Several years ago, Oprah returned to her old stomping grounds of Baltimore Maryland (where she spent her twenties looking for love in all the wrong places) and was interviewed by a nice blond reporter.
The difference in brain size could not be more stark.
Oprah was there to play the daughter of Henrietta Lacks. In the excellent HBO film, Oprah’s character is informed by a white journalist that the medical community had turned her mother’s miraculous cells (nicknamed Hela cells) into one of the most valued commodities in medicine, and the family didn’t get anything.
I was reminded of Ayn Rand who argued Middle East oil belonged to America because they discovered it and extracted it, so without them it was worthless.
Sadly, I suspect by the same logic she’d feel that Hela cells belong to white people, and not Henrietta Lacks and her heirs.
Pumpkin Person 
Pill Pumpkin or whoever if you think my IQ is so low you should at least give me an estimate for what you think it is! i hope to take the Weschler’s soon anyways so maybe i wont even need your insights but i would still like to know!
Good article PP!
Capitalism vs. Communism. Labor theory of value vs. Utility.
By appending a value to some object you give people goals and a common objective. You also risk prematurely creating a value hierarchy based on something false. Like buying land and then claiming you own it forever despite a lot of the surrounding society changing… and nothing ever really being completely “fair” in the first place.
Also, the conundrum of managing other humans which is labor and risk itself, but takes advantage of others. Though they also take advantage of your company and management.
And, the conundrum of introducing rights into societies that don’t have them, and then it later being used against you because you somewhat violated their rights since you treated them differently from those who have those rights simply because of the fact that they didn’t value those rights before. Civilizing someone, but in the process treating them as not civilized because they ACTUALLY weren’t civilized and when they become civilized, they realize that fact (Colonizers vs. colonized, but also using today’s values against individuals of the past, or raising kids and treating them as kids which they resent).
China is the world’s factory but basically steals all their IPs from the West. And some of that technology is invented/researched by Chinese descendents in the West.
But I think it’s pretty clear the oil and Hela cells belongs to both parties in some sense. That’s only fair.
That’s why the market needs to be free so that the value of things can continuously be updated. But obviously, there is no such thing as completely free or completely controlled in the first place as they are both contingent on each other. Capitalism requires laws (constraints) and control over the market requires the freedom to act against those who would coerce you into working for them. Freedom makes us value control to stop the bad parts of freedom, and control makes us value freedom to stop us from enjoying the good parts of what we can control (and can’t control).
Your comments are a lot better than other peoples comments on this blog I must say.
In terms of economics “freedom” and “control” are 2 sides of the same coin. Correct.
We all use fake paper money that has no inherent value. Its all a game. I have said for years that I suspect the central bank in some nations prints money and sends it directly to certain private individuals and therefore, we all live in a feudal system, not a market reality.
what an idiot! marx distinguished three ways of valuing commodities:
1. use value (aka utility),
2. labor value (how much work does it take to produce),
3. market value.
in general these are all different under capitalism.
and contrary to retards the labor theory of value can be made very precise. one just needs man-hours for a lot of industries + all of their non-labor inputs + some of these industries need to be “basic industries” like mining, farming, etc.. then with some linear algebra one can solve for the labor value of every commodity.
the labor theory of value therefore is a precise description of economic reality if…
the arduousness, hatefulness of the labor and the level of skill of the labor can be taken into account somehow.
but as LotB has noted the most an individual (a highly skilled individual) can actually produce in terms of use value isn’t more than 250k per year. thus income above this comes from “expropriation of surplus value”.
the dilbert principle is true. in general, managers add nothing. people can manage themselves. employee owned companies are actually MORE competitive than capitalist owned cos…or so the studies say. MBAs are value destroying psychopaths just like most professors.
In many East Asian countries besides China and Korea I think, prostitution is legal in some form. Probably you heard about the sex trade and human trafficking in China and Korea (North and South). Sometimes illegal, but loopholed but very shallowly. Including Japan, where you can search for soaplands and they appear in the side bar like any other business. Singapore and Hong Kong allow it. Obviously Southeast Asia is famous for it.
I think some Japanese porn industry guy estimated 1 percent of Japanese women were in sex work, porn (softcore or otherwise). Probably true if you count all the adjacent things like hostess clubs too.
Is this superior evolutionarily, inferior, or neither?
I think sexual attitudes, being related to sexual selection, are probably pretty indicative of the genetics of the population. Probably most intelligent, educated people in the West would agree that prostitution should be legal, but basically never engaged in. It would kind of be the liberal democratic view. That seems to go along with the way they might want to treat others in their society and their personal life. Expecting that everyone can control themselves but that exceptions and deviations occur in everyone’s life. So probably, that’s the best path for society… but it requires the right genetics and/or the right culture/education early in life (depending on your views about nurture v. nature). But it seems East Asians are slightly different in there views, despite being smarter on average.
Asians are way more conservative about sex than westerns and their danish mind controllers. I would say though that attitudes about prostitution are roughly similar. In singapore there is a red light district even though the government is very socially conservative.
Social conservativism basically means patriarchy and it usually means prostitution is legal.
In Japan as long as you’re dating the person then it can’t be prostitution, even if one person exchanges money to another for any reason at all. Including if the continuation of the relationship is allowed only under the condition of one person giving another money, and breaks the moment such a condition no longer applies and isn’t needed.
Asians have a different idea of what is most important in the display of virtue, although I only really know about Japanese conceptions of morality. Traditionally Japanese view of prostitution broadly does share resemblance with western ones, but there’s some nuance in terms of what sort of things are considered allowable to break. Filial piety played a more important role in asian morality, so for example, if a woman had to sell her body in order to provide for her impoverished parents who wouldn’t by their own power be able to provide for themselves, she isn’t considered immoral or impure for the action in itself. The opposite, she is virtuous, is true because she sacrificed herself in order to help her parents.
Prostitutes, entertainers, merchants, etc are still considered low class occupations. Kabuki actors were made male-only out of fear of female actors disrupting the social order by way of eroticism and prostitution.
>Is this superior evolutionarily, inferior, or neither?
No clue. There was at some point in time in London Christian run, or something along the lines of that, brothels. The only speculation I’ve read is that prostitution reduces the amount of male-male competition and thus increases the internal coherency of a group. In general if it’s widespread I’d imagine it’d intensely disruptive to the reproductive strategies of more able men.
This is (now dead) Marika Mitsotakis, the wife of a former prime minister and mother of the current prime minister. https://nb.bbend.net/media/news/2016/05/06/693993/snapshot/marika708.jpg
I have seen her up close and she did have a huge skull.
Also https://www.newsbreak.gr/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/nb_mitsotaki_marika-696×397.jpg
Youre greek?
Greece is basically run by organised crime lol.
if i were greek i would shoot myself in the butthole in front of a giant poster of oprah.
Can you post one picture which isn’t slanted or at a wonky angle?
The most accurate photos are here, providing an apples to apples comparison of Oprah & Ellen on all 3 dimensions of cranial capacity:
https://pumpkinperson.com/2018/08/28/oprah-vs-ellen-cranial-capacity/
Thousands of miles in the air writing this comment.
Not thousands of miles but 30000 feet since I am on a plane. Still on a plane.
Yeah those photos are way better. But the recent ones like this post and Clarence Thomas photos from a post in the last 2 years or so looked crazy angled.
Im on an a plane thousands of feet in the air writing this.
oprah’s face is wide but her brain case is narrow and high.
her cranial capacity is at most average.
No it’s HUNDREDS of cubic centimeters above average.
Her brain case looks narrow compared to its height and the width of her face, but it’s still about 1.7% wider than Ellen’s.
Her cranial height is 26% higher than Ellen’s and her head length is 20.5% longer than Ellen’s.
These three variables give a cranial capacity that is 48% larger than Ellen’s.
Assuming Ellen’s brain case is average for a woman, this puts Oprah’s at 1874 cc,.
https://pumpkinperson.com/2018/08/28/oprah-vs-ellen-cranial-capacity/
This is further corroborated by her claiming to have a 25.25″ head circumference and having a head so big she requires custom made hats and two wigs sewn together which is further confirmed by David Letterman’s show discovering her hat size is 8.
the above is a lot of effort to not post my pictures.
The top photo confirms she has a huge brain case.
The second one implies nothing either way.
The third implies Paltow has a freakishly huge head, partly because we can see all 3 dimensions of Paltrow’s cranium but only 2 of Oprah’s, plus Paltrow is closer to that camera man. The same moment captured by other camera man makes Oprah’s cranium look larger:
Yeah this is a good case example pp. Can you post your frame in a quality like the guy you are responding to pp? Plenty of your recent skull comparisons look morphed. I know you are not morphing them but that is a poor quality snapshot. Try using something like gyazo instead of literally snapping something with a camera on your screen.
kasparov’s cranial capacity is greater than andreessen’s.
This cheating controversy in chess is similar to the controversies in other intellectual ‘sports’ like video game tournaments and other mental disciplines.
Cheating is totally rife online gaming. I play Age of Empires 3 and theres cheating. I even play games where theres no rankings and no rewards for cheating and people still do it. Its very weird. Autists must scratch their heads wondering why people cheat even harder than I do.
The UK government looks like it could collapse before Christmas. I thought the neoliberals were in complete control of this country but they can’t even agree on tax rates and welfare spending.
As long as the central bank keeps saying they will cap bond yields theres zero chance the country will go bankrupt, right?
If the central bank can control bond yields, then why isn’t there an inclination to spend rather than cut taxes?
These people want to spend the money on the rich and the markets reacted badly to ideas that the market put into their own universities and media. Its hilarious.
Someone should write a book about why Greece declined so horribly over the past 2000 years.
Well I guess, people might even say the same about Eygpt. Eygpt is even worse than Greece.
Maybe it isn’t a surprise. The British Empire was alive and well up until the 1960s and look at the UK now hahaha. Within 2 generations it needed an IMF bailout.
Egypt stagnated long before it fell to foreign powers. Most (not all, but most) of the innovation was in the early dynastic and old kingdom periods.
I worry about the birth rates of blacks and the work of the mad scientist Bill Gates in making the world 1/4 black.
That obviously means more R selection and a complete breakdown of civilisation in many parts of the world even outside Africa.
redacted by pp, 2022-10-09] generally if the world is 1/4 black, that means, civilisation will cease to exist in many parts of the world.
Barrack Obama lives in Marthas Vineyard because he’s red pilled on blacks.
Look, Oprah is great but you have to accept most black women are kind of like something from sci-fi or Lord of the Rings. And I’m not talking about the elves or even the normal humans.
Lol!
One thing I disagree with PP about is when he says smarter people exploit stupider people. That would only apply if smarter people were always parasitic and unempathetic, but most smart people aren’t (at least any more than the average). I think being a total asshole usually caps the enjoyment you get out of life to pretty low levels, because anyone around you leads a shittier life and society degrades, which is why psychopathy is always limited to a couple percent of the population. Society can’t progress without mutual beneficial relationships.
Stupid people experience the benefits of the hard work of smarter people. Technology and art they couldn’t create, cities they couldn’t build, ideas they couldn’t think of. Even if they are in a lower rung in society, the smarter person gets the most out of the stupid person when the stupid person is able to produce as much as they are capable of anyway.
We don’t have any interest in hurting the feelings of farm animals, we just want them to produce meat, milk, wool, and not spread disease. And further more, that those farm animals can at least defend themselves from outside harms and not disturb the surrounding environment too much through pollution. In exchange they get safety and food. They can’t reach the same potential they would in the wild, but they don’t really have much potential except fulfilling a place on the food chain.
Of course their intellect is up for debate, but if they are actually stupid, we aren’t really exploiting them anymore than the environment exploits them already. (It chews them up and spits them out, maybe only in a more biodegradable way.) They aren’t going to invent calculus in the wild (at least not without millenia of evolution through which we would easily recognize their increase in intelligence anyway)
Anyway any HBDer should recognize intelligence hardly makes you an exploiter of the less intelligent. We are basically ostracized if we share our views in public. Knowledge equals power but power often equals people hating you for being different than them. PP also has to go through many comments he considers beneath him and so should recognize how greater intelligence does not necessarily mean he is winning the battle of exploitation. Lol!
I think smarter groups exploit stupider groups but the situation reverses on an individual level, but this isn’t dissimilar to skilled people being relied on more often for help in tasks related to their skill. It’s a question of who best fulfills specific and general roles, and whether a person is capable of attaining personal interests.
Since humans are generally status-driven animals, the intelligent of our kind are going to invest their energy into attaining status, and if intelligence helps in any way than they’ll out compete those who have less of that trait than them. During, or at any point, exploitation then becomes a possibility. It might’ve even been the vehicle of their success. Even when a person affects empathy and compassion, or genuinely does hold these things, the consequences of the actions aren’t always going to be play out as imagined, and certain types of exploitation are just necessary for a society to exist. Not because it’s vital, although some are, but because capitalistic interests of each person might not coincide with the best interests of the average person in that society.
A society could both by law and by practice be cooperative, empathic, agreeable, and designed with good intentions, but the actual mechanistic effects can diverge wildly from the original expectation. Although these things may just be the affect of unfounded expectations (stupidity).
Necessary precondition is a fun term and I hope I’ll use it to death until I come up with something less obnoxious.
PP has recently said something similar in thought to your comment, paraphrasing since I don’t want to look for it, that blacks in america benefit from the increased standard of living relative to if they were still in africa and that this works as a sort of compensation for slavery.
>the smarter person gets the most out of the stupid person when the stupid person is able to produce as much as they are capable of anyway
With the least amount of money and energy invested into them and with the lowest possible chance of their own position being challenged, and if neither of these things are true then someone else more cruel is going to work to correct the lack of cruelty (cause the free market, fuck you).
Also I should note I’m not saying stupider people are like farm animals, as the capability of even 80 IQ people to learn new fairly abstract things is there, given enough time and training. The language capability or at least conceptual thought associated with it makes even the dumbest human deserve certain human rights.
Just using the example to show we don’t exploit intellectually inferior animals anymore than they exploit us. It’s harder to show that concretely with stupid vs. smart people because the differences are much more complicated and society is always progressing and hard to measure.
“I was reminded of Ayn Rand who argued Middle East oil belonged to America because they discovered it and extracted it, so without them it was worthless.”
I was a Rand acolyte for a couple of years during my teens. I can scarcely think of a more intensely unpleasant, sanctimonious, or paranoid personality (excepting genuine lunatics).
Just the same, Rand had her moments. I still appreciate her unabashed defense of the absolute moral and intellectual superiority of the West.
This may be attributable to photographic distortion, but Oprah’s head looks freakishly elongated there. I wonder whether she tries to hide the (apparent) deformity using hats and carefully selected camera angles.
PP, have you considered writing a post on small-skulled/small-brained ‘geniuses’? Anatole France had a tiny head.
I recently read that brain size may correlate more strongly with potential to acquire expertise than with g (bigger brain –> more brain mass for specialized circuits).
I was struck the other day by how uncultured I.Q. society members are. It’s hard to imagine a more crassly ignorant bunch of self-worshipping geeks. Science fiction (including the deranged apocalypticism of Kurzweil) is the gnosticism of our time. Does anyone really believe that Chris Langan is smarter than Socrates in any meaningful way? “Yeah bro, I know Socrates defined the very dimensions of Philosophy for 2,000 years, but Langan solved the block puzzle in 2.3 seconds! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW”