President Obama, reflecting nostalgically on the 2007-2008 Democratic primary, recently praised Hillary to the media:
She had to do everything that I had to do, except, like Ginger Rogers, backwards in heels. She had to wake up earlier than I did because she had to get her hair done. She had to, you know, handle all the expectations that were placed on her. She had a tougher job throughout that primary than I did.
Backwards in heels? Is President Obama gay? 🙂 That’s a reason a gay man would give for supporting Hillary: “she does it backwards in heels, just like Ginger Rogers, baby!”.
Does President Obama realize gay men HATED him with a passion in 2007 because they were so pro-Hillary. I would see them parading down the gay section of Ottawa (bank street) with their pro-Hillary buttons. You mention Obama to these and they would say “Obama YUCK!”. I was a huge Obama supporter so I asked one of these why he loved Hillary so much.
“It’s a gay thing, you wouldn’t understand,” he snapped.
“Try me,” I replied.
“Because she’s a diva who wont back down.”
Hillary is indeed a diva who wont back down, which is why in a World exclusive, pumpkinperson.com speculated that Obama is TERRIFIED of Hillary, and shaking in his boots at the prospect of her becoming the next president.
So why is he now almost endorsing her?
In my opinion, and I have no direct evidence of this, Obama was instrumental in getting her embroiled in this whole email scandal, that the FBI is taking quite seriously, but Obama would look like a jerk if the public knew he was trying to sabotage the first female incipient president, so he’s feigning support for Hillary to have plausible deniability if her campaign is derailed. And a lot of pundits are falling for it including, sadly, my hero, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who is normally the sharpest political analyst in America.
Meanwhile gay men who attacked my candidate in 2007-2008, are also now attacking my bro Bernie Sanders. Hillary’s gay attack dog David Brock has viciously accused this wonderful man of being a racist simply because his recent add included too many whites.
Brock was a hardcore right-wing wacko until he became so impressed by the Diva who wont back down, that he through his own party under the bus to become a Clinton shill, accusing prominent conservatives like Matt Drudge of being secretly gay. Brock’s gay conservatism, and the gay conservatism he claims to have exposed in others, is consistent with my theory that conservatism is an evolutionary strategy for spreading gay genes.
Pumpkin Person 
No exist evolutionary strategy.
Conservatives have more children and many more in the past. More kids, more chances to happen developmental noises.
Your”strategy”.
Ah…Friday nights in winter in the NorthEast… not much mobility to do stuff….
So….. I spent some time looking at statistics of how much of the Democratic Party is non-white and based on Chris Cuomo’s remark at the Iowa town hall the other day, that 2/3 of Minorities polled support Hillary over Sanders (could this lend truth to Brock’s remarks over the demographics’ in Sander’s video?) I did those on NotePad for neatness, and used the basic Personal Computer Calculator Windows 10 app.
Democrats: 32%
Republicans: 23%
(30×0.64)/0.23= 83%
Democrats:
(25×0.64)/0.32= 50% non-Hispanic White
(64×0.12)/0.32= 24% non-Hispanic Black
(34×0.18)/0.32= 19% Hispanic
07% Non-Hispanic Asian
Now… Hillary has “2/3” of Minorities’
votes….Hillary is at 52% Bernie at 38%
O’Malley at 2% with 8% undecided, nationally
Hillary: (48×0.67)/0.52= 62% Non-White
30
23
09
Bernie: (48×0.23)/0.38= 29% Non-White
14
11
04
Pew, forgotten source overall demographics knowledge, this is assuming equal regristration and that Minorities proportionally support O’Malley and are undecided voters.
Of course, the Polls showing Hillary at 52%, Bernie at 38% and O’Malley at 2% are from CNN(through Real Clear Politics), where Chris Cuomo works.
On second thought, O’Malley was the mayor of Baltimore, a majority Black City and probably has more minority support than proportion. Bernie’s supporters are proportionally more Non-Hispanic White than the national average! (see above)….
Rational millionaires would recognize the risk posed by high inequality combined with stagnation for making the peasants revolt and go all french revolution on their asses, so they would elect Bernie.
How many of the most intelligent, i.e. self made billionaires are conservative, vs. how many are liberal? I would guess that most, especially the politically active ones, are liberal.
Soros, Buffet, Gates, Zuckerberg, are all concerned about inequality.
Trump, Kochs, Waltons (inhereited wealth) are on the other hand quite opposed to thinking about inequality at all.
Trump wants to reduce inequality.
My guess is that he is not very sincere about that, and is only saying it because it is currently in vogue, even among republicans.
In 2011 he said we should lower capital gains taxes. He’s not for anything except being elected. My mistake for including him.
I definitely think that the smartest billionaires tend to be Democrats, for several reasons, not least of which is their ability to foresee a backlash against the rich. That’s probably why you saw Gates and Buffet pressuring other billionaires to sign a pledge to give most of their wealth to charity.
Gates and Buffet are two of the absolute richest billionaires, so they’re probably paranoid that any anti-rich backlash would be directed at them first. Also, they can afford to give away most of their wealth and still be decabillionaires. Most billionaires can not so it’s unfair of Gates and Buffet to expect the less wealthy billionaires to give up most of their wealth so Gates and Buffet can get the credit.
But yes, the smartest billionaires are probably smart enough to know not to push their luck. The rich are the ones who benefit most from a stable society so they’re the ones who have the most to lose from a revolution.
But despite being a Sanders supporter, I have sympathy for Republican billionaires. For the rich already pay most of the taxes in an absolute sense:
Buried inside a Congressional Budget Office report this week was this nugget: when it comes to individual income taxes, the top 40 percent of wage earners in America pay 106 percent of the taxes. The bottom 40 percent…pay negative 9 percent.
You read that right. One group is paying more than 100 percent of individual income taxes, the other is paying less than zero.
http://www.cnbc.com/2013/12/11/the-rich-do-not-pay-the-most-taxes-they-pay-all-the-taxes.html
The far left wants to soak the rich because not only are they jealous, but they can’t believe that anyone could be worth billions of dollars without somehow exploiting the labor of others. Marxist ideology makes the a priori assumption that the rich are guilty until proven innocent.
The biggest lefties tend to be college professors. That’s partly because they’re smart and educated enough to know that many rich people really do exploit the lower classes, but it’s also because they’re jealous that despite professors being the most learned and educated people in society, it’s the millionaires and billionaires who are the biggest winners. Even Bernie Sanders is a former professor.
Trump wants to reduce inequality.
His tax plan doesn’t do very much to reduce it.
A quibble about that “nugget”: The top 40% of wage earners is not the rich. Not yet at least. Though looking at the attrition from the middle class to the upper class, it makes one wonder if they may soon be.
In my opinion, it is not rational for any very wealthy person to be bitter about paying any amount of tax as long as they are still wealthy afterward, unless the taxes are so high that they are themselves a threat to the stability of society.
I’ve definitely met some professors with inferiority complexes. The college I attended was so liberal that they cancelled a band for being too white 😂😂. I think marxism and much of 20th century philosophy is an expression of impotence and frustration. Particularly the continental school.
In my opinion, it is not rational for any very wealthy person to be bitter about paying any amount of tax as long as they are still wealthy afterward,
Really? So if you earned a billion dollars, you wouldn’t be bitter about having to pay 99% in taxes, leaving you with only $10 million? I would be furious.
I realize of course that most billionaires pay nowhere near that much, and actually pay less as a percentage than the middle class (though a few billionaires pay a large percentage)
I’d be fine with it, because I have no idea what I would do with $10 million, let alone a lot more.
Maybe I would buy a huge sailboat and spend the rest of my life sailing from place to place with a cook on board.
I think that the desire for obscene amounts of money is a psychological holdover from a less civilized era when wealth was associated with higher fertility. Nowadays it makes no sense to spend obscenely. Psychological studies suggest that money doesn’t make people any happier above 100k a year or so.
A teacher of mine compared a dude buying a fancy car to a deer growing antlers. They are both handicaps from a fitness perspective, and both are intended to be signals to the opposite sex. A deer with huge antlers is sexy because even though it has huge, mostly useless things on its head, it can still feed itself, and fight off disease, thereby proving that it has good genes. A guy can waste a ton of money on a shiny metal toy and still take you out to dinner, proving his fitness. Someone who earns 10 million but still wants more, to me, is like a 100 pound deer with 500 pounds of antlers, dragging its head around, waiting to starve to death.
High inequality poses no risk to the rich. The poorer the poor are, the less capable they are of mounting any effective rebellion, and the less willing they are to try. When the poor are very poor, their energy is focused on survival, not politics. Meanwhile, the richer the rich are, the more able they are to resist any rebellion. When the rich are very rich, they can protect themselves with giant fortresses, praetorian guards and sophisticated weapons, including weapons of propaganda.
The rational rich, then, would want to keep the inequality that exists, and perhaps even increase it. What they would want to reduce, probably, is idleness. The more idle people there are, especially idle intelligent people, the more risk there is that some will start dreaming up utopian schemes to improve the world – utopian schemes that require overthrowing the present system and installing new dictators who will, of course, be the utopian dreamers themselves.
A highly equal society is far more unstable than a highly unequal one, since subversion might arise at any time from anywhere, and nobody has the means to overwhelm it if it does. To say that subversion wouldn’t occur is no defence, since it relies on wishful thinking. Without a powerful authority to control people’s thoughts, it is always only a matter of time before a charismatic individual with grand ideas emerges and gains a following. Leadership and followership are part of human nature.
These facts reduce the arguments of Wilkinson and Pickett, Piketty, and others like them to nullity even before their statistical and economic analyses are scrutinized in detail for fallacies.
Notice that Richard Wilkinson, Thomas Piketty, etc., are not real egalitarians at all. They are socialists. That is to say, they want to create a highly unequal society in which all economic power is concentrated in a few hands which control all the wealth as if they owned it, without technically owning it themselves — the same way the Pope keeps his vows of poverty while living in a grand palace, sovereign over a state that in turn owns vast banking wealth as well as hoards of art, gold and real estate all over the world. By convenient coincidence, the people who will run the socialist state of their utopian dreams will be a nomenklatura consisting of people exactly like themselves.
Smart millionaires will not be fooled by the arguments of Thomas Piketty and others like him. They will see such arguments as nothing in the end but a self-serving ploy on the part of the intellectual class, which envies the greater power of the industrial class and wants to seize that power for itself. They will realize that, from their own selfish point of view as millionaire owners of property and employers of labour, high inequality includes the possibility of dire poverty, which usefully stokes the workers and tenants with fear, and the possibility of great wealth, which stokes them with ambition, so inequality keeps the masses compliant, busy and productive, as opposed to dangerously idle.
I’d be fine with it, because I have no idea what I would do with $10 million, let alone a lot more.
I would like at least a billion to do all the scientific research I’m interested in pursuing. My dream home would also cost a good $50 million. I would also want another $50 million to do creative projects like making movies. If I were American, I would want another couple billion on top of that to influence elections through starting super pacs and buying media. And then there’s all the attention and respect that comes from all that money (though the rich are also increasingly resented)
I think that the desire for obscene amounts of money is a psychological holdover from a less civilized era when wealth was associated with higher fertility. Nowadays it makes no sense to spend obscenely.
If all one cares about is genetic fitness, then one could use their money to impregnate thousands of women (with good genes), not to mention help other people with similar genes survive and impregnate thousands of women, but I don’t think that’s point of life (though it is the point of evolution).
. I think the desire for extreme wealth is that money (if spent very wisely) can maximize pleasure and minimize pain which is what all higher organisms evolved to do, because we evolved to feel pleasure when we are surviving, reproducing, or helping our tribe survive and reproduce.
Psychological studies suggest that money doesn’t make people any happier above 100k a year or so.
But those studies are probably misleading because the people who are most driven to make huge amounts of money are probably less happy to begin with (by definition a driven person is unsatisfied). Also, while money itself can make you happy, the hoops you have to jump through to make it can make you miserable so I agree that it’s sometimes a lot better to settle for less
. But winning a lottery (which is less correlated with drive and work) does appear to cause happiness, at least if you’re smart enough to know how to spend it, and adapt to the culture shock:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/will-winning-the-powerball-lottery-make-you-happier-2016-01-06
A teacher of mine compared a dude buying a fancy car to a deer growing antlers. They are both handicaps from a fitness perspective, and both are intended to be signals to the opposite sex. A deer with huge antlers is sexy because even though it has huge, mostly useless things on its head, it can still feed itself, and fight off disease, thereby proving that it has good genes. A guy can waste a ton of money on a shiny metal toy and still take you out to dinner, proving his fitness. Someone who earns 10 million but still wants more, to me, is like a 100 pound deer with 500 pounds of antlers, dragging its head around, waiting to starve to death.
Except over-sized wealth can enhance your genetic fitness by orders of magnitude if that’s what you want to do. Over-sized antlers can not.
“The poorer the poor are, the less capable they are of mounting any effective rebellion, and the less willing they are to try”
King Louis XVI lived by those words – and died by them. By a guillotine, to be literal. Tsar Nicholas as well. The poorer the poor are, the less they have to protect by going along with the status quo. Even modern technologically advanced police states don’t tend to last very long. How long before North Korea comes toppling down?
“A highly equal society is far more unstable than a highly unequal one, since subversion might arise at any time from anywhere, and nobody has the means to overwhelm it if it does.”
A claim that begs for some supporting evidence, but I don’t think you will find any supporting evidence from the modern era. In the past, cultural/technological equilibriums were reached in places like ancient Egypt that enabled a highly stratified yet stable society. However, comparing ancient Egypt to modern societies is foolish because we have not had anything like cultural equilibrium in hundreds or thousands of years. There are other more modern examples to look at anyway:
What was the first european power to wrest control away from the monarchy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_date_of_transition_to_republican_system_of_government
Wow, thanks wikipedia!
England in 1649!
Well technically they restored the monarchy a few years later. But a few years after that, in 1688 (still long before other european powers) they became a constitutional monarchy. Let’s not forget that the Magna Carta prefigured all of this social change way back in the 13th century.
And England has perhaps been the most culturally important and influential country in the world since then, thanks to their stability and power.
Also note that Switzerland and Netherlands were before England. Two very stable, enlightened, and economically powerful nations today.
Look at who is on the other end:
Spain and Greece in post WWI era. Let’s see… Spain fought a civil war in the 20th century, and almost succumbed to anarchism. Greece has nearly dragged the rest of Europe into an economic catastrophe. Does that sound stable to you? Need I go on? Your hypothesis in a non-starter in the modern era.
The revolutions in France and Russia that I alluded to above are fine examples as well. The abuses of King Louis are not debatable. Nor are the antiquated policies and absolute power of Russia’s Tsar Nicholas.
The rest of your post is a straw man effigy-burning of your own very limited, almost child-like understanding of “socialism”. For example:
“they want to create a highly unequal society in which all economic power is concentrated in a few hands which control all the wealth as if they owned it,”
This is pure idiocy. The most equal, most democratic, least corrupt societies in the world are the social democracies of northern Europe and other countries like Canada that follow similar rules. They also have the highest median standards of living in the world. You clearly have a serious lack of knowledge or a bias that renders you totally incapable of clear thinking in this area. “They” as you term Wilkinson and Piketty want the rest of the world, particularly the United States because it is so powerful, to adopt similar rules. They don’t want Bolshevism.
Peregrino Nuzkwamia, what a fascinating and hyper-educated comment!
I still think the smartest billionaires tend to be Democrats, but perhaps not so much for the reasons C and I mentioned above, but for reasons that I mentioned on my other blog:
https://brainsize.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/why-are-high-iq-people-more-liberal/
But some liberals told me (don’t know if it’s true) that in societies with more income inequality, even the rich have shorter lives, though interpreting causation is tricky.
It took me 2 minutes on wikipedia to show that historic fact is not at all compatible with the basis of his argument, that inequality = stability. In fact, European history suggests that the exact opposite is true.
“Except over-sized wealth can enhance your genetic fitness by orders of magnitude if that’s what you want to do. Over-sized antlers can not.”
Good point, but my point is that people are unconsciously imitating the behavior of someone who is trying to maximize genetic potential – but not actually doing so. Kind of like a chicken who sits on infertile eggs for their whole life instead of going out and doing intellectual chicken stuff and improving chicken society: what they are really doing is wasting a ton of resources.
My main point is that displays of wealth are irrational. And I think that this irrationality suggests a deeper irrationality about wealth in general. For crazy ambitious people like yourself it wealth may make sense, but for most rich or wealthy people, they are just sitting on infertile eggs.
There is something called supernormal stimuli – incidentally the classic example of it is giving a chicken something that resembles a chicken egg but is much much larger. They will choose to sit on it and even ignore a real, fertile chicken egg. I think that wealth, for most people, causes similar irrational behavior where the primal urges overwhelm the rational part of the brain.
peregrinator is a moron. and he spells “defense” with a “c”, so maybe he’s just another british thater clit sucker.
when’s the last time scandinavia had a revolution or civil war? the finnish civil war doesn’t count, finland’s not part of scandinavia.
and how stable has latin america been?
huh….fucktard?
peregrinator makes the typical conservatard reduction of…it’s either american style capitalism or it’s stalinism.
but the soviet union accomplished infinitely more than latin america over it’s 72 year history.
why didn’t brazil ever develop nukes, win nobels in science, put a man into space, win gold medals at the olympics, the world chess championship, etc.?
hmmmmmmmm?
fucktard?
Y
A
W
N
!
Yes, Latin America’s history also comports with the history of the most republican of Europe’s countries being the most stable.
Finland’s civil war was more of a war of independence from Russia than an internal conflict. During the period of Russification, Finland basically became a colony of Russia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification_of_Finland
that’s …thatcher clit sucker… and …its 74 year history…
what’re you retarded C?
since the 1820s latin america, the MOST unequal part of the world, has been one revolution after another…after another.
it’s been the most politically unstable part of the world for 200 years.
this all ended about 40 years ago and the end of the cold war was a stake through its heart.
Yes I am actually agreeing with you lol.
By republican I mean having a constitutional and representative government. See my comment above about europe’s break from monarchy.
And thank you for the insult.
Being insulted by you is something of a rite of passage on this blog, huh?
I’m part of the fam now ♡♡
Good point, but my point is that people are unconsciously imitating the behavior of someone who is trying to maximize genetic potential – but not actually doing so.
I disagree. I think people are consciously trying to get what they want, but what they want no longer confers genetic fitness in the way it used to. But that doesn’t make greedy folks irrational for pursuing wealth. Pursuing what you want is extremely rational regardless of whether those wants are still being selected by evolution.
See, you’re equating fitness enhancing behavior with rational behavior. I separate the two.
There is something called supernormal stimuli – incidentally the classic example of it is giving a chicken something that resembles a chicken egg but is much much larger. They will choose to sit on it and even ignore a real, fertile chicken egg. I think that wealth, for most people, causes similar irrational behavior where the primal urges overwhelm the rational part of the brain.
I agree with your analogy up to a point, but everything a chicken does is by definition irrational because chickens can’t reason. Sitting on a fake chicken egg is not any less rational than sitting on real chicken egg because the chicken doesn’t care about its own genetic fitness and implying that it should care is just a value judgement.
. Humans don’t really care about our genetic fitness either, but we were selected to care about things that prehistorically enhanced our fitness. The fact that some of those things no longer enhance fitness doesn’t mean it’s rational to ignore them, because we care about them, so by definition they have value to us.
“Pursuing what you want is extremely rational regardless of whether those wants are still being selected by evolution.”
Pursuing what you want may be rational, separately from what is rational from a genetic perspective. However, not all pursuits of happiness or satisfaction are rational. For example a lady who hordes cats is doing so to meet a need, but this strategy is not serving her well. Similarly, someone who engages in an addictive behavior is not being rational despite the fact that they want their chosen chemical. Vestiges of cultural or instinctual behavior that is no longer useful may still have a pernicious effect on one’s ability to know what will make one happy or satisfied.
“See, you’re equating fitness enhancing behavior with rational behavior. I separate the two.”
I’m not equating the two, I’m just saying that they can become muddled in people’s hearts and minds. People *do not* always behave rationally.
“The fact that some of those things no longer enhance fitness doesn’t mean it’s rational to ignore them, because we care about them, so by definition they have value to us.”
We care about them – but we also have an ability to examine our own value systems and reshape them to serve our most vital needs. Sometimes this means rejecting old norms or values, and these can be of cultural or biological origin. We have the ability to care about things in ways that harm us in the long run.
If the chicken could be rational – she would reject the giant egg because though the experience of sitting on a giant egg is a positive one for her, she would know rationally that the smaller egg will serve her deeper need of reproducing better.
and another thing…
economic growth is grinding to a halt, because there’s just very little more that people need in the developed world.
the life expectancy of a female japanese is 87 years…being richer isn’t going to move the needle on that.
so…the USSR was poor in comparison to the US and western europe, but…
1. so was the russian empire before it, and…
2. so is russia today 24 years after the end of the soviet union, and…
3. poverty and GDP are relative…the USSR had no homeless people, none lived in trailer parks…there was very little crime…etc.
my own rule is…if it doesn’t increase your life expectancy it’s not worth working for, not worth making any effort for…
it seems that income has very rapidly diminishing returns…its effect on life expectancy becomes either zero or trivial very quickly after a certain pretty low threshold…a threshold much lower than the median income of the US or canada for example…
but americans love conspicuous consumption so the US is the poorest country in the developed world in terms of median household wealth, despite being among the highest in median household income (PPP).
Yes chartreuse, you hit the nail on the head: stagnation is a result of a permanent economic shift that will upend economics as we know it. The most basic founding principle of economics is unmet needs and limited resources to meet them. This is becoming obsolete, and this fact is making economists as stupid as physicists would look if inertia stopped being a thing.
And as you wisely point out, the culture of consumption in the US is a counterweight to this revolution, and one of the reasons that the US is nominally outperforming other countries such as Germany and Finland, even though those countries have higher median standards of living.
“
Pursuing what you want may be rational, separately from what is rational from a genetic perspective.
Humans did not evolve to care about our genetic fitness so it’s generally not rational to look at things from a genetic perspective. Cavemen did not have sex because they were trying to pass on their genes, they had sex because it gave them pleasure. The pleasure was the rational motive and that’s precisely why the human sex drive is so strong: To negate the lack of alternative incentives for reproduction.
Similarly, someone who engages in an addictive behavior is not being rational despite the fact that they want their chosen chemical.
Sure they are. They strongly desire the chemical to the point where they are miserable without it. Thus they are rationally choosing to relieve their pain and gain pleasure. If you don’t suffer from addiction, it’s easy for you to see the behavior as irrational, but you’re not feeling the enormous pain they’re feeling when they don’t submit to it.
Vestiges of cultural or instinctual behavior that is no longer useful may still have a pernicious effect on one’s ability to know what will make one happy or satisfied.
There’s not some one size fits all magic solution to being happy. The primary reason folks are happy is not because they’re rational, it’s because their wants just happen to be complementary with one another and the environment. By contrast, unhappy folks have mutually exclusive wants and will never be happy no matter how rationally they behave.
I’m not equating the two, I’m just saying that they can become muddled in people’s hearts and minds. People *do not* always behave rationally.
I don’t like to use absolutes, but when a high IQ person appears to be behaving irrationally, it’s almost certainly rational behavior if you knew his incentive structure, because the high IQ mind has already been proven to be a good problem solver.
We care about them – but we also have an ability to examine our own value systems and reshape them to serve our most vital needs.
But for most people, enhancing genetic fitness is not the most vital need. It may not even be a need at all.
And while we can alter our values, we want what we want and there’s not a lot we can do to change it. Look at all the gay men that want desperately to want women, but they’re not capable of changing their desire for men. Is homosexuality irrational?
If the chicken could be rational – she would reject the giant egg because though the experience of sitting on a giant egg is a positive one for her, she would know rationally that the smaller egg will serve her deeper need of reproducing better.
Or maybe the rational chicken would realize she’s nothing but a bag of chemicals selected by trial and error evolution, so reproduction is meaningless.
and the epitome of the current situation is AAPL.
a toy manufacturer which has or recently had a market cap more than 2x that of real companies like XOM.
but…
no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the american consumer…
or something like that…
here’s how to make bank peepee:
go long mREITs and 20+ y coupon stripped US treasuries.
FANUC missed its earnings estimate, and the yen fell on the same day. a board lot of FANUC is only 13k USD now.
do it!
my own rule is…if it doesn’t increase your life expectancy it’s not worth working for, not worth making any effort for…
life span != life quality, though the latter can’t be objectively measured, as far as I know
marx predicted that capitalism would “choke on its own wealth”.
and this has come to pass…at the same time that the population of the developed world is aging and decreasing…
predictions:
within 5 years the 30 y US treasury will have a ytm of < 2%.
and lloyd blankfein will be dead.
this time IS different!
“it’s almost certainly rational behavior if you knew his incentive structure”
This sentence is tautological because your using the word rational to mean “explainable” so saying that any behavior where you know their “incentive structure” is rational is just repeating your own definition of the word. Your model of addictive behavior is constrained by this same mistake. It’s not grammatically incorrect exactly because that is an acceptable usage of the word. However, as a model it has little predictive value because it flattens all behavior into binary terms, rational or irrational. So if you don’t like absolutes, you shouldn’t be using the word rational in this way.
I am using the word rational as a proxy for degree of behavioral optimization. It is not a binary thing in my mind, but a gradient, an infinite matrix of possible behaviors and their corresponding outcomes. This seems a more appropriate use of the word in the context of behaviors, because some actions are *more rational* than others.
Such a model that incorporates degrees of rationality comports better with a model of behavior that acknowledges how complex the decisions that individual must face are. No person is going to only make correct decisions in life. High IQ people can make huge mistakes, even in situations where the parameters are relatively well understood, like the hard sciences. The efforts of intrapersonal intelligence and self understanding do not have the benefit of well defined parameters, so people are even more likely to make mistakes.
It seems rather melodramatic to say that it’s choking on its own wealth. It may if it is not able to navigate this transition without some kind of major disaster, but this has not happened yet. Marx also probably thought that it would happen like 100 years ago, but technological innovation changed that: it enabled capital to keep up with labor in terms of importance to productivity. He won the battle of melodramatic but vague predictions, but lost the war of praxeology. No dictatorship of the proletariet will ever come to pass: by the time the capitalism ends, the would be proletariat will be wealthy and will hardly have to work at all.
This sentence is tautological because your using the word rational to mean “explainable” so saying that any behavior where you know their “incentive structure” is rational is just repeating your own definition of the word. Your model of addictive behavior is constrained by this same mistake. It’s not grammatically incorrect exactly because that is an acceptable usage of the word. However, as a model it has little predictive value because it flattens all behavior into binary terms, rational or irrational. So if you don’t like absolutes, you shouldn’t be using the word rational in this way.
I am using the word rational as a proxy for degree of behavioral optimization. It is not a binary thing in my mind, but a gradient, an infinite matrix of possible behaviors and their corresponding outcomes.
This seems a more appropriate use of the word in the context of behaviors, because some actions are *more rational* than others.
Not sure this is an important distinction. Any continuum can be reduced to a binary distinction by arbitrarily setting cut-off points: Tall vs not-tall, smart vs not-smart, rational vs not rational.
No person is going to only make correct decisions in life. High IQ people can make huge mistakes, even in situations where the parameters are relatively well understood, like the hard sciences. The efforts of intrapersonal intelligence and self understanding do not have the benefit of well defined parameters, so people are even more likely to make mistakes.
My point is that if we had the ability to know everyone’s incentive structure, and define mistakes accordingly, then the inverse correlation between IQ and mistakes would get a whole lot stronger. Of course we don’t have that ability so my model is currently unfalsifiable and unscientific, though that doesn’t necessarily make it wrong.
i agree with pp’s last comment.
and so does chomsky.
chomsky is one of those extreme leftists (extreme by american standards) who is also an hereditist, but he found the bell curve to be ridiculous, because (he claimed) it assumed that making as much money as possible was at the top of everyone’s to do list…which it simply is not.
chomsky is one of those extreme leftists (extreme by american standards) who is also an hereditist, but he found the bell curve to be ridiculous, because (he claimed) it assumed that making as much money as possible was at the top of everyone’s to do list…which it simply is not.
Even though I think money well spent can be unbelievably advantageous to virtually everyone, the obsessive pursuit of money can ruin your life, which defeats the whole point of having it in the first place.
I can see how someone like Chomsky, who has a prestigious leisurely stimulating job with the freedom to speak his mind, would be unwilling to trade all that for a life of pursuing wealth. and though there’s no evidence he’s a pervert, you claimed that a lot of professors are attracted to young women which he would be surrounded by in a university, so that would be another incentive for perverted high IQ types to choose academia over money.
Of course there are some brilliant people who achieved both a stimulating job they loved, and colossal cash (Bill Gates), but they were lucky enough to get into a field they loved, that just happened to have market value at the time. There’s very little market value in what Chomsky loves and even less in what Chris Langan loves.
Poor Chomsky. Although I generally agree with a lot of what he says, there is always the undercurrent of idealism and moral purity that throws me off. When he talks about IQ, it seems he is trying to explain a competitive and amoral universe using humanist idealism. It comes off as just another moralistic plug for leftism, which is pretty boring.
E.g.
“a correlation between race and mean I.Q. (were this shown to exist) entails no social consequences except in a racist society”
He seems to be implying that we could flip a switch and our society wouldn’t be racist anymore. We could undo hundreds of years of slavery and make every ethnic group socially equal.
No Chomsky. Our society IS racist, almost every society is racist, by extension the UNIVERSE is generally racist, simply because it is careless, in that it favors the fortunes of some races above others at different times.
Does Chomsky believe that we can select our society’s features like one does when one buys a new car?
Even though I suppose this is possible over the long term, there is still the present to contend with.
i think i read the same article of chomsky’s.
i agree, “racism” in its broadest sense is in-eradicable. think how much energy is wasted on race in america. NPR has become un-listenable…it’s just all race all the time.
chomsky is an idealist in the philosophical sense too…as am i.
plato, berkeley, fichte, hegel, heidegger, chomsky, …
Pumpkin, the large population of the black underclass in America, is really the biggest problem facing the country, and politicians have taken advantage of it, and at times, creating havoc. The dynamics between the Republican and Democrats would be very different, if blacks are not part of the equation.
I don’t think those college professors are jealous of the rich.
Many tenured professors are well to do. Maybe not millionaires, although some of them are. They live in nice neighborhoods and earn about 1/4 million in yearly salary. Some of them also invest, so they have more money than that. Furthermore, some universities/colleges provide fancy perks to them.
How about interest free loans to buy vacation homes, sound nice to you?
Pumpkin, the large population of the black underclass in America, is really the biggest problem facing the country,
No the biggest problem facing America is the neocons and their puppets. They’ve wrecked the whole country.
On the other hand, I understand that some people have an irrepressible urge to consolidate their own power; to influence; to shape history and change the world. I even acknowledge that some of these people might be good for society, like Elon Musk for example. I can understand how someone like that would be bitter being left with $10 million. In fact, it seems rational in that context. So I’ll go back on what I said before that “any” wealthy person who feels bitter is irrational. Those who have already earned a billion are likely to be that type of person anyway. It’s not rational for most people though, because they are not power attuned like an Elon Musk or Koch. Or Pumpkinperson, apparently.
A 99% tax would also meet the condition of being a danger to society, though. And if it didn’t, then we would be living in a world of such stability and wealth that we wouldn’t need or want the world-shakers anyway, so I guess what I said before was true, keeping in mind the caveat that excessive taxes are a definitely possibility in today’s world.
can peepee recognize famous people just from their chins?
i got all of them.
http://time.com/3823115/chins-why-we-have-them/
i found this picture of oprah’s chin.
[pumpkin person Jan 30/2016: inappropriate photo redacted]
Weird that someone with such high test scores has such a childish sense of humor.
why did you delete the picture of oprah’s chin?
Pink & brain cartoon explain basically the two extremes of behavioral spectrum of naivety and astuteness.
Unfortunately most of human beings will fall in the three pathological types: The naive, the apathetic (le masses), the astute.
And great part of people that psychometricians define as “smarter” also will fall among one of the this three essential human behavioral types.
Interesting assessment, not what I would have assumed to be the case. Hillary crushes Sanders among black and Hispanic Democrats, and those groups, especially the former, treat homosexuality with much less reverence than whites do, let alone liberal whites. Homosexuality, especially male homosexuality, is characterized by neotenous cognitive, behavioral, and emotional traits. As Bernie appeals to college kids, so I’d expect him to appeal to gays.
Reuters/Ipsos five-day tracking shows Bernie winning among gays/bisexuals/other orientation 58%-32%, while Hillary beats Bernie among heterosexuals 53.9%-35.8%. Do you think it’s homosexuals in general, restricted just to gay men, or even just to high-profile/activist gay men?
See my post above; Hillary does indeed ‘crush Bernie among black and hispanic democrats’
Hillary Supporters: 62% of them are non-white
Bernie Supporters: 29% of them are non-white.
That could somewhat explain Brock’s criticism of Bernie’s add.
The Reuters poll would make more sense of minorities are typically less homosexual than whites…..
“if” not “of” for my last post. oops.
Thanks for testing the hypothesis. Looks like it’s not borne out by the data, although you looked at Democrat non-straights in general instead of specifically gay men, who I assumed would have supported Hillary over any non-sexy man, but perhaps I’m underestimating them.
It could be that they opposed Obama in 2007-2008 because he pandered a bit too much to religious black folks, but in 2016, they prefer Bernie’s strong consistent left-wing record over Hillary’s flipflopping.
It could also be that the gay community today is very different than it was 8 years ago, both because they’re younger (and thus care less about Hillary) but also because a much broader segment of society now identifies as gay because it’s more acceptable
It could also be the Flynn effect. As a younger smarter generation of gays takes over, they can see through Hillary’s BS 🙂
what are the stats about homosexuality rates by race?
Hillary supporters are actually majority non-white (if my numbers/sources are right)..
Could that play a role? Gays should have lower testosterone, and be higher IQ, and feel that conservatism is bad for the country, and hence hinder their chances of reproduction even more. Is this reasonable?
I personally find the sexually antagonistic androphilia to be sufficient explanation of gay gene survival. The primary way that gays themselves propagate their own genes is through “avuncular” benefits, in other words by nurturing their siblings children. The nurturing personality type would be more attracted to someone like Bernie, who is a cute old avuncular man and who is not so icy and corporate like Hillary.
Obama is perhaps even less personable than Hillary, so their preference for Hillary in the 2008 election may be partially attributable to the same personality difference.
Or “non-heterosexuals in general”, rather than “homosexuals in general”
Gays seem to be high IQ based on occupation. I would expect they could rise above all this psychology stuff, you know cliche “mind over matter” type stuff.
“observation” not necessarily “occupation” although they would correlate highly.
chartreuse,
Why do you think lifespan is that which should be optimized?
Granted, it’s a common idea among Western medicine, and medical practitioners will often torture people, to the point that they beg for death, merely to prolong their lives, but it has never been obvious to me. A short, good life is better that a long life of unrelenting suffering, in my mind.
are you another peepee sock puppet?
obviously if your life is torture from beginning to end the shorter it is the better, but such lives are almost invariably short.
that is, there is a level of ease and quality of life which effects/is conducive to a longer life…though not much longer.
but the “nasty, brutish, and short” jive is just propaganda for civilization.
until 200 years ago savages and civilized had the same life expectancy.
and the few remaining savages in the amazon or new guinea work less than most civilized people and are immune to their diseases…however long they live…including atherosclerosis, most forms of cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, and all psychiatric illnesses…savages never commit suicide.
I don’t use sock puppets.
Celebrities don’t have to.
chartreuse,
Why is it obvious that lifespan should be the single factor to be optimized?
The majority of lives on this planet, in both the present and the past, seem awful to tortuous. I’d prefer a short life if I had to live many of them.
What about Bern’s IQ? I suspect it’s not very high
Lol why not? He’s a successful liberal Jew so he’s almost high IQ by definition.
I guess by ‘not very high’ I mean above 135. He’s probably somewhere between 110-120 top. He’s not the towering intellect some one the left wish he were
America has had 100’s of years for a prole revolution and it hasn’t happened. There are aspects of American culture and economics that makes it resistant to uprisings
bread and circuses, and a consumption culture to distract the masses. American proles are not really poor, but greedy.
peepee loves capitalism…who doesn’t?…
that is…
who doesn’t love the good things about capitalism?
both american capitalism and soviet communism suffer from the too much theory too few facts problem.
and of course america is much less capitalist than the third world. much less.
that’s one of the third world’s problems.
its state sector is too small.
there are horrible things about capitalism…and communism.
scandinavia has taken the good from both and thrown away the bad.
how is this not the OBVIOUS thing to do?
There is the argument that, assuming a country like the US has even slightly higher gdp growth, growth is more important than present quality of life, because growth grows exponentially while present quality of life does not, so a small difference year to year will hurt people in very long term.
the US is a freakishly right wing country, because inter alia it is NOT a nation.
when government is it or them rather than us, then government is bad.
this is why all lefties, in the american sense, should also be “racists”, in the sense that they should believe homogeneous societies are better than heterogeneous societies ceteris paribus.
homogeneous societies are almost invariably more equal and better/happier than heterogeneous societies.
empires and new world states are really bad ideas.
the EU and the PRC are not homogeneous, but they’re close…that is manchurians and cantonese, swedes and sicilians are much more alike than they are like anyone outside of china or europe (and its diaspora).
so what’re the growth areas?
1. healthcare
2. emerging and frontier markets…but which ones?
3. what the debt hawks don’t get is that debt may always be restructured and low rates means high debt has a low expense…and if rolling the debt is a problem…the central banks can, and will, intervene and keep rates low.
the whole fucking world is gonna be japanified.
We’re not going to be Japanified for a long time though. For the time being, we’re going to have plenty of poor immigrants come and keep our population growing and help us poop when we’re old.
ah…but…
by japanified i mean also that the fed will be called upon to do everything that america’s sclerotic and pathological political system is incapable of doing…and this because the US economy will continue to fail…labor force participation for males is at its lowest since the great depression, real productivity has been flat for 30 years along with median wages.
it’s gonna be the long bond under 2% soon. it’s already been at 2.25%.
and all of this because of ideology and the “work ethic”…ignoring that when a machinist loses his job to china he either never works again or becomes a burger flipper, retail sales associate, etc.
but conservatards think the poor are just un-motivated…
the problem is…
the rulers and their ruling ideology simply doesn’t even approximately conform to the way the word IS, or has BECOME, if if ever did.
the world has changed.
the engineers and tradesmen know this. they make. everyone else is just in a meaningless un-neccessary status whoring circle jerk.
techne and demography is always ahead of social science theories.
and always will be, until the theories become…
technological determinism…otherwise known as marxism.
the biggest “coulda had a v8” in the history of philosophy…
but so few have actually ever read marx.
but the fed board is just a bunch of cheerleading retards, so they may keep raising just to save face.
it’s gonna get ugly.
roll your puts.
*”Is President Obama gay?:-)”*
In this face swap with Michelle;
(where Obama is hence wearing a dress), he actual looks like a woman. That means he has very feminine features. He very well may be homosexual.
What do you think about FBI director Comey and re-opening the email investigation?
Do you think Obama’s secret motives have anything to do with this?
I’d doubt he’d want Trump to win, but it could be he wants her to enter so hated and disliked that she is unable to advance any policy agenda and he looks better in comparison.
Trump has the backing of the “establishment” (Neocons), it appears.
“Trump has the backing of the “establishment” (Neocons), it appears.”
I’ve been saying this for months. At least someone else gets it!
What do you think about FBI director Comey and re-opening the email investigation?
Do you think Obama’s secret motives have anything to do with this?
I’d doubt he’d want Trump to win, but it could be he wants her to enter so hated and disliked that she is unable to advance any policy agenda and he looks better in comparison.
Too risky. He’d need to hope the new FBI probe would damage her just enough to make her an ineffective president, but not enough to hand the Presidency to Trump.
No, I think Comey reopened the investigation to save his own reputation as a non-partisan investigator, and not appear as though he was in the tank for Hillary.
Trump has the backing of the “establishment” (Neocons), it appears.
Hillary’s backed by quite a few neocons too.