He's talking about statistical distributions. "It's an established fact that six-year-olds are taller than five-year-olds. There are exceptions."

I'm not sure where he got the "hipster" stuff, though.

Empirically, prior girlfriends have been unimpressed with my slavish devotion to their every-moment's well-being. My current girlfriend is much more devoted, and much more enthusiastic.

I am fairly overt about this. I told her to read The Red Queen after our first date. And I don't lie about this. But when I'm asking myself what's better for the relationship, and what's going to make the person I'm with happier, I have to take into account that my behavior affects her happiness indirectly, too. You'd have to be a real jerk to make her date a nebbish.

n = 1, but this has worked for me. Deliberately act like you can take it or leave it, and you're unlikely to be left. (And note that women initiate the majority of breakups and divorces, so you're not risking much if you risk a breakup.)

It is striking that you've mustered so much rhetoric about conclusions in order to avoid looking at the facts behind those conclusions. It is a little like preachers talking up hellfire when someone questions the 6,000-year-old-earth thing.

I'm still hoping for a follow-up addressing the claims, rather than the person making those claims.

That's a good way to talk past people. If you're legitimately concerned with their views, this is a great opportunity to identify what flaws there are with this argument, instead of the ways you already disagreed with the conclusion.

I mean, think about this in terms of who is contributing to the argument. Vdare: "Here is some analysis of the data, revealing what may be surprising results!" You: "Like most people, I disagree with VDare's conclusions. I'm not going to address their arguments, and I'd like to warn others against doing so, too." Who is contributing, here?

Perhaps you should call the VDare people "White Nationalists and Japanese Supremacists," to clarify your position.

If you read the Autobiography of Malcolm X, you'll see that he's a "white supremacist" and a "Jewish supremacist" in some respects, but still a "black nationalist" in terms of how he wants to live.

There's obviously a difference between preference and policy. But my guess is that you're willing to reap the benefits of eugenics without considering the ethical implications.

Certainly a complete sociopath will still have non-selfish internal organs. But it's highly reductionist to claim that a sociopath is not sociopathic because his heart generously pumps blood to his other organs.

What looks like generosity generally falls into a few categories of gene-level selfishness, e.g. kin altruism, in-group altruism, reciprocal gifts, etc. Our evolutionary inheritance doesn't allow for pure altruism; that's a bug that gets fixed by selfish groups out-reproducing.

In a broad sense, it's very hard to argue that selfish genes don't explain most human behavior. Certainly, I would spend my time differently if I weren't the result of a couple billion years of brutal gene-versus-gene competition.

A runner-up: "social security" is not the exact nature of the problem we face. Instead, the problem is the dependency ratio: old people can live off of million-dollar 401K portfolios and the proceeds from selling million-dollar houses, or live off of social security--in either scenario, the working population will be forced to accept lower available consumption (and low returns on their savings) for a given level of income.

It should be possible to admit that if 1) you're dealing with a country of genetic relatives, and 2) genetic factors are responsible for 60-80% of the variance in IQ, then Finland's superior education can be explained in part by the fact that it's full of Finns.

Seriously.

Alcohol is a great evolutionary adaptation, since it allows people to be extremely dour and responsible most of the time, while being able to loosen up with chemical assistance. Countries that are known for their seriousness and work ethic often have a strong drinking culture (e.g. Germany, Japan). There's a Steve Sailer article about this; I can't find it, and the domain is auto-killed upon submission anyway.

Did the Belgians just find a country like that, and take it over?

What's interesting is that I almost never find out, halfway through an argument like this, that I'm talking to someone who moved to a place unspoiled by Western imperialism. Mongolia, for example.

Any concrete reason for that belief? It looks like the "overbreeding" is objectively true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_birth_rate . As far as simpletons go, you tell me: is there any intelligence test you know of that routinely ranks people in Djibouti over people in Japan? If not, it sounds like your statement is unfounded.

The rest of your interpretation is also suspect. The places Victorians conquered weren't more advanced than the places the Victorians came from. Regardless of the reason, Europe was more technologically advanced than the rest of the world, and they used that advantage to conquer as much of the world as they could.

When you complain about how the Victorians ran things, you have to compare it to something. If you compare, e.g., the Congo in 1955 (http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,866343,00.html ) to the Congo in 2008 (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1713275,00.htm... ) you get the idea. You might not like how imperialists run things--but they run things well because they run them for profit. You can also consider Singapore (which is basically Victorian, and basically paradise on earth for law-abiding people).

http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7819&...

That's just how humans roll.

Western Europe had lots of problems, but countries that operate in the European tradition are better places to live. (At least, when you look at the immigration patterns between third-world and first-world countries, it's clear that first world countries export idealism, which is then processed into jaded realism and returned. Meanwhile, poor countries send their top .1% to join the Western world's top 10%; a good deal for both sides).

But that does not mean that all engineering and hard-science types are more likely to become terrorists.

Right, but that's not what I said at all. Regardless of why there is a correlation between engineering education and terrorism, there is a correlation; whether you're equipping potential terrorists with the tools to commit terrorist acts, or somehow making non-terrorists more terroristic, the end result is the same.

It just means that if you take a random sampling of people and you test them for terrorist potential you will find that the technical ones will do better at it.

That's interesting; I hadn't heard that the same kind of study had been duplicated elsewhere. Do you have a source? Before I saw the study, I was struck by how many of the 9/11 hijackers had an engineering, compared to, e.g., American terrorists. (The Unabomber is the closest analogue, and his academic background was fairly abstract).

What I think is that if having an education will make them less susceptible to brainwashing.

And yet that effect is clearly counteracted by whatever else it is that makes engineers more likely to blow stuff up. If they're half as willing but ten times as able to commit terrorist acts, we still lose.