I understand that many college students are made to feel “unsafe” by certain speakers addressing particular subjects. But although most people like crisp breakfast cereal, there are those that like it as soggy as possible. One would think that there must be a significant fraction of the university market that wants genuinely scary content, a fraction that prefers mega-aggression to microaggression.
I can do that.
West Hunter 
Sorta like Budweiser’s macrobrewing ads.
I have to learn to sit back from the laptop when I drink coffee while reading Greg Cochran. Never know when a good laugh will result in a mess on my keyboard.
You could put up a series of lectures on You Tube. While it wouldn’t be as fun as looking at the faces of the offended, we could still get a kick out of their comments.
I just started discussing evolution in my game theory class at Smith College. I wonder how many minutes it would take me to get fired (and I have tenure) if you were an invited guest speaker and I openly requested that you go into mega-aggression mode.
While sticking strictly to verifiable points, and without enthusiastically praising any student’s bazongas.
What’s wrong with bazonga praising? Theyre nature’s way of saying ‘enjoy the show’.
Totally unrelated question: I sometimes hear the argument that IQ is correlated with income mainly because it helps with “arbitrary” tests like the SAT (tests which can open up career opportunities), and that its predictive power is therefore deceptive. This is obviously absurd, but I was wondering if there are any easy ways to refute it. Do you know of any data, for example, on the correlations between IQ and income among those who don’t go to college (and thus don’t benefit from tests like the SAT)? Thanks.
I’m sure that JayMan can steer you to bundles of such data…but just look at GDP/capita versus average IQ by country–there is a massive correlation, about 70%.
Actually, that’s a pretty convincing argument. Even those who deny that IQ differences are heritable will have a hard time explaining it away as a mere artifact. I suppose they could argue that better education and nutrition improve “intelligence” and IQ while maintaining that they have very little in common.
“deny that IQ differences are heritable”
They’re crazy.
They’ve just fallen victim to the self-reinforcing mass delusion of biological egalitarianism.
No, they’re massively misinformed.
Dylan, however indisputably factually robust your discussion is with people who deny the link between IQ and heritability, they will simply refuse to change their beliefs. That’s because they believe it’s racist and is counter to their belief that interventions can cure low IQ.
You can’t fix “stupid”
I don’t think they are necessarily “stupid”. The emotional basis of their beliefs is simply too strong to be affected by any empirical evidence. Talking to them is like trying to convince the Ayatollah Khomeini that maybe the Koran might contain some problematical assertions.
Sometimes it seems that the same people say that IQ is purely a meaningless artifact and that we need to be concerned about the potential of environmental lead to reduce average IQ levels.
There’s a lot of work on the relationships between IQ and both job performance and job status— which make for an obvious connection between IQ and “the real world”. One example along the lines you mention is that IQ predicts job performance even for the most menial jobs. Most of the people in that job class presumably have not gone to college. Another relevant example is that mismatch between IQ and complexity of a person’s current job predicts their career path. If their IQ is higher than the job requires they move up; if it’s lower they move down.
For a summary of the research, there’s Hunter and Schmidt’s 2004 paper “General Mental Ability in the World of Work: Occupational Attainment and Job Performance”.
I have a hard time believing that “IQ predicts job performance even for the most menial jobs” because I’ve never been very good at any of the menial jobs I’ve had and have been fired from lots of them; Mexicans are much faster at washing dishes than I am, for example. Same with boring repetitive office work. I’ve been fired from lots of those jobs too. More recently, I’ve lost lots of adjunct-teaching gigs, and I’m pretty sure I’ve had more interesting thoughts than most of the people who were rehired!
Garr, it sounds like the factors you mention affecting your relative competence in various jobs have little to do with IQ.
You might have ADHD.
This is exactly what I need. Thank you.
You may want to look at the short brochure by Charles Murray “Income inequality and IQ”, available on Amazon
or for download: http://www.mega.nu/ampp/murray_income_iq.pdf
The main Idea was to study sub-sample of NLSY: National Longitudinal Study of Youth;
namely to consider those participants of NLSY, who had siblings covered by the same NLSY. In this manner the influence of shared environment is as the similar as it can possibly be.
General Social Survey has a vocab question Wordsum as a proxy for IQ, income in constant dollars and educational variables.
To me it does not seem as if there is a great deal of return to Wordsum (and by proxy IQ) within an educational class, for above average persons. Certainly they are dwarfed in scale by the between educational class differences.
Possibly people who are above average Wordsum for a given educational class tend to be “He’s smart, but….” (unfocused, lazy, irascible, etc.) though, so perhaps this affects the result.
My impression is that IQ affects job performance more than it affects income, while personality traits tend to show the opposite pattern. Conscientious extraverts run the world, brainy people keep it from falling apart.
Interesting graphs. I’m not sure why you think they suggest that IQ doesn’t make much difference within educational classes. In the upper left graph, you can see that the highest scoring high school graduates made almost as much money as the lowest scoring graduates. The overall trend seems to be that the lowest scoring decile within each group earns about 2/3 of the highest scoring decile. That’s very significant.
Well, they’re close to relatively grads who literally have Wordsum 0 (which works out around 2 SDs below average), somehow.
My comment was “Wordsum (and by proxy IQ) within an educational class, for above average persons”, not strictly about all Wordsum variance within an educational class, really about returns to above average intelligence within lower educational classes than grads. How much better is it to be 10 than 6 or 5 within these educational class?
How much absolute difference is there actually between High School grads with Wordsum 6, more or less equivalent to an average IQ, vs 10 (which is about 2 SDs above based on the Wordsum SD)?
It doesn’t seem like a great deal compared with the difference between the average High School grad and average Graduate. There is a penalty for being lower than average intelligence within every class, seems like no real major benefit to being above average, or a modest one.
So I think the main route to financial benefit from being above average is to acquire above average education, skills and a higher paying position. YMMV. I do think that education actually does measure something useful, in general.
It’s really only in the lower left graph that IQ plays no noticeable role (and since income is all over the place, it suggests a very small sample size). I don’t even take the graphs on the right seriously for the same reason (it’s really only the between-class differences that are significant). That only leaves the upper left graph for the kind of analysis I’m interested in, which shows a clear correlation between IQ and income even at the graduate level.
Just for info on sample sizes, for the bottom left graph, re samples – Overall, the Weighted N is 7,238.6, N is 7,262. N within each class is Left High School 645, High School 3850, Junior College 634, Bachelor 1419, Graduation 714.
Some of the overlap between a Wordsum level and level of education is indeed small – there are only around 20 Graduates with Wordsum level below 5, 21 at 5 and then successively more in each higher class, so perhaps it would make sense to not put too much weight on those.
Lower sample sizes tend to be present at Wordsum less than 3 across all categories, so perhaps those are the ones to put less weight on.
There are pretty respectable numbers within each Wordsum class for the High School class, around 100 generally, Wordsum 0, 1, 2, 10 are those that has less than 100, with 10, 20, 64, 83 respectively.
The top right graph has N 16,950. Proportionately similar.
Here’s another way of presenting that data from the top right graph with no filter for age or US born status (because US born status affects language skills).
the problem is: the more you get used to macro aggressions the more you want to have even bigger macro aggression. Up to now I have not found any place in the internet with even bigger macro aggressions than in west hunter, still searching.
Tom Kratman.
Vox Day.
Larry Corriea.
Is your name a Videodrome reference?
Vox Day’s a pretty extreme libertarian who’s against evolution, against women’s suffrage, etc, etc. I often read him and find him interesting, but holy shit his comments section is saturated with morons. Fire a howitzer into a crowd of them and you’d hit three people who answer to “Cletus” and breath through their mouth. Once Jayman showed up there to answer questions and it was about as cringeworthy as you’d expect.
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-three-laws-of-behavioral-genetics.html
Larry Correia wrote Monster Hunters International, right? Fun book, but it really bothered me that he described tentacles as “withering” when he meant “writhing.” Vox Day — after his third successive anti-Jewish post I kind of got the feeling that I wasn’t in friendly territory there, so I stopped going.
Day thinks that liberal Jews, considered as a group, are advocating policies that are harmful to both Jews and to the West because of anti-Christian bias, and he makes a pretty good case. He’s certainly not an anti-Semite of the “Stormfront” kind, and is a firm supporter of Israel’s right to exist. You might want to give him another try…
A different kind of mega-aggression, but very mega indeed: http://qntm.org/destroy
Whoever writes the “Week that Perished” columns at Takimag is friggin’ hilarious in a Cochran-like way.
If you enjoy being triggered and still hold a soft spot for Democracy, moldbug archives might be fun.
“I understand some college students are made to feel ‘unsafe’ by some some speakers.”
Well they are are worms worth further provocation aren’t they. I don’t see much credence in the gay germ theory but I respect you for it. It reeks of your instigation tendencies.
Right now, it’s the only viable theory out there.
There’s always Romans 1 asserting that forsaking the knowledge of God leads to sexual, um, diversification.
People say that there’s two types of gays, the hypermasculine type and the effeminate type. Does your germ theory explain only one type or the other?
I suppose the expression “Aw, grow up!” must have fallen out of use. Ditto “Mummy’s brave little soldier!” and other encouragements to stoicism.
Other expressions come to mind. “Get a grip!”. “Pull your finger out!” And the sarcastic “Aw, didumms?”
And the colourful “Away an’ boil your heid!”
It reminds me of the Tinkerbell approach to science. If you believe it must be true.
You’re a modern day Galileo.
Which probably means you’ll be well honored posthumously.
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I had a high school history teacher who used to make provocative statements to challenge his students, less than one-tenth ever spoke back. This was in the early 1970’s; perhaps today there would only be pushback if he made statements in disagreement with the accepted narrative.