Viewing profile — nhaliday

> a Protestant culture which places a lot of religious and moral significance on conceiving human life Er, that would be more characteristic of Catholicism. There's a reason for th…

I just remembered this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DVR27dKuQY , a chimpanzee smoking a cig somewhere in China.

I like the following anecdote of Darwin's (though it's from quite a bit later in time): Many kinds of monkeys have a strong taste for tea, coffee, and spiritous liquors: they will …

Unfortunately "starving the beast" doesn't seem to actually work. Low tax revenues don't lead to lower spending, just fiscal indiscipline. I personally would prefer a leaner federa…

The sentiment is lifted directly from the linked post. It's hard to argue with given the subcontinent had agricultural, seafaring populations while Australian populations never mad…

here's some interesting speculation on this topic: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/a-three-hour-tour/ Basically there's genetic (Y chromosome) and linguistic evidence sug…

If you're a remotely rational government, why would you not subsidize it? The dividends you could reap from a population with greater health, intelligence, self-control, low time-p…

> 90% of genetic variance in human races exists in the African continent Counting neutral variation (the vast majority of genetic variation). You can get plenty of variation in non…

*related since this doesn't seem familiar to people, a little more detail: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/16/did-falling-testosteron... https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article-loo…

relsted to the secular decline in testosterone (whatever's causing that)?

I have no idea what a DMT trip is actually like but I liked the depiction in Enter the Void: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCIe9gh84NE .

People complain about US govt surveillance all the time. It doesn't always lead to change but there's a healthy degree of dissent.

I've heard that there was a sharp increase from the early 20th century to the 70s-80s, then a small decline since then (maybe due to deleading gasoline among other things), and it …

This—on a somewhat similar treatment from Japan, unavailable in the US—seems relevant: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/07/the...

Alternate perspective: "Rethinking the Transmission Gap: What Behavioral Genetics and Evolutionary Psychology Mean for Attachment Theory", https://www.researchgate.net/publication/…

https://danluu.com/

Alternative viewpoint: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/17/heartmath-considered-in... , "HeartMath Considered Incoherent" Normally I wouldn't attack something that someone else fe…

What I find interesting is that the labels for the perturbed images aren't completely off in all cases, eg, wool for a shaggy dog.

Interestingly enough, even idealized prediction markets don't produce accurate probability estimates, but generally overweight bad events like collapse of the market itself: https:…

Unfortunately no, I don't have good evidence. It's an instance of a more general intuition that excessive consumption of fiction distorts people's beliefs about the world. For exam…

> Hanson is not breaking new ground; he's recycling SF as economics. World-building for purposes of entertainment generally has little to do with successful prediction. Hanson has …

Hanson has actually disparaged science fiction in general for purposes of futurism. I don't think he's been influenced by it much.

Has Thiel described himself as "libertarian" recently? Even if he has, I'm not sure he means it in the same sense as the general population. I like Samuel Hammond's analysis. His s…