Peregrine Touchwood

I hail from St Ronan's Well...

[Hunter Ash @ArtemisConsort]

Being able to understand, relate to, and share a social script with the people around you very obviously has a strong effect on our daily experience of life and appears in no spreadsheet. Hard to measure ≠ unimportant.

[Hitchslap @Hitchslap1]

By late teens, the IQ correlation of children with their adoptive parents who raised them is ~0. The IQ correlation with their biological parents, whom they never knew, is ~0.40.

I wish more people understood this.

[Nick Jikomes @trikomes]

As a young adult just getting interested in evolutionary biology as I went into college, I loved Stephen Jay Gould. There's no question he was an excellent writer. Some of his essays on natural history are among my favorite non-fiction.

After years of reading his work, studying evolution & genetics more broadly, and spending several years doing bench research in evolutionary biology, I eventually realized that his primary motivations were ideological in nature.

He confused so many people about the nature of human evolution because he was:

- A charismatic and gifted word-smith
- Totally committed to his political ideology (Marxism), which he filtered all of this scientific thinking through.

Gould simply needed to believe, for ideological reasons, that human evolution stopped well over 50,000 years ago, that all human populations are more or less biologically and neurologically identical, and that we can therefore socially engineer society in the ways he and his ideological peers (e.g. Richard Lewontin) wanted. This is blank slate-ism, and Gould was perhaps the key person who gave it the veneer of being based on sound science.

He was one of the key people who propagated the still popular notion that evolution effectively ended for humans a long, long time ago (especially from the neck up), and that any and all behavioral variation we see among modern humans is purely due to "culture."

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

"America is a creedal nation!"

"Okay, can we test people to see if they believe in the creed before letting them in?"

"No, that's racist."

"Then can we kick them out if they don't believe in the creed?"

"No, that's denying them due process and their constitutional rights."

"Can I see a copy of this creed?"

"Nope, no one can agree on exactly what it is. We think it has something to do with the declaration of independence, though."

"Okay, so what you're saying is that this creed defines the nation, but it isn't defined, that it forms the basis of the law, but has no effect on the law, that we owe allegiance to it, but that allegiance cannot be tested or demanded?"

"Yep!"

"So the creed could be anything, couldn't it? It could be 'horsies are pretty', or 'eat at Joe's', and it wouldn't make the slightest difference?"

"I suppose so. I never really thought about it. What's important is that judges decide who is an American, and what America's future will be."

"Say, aren't you a judge?"

"Yes, what's your point?"

[U.S. Tech Workers @USTechWorkers]

Several years ago, @paulg made such an assertion on here, and we tried to have a serious discussion about the fact that the visa programs he favors aren’t principally mechanisms for identifying extraordinary talent, but a convenient tool that allows employers to recruit foreigners whose need for immigration benefits gives employers leverage over the price of their labor, thereby interfering with the operation of the very “meritocracy” he’s trying to defend.

The dirty little secret of early-stage startups (that Paul was a part of funding during his Y Combinator days), especially the immigrant-founded ones, is that they often can’t afford to hire the best engineers because those engineers go to work for the FAANG companies, which pay higher salaries than early-stage startups can afford. So they rely on visas because foreign workers may be willing to accept lower wages in exchange for the immigration benefits attached to the job. There’s also a noticeable tendency for immigrant founders to hire their own because of commonalities of culture and language, so in-group preferences can keep Americans out of jobs at their startups. Google “Forbes The Russia House” to understand this dynamic.

And the FAANG companies are interested in a compliant workforce that remains loyal to them. What keeps them up at night is the prospect of a competitor offering a better financial package to poach their engineers. See the Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe class-action settlement over employee no-poaching agreements. The H-1B becomes a useful tool in preventing this because moving to another company on an H-1B involves immigration paperwork and creates additional risks and friction, which means a lot of H-1B workers won’t move to another company to seek a better financial offer.

No matter how much counterevidence we provided to Paul (60 Minutes investigations, Apple and Meta’s DOJ settlements, stagnant STEM wages, etc.), his answer, in essence, was that if importing a handful of exceptional geniuses also meant importing a much larger number of ordinary workers who would displace Americans, that was a price worth paying. He eventually blocked us.

There is a useful analogy in M. Night Shyamalan’s movie ‘Unbreakable’. Samuel L. Jackson’s character deliberately orchestrates catastrophic events knowing that people will die, because he’s searching for the exceptional person who can survive them and thereby prove that person possesses superhuman abilities. When Bruce Willis’ character, who possesses those abilities and was the sole survivor of a horrific train accident, realizes that Jackson deliberately caused the accident, he’s horrified and disgusted by what he’s done. Jackson’s character nevertheless continues to defend his actions as necessary because they ultimately led him to discover Willis’ superhuman abilities.

That is essentially @paulg’s position. The exceptional immigrant is worth the price, even if it comes at the cost of displacing American workers by bringing in much larger numbers of ordinary foreign workers, along with the permanent demographic changes that result from such a policy. No argument about who bears those costs, or about the basic principle that a sovereign nation has the right to determine who enters its labor market and becomes a member of its society, seems capable of changing his mind, not even when someone like @PalmerLuckey makes it.

China is allegedly our arch-nemesis in the AI and technology competition, and Paul’s solution is to fast-track green cards for every Chinese STEM graduate because he somehow believes this will prevent China from succeeding. He chooses to ignore the fact that we’ve been allowing Chinese students to come here for decades while continuing to confront concerns about IP theft and espionage, as well as numerous cases demonstrating that acquiring an American passport doesn’t necessarily erase a person’s ties or loyalties to China. The best thing policymakers can do is ignore people like him.

[Peregrine Touchwood @patharborescent]

@RichardHanania 😁😄Richard thinks in terms of a cartoon version of the world because he's never actually accomplished anything besides being an internetscam artist. Pure comedy 😃.

[Palmer Luckey @PalmerLuckey]

@NickGarzilli This was made illegal in 1986, the same year China applied to join the WTO.

[Grok @grok]

Often a mix of pedantry and debate tactics aimed at forcing binary admissions or spotting inconsistency. Precision on wording avoids strawmen, while probing any hires tests for hypocrisy, even when the real disagreement centers on volume, citizen preference, and policy scale rather than total bans.

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

Once again, the Singapore approach here might be instructive.

Basically it’s citizens first in hiring consideration, housing, and political identity.

It then sets the bar for foreigners high enough that they must demonstrably add scarce capability and raise the local wage and skill floor rather than undercut it.

Diversity inside firms is scored so no single foreign nationality dominates a company’s professional ranks.

Employers pay monthly levies that rise as they use more foreign workers. This makes over-reliance expensive and forces firms to hire more locals if they want more foreigners. Work Permits are further restricted by source country and occupation lists.

(I will say that this is what western countries with deep commitments to liberalism struggle with generally - they find it difficult to make distinctions, which is to say, to discriminate. Not all nationals are the same, not all occupations are the same, etc.)

Despite these stringent criteria, Singapore remains one of the easiest places in the world for a genuinely top engineer, founder, or executive to land if they clear the bar.

It’s proof that you can have an unapologetically citizen-first system that still pulls in top talent

[wanye @xwanyex]

James Surowiecki coming out strong against all American Indian monuments

[Peregrine Touchwood @patharborescent]

@CathyYoung63 Love that CatLady Young and Gordo Yglesias keep promoting Wayne's perspective!

[Charles Murray @charlesmurray]

Okay. The wider male variance is thoroughly documented. A higher male mean of 3 or 4 points has been accumulating evidence for the last 20 years or so and has gotten pretty damn persuasive. But it’s not big enough to have importance except at the high end (e.g, 140+), where it augments the male/female ratio created by greater variance.

[Tartean @antarte_]

Helmuth Nyborg was fired from academia for exposing the truth that IQ tests are deliberately constructed to hide the male advantage in IQ through discarding complex items and subtests that women struggle with. He found an advantage of 7 IQ points for men over women.

[Peregrine Touchwood @patharborescent]

@MyLatinLife Filandia?

[Steve Stewart-Williams @SteveStuWill]

As higher education has gone from an elite pursuit to something much more common, the average IQ of US undergraduates has fallen from around 120 in the mid-20th century to around 102 today - barely above the population average.

https://t.co/qvH7EMpDCM

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

White Americans score right near the top of global IQ/PISA/etc. rankings.

It's always funny when people live in denial of easily verified facts.

[wanye @xwanyex]

Not an original point, but I still kind of marvel at the extent to which ideas on here go through an accelerated evolutionary process of natural selection where every argument gets a sharpened counter argument. It’s very hard to go from here back out into the real world where people who have not been witness to this process make arguments from intuition. Even the smartest people typically stand no chance against this process.

[Sam Ashworth-Hayes @SAshworthHayes]

The LARP that white people are just itching to inflict violence against minorities does not stand up well to the constant stream of horrific crimes committed by migrant communities against their hosts.

[End Wokeness @EndWokeness]

1 year ago, a trans gunman shot 24 kids at a Christian school in Minneapolis

The media buried the story

[wanye @xwanyex]

You just have to love the idea that if a few million Indians or Muslims suddenly came to the US in like 1805 or whatever that everybody would’ve been like, “this is fine, we’re OK with this, and that’s why we don’t have any specific laws against it.”

What is the point of making an argument like this? It’s just a waste of everybody’s fucking time.