Human Progress Requires Free Will

I have posted many times on research on why Christendom has succeeded so well. This interview has another theory:

Agency as an Engine of Human Progress | Martin Seligman

What makes civilizations stagnate or flourish?

Martin Seligman argues that agency combines efficacy, optimism, and imagination, then explores how evidence from psychology, historical writing, and AI analysis can be used to investigate its relationship with human progress.

In particular, the West developed a belief that human action can make things better, as opposed to believing the world was fated by the gods.

You might think that it is ridiculous to suggest that Medieval Europeans somehow had better agency and optimism. But maybe it also explains how the USA has been more productive than Europe for the last century. Tesla, Google, Microsoft, Apple, SpaceX, Nvidia, Amazon, and Meta were created by innovators with agency and optimism.

I am not recommending interviews of Jared Diamond, by Sean M. Carroll and Tyler Cowan. He is widely praised, but he sees progress as accidents of geography, and has some goofy theories. For example, he says:

DIAMOND: The fact is that particularly European scientists went to great efforts for the last century, ever since the IQ test, to demonstrate that Europeans have higher IQs than do other people. There’s no evidence whatsoever for it. There are lots of people who try.

In my experience, when people say there is no evidence, they really mean that they refuse to look at the evidence. Europeans do have higher IQ averages that most other groups, and possibly lower than Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews. The evidence is not just IQ tests. Just look at European intellectual accomplishments.

Diamond spend a lot of time in New Guinea, and he as claimed that the natives were the world's smartest people. I think he is just trying to align himself with anti-whites.

Some Clancy Jurors give Public Interviews

Several of the Lindsay Clancy female jurors have gone public with their opinions, including the forewoman. They are even worse than suspected.

They complained that the lone holdout man could not get past the fact that Clancy murdered her three kids. And that he was not persuaded by the pharmaceutical opinions of the nurses on the jury.

I found it difficult to listen to these women for even five minutes. One stupid opinion after another. One even complained that the prosecutor did not show compassion. Another complained that there was no character witness showing that Clancy was a bad mom. The poor holdout had to listen to them for 38 hours! He is a better man.

There is no need for him to give a public response. The situation is painfully obvious by now.

Convicted of letting a Child collect Goose Feathers

Jonathan H. Adler writes:

On a sunny day in June, Karyann Parkinson made a fateful choice that could affect her life for years to come: She let her 5-year-old son, Sam, walk alone to a neighborhood pond to collect goose feathers.

Nothing happened to Sam, at least not physically. But for her choice, Parkinson was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a first-degree misdemeanor in Virginia. In August, she was convicted by a local judge after a bench trial in the Williamsburg Juvenile & Domestic Relations District Court and given a six-month suspended jail sentence.

Knowing Parkinson — a then-neighbor and former student—and having attended the trial, it seems she was punished less for making a debatable parenting choice and more for refusing to come to heel when questioned about her decision.

Lenore Skenazy often posts stories like this. We need laws that clearly say that parents can use their own judgment, unless some objective harm is proved.

Ben Shapiro v Tucker Carlson

Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson are the two leading conservative podcasters in the USA today, and they just dropped videos attacking each other. I enjoy listening to both, but obviously I cannot agree with both.

Carlson blames Jews for getting the USA into war, and in promoting various vices. Shapiro is very pro-Israel, and sees much bigger threats in Mohammedan and socialist politicians.

I am not going to try to arbitrate. Listen to both, if you want to sample conservative opinion.

Nature blames Press for Exposing Phony

The science journal Nature editorializes:

In his resignation letter, Arday wrote: “The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me ...

Arday did not return, so it is incumbent on all of us in the media and academia to reflect on our roles and responsibilities. Both research and media organizations have an obligation to communicate information fairly and accurately — and to avoid causing harm to the people they employ or report on. We can and must learn from this tragedy.

No, Arday did not write that letter. An AI LLM wrote it. He was illiterate.

The editorial blames those who drew attention to Arday's failures, and to the college for not defending him better. And it blames racism against Blacks.

It acts as if some minor plagiarism was only accusation against him. No, the charges were much more serious. He lied about his academic credentials, and colleges never put up with that.

The bigger issue was that his academic work was garbage, and he was grossly unfit to teach college.

Nature is a disgrace. For more criticism, see this.

Update: Also here and here.

No Jury Verdict for Lindsay Clancy

There is still no jury verdict. It appears that we have a hung jury.

Usually men are more sympathetic to women criminal defendants, and many men do not blame moms at all. But this case is different. Men have no sympathy for a mom who strangles and kills her own kids. And many women are openly saying that she should be found not guilty, because they themselves have mental health issues and have wanted to harm their own kids.

Update: As of Wed Sept 3 afternoon, a single juror appears to be blocking a not guilty verdict.

Was Christian. Now Muslim.

Tweet:

When imams tell you they are here to conquer, believe them.

Iraq: Was Christian. Now 99% Muslim.
Syria: Was Christian. Now 93% Muslim.
Libya: Was Christian. Now 97% Muslim.
Egypt: Was Christian. Now 95% Muslim.
Sudan: Was Christian. Now 91% Muslim.
Jordan: Was Christian. Now 97% Muslim.
Turkey: Was Christian. Now 99% Muslim.
Algeria: Was Christian. Now 99% Muslim.
Lebanon: Was Christian. Now 61% Muslim.
Tunisia: Was Christian. Now 99.5% Muslim.
Morocco: Was Christian. Now 99% Muslim.
Albania: Was Christina. Now 50.7% Muslim.
Kosovo: Was Christian. Now 93.5% Muslim.
Palestinian territories: Was Christian. Now 98% Muslim.
Bosnia and Herzegovina: Was Christian. Now 51% Muslim.
Not just Christian. They conquer everyone:
Iran: Was Zoroastrian. Now 99.5% Muslim.
Malaysia: Was Hindu and Buddhist. Now 63.5–66%.
Indonesia: Was Hindu and Buddhist. Now 87% Muslim.
Pakistan: Was Hindu and Buddhist. Now 96.5% Muslim.
Bangladesh: Was Hindu and Buddhist. Now 91% Muslim.
Afghanistan: Was Zoroastrian and Buddhist. Now 99.7% Muslim.

England Complains about USA not Importing Nigerians

The London Economist has a podcast complaining about USA immigration policy:

But the the concept you drill down, okay, if you are an American citizen and you are married to a Nigerian, you cannot live with her or him in America. Right? There's categories of people largely ethnically chosen you are not allowed to marry. Now, that that has echoes of something that disappeared in 1967 when the last laws against um mixed race marriages were struck down in America.

That's an extraordinary infringement of American liberty. And it's also something that people in the rest of the world can see. And they say, "Look, we're moving to this place. We thought that it was this wonderful melting pot that was welcoming, but they have these laws that are just sort of one inch away or these orders that are one inch away from being overtly racist. Are we going to be happy there?" And the most talented people, you know, they have choices and they have families.

So he is saying that a talented foreigner who is interested in becoming a naturalized American citizen, might lose interest when he learns that the USA is not a melting pot for Nigerians.

This is crazy. No one wants the USA to become a melting pot for Nigerians, except maybe Nigerians.

NYT Sickness Worse Than Wokeness

A lot of people do not like NY Times columnist David French. I get the impression that he is a Woke Leftist who pretends to be a conservative in order to keep his job. As long as he keeps attacking right-wingers, he gets paid.

Here is his latest long column:

There Is a Sickness Worse Than Wokeness

His main point seems to be that he favors free speech for leftists, but not rightists.

we defended the free speech and academic freedom of a professor named Ward Churchill. He wrote an essay just after 9/11 that compared the victims of the World Trade Center attack to Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust. He called them “little Eichmanns.” Their sin was being part of “a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire.” He praised the 9/11 hijackers for making “gallant sacrifices.” ...

Perhaps the worst example is a woman named Shiloh Hendrix. She achieved her 15 minutes of infamy when she was recorded on video defending calling a young Black child the N-word,

So he favors a public college having to pay a pro-terrorist professor, while he sides with prosecuting a mom for using the N-word.

He also complains that Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are able to express their opinions. That, he says, is the sickness worse than wokeness.

The Push to Tax AI LLM Words

Whenever there is a lot of money moving around, there are parasites wanting a piece of the action. WSJ:

To actually discourage AI-driven job replacement, some call for a “compute” or “robot” tax, perhaps levied on tokens (the unit of AI usage). This, though, could be a nightmare to design and administer, and discourage the use of AI to benefit all humanity, such as new drug discovery.

That brings us to the tax system. The case for low taxes on capital is that this boosts investment, which raises productivity and, ultimately, wages.

A comment:

Insane.

WSJ editor has lost his mind by permitting this writer's harebrained assault on its readership. The whole purpose of the WSJ is to explore ways to increase the efficiency of private capital deployment to accelerate GDP in the future.

Stealing more of Americans' already multi-taxed capital accumulations to deploy to the unaccountable, genuinely corrupt, black hole for money government is Genghis Khan economics.

The CCP and USSR, one might recall, taxed private capital 100%, nationalizing the economy and stealing investors' wealth as the two murdered 120M citizens in my lifetime.

A couple of investment bankers write in the NY Times:

In order to achieve progress that is both consistent and sustainable, two things are required from A.I. policy: We must make society resilient to disruption and we must avert technological catastrophe. Failing to accomplish either of these goals means failing to achieve the promise of A.I. ...

Tax policy must stop disincentivizing human labor over machine labor. Because only human labor is taxed, the scale is tipped toward substitution. A consumption tax on A.I. tokens may flip this script. ...

Absent action today, mitigation of A.I.’s risks will become nearly impossible as the technology diffuses and models become able to improve themselves and act autonomously. We may have only one shot at taking meaningful action.

During the dot-com boom of the 1990s, everyone was talking about how often internet bandwidth was doubling, and how it was going to disrupt business models. Did anyone propose taxing the bit transmission and using the money to preserve jobs?

Maybe they did, but no such taxes were enacted. In retrospect, they would have been foolish.

There is a way in which the AI boom is different from previous technological advances. AI piggybacks on a world-wide effort.

The entire cumulative knowledge of mankind is used to train the AI LLMs. The chips, algorithms, networks, and everything else is a global combination of our best technology.

Another question sometimes raised, is what if AI LLMs fall into the wrong hands? The answer is that they have already fallen into the wrong hands. The leaders are Anthropic and Openai. They have made very little, and they are led by lunatics.

Psychology Professors will Lie to You

You may expect college professors to put a high value on truth. Or maybe not for social scientists, after the Jason Arday scandal. Here is a poll that asked directly:

When psychology professors are asked whether they'd put the truth before social equity concerns, 66.4% of male professors said yes, but fewer than half of female professors (43%) agreed.

So apparently most women psychology professors will lie to you about facts, if it promotes her social equity goals.

This is apparent when they say that there is no such thing as race, sex, intelligence, group differences, heritability, innate behaviors, etc.

Why mass media owns them

I am still struggling to understand support for Lindsay Clancy, and found this Tweet:

Let me explain women’s biology to you that your MOTHER wouldn’t teach you.

Women cannot survive by strength. So nature gave them a different survival trick: fit in or die.

They don't have a truth filter. They have a SAFETY filter.

A man hears an idea and thinks: "Is this true or false?" A woman hears an idea and thinks: "If I say this, will other women still like me? Will I be cancelled? Will I be alone?"

Belonging matters to women more than truth. Always.

That's why mass media owns them.

You put the same slogan on every TV, every TikTok, every Instagram ad - "girlboss," "finding myself," divorce glow "you don't need a family," "freeze your eggs"

and her brain thinks it's REAL because every woman is saying it.

You don't need to convince her with evidence. You just need to make her think EVERYONE ELSE already believes it.

She will swallow any lie if it makes her feel included.

Tell her being a single mother at 35 with a corporate job is empowerment and she'll clap, even while she's on antidepressants and crying herself to sleep.

Tell her being a wife at 20 with 3 kids is oppression, and she'll laugh at her own mother.

The media doesn't win by being right. It wins by making her scared to be LEFT OUT!!!

Real intellectual independence requires the ability to stand alone and defend yourself when the whole crowd turns on you. That kind of courage is built on physical strength. Only a mind that knows it can survive outside the herd dares to ask:

"Is it true - even if everyone says it's false?"

Only men can do that.

_"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies..."_ *- George Orwell, 1984*

@DailyLoud

A man called off his wedding because his finance supported Lindsay Clancy

The Nonsectarian Ten Commandments

There are current court cases about displaying the Ten Commandments in the public school, and it might seem obvious that this promotes an establishment of religion, in violation of the First Amendment.

Actually, the Catholics, Protestants, and Jews all have different versions of the 10C, and the schools use a version specifically formulated to be nonsectarian, as explained here:

Shortly after the Second World War, a Minnesota judge named E. J. Ruegemer became concerned with what he perceived to be the rise of juvenile delinquency. He believed that “if troubled youths were exposed to one of mankind’s earliest and long-lasting codes of conduct, those youths might be less inclined to break the law.” He formed a committee “consisting of fellow judges, lawyers, various city officials, and clergy of several faiths” to develop a “version of the Ten Commandments which was not identifiable to any particular religious group.”

Judge Ruegemer eventually partnered with Cecil B. DeMille and the Fraternal Order of Eagles to help place monuments inscribed with the Ten Commandments throughout the United States. When they were first erected in the mid-1950s, Protestants and Jews immediately pointed out that the numbering system was inconsistent with that used by their traditions.

DeMille went on to make the movie, The Ten Commandments (1956 film), and the monuments were used to promote the movie.

The Arday Saga Continues

Jason Arday is dead, but defenders want to continue the fight.

WSJ reports:

Cofnas argues that hereditarianism isn’t about skin color per se. He has written that in the U.S., for instance, “rednecks” are likely to have lower IQs than other American whites. He points out that Blacks who migrated to the U.K. on average perform better in school than British whites.

“I think he’s dangerously tactless in a radioactive topic” and “should exercise more caution,” Steven Pinker, author and Harvard University evolutionary psychologist, said of Cofnas’s rhetoric on genetics’ role in intelligence. Pinker said examining potential racial discrepancies in intelligence “could cause harm to African Americans” and lead to discrimination against them. “There’s times in science where the best policy is don’t go there,” he said.

What harm? Pinker seems to be saying that our universities should have incompetent Black professors, and no one should say anything about it.

Tweet:

U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Bill White
Department of State
@USAmbToBelgium

The United States Mission to Belgium condemns, in the strongest terms, Ghent University’s retaliation against an American scholar following his accurate whistleblower reporting on academic fraud.

Surprisingly strong statement. Tweet:

Gad Saad @GadSaad The rector of @ugent is Petra De Sutter (photo below). This is the person who is ultimately on watch as @nathancofnas is fired for having pointed to the unimaginable fraudulence of Jason Arday at @Cambridge_Uni . Petra, who is a biological male and a gynaecologist, is a trans "woman." I presume that Dr. De Sutter does not believe that human beings are a sexually dimorphic and sexually reproducing species consisting of two default phenotypes: male and female.

This story understates the Orwellian and Kafkaesque world of academia in every conceivable manner.

The letter from the transgender gynecologist professor firing Cofnas is posted here. It takes him six pages to say that Cofnas should be fired for telling the truth.

Update: The New England Journal of Medicine is the world's most prestigious medical journal, and it just published an article by a female Black health equity researcher Kemi M. Doll.

Jason Arday and the Perils of Being Black in Academia

They are trying to kill us.

When Black academics say this, I imagine folks outside of our community think we are being hyperbolic. We are not. I think my non-Black colleagues are starting to get a taste of this as they realize how diabolically opposed to our own well-being most of the movements of our federal health agencies seem to be these days. It’s appalling and scary and also — yes, welcome. This is how it feels to know that there are systemic pressures working against your success, your well-being, and in the case of Jason Arday — your life. ...

I want to be clear that I don’t care whether or not any of these allegations against Prof. Arday were true. ...

In these times where trees bearing strange fruit are on the rise (again) in the U.S. South, where Black mothers everywhere heard about Nolan Wells long before it was in the mainstream media, I don’t believe there is such thing as hyperbole. They are trying to kill us. They always have been.

That last paragraph is a reference to some recent unexplained deaths. Wells was a Black boy who stayed on an island to avoid a leaky boat, and apparently drowned. A couple of Blacks hanged in apparent suicides. In one case, a Black boyfriend has been arrested.

Doll seems to be implying that these were lynchings like what sometimes happened 150 years. No they are not. Lynchings were done as a public punishment for a crime, and none of the deaths fit that pattern.

Note that Doll is unconcerned with the facts, and mainly wants to propagate crazy racist conspiracy theories. I suspect that she is representative of academic Blacks.

The Pathetic Defense of Jason Arday

I keep seeing online comments defending the late Jason Arday. It is amazing how the Left and Blacks choose the worst idols.

I am not in favor of cancel culture, or speaking ill of the recently deceased. I am mainly commenting on the public reaction.

It appears that Arday was not being fired for plagiarism, as was the focus of most of the stories. There were other lies that did him in.

White journalist lady Carole Cadwalladr posts:

This newsletter is called How to Survive the Broligarchy because it draws on my decade of experience of both reporting on power and being targeted for doing so.

On Friday night, the shocking news broke of the death of Jason Arday, a black Cambridge University academic who had found himself in the blast zone of an online culture war; an apparent suicide.

Over the weekend, there have been pieces in the UK press about Cambridge University’s failures but almost nothing at all in the mainstream media about the mainstream media’s failures or the role it played in his death.

I looked up her own cancellation. She got sued for libel because a TED Talk implied that a politician was being paid by Russia. A British court ruled against her because she failed to correct the online video, even after the politician sued her and was publicly proved innocent.

So she knows something about public media attacks. But her advice is that more people should have publicly come to the defense of Arday, and to go on a counterattack against his accusers as being racist!

No, Arday's problem was not that no one was defending him. His problem was that too many were defending him, and much of the defense was to call his accusers racist. The defense was proving that the corruption was wide and deep, and begged for more investigation.

It was primarily White liberal women who appointed, promoted, and defended Arday. I guess Cadwalladr thinks that she can say whatever she wants because she is a journalists, but her defense of Arday is not helping.

I saw a lot of online attacks on Arday, but those were amplified by the defenses. Arday was not the main issue. The main issue was how someone like him could get a couple of university degrees, get a Cambridge professorship, draw a salary, get a far book contract, and be treated as a big hero for telling wildly implausible stories.

I also see a lot of online defenders of Karmelo Anthony and Lindsay Clancy. Google them to learn about the horrible murders they committed. Nobody thinks that they are innocent. Instead they have some ideological purpose in not holding women and Blacks accountable. Here is Democrat candidate James Talarico defending Anthony.

Elon Musk just posted:

Derek Chauvin was unjustly convicted of murder, therefore he should be freed.

The facts show that he was not the cause of death, nor did he at any time intend for a death to occur. Whatever else he may be, he is not a murderer.

That is the truth.

Musk is independent enough and gutsy enough to tell the truth.

Why did the whole world defend George Floyd? He was a criminal junkie who died of an illegal drug overdose. It is impossible for any fair-minded person to think that Chauvin and the other cops were trying to murder Floyd.

Update: A university is considering firing Cofnas for helping to expose Arday. As someone commented:

The message is clear:
Expose the fraud and lies of a non-White scholar and you will be persecuted.

World's Most Famous Economist gets Trashed

The Economist magazine reports:

The world’s most influential economist is oddly unconvincing
Daron Acemoglu is revered. Why? ...

His Nobel rests heavily on a paper released in 2001 with Messrs Johnson and Robinson, which researchers have cited more than 23,000 times. It seeks to explain why some countries are rich and others poor. In places where European settlers died in droves, perhaps because of disease, colonisers built “extractive” institutions, with power and resources concentrated in the hands of an elite few, to take as many resources from the area as possible. But in more agreeable climates, settlers survived. In these places the colonists built more inclusive institutions, with proper roads, schools and medical services. Those institutions persisted, with the effect that places with lower settler mortality during colonial times are richer today.

Economists now take these results seriously but not literally. The paper encouraged wonks to think more deeply about institutions, but they have also picked it apart. ...

Mr Acemoglu’s arguments about AI are also pessimistic to the point of losing their credibility. In a paper released in 2024 he calculates that AI will boost American productivity by only a small amount over ten years.

I get the impression that he invented a politically popular conclusion, and then searched large amounts of data for a contrived argument to support that conclusion.

No, I do not think that colonizer institutions have much to do with why some countries are richer than others. He is trying to cover up human capital, and factors that cannot be changed in a reasonable time frame.

He says he will write a rebuttal.

Jason Arday still has Defenders

Tweet:

Nathan Cofnas @nathancofnas

There is an anti-Cofnas hate rally in Trafalgar Square with ~15,000 attendees. If I were in London there is a real possibility that I would be murdered.

1000s of academics & journalists knew the truth about Jason Arday for more than a year. Now you know why no one said anything.

Copyright Law Destroys Books

Here is evidence that copyright law was forcing the destruction of books.

It is the logical consequence of AI needing massive data, copyright law making it impractical to license old works, and strange court rulings about fair use.The best way to train an AI LLM is to destroy old books. Now here is the proof:

We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

More:

Amazon, which started off selling books, is destroying rare texts to train AI

Amazon is buying tons of rare books, cutting off their spines, and scanning them for AI training, according to 404 Media, which placed a tracking device in a rare book that ultimately arrived at an Amazon facility in Las Vegas.

The facility, known as VGT3, identifies itself with a symbol of a dinosaur holding a book in its claws. Amazon told 404 Media in a statement that it “purchases books through commercial channels to improve the products and services customers use.”

This story only proves that the bindings are being destroyed. It is likely that the pages and scans are also destroyed, once the AI LLM training is complete.

People have been asking Congress to fix this defect in copyright law for decades.

Jason Arday Committed Suicide

I mentioned this scandal.

News:

Embattled ex-Cambridge University professor Jason Arday was found dead Friday after quitting his job at the school over allegations that he plagiarized and lied about past jobs, according to a report.

Arday, 41 — the youngest ever black professor at the lauded university— was found “unresponsive” in his south London home and later pronounced dead at the scene, according to the UK Telegraph.

He lied about nearly everything. His academic work was extremely poor. Nevertheless, he was very successful, with a high-status professorship and a fat book contract.

The odd thing to me is that he was apparently done in by trivial lies about easily checked facts. The real scandal was not those lies, but the fact that he was hired, promoted, and defended in the first place. Dozens of university officials had to approve him, and they are all either incompetent or dishonest. It was painfully obvious that Arday was a phony.

We are being fed Goyslop

The Jewish ADL tweeted several weeks ago:

The term 'goyslop,' blending Hebrew 'goy' for non-Jew with 'slop' for junk food or content, originated on 4chan in 2016 and spread in far-right circles with conspiratorial undertones. On June 19, the ADL warned against normalizing it as teen slang for fast food or media, fearing it perpetuates harmful stereotypes. Critics like podcaster Clint Russell and Jack Posobiec accused hypocrisy, comparing non-Jews' use to reclaimed slurs, while defenders and linguists note 'goy' started neutrally in the Bible but can turn pejorative by context. Community notes and Jewish voices highlighted the debate amid rising antisemitism concerns.

Wikipedia says Goyslop is a internet slang term for ultra-processed foods, fast food, entertainment, and other mass-produced products.

Spiritually Israeli is a pejorative internet slang term that emerged on social media platforms in 2025, used to describe people, brands, cultural trends, or phenomena that the speaker finds vapid, soulless, commercially hollow, or inauthentic.