Monthly Archives: February 2015

Do liberal elites secretly believe in HBD?

13 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by in ethnicity

≈ 43 Comments

I remember a long time ago, a lot of people in the HBD community were speculating that “liberal elites” secretly believe HBD and the Lion of the Blogosphere explained that such speculation was false. He said that because a lot of HBD people are nerds, they have trouble understanding how non-nerds think. The Lion’s argument (if I remember it) went something like nerds believe in HBD because they are rational, but non-nerds don’t believe in HBD because they are emotional and believe whatever other people believe, and since other people don’t believe in HBD, they don’t either.

And thus I was interested to see Charles Murray claim (go to the 57 minute mark in the video below) that some of the fiercest critics of his book The Bell Curve were privately fans, and we the public would be stunned to learn who the fans are (apparently some of the biggest liberals in academia).

Among the few liberals I have known well enough to access their private views behind closed doors, I’ve noticed that the dumb ones are quite sincere in their HBD denial, but those with high IQ, particularly high math IQ, secretly believe that races differ in genetic intelligence.

I had one high math IQ liberal tell me privately that his objection to HBDers was that they were either racist or stupid to be shoving such an unpleasant truth in our faces. “To me this is very stupid thing,” he explained, refering to scientists who argue that black people have lower IQs. “They’re poor…maybe they’re dumb” he said immitating an HBDer. “Well very brilliant, Sir,” he added sarcastically in response to such HBDers, “you deserve a Nobel Prize!”

“Well it sounds like you actually agree that blacks are less intelligent?” I said.

“They’re at the bottom, they suffer everyday. What do you think it is?” he snapped.

His attitude was HBD was so obviously true, that only a fool would point it out.

Another example of liberal elites secretly believing HBD was the respectful treatment the elite liberal media, including The New York Times gave to Cochran and Harpending’s theory that Ashkenazi Jews are genetically smarter than gentiles. Are we supposed to believe these liberal elites only believe in HBD when it’s between gentiles and Jews, but not when it’s between blacks and whites? More likely they just publicly support HBD when it doesn’t offend a historically oppressed group, and when it does, they pretend not to believe it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if even Stephen Jay Gould, if you had got him drunk, would have confessed to being a closet HBDer.

Good news for HBD deniers?

11 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by in heritability

≈ 38 Comments

A new study by Sanja Franic and his colleagues, published in the prestigious journal Intelligence found no link between genes and intelligence. The authors write:

Using an existing pool of known intellectual disability genes, we constructed a set of 168 candidate genes for normal-range intelligence, and tested their association with intelligence in 191 individuals (aged 5–18) sampled from the high and low ends of the IQ distribution. In particular, we 1) employed exon sequencing to examine the possible effects of rare genetic variants in the 168 genes, and 2) used polygenic prediction to examine the overall effect of common genetic variants in the candidate gene set in a larger sample (N = 2125, mean age 20.4, SD = 14.1). No significant association between the candidate gene set and intelligence was detected.

Of course I’m not surprised this study found nothing, because genes that cause organic retardation (which are presumably what they looked at) should have little to do with normal biological variation in intelligence, because organic retardation, by definition, should have an exceptional cause.

Instead they should have been looking at the genetic causes of familial retardation, because familial retardates are just the extreme low end of the bell curve of the biologically normal population that has a mean of 100, while organic retardates are a different population with their own bell curve, with a mean of about 50. Just as some biologically normal people have IQs below 50, some organics have IQs above 100, but the two groups are qualitatively different, even when they are quantitatively the same (i.e. matched on IQ).

Of course we don’t know the genetic causes of familial retardation which is precisely the problem. Scientists have only discovered the causes of organic retardation, not biologically normal variation in intelligence.

An ideal study, would be to compare the DNA of biologically normal people from around the world who are say 50 IQ points smarter than others of their country and ethnic group, with those who score 50 IQ points lower than others of their country and ethnic group. But it would be essential that those scoring 50 points lower are familial retardates, not organic retardates. As for those scoring 50 points higher, it’s generally assumed that giftedness is always familial, but if organic giftedness exists, they should be excluded from the study too.

To understand the difference between organic retardates and familial retardates, consider the difference between organic giants and familial giants. Familial giants are biologically normal people who are over seven feet tall. Because they are biologically normal, they have all the traits associated with height. They tend to be men. They tend to be black or caucasoid. They tend to be good at basketball. They tend to have tall siblings. They tend to have lots of girlfriends and radiate good health.

By contrast organic giants tend have something wrong with them like a pituitary disorder. They are the same height, but they tend to look odd, they are bad at sports, they don’t get many dates, they don’t have tall siblings. Even people from demographic groups we don’t consider especially tall (i.e. Chinese women) can be organic giants.

Analogously, organic low IQ people tend to have something wrong with them like an extra chromosome, and they tend to look very different, and do not have the background normally associated with low IQ; they are virtually no more likely to come from low IQ families or low IQ demographics than anyone else.

As a result, genes or genetic variants that causes organic retardation can be very different from genes or genetic variants that cause normal intelligence variation. A good example might be myopia. It is believed that high IQ and myopia both have a common genetic cause. But as scholar Arthur Jensen has noted, people with Down’s Syndrome show the same rates of myopia as everyone else despite averaging IQs around 50. This is because Down’s Syndrome is organic and thus overrides many of the normal genetic causes of IQ. But this is precisely why focusing on organic retardates can be so misleading when searching for the causes of biologically normal IQ variation.

It used to be thought that high IQ people had myopia because they did a lot of reading and other “near work”, but the fact that Down’s Syndrome people have the same rate of myopia as the general population helped debunk such environmental explanations.

Atom Egoyan movies

10 Tuesday Feb 2015

Posted by in dark dramas

≈ 10 Comments

I was trying to coax my fiancée into a cozy weekend at home watching horror movies when a bunch of my coworkers skated over.  Since it would look very unprofessional to put on a slasher film, but I still wanted something dark and haunting that would go with the weather outside, I decided to order some Atom Egoyan movies, since not only are they generally very good and distinctly Canadian in their atmosphere, but they signal extreme sophistication.

I asked one of my coworkers to skate to the store to buy chocolate bars so I could make my signature hot chocolate for the group.

We watched three Atom Egoyan movies (commenter Rockall suggested I rate the movies I write about, so I will do so):

Chloe (2009) 7/10:  In this movie, a gynecologist played by Julianne Moore hires a beautiful and classy hooker played by Amanda Seyfried to seduce her professor husband played by Liam Neeson, as a test to see if he’ll remain faithful.

One thing I enjoyed about this movie was just the house where the gynecologist and the professor lived.  The walls of the upstairs level were all made of glass.  I see this a lot when I visit clients who live deep in the woods.  They are too secluded to worry about strangers peaking into their window, but they want to peak out from every angle to enjoy the beauty of the surrounding wilderness.

Calendar (1993) 8/10:  The movie is about a Canadian photographer of Armenian ancestry (played by Atom Egoyan himself) filming and photographing churches in Armenia to make a calendar, as a local driver tells him about the history, and the photographer’s wife (played by Egoyan’s real wife) translates what he’s saying into English so that the photographer can understand.

I think you generally need an IQ of at least 115 to enjoy this movie, otherwise you’ll be bored out of your mind and the whole thing will seem tedious and pointless.  First you need to be smart enough to understand the nonlinear narrative structure, because the movie keeps flashing from the present to the past.

You also need to understand the tension slowly building between the photographer and his wife, who in very subtle ways, makes him feel like he’s not Armenian enough since he doesn’t know the language and doesn’t even seem to care about the history, but is only there to create a calendar he’s been hired to make.

The film is ultimately about being disconnected from your past and that sense of not belonging anywhere, that so many children of immigrants feel.

The Sweet Hereafter (1997) 10/10:  This one of the best movies I have ever seen in my entire life.  It’s about a lawyer who comes to a small snowy town to get the parents of children who were killed or paralyzed by a school bus accident to join a class action law suit.  Meanwhile his drug addict daughter is constantly phoning him asking for money.

Like Calander, the film is hauntingly beautiful and constantly flashing between past and present.  The film is about how part of being a parent is accepting the death of your kids.  As the lawyer explains, “all our kids are dead to us”.  For his drug addict daughter is dead metaphorically, his client’s kids are dead literally from the accident,  and a surviving child is dead in ways we don’t fully understand until late in the film.  Meanwhile the nation’s teenagers wander through shopping malls like zombies.  The entire film is set against the backdrop of the winter landscape; the season where we’re surrounded by the death of nature.

The BGI study

08 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by in heritability

≈ 45 Comments

The  Beijing Genonomics Institute in Shenzhen, China, the largest gene-sequencing facility in the world, is analyzing the DNA of extremely high IQ people (145+) to identify genetic variants associated with high IQ. Ultimately, the goal might be to create a mathematical formula that would predict someone’s IQ from their genes with a high degree of certainty.

A commenter on this blog named “Mugabe” is a fierce critic of the study, despite claiming to be a participant of the study.  His main criticism, if I understand it, seems to be that if all the genetic data comes from people living in similar environments, then any formula that would predict their IQs from their genetic variants might only predict the IQs of people in those types of environments, which might be useless since environments are always changing.

Thus he has argued that the BGI study needs DNA from genetically similar people living in a wide range or environments.  Perhaps a good study might be to get the DNA of African Americans (with very little non-black admixture) who are 60 IQ points higher than the average African American.  And then get DNA from West Africans who score 60 IQ points higher than other West Africans.  Then whatever genetic variants that differentiate both the brilliant African Americans and the brilliant West Africans from the ordinary African Americans and the ordinary West Africans would be genetic variants that cause higher IQ in both the First World and the Third World, which means you would have identified independent genetic effects, instead of genetic effects specific to a particular time and place, and thus useless if the environment changes.

Of course these genetic variants might only predict high IQ in African Americans/West Africans and be useless in other ethnic groups, so you would want to repeat the procedure on different races. But African Americans are unique in that they came to the U.S. as non-voluntary immigrants and thus were a fairly random sample of the West African gene pool, that has just happened to have lived in the U.S. for centuries.  Thus by comparing un-mixed African Americans to West Africans, environment varies radically but genes are virtually held constant.

But in other populations, (i.e. Indian Americans vs Indians in India) not only does environment vary, but so do genes, since the Indians who voluntarily migrate to the U.S. are genetically different than the ones who stay in India, so they are less useful for isolating the independent effect of genetic variants.

An ideal study on the heritability of IQ

07 Saturday Feb 2015

Posted by in heritability

≈ 48 Comments

A term I sometimes use on this blog is “genetic IQ”.  An aggressively anti-HBD commenter on this blog named “Mugabe” feels the very idea of “genetic IQ” reveals how confused us HBD people are.  I think it depends how HBD people define the term genetic IQ.  If an HBD person defines genetic IQ (as I might have in the past) as the IQ people would have if everyone experienced the exact same environment, then this might show flawed thinking because it fails to consider the possibility that John might be smarter than Ted in environment A, but Ted might be smarter than John in environment B, so who has the higher genetic IQ?  My answer might be whichever geneotype averages higher IQ phenotypes holding a wide range of environments constant, has the higher genetic IQ.

Mugabe has suggested that an ideal measure of heritability would be the IQ correlation between identical twins randomly assigned to different wombs and homes across the developed world.  I think he’s on the right track, but if it were possible, I would do it very differently.

The ideal study (though obviously not practical) would be 100 groups of identical octuplets, where one member of each brood is randomly assigned to a womb and home in America, and each of her seven identical siblings are randomly assigned to wombs and homes across the entire world (not the developed world, only).  At age 40, the 100 American assigned fetuses and each of their seven identical international siblings take a large battery of culture reduced IQ tests, and the IQs of the (now adult) American fetuses are correlated with the average of their seven siblings raised all over the world.  

The average IQ of the seven clones would correlate extremely highly with the genetic IQ of each American because the seven identical siblings are raised in random environments around the World, so environmental effects, whether cultural, economic, prenatal, or nutritional, tend to cancel out when you average the IQs of the seven siblings.  Thus knowing how well the IQ of Americans correlate with the average IQ of their seven international clones tells us how well IQ correlates with genetic IQ in America.  Squaring this correlation might give us a much more meaningful measure of heritability than conventionally defined.

Now such an elaborate study might produce the same sky high heritability figures that conventional twin studies report, or it might produce a value much lower.  It just depends on whether most of the genetic effects on IQ are dependent on the environment or independent genetic effects.

The Best of Me (2014)

06 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by in love stories

≈ 19 Comments

A bunch of us just watched the movie The Best of Me (2014) staring Michelle Monaghan and James Marsden.  It’s a great movie to watch with your girlfriend, wife, or mistress, as long as you can keep from sobbing hysterically.  Women like a guy that shows some sensitivity (a little watering of the eyes at the appropriate times) but don’t do much more than that or she’ll think you’re gay.

The movie is about a pair of high school sweethearts who reunite 21 years later.  When they were young the girl introduced the boy to her rich dad who pretends to be impressed with the boy’s high grades and outstanding SAT scores (1520) and then offers to show the boy his car collection.  Once they’re alone, he informs the boy that someone like him can’t afford college, but he’ll make it easy by giving him $80 K (big money in those days) if he stays away from his daughter.  The boy tells the rich dad to buzz off (using more vulgar language) and continues to date the daughter, but at the same time he is constantly encouraging the girl to dump him because he loves her so much he’d rather let her go then impede her bright future.

It was a good movie but it would have been a lot better had they not had Luke Bracey (born in 1989) play the male lead at age 18 and James Marsden (born in 1973) play the male lead at 39.  Marsden doesn’t look like an older version of Bracey he looks like a completely different person.  They don’t even look like they’re related, let alone the same individual.  Hard to maintain empathy for a character when he suddenly looks like someone else entirely.  It’s not like one actor is a child and the other is a man; both are fully grown men so the massive physical transformation is very distracting.  The casting for the young and old female lead is much better done.

The movie was fiction but in reality there’s a great tradition of paying people not to date your kid.  I was watching an episode of Life Story Project on the OWN network…a show where they place a purple couch on a busy street, park or beach, and ask strangers to talk about their lives.  On one episode a woman talked about how much she loved a black boy when she was young but in the morning he was gone, never to return.  “If he loved you he wouldn’t have accepted the money,” her mother explained.

HBD Chick & Jayman talk about inclusive fitness

04 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by in ethnicity

≈ 50 Comments

One of the best things about being a celebrity is you get messages from other celebrities on twitter and yesterday to my delight I got a message from the fabulous HBD Chick sharing her latest thoughts on inclusive fitness since this is a topic we’ve discussed in the past.  Most people have to go to HBD Chick’s blog to see her opinions, but when you’re a celebrity, HBD Chick comes to you.  Not that I consider my fame to be in the same league as HBD Chick’s (who get’s referenced by some of the most iconic figures in society, including Charles Murray who I saw referencing her on twitter the other day).

Now when a celebrity sends you a message, you want to respond immediately but unfortunately I can only access twitter from my home computer and I’ve been away from home a lot lately, but seeing as we’re both celebrities, I’m sure she’ll understand.

Now here’s what she writes about inclusive fitness:

there’s some amount of confusion out there in the hbd-o-sphere (and beyond!) about inclusive fitness, which is understandable since the concept is not that straightforward — especially for those of us who are not scientists. i thought it’d try to dispel some of that misunderstanding by sharing my layman’s understanding of the concept — i think i grok the idea pretty well now (in a basic sorta way) — hope i don’t add to the confusion!

Notice the humility in HBD Chick’s tone.  Us celebrities learn early that it’s always good to be humble, because our fame and the authority that comes with it attracts a lot of jealousy, and anger from those who think us unworthy of the power we wield.  Being a woman in a male dominated science field, HBD Chick likely faces additional resentment, but the high social IQ of the female brain makes her especially aware of it, and able to deflect it.(UPDATE FEB 7, 2015: HBD CHICK IS NOT A SCIENTIST AND DOES NOT HAVE A STEM BACKGROUND, BUT MY POINT WAS SHE BLOGS ABOUT SCIENCE RELATED FIELDS. HBD CHICK TELLS ME SHE HAS NEVER EXPERIENCED ANY SORT OF RESENTMENT OR HOSTILITY FROM MALE COLLEAGUES OR ANY ACTUAL SCIENTIST SHE KNOWS.)

She continues:

to start with, inclusive fitness is NOT some sort of biological law that organisms (including humans) will automatically be altruistic towards other individuals with whom they share a lot of genes (or vice versa if vice versa). if you hold that idea — and i get the impression that a lot of people do — get it out of your mind right now! you’ll feel better for it, trust me.

inclusive fitness is simply a concept or model which explains HOW certain social behaviors — especially altruism — might’ve evolved at all. period. full stop…

She goes on to say:

….everybody gets half of their dna from each of their two (for now, anyway) parents. but we also share dna with siblings and (blood-related) aunts and uncles and (wait for it…) cousins. given this inheritance pattern, probability says, for instance, that, in a randomly mating population, an individual should share 12.5% of their dna with a first cousin. so, if an individual with certain “genes for altruism” behaves altruistically toward their first cousins, odds are not bad that those first cousins might also have those same “genes for altruism.” here, then, we have a mechanism for how apparently self-sacrificing social behaviors can be selected for: since the altruistic individual 1) aids close kin with whom he shares much of his dna AND 2) probably in many instances shares the same “genes for altruism,” his being altruistic toward those kin 1) does not reduce his fitness AND 2) the “genes for altruism” get selected for, too. mystery solved. (see also: kin selection.)

I think most of us would more or less agree with what HBD Chick is saying.  But then one of my other celebrity friends Jayman makes an appearance in the comment section of HBD Chick’s blog.  It’s always a thrill for the little people when one of us celebrities shows up in the comment section of random blogs with the commoners.  I try to do it at least once a week, just to show you regular folks I haven’t forgotten where I came from.  Here’s what Jayman writes:

No description of inclusive fitness would be complete without Hamilton’s rule (lifted from Wikipedia):

rB > C

where

r = the genetic relatedness of the recipient to the actor, often defined as the probability that a gene picked randomly from each at the same locus is identical by descent.
B = the additional reproductive benefit gained by the recipient of the altruistic act,
C = the reproductive cost to the individual performing the act.

When this is inequality is true, the altruistic trait is selected for.

This formula, along with this table of the coefficient of relationship between human relatives (also lifted from Wikipedia):

Degree of
relationship Relationship Coefficient of
relationship (r)

Inbred strain 99%
0 identical twins; clones 100%[4]
1 parent-offspring[5] 50% (2^−1)
2 full siblings 50% (2^−2+2^−2)
2 3/4 siblings or sibling-cousins 37.5% (2^−2+2⋅2^−4)
2 grandparent-grandchild 25% (2^−2)
2 half siblings 25% (2^−2)
3 aunt/uncle-nephew/niece 25% (2⋅2^−3)
4 double first cousins 25% (2^−3+2^−3)
3 great grandparent-great grandchild 12.5% (2^−3)
4 first cousins 12.5% (2⋅2^−4)
6 quadruple second cousins 12.5% (8⋅2^−6)
6 triple second cousins 9.38% (6⋅2^−6)
4 half-first cousins 6.25% (2^−4)
5 first cousins once removed 6.25% (2⋅2^−5)
6 double second cousins 6.25% (4⋅2^−6)
6 second cousins 3.13% (2^−6+2^−6)
8 third cousins 0.78% (2⋅2^−8)
10 fourth cousins 0.20% (2⋅2^−10)[6]

…demonstrates why “ethnic genetic interests” do not exist. Ethnocentrism cannot evolve via kin-selection because the coefficient of relationship falls off so much once you go past 2nd cousins.

However the late scientist J. Phillipe Rushton (who I also knew) would disagree strongly with Jayman’s last paragraph, and argues that racism and ethnocentrism evolved to enhance our genetic fitness and that “in comparison to the total genetic variance around the world, random co-ethnics are related to each other on the order of first cousins”

I don’t know enough about genetics to know whether Jayman’s right or Rushton’s right, but it would seem logical to me that people evolved to be nice to people who look like themselves or their relatives, because (1) people who look like you have a better chance of being related to you, and (2) even if they’re not related to you, they still share some of your genes.

I also don’t see why there wouldn’t be genes for certain traits (i.e. skin color) that might cause people to be especially nice to others with the same trait even if they’re not especially related or related at all.  This is known as the green beard effect, where a certain allele causes (1) a green beard, and (2) a tendency to be nice to others who have green beards.  If everyone with a green beard had a tendency to help one another, then pretty soon alleles for green beards would replace alleles for beards of other colours that were not associated with such behavior.  And those with green beards would not have to sacrafice themselves to help other green bearded strangers, but simply helping someone get a job to support a family or other acts of friendship would be enough to enhance the probability of other green bearded people passing on their green bearded alleles.

I’ve long noticed that best friends tend to look alike, have similar heights and body types.  I’ve even speculated that green beard effect might explain why suspected alleles for homosexuality might persist despite leading to low reproduction.

Rushton has assembled enormous evidence that people tend to befriend and mate with others who resemble themselves, especially on the most heritable traits, even on the most unexpected of traits like the size of ear lobes, and a lot of these traits could be ethnic too.

Another mechanism by which ethnocentrism could have evolved is group selection, but HBD Chick is skeptical, writing in the comments:

there’s no good evidence for group selection in humans, and the population geneticists (like greg cochran) say that the math doesn’t work. also, to date, none of the pro-group selection arguments that i’ve seen have included the math for individual selection — which makes me think that they are probably overlooking it (individual selection).

 

 

However I’ve been personally told by a highly competent scientist that group selection is indeed quite plausible, though even competent scientists can be wrong.

Breathe In (2014)

02 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by in dark dramas

≈ 20 Comments

Before I was famous it was a lot easier to review movies because I didn’t have to worry about the people who actually made them googling my reviews, but these days I have to be a lot more guarded in what I write. Fortunately, I have only good things to say about Breathe In (2014) starring Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones.

So the other day I’m visiting my parents in the suburbs and the snow starts pouring down. I knew it was going to snow that evening but I had no idea it would do so with such speed and intensity. I was scheduled to meet some clients way out in the country but the driving conditions were hazardous, so I rescheduled the appointments. Finally a night off and on a cold cozy night to boot, I thought; this calls for a movie!

Impressed with how hard I’ve been working at my job, my father offered to cook me some French Toast made of English muffins (my favorite!) which would go perfectly with my movie. Unfortunately, my mother was dominating the huge screen TV watching comedies (yawn), so I took my plate of French Toast and headed to the basement which also has a big screen TV (but not nearly as big).

I went to movies on demand, and started scrolling through the newest releases for something dark and haunting and stumbled on Breathe In. Here’s the trailer:

The movie stars Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones but to me, the real star was Mackenzie Davis, who I just found out it is Canadian (attended McGill University). I’m not praising her because she’s Canadian or because I know her…everyone thinks all Canadians celebrities know each other, nothing could be further from the truth…but because her performance was interesting and original.

Davis plays Lauren, a high school girl who must share her bedroom with a foreign exchange student (spoiler alert) named Sophie (played by Felicity Jones). At first they get along great and Lauren introduces Sophie to all her friends, but tension builds as Lauren’s friends seem to like Sophie better than they like her, and Lauren’s father is more impressed by Sophie’s piano skills than he is with Lauren’s swimming talent. But when Lauren discovers that not only is Sophie getting intimate with a boy Lauren likes, but also with Lauren’s own father (played by Guy Pearce), she goes ballistic.

Lauren’s father works as a music teacher at the school Lauren and Sophie attend and when he runs into his daughter in the hall, he doesn’t know that she saw him on a blanket in the woods with Sophie. He tries to say hello but she says nothing. She just looks at him with eyes full of tears and face that contorts, before regaining its composure and then contorting again. She storms off, much to the confusion of her perverted clueless father.

That night she doesn’t come home for dinner.

Nor does she come home for bed time.

But deep into the night, when everyone is sleeping, she comes home.

She slowly makes her way to her bedroom that she is sharing with Sophie, and approaches the bed where Sophie is sleeping and starts touching Sophie’s face with her fingers. Startled and confused, Sophie wakes up and greets her. And in one of the creepiest scenes in a recent movie, Lauren quietly orders Sophie to sit up, and to stop breathing so loudly. But as soon as Sophie sits up, Lauren wrestles her back down, pinning her to the bed.

“This is my house,” Lauren keeps saying, over and over.

Sophie realizes she has no choice but to find somewhere else to live.

I watch a lot of horror films, but they don’t disturb me as much as haunting dramas about the dark side of suburbia do. This movie hit just right the tone, and much like American Beauty (an even better film) exposed the fact that behind the perfect facade of your all American suburban dad may lurk an evil pervert, secretly lusting after young girls. No matter how well you think you know someone, you can never know what goes on in their private mental world. That’s a lot more terrifying that any horror film.

At least the “young” girl he was lusting after was played by a woman in her thirties, which not only made me feel young again, but also made me much less creeped out by the movie. I think film makers deliberately hire old actors to play teenagers to comfort the audience with delusions of youth. Or maybe the flim makers are just comforting themselves.