HWFO Reading List August 2023

And a few videos as well

HWFO dropped this article in a neopagan feminist nerd zine in 2018, inking me as likely the only person alive with a hardcopy article in something like that and also in RECOIL. While the superficial topic of the article was racism and IQ, the finale thesis was that soon IQ won’t matter as AI advances. Five years later this looks very prophetic.

But what I didn’t anticipate was how quickly AI was going to invade not only the INT stat, but also the CHA stat. Paul Joseph Watson deserves to be shared, if nothing else, for the awesome title of this youtube video which covers how e-girls are the first on the creative automation chopping block:

While we’re reminiscing about the classics, this ACX fiction is worth re-reading, or just reading if you never read it:

Every Bay Area House Party

Haidt’s Substack continues to be worth reading, if for no other reason than he’s dropping nuggets of his book material in digestible quantities which may mean you don’t actually have to buy his next real book.

Play Deprivation Is A Major Cause of the Teen Mental Health Crisis

This challenged one of my environmental priors in a relatively robust way, although a lot of the HWFO readers considered the analysis to be sloppy. My priors remain challenged:

No, the U.S. didn't outsource our carbon emissions to China

This is “classic Kareem” at Open Source Defense, and it inspired me to tool around with a different kind of Laffer Curve analysis on crime itself for a future article:

OSD 232: The gun control Laffer curve

This also challenged my priors, and makes me hopeful for the future of US infrastructure:

The Worst US Bridges are Getting Fixed

The “liberalism is a mental disease” people often go far too overboard with rhetoric without backup data. This article is the opposite of that:

https://unherd.com/2023/06/is-liberal-society-making-us-ill/

From the “IQ is genetic” front, a new statistical approach to disentangling genetic and environmental factors in twin studies shows that 51% of educational attainment is predictable by genetics alone:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-023-00173-y

I wanted to write an article about how CAFE standards killed light trucks and provided a net disadvantage to environmentalism, but after doing some research I concluded that nothing I could write would do a better job explaining it than this youtube video:

Jeff Asher, author for the Atlantic, inadvertently bucked some narratives by pointing out that this past year sported one of the largest drops in overall murder rate in recorded history. (-12.2% YTD) He goes into more detail on his blog:

Contextualizing the Largest Decline in Murder Ever Recorded

I’m always wary of “smoking gun evidence,” but I’ve also always been wary of the idea of dark matter itself since it all seemed to be cooked up from thin air. Astrophysicist Kyu-Hyun Chae from Seoul Korea just released a fascinating study on wide binary star orbits which shows that at very low orbital accelerations these stars start to vary from Newtonian or Einsteinian predictions, and if you correct properly for this effect you no longer need dark matter as a fudge factor to explain observable galactic rotation. This could put a shit pile of physicists out on the street looking for new things to build their careers around. More:

https://phys.org/news/2023-08-smoking-gun-evidence-gravity-gaia-wide.html

HWFO has taken a firm public stance that we should Burn the Universities and Salt the Earth, and WSJ released a great analysis of exactly how much money these universities are burning:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/state-university-tuition-increase-spending-41a58100

Kinda culture-war-ish, but in my opinion worth the read, Hannah Spier outlines her frustration with how the virtuals fetishize the reals without understanding them in The Federalist:

https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/27/the-laptop-class-fetish-for-manual-labor-is-an-attempt-to-justify-privilege/

Open Source Defense member Chuck Rossi did a podcast with Tactical Payments about how to reach non-traditional gun owners. It’s good and has received almost no traffic, so you might consider watching it just to pump their numbers up:

I wish I could come up with an article title as good as “Spider Capable of Causing Permanent Erections Shuts Down Entire Supermarket.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/spider-capable-of-causing-permanent-erections-shuts-down-entire-supermarket/ar-AA1f6mgE

This rant by Billionaire Psycho is riveting:

Pygmalion and the Anime Girl

But also provoked several stiff rebuttals, including this:

Junk Food for the Mind

And finally, I would not qualify the offshore wind turbine industry killing the last of the Right Whales with federal government approval to be the “biggest” environmental scandal in the world today. I happen to think plastic recycling itself is probably a bigger scandal. But it certainly ranks up there in the list of “environmentalists taking their Ls,” at the cost of a severely endangered species, which is worth reading about. This article is very well researched:

The Biggest Environmental Scandal In The World

If you want to stay on top of these and much more as the HWFO community digs them out to talk about them in real time, subscribe and join the private Slack server.