20240929 – The Genetic Lottery
MAIN IDEA:
The main idea of this book is to demonstrate that success in life, or lack thereof, is highly dependent on an individual’s DNA and family wealth. To evaluate the impact of DNA, the author relies on the polygenic index for traits positively correlated with high levels of education. Here is the graphic representation:
The book’s first part is quite scientific, and the author clearly states what she was expecting to achieve:” By this point in the book, I hope I have convinced you of three things. One, genetic research has developed an array of methods, using family members, measured DNA, and combinations of both, that estimate the effects of genes on complicated human outcomes. Second, the overwhelming consensus of that research is that genetic differences between people matter for who succeeds in formal education, which structures many other forms of inequality. Third, while the biology of these genetics is still largely a mystery, progress is being made on understanding the psychological and social mediators of genetic effects on educational success.”
The book’s second part discusses the social environment, especially equity vs equality, and makes an interesting proposition that increases in resource availability actually increase the difference in outcomes:
MY TAKE ON IT:
It is a very interesting book. I enjoy watching how the author turns herself into a pretzel trying to reconcile somehow the knowledge she obtained as a scientist with leftist dogmas that she was brainwashed into via higher quasi-education and the liberal environment she lives in. There are many funny examples, such as diatribes against Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s work, that demonstrate a clear lack of understanding of this work. The same applies to the author’s hate of eugenics and a few other similar things.
However, I fully agree with the author’s conclusions and overall direction of this book. It is just ridiculous to divide the environment into nature vs. nurture. It is all combined into one indivisible system with a multitude of positive and negative feedback loops that make it all but impossible to isolate them from each other.
As to eugenics, it is just the application of scientific methods developed in agriculture to human beings. The problem is not that it is scientifically wrong. Since humans are biological objects, one can produce tall blond people using the same methods as were successfully used to create more productive milk cows. The attitude of eugenics is wrong because humans are not cows; they exist for their own sake, not to satisfy some collectivistic ideologues of Nazism or Communism. Therefore, a decent society should provide people with resources sufficient to pursue happiness, protect them from individuals whose perceived happiness demands the misery of others, and leave it at that.
20240922 – Supercommunicators
MAIN IDEA:
This book is about communications, and here is the author’s definition of its main idea: “This book, then, is an attempt to explain why communication goes awry and what we can do to make it better. At its core are a handful of key ideas. The first one is that many discussions are actually three different conversations. There are practical, decision-making conversations that focus on What’s This Really About? There are emotional conversations, which ask How Do We Feel? And there are social conversations that explore Who Are We? We are often moving in and out of all three conversations as a dialogue unfolds. However, if we aren’t having the same kind of conversation as our partners, at the same moment, we’re unlikely to connect with each other.”
There is also a graphic representation:
MY TAKE ON IT:
I like the idea that there are different types of conversations, and communication difficulties often occur because participants perceive that they are in different types of communication than they really are. For example, one side believes it is in a Decision-making conversation and seeks a way to resolve a problem, while another is in a Social conversation and seeks to reaffirm its core beliefs. I think many problems, not only at the individual and small group levels but also at the international level, occur because people do not understand that the other side is in a completely different conversation.
A good example is the most enduring conflict of our time between representatives of contemporary secular Western Civilization and traditional theocratic Islamic Civilization. The leaders of the West believe that the conversation is about some specific problems, such as the Palestinian State, grievances from the history of colonialism, low level of economic development, or some other resolvable problem. They are in a Decision-making mindset conversation. The leaders of Islam believe that the issue is whether they are the one and only legitimate representatives of the true God or just one of many religions that different people come up with. If their beliefs are correct, their god should make them dominant in the world and give them the power to conquer and dominate over everybody else. If such conquest fails, they are wrong, and their core understanding of themselves is invalid. They are in a Social mindset conversation, seeking to assert their beliefs about who they are.
The possible outcomes of this conflict are either Islamic theocracy established all over the world or changes in the leadership of the Islamic populations, who eventually arrive at the same downgrading of their god that the Christian population went through in recent centuries regarding their god.
I think that the first outcome, Islamic dominance, is unfeasible, and the second is inevitable. However, due to Western leadership’s lack of understanding of what kind of conversation they are in, the road to this will be much more complex and bloody than it should have been.
20240915 – Where Have All the Democrats Gone
MY TAKE ON IT:
With all due respect, I think the authors are missing a big part of the picture. They correctly identified Democrats’ losses among working and middle-class people of all races and ethnicities but missed a big part of their gains. These gains came from the managerial class and business, not because they were good in economics but because contemporary businesses, both big and small, are highly incorporated into the regulatory hierarchy of government and dependent on government bureaucrats for their very existence. Ever since FDR’s revolution, these government bureaucrats have become a core constituency of the Democratic party, with the working class providing mass support in exchange for government handouts and interventions into the economy through Union support, labor legislation, welfare, and so on.
The expansion of government in all areas of life and the economy led to the creation of a massive parasitic class in overblown, hugely expensive, ineffective, and inefficient healthcare and education. This new class does not provide enough numbers to override the popular vote, but it has control over the election process, making popular vote nearly irrelevant to its results. Democratic success in 2020 and 2022 in fixing election results created overconfidence in their ability to maintain power forever.
This prompted Democrats to open borders so they could substitute Americans who used to feel themselves to be free, whether this feeling is realistic or not, and have a high demand for quality of life (American Dream) with masses of illegal immigrants that often see the difference between high-quality live in America and misery of their native countries as something natural, not related to culture and institutions. They could be excused in such thinking because all they see is that doing the same job they did back home in the USA provides 40-50 times more returns while doing nothing, and just getting on public assistance provides 10 times more. To come to America illegally and illegally vote for Democrats is a very small price to pay for such dramatic improvement.
However, I do not think this is the end of the story. Many more Americans were hurt by Democratic policies than benefited from it. These are not only working-class people who see their jobs going to illegals or that the factories they worked in before shipped to China or Mexico. It is also college graduates who invested in education and could not get decent jobs they counted on or could not move ahead because they belong to the wrong race. The history of the Soviet Union demonstrated that it is possible to suppress the majority, however miserable, using ideologically brainwashed youths and government violence. Still, it could happen only if all communications were fully controlled, any resistance or even expression of unhappiness suppressed with concentration camps or outright murder, and an organization like the KGB or Stasi fully controlled by the party had a vast network of informers. The control of the Democratic party over media, especially social media, is far from complete. The FBI is corrupted to the bone, but not KGB yet. The population not only has access to any information, but it also includes lots of people who understand the situation, including immigrants from totalitarian countries and lots of Americans educated in real history. Finally, the population is armed and seems uninclined to give up these arms. It would be interesting to see how it unfolds over the next few years or months.
20240908 – Free Agents
MAIN IDEA:
This book is about a very popular current discussion about whether the world is deterministic and humans, therefore, have no free will or whether something still allows them to exercise it. The author rejects both religious and purely mechanistic approaches, and here is how he defines his approach:
“…basic laws of physics that deal only with energy and matter and fundamental forces cannot explain what life is or its defining property: living organisms do things, for reasons, as causal agents in their own right. They are driven not by energy but by information. And the meaning of that information is embodied in the structure of the system itself, based on its history. In short, there are fundamentally distinct types of causation at play in living organisms by virtue of their organization.
My goal in this book is to explore how living things come to have this ability to choose, to autonomously control their own behavior, to act as causes in the world. The key to this effort, in my view, is to take an evolutionary perspective. If we want to understand how choice and free will could exist in a physical universe, let’s look at the details of how they actually came to exist. The book therefore tracks how agency evolved—from the origin of life itself, through the invention of nervous systems, the subsequent elaboration of decision-making and action selection systems, and the eventual emergence of the kind of conscious cognitive control in humans that we refer to as “free will.”
MY TAKE ON IT:
Somehow, the intensity of the discussion about free will puzzles me. For me, it just does not matter whether human actions are predetermined at the initiation of the universe or not. In either case, acting individuals should be held responsible for the consequences of their actions because responsibility should be not about the past but about the future. It means that if an individual commits some action that is considered not acceptable, like murder, the one and only way to make sure that this individual will never do it again is to eliminate this individual. Our society’s biggest problem is the disconnect between actions and consequences, meaning that some people commit actions, but others have their well-being compromised as a result. I think it is not that impossible to create such a link when we have a huge capacity for information processing. For example, many people who support increasing the gas price by additional taxation feel no difference between $2/gallon and $5/gallon. I am pretty sure that if instead of the same price for everybody, the gas tax would be linked to income, resulting in somebody making twice the average income paying double the price for gas, then the number of people supporting saving the planet would go down. I see no problem with a person making $50k a year paying $2 while a person making $500k paying $20. By the way, it would nicely demonstrate to what extent cosmic forces predetermine support for such measures, or this support could be manipulated by the free will of people who do not want to pay too much. Overall, I find the deterministic idea not necessarily wrong but just meaningless because it is impossible to falsify. It is also an impediment to any action because there is no action if there is no will to act.
20240901 – The End of Everything
MAIN IDEA
This book is not just about the history of destroyed
civilizations but also about applying the lessons of this destruction to the
contemporary world. Here is how the author defines his main point:” Naïveté,
hubris, flawed assessments of relative strengths and weaknesses, the loss of
deterrence, new military technologies and tactics, totalitarian ideologies, and
a retreat to fantasy can all explain why these usually rare catastrophic events
nevertheless keep recurring—from the destruction of the Inca Empire to the end
of the Cherokee nation to the genocide of a populous, vibrant, and
Yiddish-speaking prewar Jewish people in Central and Eastern Europe. The
continual disappearance of prior cultures across time and space should warn us
that even familiar twenty-first-century states can become as fragile as their
ancient counterparts, given that the arts of destruction march in tandem with
improvements in defense. The gullibility, and indeed ignorance, of contemporary
governments and leaders about the intent, hatred, ruthlessness, and capability
of their enemies are not surprising. The retreat to comfortable nonchalance and
credulousness, often the cargo of affluence and leisure, is predictable given
unchanging human nature, despite the pretensions of a postmodern
technologically advanced global village.” And, just in case somebody missed
this point, the author adds:”Unfortunately, the more things change
technologically, the more human nature stays the same—a law that applies even
to the United States, which often believes it is exempt from the misfortunes of
other nations, past and present. This book makes clear, however, that there is
no certainty that as scientific progress accelerates and leisure increases, and
as the world shrinks on our computer and television screens, there is any
corresponding advance in wisdom or morality, much less radical improvement in
innate human nature.”
MY TAKE ON IT:
This is a great description of what happens when people become too self-assured, try to find a compromise with enemies who are clearly looking to destroy these people and refuse to fight seriously until it is too late. I think that the author’s diagnosis is pretty much correct. I can understand when people believe that it would be already too late to save the USA and Western civilization from destruction by barbarians, whether these barbarians are Islamic religious fundamentalists living mentally in the 7th century or they are Chinese communists striving to remake the XX century, or they are Russian imperialists dreaming to bring the world into XIX century with global dominance of Russian Empire, which in historical XIX century Russia failed to achieve.
I am much more optimistic than that, mainly because of the war in Ukraine, which demonstrated the huge technological superiority of even older Western weapons and the barbarians’ clear inability to be effective and efficient in their attacks. Another interesting point is the barbarians’ economic dependence on the somewhat civilized world, which leaves the moral weakness of the Western population as the one and only reason for the barbarians’ hope to achieve their objectives.
However, human psychology is not something constant and can change really fast. It was clearly demonstrated by the recent attack of Islamic barbarians on Israel. Initially successful due to the bureaucratic ossification of the Israeli army and political divisions in the society, it failed to break this society, consequently leading to the massive violent response that clearly was not anticipated by the aggressor due to decades of previous weak responses. Similarly, Russian aggression against Ukraine changed the calculation of European leaders and led to a much stronger, even if insufficient, response. It is quite possible that this response convinced Chinese leaders that it was too early to attack and that they had to wait until the moral degradation of Western societies reached more significant levels.
In short, I believe that the impact of leadership failures on the Western population will be big enough to change the attitudes of this population and consequently lead to a change in leadership well before the balance of power will change sufficiently for barbarians to have a good chance for victory. When this happens, the unconstrained use of Western power will make Israel’s slow, constrained, and tentative use of power look miniscule.
Equal Rights Libertarian 