Thursday, May 01, 2014

Gosh! We're not all clones!

Busy recently: Alex & Adrian were here for for two weeks over the Easter - we hung out at the Mendip Snowsport Centre and tried not to crash as we worked on our parallel turns. Then I suddenly realised that the holidays are fast approaching .. we're away in France and Italy in the summer and the logistics are frightening: route planning, campsite selection, parking for tourist visits to tightly-packed Italian towns. Why don't people routinely quote GPS coordinates (latitude, longitude) to all sites of interest and/or utility? Hint: Google Maps and right click on a location, select "What's here".

More here on the theme that human beings are physically and psychologically diverse, so we need to get over it. More specifically, this self-evidently also applies to different ethnic groups when we're not being too polite to notice.

Steve Sailer writes:
"Nicholas Wade, the New York Times’ chief genetics reporter, has published 1,052 articles in the newspaper of record since 1983. For most of this century, Wade has been methodically waging war in the Science section of the NYT against the liberal creationist myth that race isn’t real. He has now written a definitive book on the existence of biological differences among races, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, which will be published in May."

Here's a brief extract from Wade's book.
"The view of economic development generally taken by economists is that people have little or nothing to do with it. Since all humans are identical units that respond the same way to incentives, at least in economic theory, then if one country is poor and another rich, the differences cannot have anything to do with the people but must lie in institutions or access to resources.
...
"On the basis of this theory, the West has spent some $2.3 trillion in aid over the last 50 years without managing to improve African living standards. Could something be not quite right with the theory?"
He can expect to be excoriated for the crime of noticing uncomfortable truths. It's good to support bravery by buying the book, and as he's smart, well-informed and a good writer, we may learn something to our advantage. Because of widespread liberal denialism, we're stuck in the rut of simply asserting that such differences truly exist and have significant real-world consequences. But what then are the public policy options? They seem almost too scary to think about - and how tragic is that?