Yet another interview up (on Blueprint)

Talking with James Miller about Blueprint, here.

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Bolshoi Drap

It’s hard to come up with a plausible scenario in which the Axis wins WWII. But what do I mean by ‘plausible’?  No aliens intervene, nobody gives the Germans perfect foresight, or detailed plans for a minimal cost-and-time nuclear weapons project ( based on centrifuge separation, natch).

Plausible means that something happens differently, but that something is in the class of events that would not have surprised anyone at the time, or for that matter today.

It helps if you know how nations have lost in the past.  One way is panic: you don’t have to have been already crushed by force majeure, you just have to conclude that the day is lost.  People run. Sometimes it just takes one guy losing his nerve, like Darius at Gaugamela.

In October, 1941, the Soviet Union was in trouble. The Germans had just taken another huge bite out of the Red Army, capturing half a million men in the Vyazma and Bryansk pockets. At this point the Soviets were badly outnumbered, for the only time in the war,  and the Germans were about 75 miles west of Moscow.

On Oct 13, the Germans took Kalinin, northwest of Moscow.

On Oct 15th, Stalin ordered the evacuation of the Communist Party, the General Staff and various civil government offices from Moscow to Kuibyshev (now Samara).  “October 16th became known as the Bolshoi drap in Moscow, the day of the “Great Panic.” The Soviet government began to evacuate across the Ural mountains to Kuibyshev, over 600 miles away. Party officials jammed the roads and railway stations while offices and factories emptied out; the general public took their cue and joined the exodus. Looting was extensive in the empty streets without any police force to keep order. ”

“Stalin himself had ordered his special railway car prepared for evacuation on the sixteenth. However, he did not leave the city. He pondered whether or not Hitler might not be willing to come to an agreement similar to the Brest-Litovsk treaty of 1918, in which Russia exchanged huge swaths of territory for peace with Germany and the continued existence of the Communist government. He rejected this remote. He called on Zhukov and implored him to give assurance that Moscow could be held. Gaining Zhukov’s assurance, he then made the decision to stay.”

 

He was thinking about leaving: that railway car wasn’t for decoration.

What if he’d run, like Darius?

 

I don’t need to forgive my enemies.

David Reich says that around 4500 years ago, the existing Y-chromosomes in Iberia were almost entirely replaced. “The collision of these two populations was not friendly; instead, the men who arrived almost completely pushed out the local men.”  Spanish scientist Íñigo Olalde said that after the transition. populations had “40% of their genetic information and 100% of their Y chromosomes from the migrants.”

Which is considerably more drastic than  what happened when the Spanish and Portuguese conquered and settled Latin America – even though that was aided by catastrophic new diseases.  Apparently some of the Iberians ended up speaking Indo-European languages  while others did not.  We’ve seen other examples of male mediated-conquests, and language acquisition can go either way: Melanesians conquered Fiji, largely replacing  the  Y chromosomes, without replacing the language.  In Vanuatua, multiple waves of invasion almost completely replaced the whoe genome while preserving Polynesian.  But the Spanish and Portuguese imposed their languages, as did Aryans in India, and fairly small numbers of Turks and Magyars.

 

PRS and asabiya

There are all sorts of interesting possibilities generated by polygenic risk scores that I have not yet seen discussed anywhere.

There are existing tests  that you can’t fake ( without explicit cheating).  You could pretend to be dumber than you actually are on an IQ test, but it would quite difficult to score higher than you can.  Personality tests – well, you can always lie.  I’ve even heard that people lie on their resume!

As long as you administer the test yourself,  there’s no way for an applicant to cheat on a polygenic risk score.  It only gives you  statistical information, not incredibly strong prediction at the individual level, but it can’ be faked. sooo.

If you hired a CFO with a 4-std score on  honesty, he’d be somewhat  less likely to cook the books.  Although a given  company might not want that – might want the opposite.

You could pick boomer captains that were considerably less likely than most people to go insane. That could be a good thing.

You could hire a whole organization with  > 1-std asabiya PRS.  You’d use other indicators of asabiya, and you probably would consider other factors as well  – but you’d get less internal conflict, have fewer self-dealers, etc. And you know what unusually high-asabiya orgs talk about at the water cooler – the same thing they talk about every night.

 

 

 

The Fundamental Attribution Error

“In social psychology, fundamental attribution error (FAE), also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect, is the concept that, in contrast to interpretations of their own behavior, people tend to (unduly) emphasize the agent’s internal characteristics (character or intention), rather than external factors, in explaining other people’s behavior. This effect has been described as “the tendency to believe that what people do reflects who they are”.

Which is why such things aren’t significantly heritable – except that they are.  Reminds me of when my sophomore geometry teacher told me, at the beginning of the class: “You’ll do well.”  I asked how he could tell?  He said ” I taught your mother.”  He knew more than Lee Ross.

If we constructed the right PRS [an index of wishful thinking?] , social psychologists would, on average, have unusual scores.  In a better world, we would never employ that kind of person as a social psychologist.

 

 

 

 

Sources of group differences

Plomin is and always has been careful not to talk about questions outside his immediate research, because they’d get him in trouble. He reaps more than enough trouble just doing his job.  So much so that he sometimes says ridiculous things just to avoid trouble, like saying that nobody knows what causes male-female differences. It is to laugh.  Yeah, we know that one.

What about inter-population differences in personality and intelligence?  Are they driven by mystic factors insusceptible to the scientific method, as Mr. T suggests? Of course not. Since they exist in populations going to the same schools, eating approximately the same food, watching similar TV – since they show up by age three – you can rule out a lot of causative factors.  Generally, anything that would fall into the shared-environment category doesn’t seem to explain it, just as it doesn’t explain within-pop differences.  In most developed countries anyhow: in some places factors like iodine deficiency play a role.

We could talk about structural racism, but since it does not exist, why bother? I’d rather talk about the aether.

Probably the causes of between-population differences are the same kind of  genetic factors that explain most variation between individuals in a population – systematic differences in the frequencies of many alleles of small effect.  Probably this explains the differences between populations that lived in different eras as well: with better recovery of ancient DNA, we might be able to detect historical trends.

Could genetic differences have an effect on the flavor of culture in different populations?  Well, even allowing for differences in intelligence: sure.  Identical twins like the same things, pick similar clothes,   read similar authors:  genetically different populations could and must have different tastes and preferences, on average.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Review of Blueprint

Now up in Quillette. You can order it here.