"Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great … Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground."

Fertility Decline in the Nordics and What to Do About It In the quoted thread, the excellent account More Births makes a case for the importance of cultural factors in the Nordic fertility decline. These are indeed important. However, there are many other significant factors

Only a small minority of adults (20% or less) know the meaning of words such as audacious, ominous, tirade, encumber, plagiarize, impale, travesty. Worth bearing in mind. Many people cannot reason very well due to low intelligence.

This is another vocab test: Since the 70s, scores went up, then down, way down for the hard words. From Zach Goldberg

I’m giving some lectures on a History of Math at Princeton University this term. Here is Lecture 1; a broad overview, some discussion of number systems, and an analysis of the famous YBC 7289 clay tablet: youtube.com/watch?v=ZSk63k…

Sometimes I am asked about my ethnicity. British, Irish, German, Polish. The Potato Zone. I find it funny that several of these nations are hereditary enemies.

I'm enjoying the replies and quotes to this. People are doing things like making up sentences out of these hard words.

Devastating review of the degrowth literature (561 studies): --> 'few studies use quantitative or qualitative data...' --> [those that do] 'tend to include small samples or focus on non-representative cases' -->'large majority (almost 90%) are opinions rather than analysis'

Still can’t believe “girlboss diversity officer who complains about racism but is actually a Chinese spy” is real. I am living in Donald Trump’s fever dream.

Did you know that lab-made and lab-grown diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and about three times cheaper than mined diamonds? worksinprogress.co/issue/lab-grow…

I'm always interested in how controversial historians and political scientists (on the left and right) selectively wield the concept of agency. The easiest way to revise history is to assume highest agency for your villain and lowest agency for your anti-villain. So you get -

Both the Age of Malthusian Industrialism and the high-quality pronatal policy hypotheses of French fertility exceptionalism are wrong. They just have a lot of African and Arab immigrants vs other European countries.

In 2023, 209 gang-rapes were reported to police in Germany's most populous state, Northern Rhine-Westphalia. 54% of the suspects were foreign nationals, and an additional 24% had non-German first names, for a total of 78.1% of suspects with a "migration" background.

I have a new piece on Claremont Institute Chair Tom Klingenstein's site arguing that K-12 ed is more broken than RW media suggests. CRT/gender ideology are real issues but the foundations of instruction, management, and discipline have dramatically eroded.tomklingenstein.com/the-american-c…