Gay Germ Hypothesis

JayMan summarizes Greg Cochran’s “Gay Germ” Hypothesis

The case for the gay germ is somewhat indirect, but very strong. Critics often level the charge that there is “no evidence” for Cochran’s hypothesis – i.e., that the offending pathogen has yet to be identified. But the claim that there is “no evidence” isn’t really true; there is in fact plenty of evidence. The facts are certainly consistent with a pathogenic explanation, even if we don’t have the pathogen itself nailed down. But, the most compelling evidence comes in the form of ruling out potential alternative explanations. This itself is a form of evidence. The Sherlock Holmes quote, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” is an excellent guiding principle, and is certainly valid here.

This hypothesis seems extremely implausible to me, but I post it anyway to demonstrate the failure of other hypotheses.

Google uses IQ to hire

Google is famous for hiring people based on IQ tests, but they sure don't like to admit it. NY Times columnist Tom Friedman writes:

LAST June, in an interview with Adam Bryant of The Times, Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google — i.e., the guy in charge of hiring for one of the world’s most successful companies — noted that Google had determined that “G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything.” ...

“There are five hiring attributes we have across the company,” explained Bock.

“If it’s a technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles in the company are technical roles. For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information."

In other words, they hire based on IQ, as Sailer explains at the above link.

It is not only fashionable to deny IQ, people also human rationality. Paul Bloom writes The War on Reason

Scientists and philosophers argue that human beings are little more than puppets of their biochemistry. Here's why they're wrong.

Aristotle’s definition of man as a rational animal has recently taken quite a beating.

Part of the attack comes from neuroscience. Pretty, multicolored fMRI maps ...

Another attack on rationality comes from social psychology. Hundreds of studies now show that factors we’re unaware of influence how we think and act. ...

Some of those factors are genetic, and all human behavioral traits are heritable.

The New Atheists have have own attack on rationality. For the most part, they deny free will, claim that religious people are brainwashed, and assert all sorts of leftist political positions without any reasoned argument.

Update: A new book, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility, by Gregory Clark, argues:

How much of our fate is tied to the status of our parents and grandparents? How much does this influence our children? More than we wish to believe. While it has been argued that rigid class structures have eroded in favor of greater social equality, The Son Also Rises proves that movement on the social ladder has changed little over eight centuries. ... The bad news is that much of our fate is predictable from lineage.

This has already generated controversy, with the Economist magazine saying it "may not be a racist book, but it certainly traffics in genetic determinism."

Update: Other employers are interested in IQ also. The WSJ now reports:

Stephen Robert Morse was a candidate for a communications job when the recruiter told him to be ready to discuss his SAT score in a coming interview.

Mr. Morse, 28 years old, said he was "shocked" that a potential boss would be interested in the results of a test he took more than a decade earlier. He passed on the opportunity.

Proving the adage that all of life is like high school, plenty of employers still care about a job candidate's SAT score. Consulting firms such as Bain & Co. and McKinsey & Co. and banks like Goldman Sachs Group Inc. ask new college recruits for their scores, while other companies request them even for senior sales and management hires, eliciting scores from job candidates in their 40s and 50s.

The SAT test used to be more of an IQ test, but it was changed out of fear that it was being used as an IQ test.

Update: An LA Times op-ed explains:

First, decades of quantitative research in the field of personnel psychology have shown that across fields of employment, measurements of "general cognitive ability" — which is another way of referring to the old-fashioned concept of intelligence or IQ — are consistently the best tools employers have to predict which new employees will wind up with the highest performance evaluations or the best career paths. We shouldn't rush to assume that Google, with its private data, has suddenly refuted all that work.

How could Google be seeing no correlation between IQ and performance in their company? For the same reason that, say, there is no correlation between height and scoring in pro basketball. The average NBA player is almost 6 feet 7 inches tall, which is taller than 99% of the U.S. adult male population. The NBA selects its players based on height already, and it selects people who are outliers. Those NBA players facing one another are almost all extremely tall, which means factors other than height explain scoring. But put a team of NBA players up against a random bunch of guys, and height will make all the difference.

In the social sciences, this is known as the problem of "range restriction."

Islam is a political system seeking world domination

UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh writes:

I have argued that many (though not all) of the things that are condemned as intrusions of Islamic law into American law are actually the applications of traditional American legal principles. Those who believe in equal treatment without regard to religion, I have argued, should extend to Muslims the benefits of those principles just as Christians, Jews and others can take advantage of those principles.

Some, however, have argued that Islam should not be treated the same as those other religions. One line of argument goes so far as to say (in the words of noted televangelist and political figure Pat Robertson) that “Islam is not a religion. It is a political system bent on world domination.”[111]

It’s hard to figure out exactly what the first part of this means. What constitutes a religion for legal purposes can be fuzzy around the edges,[112] but surely Islam — a prominent system of beliefs about God and God’s supposed commands to mankind — must qualify.[113] The argument, I assume, must be that Islam, though it is a religion, is not simply a religion but is also a political ideology and therefore loses its status as a religion for, say, religious accommodation purposes.

But that can’t be right. Many religions, especially many strands of Christianity, are “political system[s]” in the sense that they create an agenda for political action. The conservative Christian political program of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and others is one example.[114] The “liberation theology” followed by some liberal Catholics is another.[115]

Yes, it can be right. While some Christians like Robertson are politically active, Christianity is not a political ideology and the mainstream Christian churches avoid politics, except when it directly interferes with their beliefs.

But whatever the difference between the religions, it can’t be that one is a “political system” and the other is not, or that one seeks “world domination” and the other does not. ...

People who want to set up Christianity as an official state religion are protected by the First Amendment.[121] So are people who overtly call for constructing a “theocracy” that “denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.”[122]

Volokh appears to know nothing about Islam. The Wikipedia page says:

Mainstream Islamic law does not distinguish between "matters of church" and "matters of state"; the scholars function as both jurists and theologians.

That's right. In Islam, church and state are the same, while Christianity has a 2000 year old history of carefully distinguishing them.

Just look around the world. There are many countries that are officially Christian, like the UK, but they do not seek a Christian world domination. The UK takes in many Moslem immigrants, and makes no effort to convert them to Christianity. On the other hand, there are dozens of Islamic countries around the world, and they all persecute Christians and other non-Moslems. Their leaders, holy books, and centuries of history all teach that Islam in not just a religion, but also a political system and way of life that is to be imposed on the whole society.

Yes, if you look hard enough, you have find an obscure Christian somewhere who advocates a Christian theocracy, and he has the free speech to say so. But theocracy is not a part of the Christian religion, and it never has been. Theocracy is an essential part of Islam as it is practiced by about a billion people in the world.

The First Amendment was adopted by Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Unitarians, and others with a concept of religion based on Christianity. They would probably say that Islam is part religion, and part legal and political system, and that only the religion part deserves religious freedoms.

For another example of a silly attempt to equate Christianity and Islam, see this UK newspaper editorial against female circumcision, aka genital mutilation. It attempts to blame Christianity and Islam equally, and blame men instead of women. As explained here, this was not practiced in any Western Christian countries, until they started taking millions of Moslem immigrants.

Medical prices not available

Health care must be the only business where people are not allowed to know what they are paying for. NPR Radio reports:

Kershner works for a nonprofit called , which is starting to make health care prices publicly available in Colorado. His boss, , says knowing prices can change the whole health care ball game. ...

Colorado is one of eleven states that are starting to make public a lot of health care prices. It's taken years. An "" is the first step in Colorado. It's basically a giant shoebox that aims to collect a copy of every receipt for a health care service in a given state. Since doctors and hospitals generally don't tell people how much services cost beforehand, the best way to figure out the price is to get receipts from the parties that pay the bills: insurance companies, Medicaid and Medicare, mostly.

The more such information is made public, Sonn says, the more people will "vote with their feet" and migrate away from high-cost providers.

But there are laws that get in the way:

But there's a glitch. In order to get the kinds of reports Ehrenberger and other health care providers want, they have to include price information from all payers, and one of the biggest is Medicare — it pays about a fifth of all health care bills in Colorado. At the moment, Edie Sonn explains, they cannot use that Medicare data in any of the custom reports they want to sell.
A snippet of the data ProPublica obtained from the federal government about Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit for seniors.

"Current federal law restricts what we can do with that Medicare data," she says. "The only thing you can use their data for is public reporting."

I don't get this. California car mechanics are required to give a written estimate in advance, or they are no right to get paid. Medical providers could do the same.

Only a dishonest business refuses to put its prices on its web site. I am surprised that anyone pays medical bills, when the amounts were never authorized in advance.

IQ gene discovered

The UK Telegraph reports:

A gene which may make people more intelligent has been discovered by scientists.

Researchers have found that teenagers who had a highly functioning NPTN gene performed better in intelligence tests.

It is thought the NPTN gene indirectly affects how the brain cells communicate and may control the formation of the cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of the human brain, also known as ‘grey matter.’

It is surprising that there are hardly any results like this. It is known that IQ is heritable, along with several personality and behavior traits. But as far as I know, there is no explanation based on specific genes. This could be a first, but I would wait for confirmation as other claims like this have had to be retracted.

My guess is that those traits are complex combinations of many genes, together with later environmental influences. But the whole idea of IQ genes gets people spooked.

You may have heard of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank, and got the impression that it was some sort of evil Nazi eugenic failed experiment that was shut down after it was exposed. In fact the real name of it was the Repository for Germinal Choice, and its chief innovation was to give the human sperm buyers some choice about what they were getting. They produced over 200 babies, but none from Nobelist sperm.

According to a book review:

But in the end, the themes mesh. Plotz's meetings with employees, consumers and offspring of the repository, sympathetic people on the whole, may have led him to his understated conclusion that the enterprise wasn't so terrible. For one thing, Graham's inspired strategy of providing consumers a choice of the most desirable men possible freed women from the tyranny of early fertility doctors. And it has become standard industry practice; as Plotz says, ''All sperm banks have become eugenic sperm banks.''

That's right, the experiment was a huge success in the sense that it transformed the industry into allowing consumer choice. Apparently the eugenics of personal choice has become acceptable.

Success traits may be heritable

Tiger Mom Amy Chua has a new book getting a lot of publicity, titled The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.

She and her Jewish husband gave this NPR interview:

This is not saying that these groups are better in any way. [at 14:10]

Nonsense. All of her evidence consists of saying that some groups are doing better than other groups, according to various metrics. So she certainly is saying that some groups are better, at least in the ways measured by those metrics.

They kept saying that their book has been misunderstood as being about groups, as it is really about individuals so it is anti-racist. The book absolves itself by saying:

Group generalizations turn into invidious stereotypes when they're false, hateful, or assumed to be true of every group member.

The book just came out, and you can read the NY Times synopsis or review and get the message.

Her Jewish husband says that third-generation Asian-American kids do no better than average American kids, and:

What this does is totally explode the model-minority myth, it shows it's not innate, it shows it's not biological ... [at 7:00]

No, it does not show that. Their third "Triple Package" key to success is impoulse control, and research on The Heritability of Impulse Control shows that it is about 50% heritable.

The other two keys are having a superiority/inferiority complex, like the Jews and Chinese.

Maybe it is unreasonable to expect good social science from this book. The authors are just law professors, so their main training is in making legal arguments for clients, not social science.

The interviewer admits that he and his NPR radio associates were reluctant to allow the book's ideas on the air because it is un-American to look at facts that could have racially divisive implications.

For another view, see this video criticizing a popular museum exhibit on race in America, saying that it has political bias and factual errors.

USA is neutral on legality of settlements

I was surprised to hear NPR radio say this:

HARRIS: Some activist group in this case means Oxfam International. Oxfam is against doing business of any kind with Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which many countries including the U.S. view as illegal under international law.

I knew that various people are always accusing Israel of illegalities, but had not heard this was the US view. Wikipedia says:

An opinion by a legal adviser to the U.S. Department of State found the settlements contrary to international law in 1978, though no Administration has officially stated so since the Carter Administration. ...

The United States has never voted in favor of any UN Resolution calling the settlements illegal except for Resolution 465 in 1980, and in that case the Carter administration subsequently announced that the vote had been cast in error[50] due to miscommunication ...

In February 1981, Ronald Reagan announced that he didn't believe that Israeli settlements in the West Bank were illegal.

This is out of my expertise. There are solid arguments for legality of the settlements. The USA does not take the position that they are illegal.

We non-Africans are part Neanderthal

For decades we have been told that anatomically modern humans emerged from Africa about 50k to 100k years ago, and that there has been no human evolution since. But there has been overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the latest being this:

Neanderthals died out long ago, but their genes live on in us. Scientists studying human chromosomes say they've discovered a surprising amount of Neanderthal DNA in our genes. And these aren't just random fragments; they help shape what we look like today, including our hair and skin.

These genes crept into our DNA tens of thousands of years ago, during occasional sexual encounters between Neanderthals and human ancestors who lived in Europe at the time. They show up today in their descendants, people of European and Asian descent.

The snippets that come from Neanderthals can be identified because a few years ago, scientists were able to extract DNA from Neanderthal remains and read out their genetic blueprint.

A startling 20 percent of Neanderthal genes live on in us today, according to a published Wednesday in Science magazine. Researchers found that out by combing through the genes of more than 600 living people.

By "our genes", NPR radio means the genes of non-Africans. The NY Times made a similar mistake.

The out-of-Africa folks are always telling us that all humans are the same, while the scientific evidence is always pointing to variation among humans. Many have trouble accepting the variation:

continuing on from the other day, jamie bartlett and timothy stanley are flat-out wrong that human biodiversity (hbd) is “neo-fascist” “bad science.” human biodiversity is simply the diversity found among and between human populations that has a biological basis.

Steven Pinker is one of those academic leftists who reluctantly accepts biological differences, but announces:

2014 - WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT?
Behavior = Genes + Environment

He merely points to technical difficulties in giving precise definitions to Genes and Environment. But he cannot dispute that behavior is some complex combination of nature and nuture. While no one has figured out how individual genes affect behavior, there is strong evidence that psychometrics are heritable. The heritability of behavior traits is typically about 50%, with the rest usually assumed to be environmental but maybe just random.

Update: John Hawks explains Multiregional vs. Out of Africa in 2005, and comments in 2010 that recent DNA evidence shows Multiregional evolution lives! Wikipedia says that Out Of Africa is the most widely accepted theory, with the main rival being Multiregional origin of modern humans. I have a feeling that the Out Of Africa folks will never admit to being wrong.

Update: The LA Times reported:

Mating between Neanderthals and the ancestors of Europeans and East Asians gave our forebears important evolutionary advantages but may have created a lot of sterile males, wiping out much of that primitive DNA, new genetic studies suggest.

The comparison of Neanderthal and modern human genomes, published online Wednesday in the journals Nature and Science, identified specific sequences of altered DNA that both Neanderthals and several hundred modern Europeans and Asians had in common.

This is misleading. The DNA comparison proves that Neanderthals are among the ancestors of Europeans. The first sentence is written as if the Neanderthals and European ancestors were two different groups. Then it goes on to mention "primitive DNA", whatever that is.

Silicon Valley CEOs against competition

I am surprised that this case has not gotten more publicity:

Between approximately 2005 and 2009, Defendants Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm, and Pixar allegedly engaged in an “overarching conspiracy” to eliminate competition among Defendants for skilled labor. The conspiracy consisted of an interconnected web of express bilateral agreements among Defendants to abstain from actively soliciting each other’s employees. Plaintiffs allege that each agreement involved a company under the control of Steve Jobs (Co-Founder, Former Chairman, and Former CEO of Apple) and/or a company that shared at least one director with Apple’s Board of Directors. Defendants memorialized these nearly identical agreements in CEO-to-CEO emails and other documents, including “Do Not Call” lists, thereby putting each Defendant’s employees off-limits to other Defendants. Each bilateral agreement applied to all employees of a given pair of Defendants. These agreements were not limited by geography, job function, product group, or time period. Nor were they related to any specific business or other collaboration between Defendants. ...

What is stunning is all the exchanges among top executives. The filing quotes numerous e-mails among Jobs, Sergey Brin, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen, and other Silicon Valley heavy-hitters that talk openly about the agreement and various threats when a member to an agreement falls out of line.

I was a student at Princeton when the university officials openly bragged about various policies designed to reduce competition with other Ivy League colleges.

The above companies located in the Silicon Valley area largely because it is so easy to poach employees from other companies.

Billions of years of climate change

President Barack Obama said in the 2014 SOTU:

Taken together, our energy policy is creating jobs and leading to a cleaner, safer planet. Over the past eight years, the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution more than any other nation on Earth. But we have to act with more urgency – because a changing climate is already harming western communities struggling with drought, and coastal cities dealing with floods. That’s why I directed my administration to work with states, utilities, and others to set new standards on the amount of carbon pollution our power plants are allowed to dump into the air. The shift to a cleaner energy economy won’t happen overnight, and it will require tough choices along the way. But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact. And when our children’s children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say yes, we did.

The fact is that the Earth's climate has been changing for billions of years. Obama sounds scientifically illiterate when he says "Climate change is a fact.", as if that were the meaningful outcome of a scientific debate.

He is like those who define evolution as change in the history of the universe, or generational variation in DNA, then proudly assert that evolution is a fact.

The speech had nothing about nuclear power, the only practical carbon-free large-scale power technology.

If our children's children complain about atmospheric carbon, they will ask why we encouraged China and India to develop fossil fuel based economies. Those are the countries that are increasing their carbon emissions.

Obama has not advanced stem cell medicine

Four years ago I posted The stem cell hoax, showing that Pres. Obama had not significantly expanded stem cell research over what Pres. G.W. Bush allowed. Now, the Obama administration has only approved one clinical trial for an embryonic stem cell therapy, and that has been abandoned.

Wikipedia says:

President Bush announced, on August 9, 2001 that federal funds, for the first time, would be made available for hESC [human embryonic stem cell] research.

Because of the development of non-embryonic pluripotent stem cells, it is nor clear that the controversial embryonic stem cells will ever be useful.

Supposedly we were losing embryonic stem cell research to overseas scientists, but much of that foreign research has been tainted with fraud, and is of dubious value.

For years, all the so-called experts told us that Bush was anti-science, and Obama pro-science, and that the proof was going to be in miracle stem cell cures. All those people are quiet now, as they were proven wrong.

Update: Another stem cell fraud.

900 year old stereotypes

From Ethnic Stereotyping in Twelfth-Century Paris:

the English were drunks and tail-bearers, the French arrogant, weak and effeminate, the Germans furious, with disgusting manners, the Normans vain and boastful, the Poitevins traitors and adventurers. The Burgundians were reputed to be vulgar and stupid. They reproached the Bretons for being frivolous and fickle, often teasing them about Arthur’s death. They called the Lombards greedy, malicious and cowardly; the Romans seditious, violent and avaricious; the Sicilians tyrannical and cruel; the Brabanters bloodthirsty, arsonists, brigands and rapists; the Flemish self-indulgent, rich, gluttonous, and weak and soft as butter.

Wow. Funny. No word on how accurate these stereotypes were.

The movie Her is boring

I am surprised by all the praise for the new movie Her, considering that it is a dull two-hour movie about a man talking to his pocket computer. It is yet another story about an AI bot that is likable at first, but ends up misbehaving. That idea has probably been done in the movies 100 times.

The hero writes letters for a living, so I was expecting him to use the 1000s of letters to train the bot to understand what he likes and does not like. That would explain how the bot could be uniquely customized to his personality, and know how to make him happy. Loss of the bot could be genuinely upsetting to him if he had personally invested many weeks teaching the bot what he likes and does not like in his letters.

But in the movie, the bot is not customized to him at all. Hardly at all, as he just initializes it with his name and a couple of other facts. The bot chooses a name, but the name is not based on his likes or interests at all. Nothing about her is, and for all we know, the bot is essentially the same program that is shipped to all the other customers.

When the bot goes bad, the hero takes it as a personal betrayal, but for all we know, it is just a system bug that will be corrected with the next update. I guess the movie is trying to tell us that the man should not have taken the bot so seriously, and human connections are better. Or maybe the opposite, as all the human relationships in the movie are cold, sterile, boring, and broken.

I am not saying the movie is bad, but if you are looking for something thought-provoking about artificial intelligence, there are many better AI movies.

I was likewise surprised as so much praise for the Brad Pitt zombie movie, when so many other movies have much better zombies.

Update: For comparison, see this video promotion for the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet with Robby the Robot.

Why some people do not donate organs

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne writes:

Only about 45 percent of adults in the U.S. — nearly 109 million people — are organ donors, a figure that donation and transplant experts say seems tragically low when the public’s attention is riveted on the lack of organs for a child such as Sarah. ...

My theory, which is mine, is that this reluctance is based largely on a religious fear that if they take out an organ when you die, you’ll show up in heaven without a kidney or a liver!

I doubt it, as Christians seem to donate more than other religions.

My theory is not even mentioned by him or his commenters. The donors cannot be lawfully paid in the USA. Dick Cheney probably paid $200k for his heart transplant surgery, but not a penny went to the man who supplied the heart.

I don't think that there are any good medical or economic reasons against paying donors. Apparently some people have some sort of ethical or religious objection. Since Coyne likes to attack irrational superstitions, it is funny that he does not attack this one.

Update: Gary S. Becker and Julio J. Elias write in the WSJ:

Finding a way to increase the supply of organs would reduce wait times and deaths, and it would greatly ease the suffering that many sick individuals now endure while they hope for a transplant. The most effective change, we believe, would be to provide compensation to people who give their organs—that is, we recommend establishing a market for organs.

Maybe the organ donors ought to go on strike.

Three Feet for Safety Act

I occasionally hear automobile drivers complain that bicyclists do not obey traffic law. I think that they are hallucinating, as bicyclist overwhelmingly obey laws better than car, in my experience. In particular, most cars violated these laws every day, and endanger bicyclists in the process.

Exceeding speed limits.

Weaving in and out of the lane.

Turning right across a bicycle lane without looking.

Passing too close to a bicycle (3 feet minimum now required in California).

Yes, a bicyclist will sometimes blow thru a 4-way stop with no one is around. but cars have the much more significant violations.

Democrats say they believe in evolution

Dana Milbank writes in the Wash. Post:

For several years, the two major parties have been moving gradually toward opposite poles: Democrats growing more liberal and secular, Republicans becoming more conservative and religious. But a survey out this week shows just how far and how fast the GOP has gone toward becoming a collection of older, white, evangelical Christians defined as much by religion as by politics. ...

Forget climate-change skepticism: Republicans have turned, suddenly and sharply, against Darwin.

This poll is not so much about science, as in using "evolution" as a code word for secularism. More and more, Republican is the Christian party, and Democrat is the anti-Christian party.

Peterike comments on the same Pew poll:

But the truth is that Progressive Liberals don’t believe in Evolution. They are Creationists.

If they believed in evolution they would necessarily have to concede that humans “evolved” differently over time and in different places, adapting to their environments the same way animals did. It would then follow that different groups of humans — which we conveniently label as “races” — would not be identical, and that includes above the neck as well as below the neck.

Yet Progressive Liberals DO believe that humans are “created” equal — there’s that word. They believe there is no substantial differences between races that cannot be explained entirely by the local environment and nurturing the humans receive. This is as stupid and unscientific as any Evangelist saying the earth is only a few thousand years old.

Liberals believe all kinds of other pseudo-science, but to say they believe in evolution is not consistent with what they say about human development. Just because they say they believe in it doesn’t mean they actually do, or that they understand the implications of what they claim to believe. The main reason Liberals “believe” in evolution is because they’ve been told that’s what smart people believe in. If the media went into full-blown campaign mode for creationism — a campaign similar to their pro-gay campaign, for instance — then ten years from now the majority of Liberals would say they are Creationists.

Milbank concludes:

But give Republicans credit for this: They don’t just doubt the theory of evolution; they’re out to prove it wrong. If they believed in the survival of the fittest, they’d be expanding their racial and ideological diversity. Instead, they’re trying to demonstrate that devotion to God can trump the Darwinian rules of politics.

No, Milbank is the one who misunderstands evolution. If human differences stem from inherited characteristics, as is the basis for human evolution, then Republicans might be better off concentrating on its main constituency of white married Christian taxpayers, as opposed to the non-white unmarried non-Christian freeloading Democrats. Republicans would shut down immigration, both legal and illegal.

Update: According to this, the belief in evolution may not have changed. The Pew claim about a trend is probably wrong.

Attacking nationalism

Libertarian economist Bryan Caplan writes:

White nationalism is one of the most reviled ideologies on earth.  But what exactly is so awful about it?  Menachem Rosensaft's piece in Slate quotes some leading white nationalists, but never really explains why this nationalism is worse than all other nationalisms. 

As you'd expect, white nationalists dominate Rosensaft's comments.  Several point out that he's is a staunch Zionist, and quip, "Nationalism for me but not for thee."  I'm a staunch anti-nationalist, ...

Apparently a lot of Jews prefer to identify as non-whites, and to promote their own ethnic interests over those of non-Jewish white groups. As Caplan explains, they are just showing in-group loyalty. Rosensaft quotes an explanation for why he favors in-group loyalty for his fellow Jews but not other groups:

Jewish activity collectively, throughout history, is best understood as an elaborate and highly successful group competitive strategy directed against neighboring peoples and host societies. The objective has been control of economic resources and political power. One example: overwhelming Jewish support for non-traditional immigration, which has the effect of weakening America's historic white majority.

Caplan may not be Jewish, but he does advocate a libertarian open immigration in order to destroy nationalism. He continues:

After all, white-majority countries still have greater military power than all other countries combined. ...

So how bad is white nationalism? Back when white nationalism was popular, its sins were massive, but hardly unique. The doctrine currently does little harm because it's so rare. If however white nationalism regained popularity, it would be a cataclysmic disaster because white-majority countries have the firepower to wreck the havoc other nationalist movements can only fantasize about.

I am not sure about the terminology here. Every country in the world is nationalistic. It is not clear how the world could function without nationalism.

I don't know why anyone would call the Nazis white nationalists. They were German nationalists. If you are going to lump together majority-white countries, it seems to me that they are some of the least nationalist countries, as many of them allow large immigration from other ethnic groups. Furthermore, the European and American countries have long histories of making the world a better place.

Caplan's main argument is that in-group bias is a human failing. This is about like saying that love is a human failing. Most, if not all, humans have in-group biases. He complains that a Chinese leader sides with the Chinese, but what else does he expect?

Even if Caplan could somehow persuade everyone in the world to treat the interests of others equally, how would that work? How could we have representative democracy, unless the representatives can favor their constituents? How could we have capitalism, unless the board of directors can favor the stockholders?

These arguments against nationalism just boil down to Rosensaft and Caplan not liking the nationalism of other groups.

What I learned in 2013

The medical industry is more hopelessly screwed up than I thought. The providers do not treat the patient as the customer, and do not give a price schedule or any reasonable expectation of costs. I wonder why anyone pays medical bills, considering that Pres. Obama says that health care is a right, and the patient has not agreed to the fees.

I learned more things that we cannot say, as Paula Deen and others got ostracized for trivial comments. But apparently the Duck Dynasty guys can still say that they prefer to be heterosexual.

Moral philosophy is in a sorry state. I have listened to the leading experts, and I think that 10yo kids have more common sense. Wittgenstein was right about much of philosophy being worthless.

There are some limits to the trend towards pathologizing male behavior -- Asperger syndrome was dropped from the DSM-5.

Modern civilization was made possible by technology, and also advances in science, politics, religion, etc. A book on the invention of Europe tells how family structures and ideologies have played a big part.

The invention of bitcoin, explained here, has proved that non-governmental cryptographic currency is possible.

Southern California has become the world center for sperm donors, egg donors, gestational carriers, test-tube babies, and doctored birth certificates. The brave new world birthing technologies are illegal in most of the world and most American states, but legal in California. In particular, gays can marry and contract to be the legal parents of test-tube babies.

There is a growing atheist movement, but it is hopelessly intertwined with leftist politics and unscientific views like saying humans have no free will. They hate religion but seem mostly concerned with harmless symbolic expressions. There are atheist conferences, but if you google what is discussed, you may find that you would not want anything to do with those on either side of the argument.

Ed Snowden has revealed much more about NSA spying that anyone thought possible, and people do not seem to care much because the spying by others is much more threatening.

A lot of smart people seem to misunderstand concepts like infinity, counterfactuals, randomness, time, and probability. I thought that these were concepts that children understand.

RSA paid for crypto backdoor

RSA Security was famous for leaking a backdoor to its biggest crypto product to Chinese hackers, and now it has been exposed to have been paid to have an NSA backdoor:

RSA has issued a statement denying allegations stemming from Friday's bombshell report that the encryption software provider received $10 million from the National Security Agency (NSA) in exchange for making a weak algorithm the preferred one in its BSAFE toolkit. ...

Nothing in the release contradicts the findings of the Reuters article — that RSA accepted $10 million from the NSA in exchange for making the Dual EC_DRBG BSAFE's default pseudo random number generator (PRNG).

This hasn't hit the press yet, but there was a similar story with a Canadian crypto company. Here is the 2003 press release:

Certicom Corp. (TSX: CIC), a leading provider of wireless security solutions, today announced that the National Security Agency (NSA) in Maryland has purchased extensive licensing rights to Certicom’s MQV-based Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) intellectual property. ... This contract, valued at US$25 million, ...

Certicom promoted MQV as an IEEE standard, and the NSA also made it a standard.

One of the stated purposes of MQV was to resist the "unknown key share attack". However the NSA weakened MQV to make it susceptible to that attack, and the weakness was published in 2001. It was the NSA-weakened protocol that Certicom promoted as an IEEE standard.

I was on the IEEE committee, and voted against MQV because it had been broken. I was outvoted. I could never get a clear explanation as to why we were adopting a broken version of a protocol, except that NSA was supporting the broken version. My guess is that Certicom was influenced by that $25M.

I cannot say that any spying resulted from use of MQV. NSA ended up dropping MQV, and I doubt that many others use it. That is too bad, as an improved version, HMQV is quite efficient and secure.

Disclosure: I was involved in a couple of lawsuits against RSA in the 1990s. I alleged antitrust violations and an assortment of patent issues. I ended up getting a judgment with a license to the public key cryptography patents. The RSA claims against me were all dismissed. The patentability issues were never really resolved, as Forbes calls it the most difficult question in patent law and it is currently back before the US Supreme Court.

Update: Certicom also had a hand in the RSA backdoor. None of these weaknesses were particularly secret, as they were always documented on the relevant Wikipedia pages.

Brooks tries to speak for conservatives

Somehow NY Times columnist David Brooks gets away with being a spokesman for conservative Christians. On Meet The Press he said:

GREGORY: ... Duck Dynasty. Phil Robertson in GQ Magazine got this started. For those who-- who love the show saying, “Start with homos”-- What in your mind is sinful, was the question. He says, “start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men…” ...

MR. BROOKS: Yeah. They-- they’re trying to frame it as a defense of faith. And I know a lot of orthodox Christians who take a biblical and more hostile view of homosexuality than I do, and a lot of people do. But I’ve never heard those orthodox Christians express with the disrespect that he did. And frankly, in the un-Christian manner he did. So to say that this is a defense of faith, that what he said is-- is-- is strictly Christian faith? That’s not what it is. It was a disrespectful way to say a lot of ugly things.

Brooks is Jewish, and writes many columns praising Barack Obama. He does not speak for conservative Christians, and he does not define what is or is not Christian faith.

Robertson did not disrespect anyone, or act in an un-Christian manner. He just stated his personal preferences and quoted the Bible, while saying that he was not judging others. If anyone is committing hate speech, it is Brooks, NBC, and the NY Times. They dishonestly attack Christians.