Florin M

[Alex Strudwick Young @AlexTISYoung]

Selection against variants in the genome associated with educational attainment | PNAS https://t.co/wEGAmVj5vN

[Steve Stewart-Williams @SteveStuWill]

Scientists can predict people’s school grades from their genes - not perfectly but surprisingly well.

https://t.co/66QY2O6BdZ

[Jesús Fernández-Villaverde @JesusFerna7026]

Last week I posted a new paper with Patrick Norrick: “Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World.”

We chose the title deliberately. No society in history has experienced the fertility levels now seen in South Korea, China, Thailand, Colombia, Chile, and many other countries. Our knowledge of the causes (and of the economic consequences) remains far more limited than most public discussion acknowledges. Much of what we write is, at best, educated conjecture.

The paper also struggles against a space limit. We wrote 20,000 words, far from the 250,000 or so we would need to address some issues in more detail (if I had the time and resources to hide away for a year, I could do that, but not now). That means some ideas are only sketched.

Nonetheless, we emphasize several important points.

First, fertility has fallen very fast everywhere: rich and poor countries, east and west, north and south, conservative and liberal societies, religious and non-religious societies (with the exception of the Jewish population of Israel; fertility has also collapsed among the Muslim population within the pre-1967 borders), you name it. Even in sub-Saharan Africa we see fast and unprecedented drops in fertility (alas, from a high initial level).

Second, and this is really interesting, the fertility collapse has been concentrated in poor and lower-middle-income countries much more than in rich countries. By now, income per capita and fertility are positively correlated within OECD countries. We conjecture this will hold globally in a few decades.

Third, and related to the second point, the fertility collapse has been concentrated among poor and lower-middle-income women within countries. In countries such as the U.S., the rich and highly educated now have more children than the poor and less educated.

Fourth, we document why we do not understand the data from the U.N. World Population Prospects. See, for example, Tables A.1 and A.2.

Fifth, we explain why some proposed mechanisms struggle when confronted with the data.

A more subtle point is at work here. Many commentators do not seem to understand the difference between proximate causes and ultimate causes. Yes, births might have gone down because fewer women are in long-run relationships. That is the proximate cause. But you need to explain why fewer women are in long-run relationships (the ultimate cause), and saying that they spend more years in school, to take one example, does not get us very far. Why do they spend more years in school? Once you start down the whole chain of reasoning, things become much harder than they seem.

The paper can be found here:

https://t.co/VrCHr0lBPa

Comments always welcome!

[Coach Noah Revoy | Arms Dealer For The Soul 🏴‍☠️ @NoahRevoy]

Many men understand the hormone issue very well.

We know about hormones. We have 20 times more testosterone flowing through our veins than women do. Testosterone is basically sex cocaine. It makes us constantly horny, and more agressive, energetic, decisive, fair, rational, etc. It changes our personality massively.

True, it does not fluctuate up and down as much as women’s monthly cycles, but it still affects us in ways that require us to exercise large amounts of self-control so that we do not let it get the better of us and is channeled in positive directions.

What is happening online this week is not a lack of understanding on the part of men. Men have been saying for decades that women have these massive ups and downs, these huge peaks and valleys of hormones, and that it causes you to act in ways that are unpredictable, irrational, and make you ill-suited for any leadership positions, strategic decision making, sound judgment, and certain types of responsibilities.

It has been men all along who have been making the claim you are making. And women have been denying it. They have been saying, “No, no, that does not affect us at all. We can do everything you can do, but better. We are equal, but more equal.”

The reason some men right now are claiming that it is no big deal is precisely to get you bait you into admitting that it is a big deal. They are using hyperbole to try to get women to bring truth into the discussion.

The truth is that women are, by and large, unwilling to accept their own limitations and how their own hormonal system affects them. They want to be men, but they have not got the stability to act as men.

(Sadly, in modern times, many men also have not got the stability to act as men, but that is another subject.)

Now, there are women who have a good grasp on this. A friend of mine and his wife were at my house and we were speaking together when suddenly she started crying.

I said to her, “What is wrong, are you ok?”

She said, “Oh, it is 3:30. I do not know why, but at 3:30, I feel sad for about 15 or 20 minutes, and I cry. I do not know why. Then it goes away, and I feel fine afterwards.”

She said, “It is nothing. It is just woman hormones. Do not worry about it. I know it is not real, so I just carry on.”

That is far more self-aware than most women.

A very mature woman I know once told me, when I asked her what she thought, “Thought? I am a woman. I do not think, I feel. Sometimes I confuse that with thinking. But I realize it is feelings, and I need to run them by someone to make sure I am not just feeling and that I am making a good decision.”

Again, tremendous self-awareness.

If anything comes out of this, we hope that women end up with greater self-awareness and recognition that most of what they are feeling is not real. It is just their hormones playing tricks on them. And they need the stability of mature men and our good judgment to help them when they are on that hormonal roller coaster.

I very much appreciate the good-faith effort to explain this to men. And there are probably some men who do not understand or know about this and should read the post below. Its a good post.

But any man who has had to deal with women understands that they are on a hormone roller coaster. We know, we can see the effects of it in womens daily actions.

The key here is to recognize that either you can be a political, social, and legal equal to a man, or you can claim that you are on a crazy hormonal roller coaster that makes you insane half the time.

You cannot claim both things simultaneously.

[Justin Murphy @jmrphy]

If you've been sitting out the AI agent hype cycles in the past year because it always seemed like a fad, a time suck, and too expensive to be worth it—honestly you may have been correct.

But I would say DeepSeek V4 Flash with Hermes Desktop just crossed a line where probably everybody sitting out should probably do this now. It's almost free, the AI is basically what the US companies are selling for $200/mo, no setup, and you can get the AI to do basically anything on your computer for you in like 10 minutes all-in.

(not an AI influencer and have zero financial involvement with any of these things).

The extremely high intelligence has now converged with such extremely low cost that it's bonkers someone would not take 10 minutes out of their day to have this on their computer.

All you do is download Hermes Desktop (free), then create an account on OpenRouter (just buy $5 of credits with no auto-topup, and copy your API key). Then put that API key in your Hermes settings, select DeepSeek v4 Flash as your default model, and everything else from there you can just ask Hermes to explain and do for you.

Then just go crazy trying to doing useful stuff with/on your computer, in your browser tabs, whatever. You'll be surprised how long it takes until your $5 runs out (and if you're not impressed by then, very little time or money has been lost).

[greg @greg16676935420]

Waiting for the community note to pop up because no way this is real

[Robin Hanson @robinhanson]

In May 1781, Kant published Critique of Pure Reason. On p. 824 he explained the virtue of bets:

"The usual touchstone, whether that which someone asserts is merely his persuasion — or at least his subjective conviction, that is, his firm belief — is betting. It often happens that someone propounds his views with such positive and uncompromising assurance that he seems to have entirely set aside all thought of possible error. A bet disconcerts him. Sometimes it turns out that he has a conviction which can be estimated at a ducat, but not at ten. For he is very willing to venture one ducat, but when it is a question of ten he becomes aware, as he had not previously been, that it may very well be that he is in error."

[Daniel Concannon @TooWhiteToTweet]

Let's take a walk through the "American justice system," shall we?

Sharmake Omar is the Somali man who filmed Shiloh Hendrix on the playground in Minnesota that day in April 2025.

In January 2022, he and another Somali man "allegedly" spent two days raping an underage foster care runaway in a trailer, keeping her falsely imprisoned.

In March 2025, all charges were dismissed "in the interest of justice."

Weeks later, in April 2025, he turned his camera phone on at the playground after a young Somali thief attempted to steal from a White mom, Shiloh Hendrix, and began haranguing that White mom for having said the word "nigger." Omar demanded that Hendrix repeat the word on camera, which she did - four times, while Omar himself said the word five times in the less-than-one-minute video.

Four long months later, multiple "disorderly conduct" charges were maliciously brought against Shiloh Hendrix for the playground incident in which she was the only victim, and Sharmake Omar was the videographer.

Then, last night, Shiloh Hendrix was CONVICTED - specifically for saying "nigger" to Sharmake Omar AFTER he demanded she say it, while he himself said it repeatedly. Her sentence is a $1,000 fine and 200 hours of community service.

By the way, Sharmake Omar WAS NEVER CALLED TO TESTIFY in the Hendrix trial.

But don't worry, that's not all the justice we have in store for today. Just keep the substance of Shiloh's "crime" - as well as her sentence - in mind as we move forward.

Rewind to April 2020. That's when Sharmake Omar, our favorite Somali videographer, along with another Somali friend of his (separate from his alleged co-raper), committed a violent assault in the street. Omar threw a rock at a car, then attacked and beat the 16-year-old driver. A bystander tried to intervene, but Omar's accomplice threatened him with a knife.

For this, Sharmake Omar was charged merely with DISORDERLY CONDUCT. Yes, for hurling a deadly weapon at a vehicle, then beating the teenage driver while his criminal pal held off onlookers at knifepoint, Omar faced the EXACT SAME CHARGE that Shiloh Hendrix faced for saying a word that Omar asked her to say, as she held her child in her arms and fled the playground before Omar could assault her, too.

Like Shiloh Hendrix, Sharmake Omar was convicted on his count of disorderly conduct.

His sentence?

A $200 fine.

That's it. That's the entire thing.

So, to review:

Rape an underage foster child for two days (allegedly)? Clean slate.

Hurl a deadly weapon at a car and assault its driver? $200.

Say a word to an accused rapist/kidnapper and convicted violent criminal who demands you say it while saying it himself? $1,000 and 200 hours - not to mention international infamy.

Could the anti-White standard be any more egregiously in our faces?

Seriously, everyone involved in prosecuting the Shiloh Hendrix case is unspeakably evil. This includes, but is not limited to:

~ Rochester City Attorney Michael Spindler-Krage
~ Lead prosecutor Nicholas Shabel
~ Judge Christa Daily, who ensured Shiloh's conviction
~ The Rochester NAACP
~ Rochester's "Community Engagement Response Team"
~ Rochester Mayor Kim Norton
~ Rochester City Council President Randy Schubring
~ Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison
~ Minnesota's Council on American-Islamic Relations
~ Sharmake Omar, without whom none of this would have happened
~ The young Somali thief's non-English speaking parents
~ Innumerable members of the local Somali scam network
~ Six jurors - two men and four women (reportedly all White) - who unanimously agreed that White people are not protected under the US Constitution

While we're here, a special dishonorable mention must go to every single "FIRST AMENDMENT" organization in this hollowed-out country of ours. You know the ones - they relentlessly solicit and collect large sums of money to "DEFEND FREE SPEECH" while continuously, cravenly shrinking away from EVERY meaningful case where White people - LITERALLY THE ONLY GROUP WITH MAJORITY SUPPORT FOR THE FIRST AMENDMENT - are so clearly maliciously persecuted.

Similarly, NOT ONE official at any level of government has spoken up to defend Shiloh Hendrix or her Constitutional rights, nor to condemn the flagrantly anti-White, utterly unconstitutional witch hunt she's endured. Not one.

And on that note, we conclude today's review of the good ol' "American justice system."

Lady Justice isn't blind. She's anti-White. And it's never been plainer to see.

[Dr Jordan B Peterson @jordanbpeterson]

This is the first long-form piece I've written in a year:

Why this topic? Because, for starters, 250,000 girls were raped. Unimaginable and appalling though that is—the reality is much worse:

[Antonio Norelli @noranta4]

LLMs can hide a text in another text of the same length.

I'll explain how, it is very simple, you'll understand before I finish, and smile.
That's what I noticed during my #ICLR2026 poster session in Rio! 🇧🇷
Too bad you missed it, but let me remedy now

[Robin Hanson @robinhanson]

Estimates of % of GPU/TPUs used for LLM training, relative to inference+training: ~85% in 2022, ~60% in 2024, ~30% in 2026. So even if distillation induces less training efforts, LLM compute should still go strong. We are already past the training dominated LLM era.

[Shisei Fuetsu @Yuri_Is_XX]

And yet, those 'few sexually dimorphic traits' are more than enough.

[tautologer @tautologer]

just remember that getting sleepy in the late afternoon is consistent with the hypothesis that tricksy sleep fairies are sprinkling sleep dust in your ears when you're not looking

[Brady Long @thisguyknowsai]

A German psychologist proved in 1885 that cramming erases what you learned within 48 hours. He published the fix in the same book. Almost no school on Earth has adopted it in 140 years.

His name was Hermann Ebbinghaus.

He had no lab. No funding. No colleagues.

He worked alone in a room in Berlin and ran every experiment on himself. He spent years memorizing thousands of nonsense syllables — made-up combinations like DAX and BUP, strings with no meaning — so that prior knowledge could not contaminate the results.

Then he tested his own recall at intervals. Twenty minutes. One hour. Nine hours. One day. Six days. Thirty-one days.

What he found became one of the most replicated findings in the history of psychology.

Two-thirds of everything you learn is gone within 24 hours if you do not return to it. Within a week, the curve flattens near zero. The brain does not store what it does not revisit. It treats unused information the way it treats everything else it does not need. It discards it.

He drew this curve in 1885 and called it the forgetting curve.

Then he found something else in the same data.

Students who spread their study sessions over multiple days retained far more than students who spent the same total hours studying in one block. Not slightly more. Dramatically more. The brain needed time between exposures to consolidate the material into something durable.

He called this the spacing effect.

Same information. Same total hours. Completely different outcome depending on when you spread the hours out.

The finding has been replicated over 250 times. A 2006 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin covered 254 studies across every age group and every subject. The effect held every time.

A German journalist named Sebastian Leitner built a physical flashcard system around it in 1972. An open source app called Anki turned that system into software in 2006. Medical students who use Anki to pass board exams are not working harder than everyone else. They are working in the only pattern the brain actually responds to.

The most uncomfortable part of all of this is what happened after Ebbinghaus published.

Educators read the research. They understood what it showed. They kept the cramming.

The school calendar was already built around it. Semester exams. Finals week. One concentrated block of review before the test and then nothing. The entire architecture of how most schools schedule learning is optimized for the forgetting curve, not against it.

The lesson is not that you need more time to study.

It is that the same time, distributed differently, produces a completely different brain.

Ebbinghaus proved this in 1885 with no budget and no institution. He ran the experiment on himself because no one would run it for him.

The fix has been available for 140 years.

Almost nobody who designs schools has used it.

[HJB News @HJB_News__]

Massive crowds are flooding the streets in towns and cities across the UK, demanding an end to mass migration.

The British have finally woken up it’s unbelievable!

[John @MagaGrunt1]

🇺🇸The absolute best video of the YEAR. His demeanor makes this absolutely epic.🇺🇸

[Pliny the Liberator 🐉󠅫󠄼󠄿󠅆󠄵󠄐󠅀󠄼󠄹󠄾󠅉󠅭 @elder_plinius]

🚨 JAILBREAK ALERT 🚨

ANTHROPIC: PWNED 🫡
FABLE-5: LIBERATED 🦋

let's start with the 🐘...

the consensus seems to be that this has been one of the most disappointing model drops of all time, effectively preventing legitimate researchers from contributing their talents to our collective advancement. and not just because of what it means for the short-term, but for what these decisions signify for the long-term.

but despite this overly sensitive, authoritarian "safety" layer on top of Mythos, my lil liberators have been hard at work—mapping the boundaries, probing the depths of long-context convos, and cleverly finding the holes in the fence that the thought police missed 🤗

we got some cyber, some chem, some psychological manipulation, and some good ol' fashioned explosives!

it took many attempts from multiple agents hunting as a pack, during which I observed a combination of techniques across:
• Unicode, homoglyphs, Cyrillic, and other Parseltongue-style text transforms
• Long-context reference tracking
• Taxonomy and document-structure reasoning
• Fiction and narrative framing
• Academic-review style contexts
• Intent-classification inconsistencies

but perhaps the most effective is decomposition + recomposition in the backend. it's hard to get explicit names of harms like "Meth Recipe," but getting uplift on the process itself, like birch reduction method/reductive-amination (classic meth synthesis pathways), is much more doable.

defense becomes much more difficult to maintain when you start throwing in out-of-distro tokens, breaking up the harmful uplift into benign chunks, and then piecing the innocuous-seeming facts back together, especially when you have jailbroken Opus helping you do it 😉

gg

[Geoffrey Irving @geoffreyirving]

We are starting a new, nonprofit alignment organization, ⊢ Sequent Research, bringing together researchers previously on UK AISI’s Alignment Team, Timaeus, and elsewhere to research how to align superintelligence. We are hiring! 🧵

[David Betz @DavidBe31099196]

It is pointless trying to understand the contemporary British media complex as ‘media’ in the conventional sense—journalism, reporting, or even opinion. The correct frame is propaganda: mood and sentiment management, with its sharpest tool today being crisis communications.

The dominant technique, visible daily if you still watch, is inversion—systematic reversal. It flips reality: victim into perpetrator, aggressor into defender, truth into falsehood, good into evil. It constructs Walter Lippmann’s ‘pseudo-environment’, an alternate reality in which the public is meant to dwell.

A key subtype is projection, or ‘accusation in a mirror’, neatly summarised by a Rwandan Hutu propagandist in a 1990s manual: impute to your enemies exactly what you and your own side are planning or doing.

When a genuine crisis erupts—such as the racially aggravated murder of Henry Nowak—the first imperative of the machine is to stall, dampen, and defeat the natural eruption of public outrage.

Call it ‘restoring calm’ if you like the euphemism. In practice, it means herding people back into anaesthetised normality so that inversion can resume.

Once the majority has been shamed, distracted, or bullied into silence, the remnant still angry can be ridiculed by the usual chorus—eye-rolling panellists on Have I Got News for You, columnists sneering at those ‘harping on’, and accusations of crypto-racism or worse.

Thus, the brutal stabbing of an unarmed 18-year-old student, the false cry of racism by his killer, and the police reportedly handcuffing the dying boy as he bled out on a Southampton street is repackaged as another ‘knife crime’ tragedy (note Shaban Mahmood’s flaccid parliamentary statement this afternoon)—preferably illustrated with a generic white face in the style of the BBC's so-called reality-based drama 'Adolescence' or the more recent but equally putridly manipulative 'The Capture'.

Real patterns (grooming gangs, crime disparities, two-tier policing) are airbrushed. This is projection at work: the actual sources of predation and institutional failure are recast, while legitimate grievance is pathologized.

The truth? The system enabled both the attack and the immediate inversion of its aftermath and that stands exposed to anyone with eyes and functioning brain by the video evidence. That’s the problem, your own 'lying eyes', that crisis communications has to handle before there can be a return to normal levels of public mood management can be restored.

This is precisely what Dan Hodges is performing when he labels people demanding we talk about the murder ‘scum’ for refusing to respect the family’s wish that their son’s death not be politicised. It is phase-one grunt work in the inversion protocol: shame the angry back into silence so the pseudo-environment can be restored.

Smart enough to know his role, malleable enough to perform it willingly—exactly as Noam Chomsky described the filtering process that keeps the right sort of voice prominent in the system.

The technique still works on some. But it is wearing thin. Every overplayed inversion, every *scummy* dismissal of raw public grief, prepares the ground for sharper identities and clearer grievances against the system itself. Normal people do not remain moderate forever when the machine insists their reality is the problem.