ist, Morality is what other people want you to do, Has Australia gone Totally Nuts? Why Do Good? For others or one’s Self?  Effective Altruists are Cute but Wrong, I’m Sick of False Empathy, Conservation of Caring, Animal Morality, New Yorker: Adopting 20 kids is awesome, except for the years of crippling suicidal depression

The Rise of Atheism, Without Ceremony, Religion is Meaningless (part 1), Without Children, Religion is Pointless (Part 2), Without ethnicity, religious identity disappears (part 3), The Decline of Religion (part 4), The Incompatibility of Christian Morality and Evolutionary Morality? Has Christianity Selected for an Atheistic Upper Class? Christianity and the Rise of the Art Instinct

Genes and HBD

Where there are memes, there are genes; all cultures (and environments) select for people who succeed in those cultures. These posts examine some genetics basics and theories on how our changing cultural-technical environments may have selected for specific traits found among modern people.

Increased gender dimorphism = lower IQ? Genetic Aristotelian Moderation,  Species is a Social Construct: My Grandfather’s Totally Badass Dog, Cats are Cuckoos, Hey, DNA: What is it good for? Light and BMI, Live Fast, Die Young: The amazing correlation between self-control and not dying, You Probably Aren’t Adapted to the Paleo Diet, “Ancestral Microbes”, Is Acne an Auto-Immune Disorder? Has eliminating hookworms made people fatter?

The Good Side of Clannishness, Making Sense of Maps–violence and grain, White Women’s Tears, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” Epigenetics, Whites like Goth and Metal because Whites are Depressives, Women, Math, and the Y Chromosome, HBD and The Continuum Concept, America and the Long Term, The Insidious Approach of Death, Somali Autism, I made some graphs (fertility vs. homicide), The Recent Development of High European IQ, African Americans, Hispanics, and longevity, …

Human Migration, Cultures, and Species of Exit

The broad story of human history is migration, in which the group with the better organization and technology tends to wipe out and replace those without. These posts look at human history through a genetic and anthropologic lens, especially migration, assimilation, replacement, and attempts at exit.

Neanderthals! Review: Decoding Neanderthals on PBS (Nova), When Enthusiasm was a Dirty Word, No, hunter gatherers were not peaceful paragons of gender equality, The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people, Human Admixture Chart, The Khazar Theory, Shakerin’ It, Oops, Looks like it was People, not Pots, Why an African Parasite got named “American Killer”, Cargo Cults, Why do Patriotic Americans like the Confederate Flag? AIDS and California, The Past Makes ISIS Look Good, West African Marriage and Child-Rearing Norms vs. African American Norms, The Genghis Khans of Europe, Germans, (Gypsies), Pygmies: Among the world’s most isolated peoples, or archaic hominin admixture? Are the Pygmies Retarded? Some Notable Nigerians, Into Africa: The Great Bantu Migration, Why do Native Americans have so much Neanderthal DNA? South Africa, democracy, and the dangers of demographics (part 1), South Africa, Democracy, and the dangers of Demographics (pt. 2), Stolen Land, Do Biker Lives Matter? Harleys, Exit, and Thedic Signaling, Species of Exit: The Sentinelese, the World’s Most Isolated People  (going up tomorrow)

Neuropolitics, Metapolitics

An attempt at understanding the neurological, psychological, and perhaps environmental traits that influence the way people think about politics and identify as “conservatives” or “liberals.”

Why Do Liberals Mock Conservatives’ Fear of Disease? Feedback Loops, Sociopaths within, sociopaths without, Studies: Disgust, Prisoner’s Dilemma, Peter Frost and Amygdalas, Amygdalaaas, Tolerance is a Meta-Value, Femininity as Fashion, X will be more like Y if X just acts more like Y, The Inverse Motte and Bailey, Liberals and Conservatives have Stopped Talking to Each Other, The Other Side Believes it is Moral, too, Society Constantly Lies: A Theory, A complicating wrinkle of uncomplicating insight via two images: Nature Observations, The Spoils, If you’re not my enemy, then you’re my friend, right? The white misperception of racial crossing, The “Other” is but a Foil for the Self, Now that gay marriage is the law of the land, everyone wants to pretend they were in favor of it from the start, Politics are Coming and they are Going to be Awful, Microaggressions and Isolation, Conservatives and Liberals Assume Everyone Else is Like Themselves, Black Friends and White Tears, Moderates are Dumb, Trapped in a Random World, Predictions for the Political Future, As the Peacock Struts: are liberals more competent than conservatives? Clarifications for “As the Peacock Struts,”  Comment on Left-Right Polarization

Psychology and Evolution

The category also known as evolutionary psychology

Aspie != Sociopath, “Shy People are Narcissists,” Study: Aspies don’t lack empathy; they have too much, To Know Thyself is the Hardest Thing, It’s all or Nothin’, Little White Lies and What They Mean, Guilt is a Thing inside of You, Sickle Cell Anemia Metaphor for Depression, Twilight Effects? Theory: Americans are fat because we don’t eat enough, Autism Exists Because Math is a Recently Evolved Ability, Intellectual Fluidity, The Uncanny Valley of Intelligence, A Zombie-Free Uncanny Valley, Pavlov Explains Lingerie, Criminality, Lotteries, Sorry, Les Mis: Criminals gonna Criminal, Man arrested more than 70 times released again, Study: Sexually dimorphic facial features vary according to level of autistic-like traits, Two Kinds of Dumb, Further Thoughts on IQ, Does childlessness drive people crazy? Is Humor Some Sort of Man Thing? Melanin, aggression, and sexuality, The Utility of Anxiety, Yes, Women think male Sexuality is Disgusting (Part one), Is Disgust Real? (Part 2), Disgust part 3: Disney explains Disgust, disgust vs. aggression vs. fertility (part 4), Creativity and Psychoticism, Bi-modal brains? Further Implications of Hippocampal Theory

Structures and Civilization

If the only morality is civilization, then we’d better figure out how to build one.

3rd world in the 1st world, The Great Informationing, Who Owns a Country? Religious Communism, EvolutionistX Manifesto, Things Have Changed Incredibly Fast, and We have Forgotten, Culture Comes from People, A Structural Proposal, Of Course your Enemies are Organized, Immigration, Corporations are Meta-Organisms and so Should not be Allowed in Politics, Why do economists fail at basic math? The Police, Let’s Talk Math, The Candy Crush Career Track, In Defense of Planned Parenthood, Family, Nation, and History, Land Value Tax and Coherent Ownership for Civilization, Les Miserables, Time Preference: the most under-appreciated mental trait

Political Critiques

Mostly responses to Feminism, SJWs and other strains of Cultural Marxism

Why I am not a White Nationalist, Throwing Women Under the Rotherham Bus, Princesses all the way Down, Rioting is the correct response to the wrong question, Society is Constantly Lying, Transsexuals are not your enemies, Everything makes sense if you know the truth, Waco, “News”, Assholes Gonna Asshole, My theory of the day: Feminism is not about men vs. women, but popular people vs. unpopular men, “Politics” is just Gossip, Moldbug, If Race is just a social construct, why can’t Rachel Dolezal be black? In 6th Grade, I Prayed Every Day for God to Turn me into a Mexican, Reality is a Social Construct, Pasting on our Plastic Smiles, The Marxist Meme-Plex as Cargo Cult of the Industrial Revolution, Democracy Fails Because Conservatives Suck at Opposing Liberals, everyone is searching for reasons to get offended and we’re killing ourselves, How Much anti-Psych Research is Funded by Guys who Think all Mental Illness is Caused by Dead Aliens? Anarcho-Tyranny, Who needs Nobel Prize Winners, anyway? Everything Adults say about Bullying is Bullshit, Bullying pt 2: Race, Crime, and the Police, Remember when Liberals gave a shit about the Environment? Women in Combat, Transsexuals Prove That Gender is Real, Women in Science–the Bad Old Days, Betrayal, Rupert Murdoch is a Lying Liar, Higher-Ups Argue about Women in Combat,

The Cathedral

Reading Ivy League publications so you don’t have to.

Update on the cathedral,  Cathedral round up #2, Job Opening in Bullshit

Misc

Mostly other science topics

Bertlemann’s Socks, Are Useless things actually Useful? Chomsky on Foucault, The problem with seeing patterns is that sometimes patterns don’t exist, Convert Me, Vaccines, Is the Internet Making us Worse at Spotting Scams? Terrifying Things, Things that Hurt my Soul, No, you don’t “build up your immunity” by getting sick, Anonymous Sex with Strangers still Spreads Disease, Doh, Comets, Judging the gift by its cover: contents don’t matter, Scientific Nostalgia, Black reactions to white people tanning, Open thread / Links / Aaargh, Wimmins, Some Pictures of the ‘Stans, Happy 200 Posts! Come join the party, third worlders probably think our obsession with saving dangerous megafauna absurd, Some statistical notes

(I’ll probably update this in about 100 posts.)

Higher-ups argue about the Marine Study on Women in Combat

Just in case you’ve been following this, here are a few articles I’ve run into on the subject.

Congressman calls for Navy secretary to resign as Marines’ women-in-combat feud escalates

“Congressman Duncan Hunter, left, a California Republican and Marine Corps combat veteran, is calling for Navy Secretary Ray Mabus to resign after Mabus criticized the Marine Corps’ gender integration research. …

“The military is on the cusp of historic change, with a mandate to open all combat roles to women by January. Each of the services has until Oct. 1 to request any exemptions to that policy.

Mabus has made his intentions clear, saying he won’t allow either the Navy or the Marine Corps to keep any specialties closed to women. …

Days later, Mabus went a step further, telling NPR that the Marine Corps’ study was flawed. He reiterated his position again this week during a speaking engagement in Ohio. …

“Mabus also has suggested the study’s results were predetermined.

“It started out with a fairly large component of the men thinking ‘this is not a good idea,’ and ‘women will never be able to do this,’ ” Mabus told NPR in an interview broadcast on Sept. 11. “When you start out with that mindset, you’re almost presupposing the outcome.””

In response, Sergent Major Justin LeHew probably stated:

“Ok, been silent long enough on this. I have been a part of this process from the beginning and I am just going to put it out there. The Secretary of the Navy is way off base on this and to say the things he is saying is is flat out counter to the interests of national security and is unfair to the women who participated in this study.We selected our best women for this test unit, selected our most mature female leaders as well. The men (me included) were the most progressive and open minded that you could get. The commander of this unit was a seasoned and successful infantryman. The XO of this unit was as good as they get, so good the USMC made her the CO of the Officer candidate school.

This was as stacked as a unit could get with the best Marines to give it a 100 percent success rate as we possibly could. End result? The best women in the GCEITF as a group in regard to infantry operations were equal or below in most all cases to the lowest 5 percent of men as a group in this test study.
I just selected the SgtMaj of the unit to head up our senior enlisted academy at Camp Lejeune, NC. No one went in to this with the mentality that we did not want this to succeed. No Marine, regardless of gender would do that. With our limited manpower we cannot afford to not train eveyone to the best of their abilities.

They are slower on all accounts in almost every technical and tactical aspect and physically weaker in every aspect across the range of military operations. SECNAV has stated that he has made his mind up even before the release of these results and that the USMC test unit will not change his mind on anything.

Listen up folks. Your senior leadership of this country does not want to see America overwhelmingly succeed on the battlefield, it wants to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to pursue whatever they want regardless of the outcome on national security. The infantry is not Ranger School. That is just a school like any other school and is not a feeder specifically to the infantry.

Anyone can go to that school that meets the prereqs, just like airborne school. Kudos to the two women who graduated. They are badasses in their own right. In regards to the infantry… There is no trophy for second place. You perform or die.

Make no mistake. In this realm, you want your fastest, most fit, most physical and most lethal person you can possibly put on the battlefield to overwhelm the enemy’s ability to counter what you are throwing at them and in every test case, that person has turned out to be a man.

There is nothing gender biased about this, it is what it is. You will never see a female Quarterback in the NFL, there will never be a female center on any NHL team and you will never see a female batting in the number 4 spot for the New York Yankees. It is what it is. As a country we preach equality.

But to place these mandates on the military before this country has even considered making females register, just like males, for the selective service is in all aspects out of touch with reality. Equality and equal opportunity start before you raise your right hand and swear and oath to this country.

Yes, we are an all volunteer force at the moment. Should this country however need to mobilize rapidly again to face the threats of the world like our grandfathers did, it will once again look to the military age males of this country to fill the ranks because last I checked, we did not require women to register for the selective service.

Until that happens, we should not even be wasting our time even thinking about opening up the infantry to women.

To my female Marine friends out there, I love you to death, you are the best of the best and you have my continued admiration for what you do and to the Marines of the GCEITF….you are tops in my book for taking up the challenge…regardless what the SECNAV says about you not being the best that we could have put in that unit because you were….on all accounts.”

This was posted on FB communities for the Marines and Infantry, rather than an “official” source like a news article, so I can’t claim 100% certainty that someone didn’t just make it up. However, if you want the full United States Marine Corps Assessment of Women in Service Assignments, this looks about as legit as it gets. Since it’s all images, I’m not going to quote, but one of the things it does note is that the vast, vast majority of jobs in the military are already open to women; only a few of the very front-line, combat jobs are under discussion.

These are jobs where raw strength matters a lot, and the average person–male or female–probably isn’t cut out for such work, but females are far less likely than males to qualify.

 

My own opinion is that, in an ideal world, we would allow everyone into all jobs and just determine whether they are qualified or not via a test. But if many of the women who’ve been through boot camp and training and are genuinely trying still can’t do the job, how many qualified women are we even talking about? I’ve seen people trying to argue that nowadays weightlifting is getting more popular with women, so more women will be strong enough to qualify, but what these folks miss is that the men who qualify are already doing strength training; it’s not like anyone can just naturally lift 200 pounds. Mere strength training is not enough; these women would have to do far more strength training than the male recruits. We are running up, here, against human limits. Yes, there are some women who are both qualified for the job and actually have an interest in it, but how many? And when we find these few women, will the military actually gain strength from them, or will the logistics of integrating them into otherwise all-male units outweigh the benefits? I hate to be crass, but we women menstruate; supply chains would need to take this into account.

Frankly, if the draft returns, the last place I’d like to be is combat (and I guarantee you don’t want me there, either.)

Further implications of hippocampal theory

So while on my walk today, I got to thinking about various potential implications of the hippocampal theory of time preference.

The short version if you don’t want to read yesterday’s post is that one’s degree of impulsivity/ability to plan / high or low time preference seems to be mediated by an interaction between the nucleus accumbens, which seems to a desire center, and the hippocampus, which does a lot of IQ-related tasks like learn new things and track objects through space. Humans with hippocampal damage become amnesiacs; rats with the connection between their nucleus accumbens and hipocampus severed lose their ability to delay gratification even for superior rewards, becoming slaves to instant gratification.

So, my suspicion:

Relatively strong hippocampus => inhibition of the nucleus accumbens => low time preference.

Relatively weak hippocamus => uninhibited nucleus accumbens => high time preference (aka impulsivity.)

Also, Strong hippocampus = skill at high IQ tasks.

Incentivise traits accordingly.

Anyway, so I was thinking about this, and it occurred to me that it could explain a number of phenomena, like the negative correlation between weight and IQ, eg:

Shamelessly stolen from Jayman’s post. As usual, I recommend it.

(Other theories on the subject: Intelligent people make lots of money and so marry attractive people, resulting in a general correlation between IQ and attractiveness; there is something about eating too much or the particular foods being eaten that causes brain degeneration.)

People generally claim that overweight people lack “willpower.” Note that I am not arguing about willpower; willpower is only a tiny part of the equation.

The skinny people I know do not have willpower. They just do not have big appetites. They are not sitting there saying, “OMG, I am so hungry, but I am going to force myself not to eat right now;” they just don’t actually feel that much hunger.

The fat people I know have big appetites. They’ve always had big appetites. Some of them have documented large appetites going back to infancy. Sure, their ability to stay on a diet may be directly affected by willpower, but they’re starting from a fundamentally different hunger setpoint.

So what might be going on is just a matter of whether the hippocampus or nucleus accumbens happens to be dominant. Where the NE is dominant, the person feels hunger (and all desires) quite strongly. Where the hippocampus is dominant, the person simply doesn’t feel as much hunger (or other desires.)

That a strong hippocampus also leads to high IQ may just be, essentially, a side effect of this trade-off between the two regions.

We might expect, therefore, to see higher inhibition in smart people across a range of behaviors–take socializing, sex, and drug use. *Wanders off to Google*

So, first of all, it looks like there’s a study that claims that higher IQ people do more drugs than lower IQ people. Since the study only looks at self-reported drug use, and most people lie about their illegal drug use, I consider this study probably not very useful; also, drug use is not the same as drug addiction, and there’s a big difference between trying something once and doing it compulsively.

Heroin and cocaine abusers have higher discount rates for delayed rewards than alcoholics or non-drug-using controls

IQ and personality traits assessed in childhood as predictors of drinking and smoking behaviour in middle-aged adults: a 24-year follow-up study (they found that lower IQ people smoke more)

Severity of neuropsychological impairment in cocaine and alcohol addiction: association with metabolism in the prefrontal cortex (Cocaine users are dumb)

HighAbility: The Gifted Introvert claims that 75% of people over 160 IQ are introverts.

Research Links High Sex Drive To High IQ, But Brainiacs Still Have Less Sex Than Everyone Else (Spoiler alert: research does not link high sex drive to IQ. Also, NSFW picture alert.)

I am reminded here of a story about P. A. M. Dirac, one of my favorite scientists:

“An anecdote recounted in a review of the 2009 biography tells of Werner Heisenberg and Dirac sailing on an ocean liner to a conference in Japan in August 1929. “Both still in their twenties, and unmarried, they made an odd couple. Heisenberg was a ladies’ man who constantly flirted and danced, while Dirac—’an Edwardian geek’, as biographer Graham Farmelo puts it—suffered agonies if forced into any kind of socialising or small talk. ‘Why do you dance?’ Dirac asked his companion. ‘When there are nice girls, it is a pleasure,’ Heisenberg replied. Dirac pondered this notion, then blurted out: ‘But, Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?'”^[30]” (from the Wikipedia.)

Folks speculate that Dirac was autistic; obviously folks don’t speculate such things about Heisenberg.

Autism I have previously speculated may be a side effect of the recent evolution of high math IQ, and the current theory implies a potential correlation between various ASDs and inhibition.

Looks like I’m not the first person to think of that: Atypical excitation–inhibition balance in autism captured by the gamma response to contextual modulation:

The atypical gamma response to contextual modulation that we identified can be seen as the link between the behavioral output (atypical visual perception) and the underlying brain mechanism (an imbalance in excitatory and inhibitory neuronal processing). The impaired inhibition–excitation balance is suggested to be part of the core etiological pathway of ASD (Ecker et al., 2013). Gamma oscillations emerge from interactions between neuronal excitation and inhibition (Buzsaki and Wang, 2012), are important for neuronal communication (Fries, 2009), and have been associated with e.g., perceptual grouping mechanisms (Singer, 1999).

Also, Response inhibition and serotonin in autism: a functional MRI study using acute tryptophan depletion:

“It has been suggested that the restricted, stereotyped and repetitive behaviours typically found in autism are underpinned by deficits of inhibitory control. … Following sham, adults with autism relative to controls had reduced activation in key inhibitory regions of inferior frontal cortex and thalamus, but increased activation of caudate and cerebellum. However, brain activation was modulated in opposite ways by depletion in each group. Within autistic individuals depletion upregulated fronto-thalamic activations and downregulated striato-cerebellar activations toward control sham levels, completely ‘normalizing’ the fronto-cerebellar dysfunctions. The opposite pattern occurred in controls. Moreover, the severity of autism was related to the degree of differential modulation by depletion within frontal, striatal and thalamic regions. Our findings demonstrate that individuals with autism have abnormal inhibitory networks, and that serotonin has a differential, opposite, effect on them in adults with and without autism. Together these factors may partially explain the severity of autistic behaviours and/or provide a novel (tractable) treatment target.”

This may not have anything at all to do with the hippocampus-NA system, of course.

Schizophrenic patients, on the other hand, appear to have the opposite problem: Hyper Hippocampus Fuels Schizophrenia?:

““What we found in animal models and others have found postmortem in schizophrenic patients is that the hippocampus is lacking a certain type of GABA-ergic [GABA-producing] neuron that puts the brakes on the system,” says Grace. “What we’re trying to do is fix the GABA system that’s broken and, by doing that, stabilize the system so the dopamine system responses are back to normal, so that we can actually fix what’s wrong rather than trying to patch it several steps downstream.””

Wow, I made it through two whole posts on the brain without mentioning the amygdala even once.