Both Sofia Kovalevskaya and Emmy Noether were able to have careers in mathematics that started before the Great War. Their abilities spoke for themselves. Mathematics is a field where that can be done fairly straightforwardly.
I am heartily sick of noble and not so noble lies, but I do wish you selected examples from both sides of the US political chasm. It might be even better to select a few examples from issues no longer relevant to anyone but historians, allowing people to examine the evidence without bringing along their pre-existing beliefs.
Perhaps, of course, you believe that US right wing liars are all ignoble - none having any higher motive than Me! me! me! or worse. But even a dyed-in-the-wool leftie like me can see that some US right wing people have sincere beliefs, and yet say what they think will work to advance the associated goals, even knowing that what they are saying isn't true.
False equivalence - the race & gender stuff is taken as faith and remedies mandated by every western government. Climate alarmism has similar hegemony - preventing the US and Canada from further developing their fossil fuels and Germany energy to implode.
I agree that the right has many bad ideas. Which ones have that sort of reach and resource mobilization ?
Seems like the only victory is occasional speed bumps in the way of the left’s March.
I agree, though that feels different considering it seemed like both parties were fully behind that effort. I don’t recall it having a partisan valence — reactionaries would criticize forever wars as a uniparty pursuit not left vs right.
Feel free to offer examples of noble lies believed in by right wingers.
In the comment thread to the previous post we had a right wing lie which I pointed out, but I don't know whether that, or other versions of the claim that the 2020 election was stolen, qualify as noble lies in the sense of statements made by people who know they are false but think that the world will be better if people believe them. I mostly interpret them as either things people believe because they want to believe them or things people say they believe because of social pressure or political considerations.
To go back a few years, how about the "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq? It's always hard to know people's actual motivation, but it seems to me that some of the people promoting belief in those weapons really believed that Hussein's regime was bad enough that it ought to be overthrown, and farthermore believed that this could be done without making things even worse. A causus belli was required, not to mention something to motivate potential allies. "Weapons of mass destruction" served this purpose, so they were solemnly declared to exist.
Likewise, I think, the "stolen election of 2020" meme is sometimes coming from people who truly believe that any Democratic presidency is a disaster. I suppose they sometimes convince themselves that this couldn't possibly be the true will of the people, and thus there must have been fraud, regardless of lack of evidence. But I doubt that's the only reason for that persistent claim. Some just want people to believe anything that gets rid of the disaster of an opposing president, regardless of truth or falsehood.
You may be right about the Iraq case. I didn't follow that story closely enough to tell whether it originated with people who believed it, but I did discuss it as a hypothetical example of a noble lie in an old Substack post:
There are probably people who push the stolen election narrative for the reason you give and don't believe it themselves, but I don't think of such people as the main source of that story.
> I think, the "stolen election of 2020" meme is sometimes coming from people who truly believe that any Democratic presidency is a disaster.
Well the 2020 election was indeed stolen.
If anything most of the people denying the rather brazen fraud fall back on noble lie-type arguments about how questioning the "free and fair election" results in "undermining democracy".
There is a sense in which it was arguably stolen — unethical actions that plausibly changed the outcome, such as the major media concealing the Hunter laptop story. What makes you confident that it was stolen in the direct sense of vote fraud? Trump and his supporters made a lot of claims along those lines, but some were provably false and none seem to have been proved true, despite efforts by Trump supporters.
Do you agree that some of Trump's claims of fraud can be proved false — I'm thinking of the Detroit claim that Jorg made and then retracted, which Trump also made? If you realize that Trump lies, what is your reason for believing that some of his claims were true?
I'm less interested at the moment in whether the election was stolen than in how people, including you, reach conclusions on such questions.
> What makes you confident that it was stolen in the direct sense of vote fraud?
Well, there's the synchronized stopping of the reported count across multiple states followed by statistically impossible jumps for Biden, the multiple instances of observers being kicked or tricked out of the counting room followed by the count resuming, in one case the counters literally blocking the windows so the observers couldn't see what they were doing, the video of counters running the same ballots multiple times through the machines, the sword eyewitness affidavits, the miscellaneous statistical irregularities, etc.
More generally, the Democrats are constantly moving heaven and earth to stop even basic common sense anti-fraud measures, like *making sure the voter is who he says he is*.
How do you know that those claims are true? The Detroit claim involves a statistical impossibility, more votes than voters, it was made by Trump and can be seen to be false by just looking up the numbers.
If you assume that Trump is routinely willing to lie, which I do on lots of evidence including that, is there still reason to believe the election was stolen, facts you can verify for yourself rather than assertions made by Trump and some of his supporters?
The alternative explanation of the Democrats rejecting anti-fraud measures is that they believe their supporters are more easily deterred from voting by requirements that make it more trouble to vote. That might be wrong now that Trump has altered the pattern of who votes for which party, but probably was correct until recently.
Good example. Are there people who act accordingly — pretend to believe when they don't because they think the results of more people believing are good and don't want to spread unbelief? The cases I am familiar with, which I think include Peterson, are people who say that religion has good effects but are not willing to pretend that they believe in it.
Hard to identify false believers, but I can imagine cases where you knew someone well enough to distinguish private from public beliefs.
There are lots of people who claim religious belief but don't act like it, do things that would condemn them to Hell if their claimed beliefs were true. I assume claim the belief for self-interested reasons but for some it might be a noble lie.
Do you think (accurate) statistical discrimination is morally permissible?
One could reverse the argument that evolutionary implications undermine support for laws against race/gender discrimination; the evolutionary implications give reason to expect discrimination would persist in a free market, so knowing the implications actually yields *support* for the necessity of such laws (if you thought statistical discrimination should be made illegal).
I believe statistical discrimination is morally permissible. In the strong sense of permissible — should there be a law against it — I think that discrimination due to prejudice or racism is permissible. I'm a libertarian and believe that relations such as hiring or renting should occur only if both parties want them.
In the weaker sense — is this something one shouldn't do — I still think statistical discrimination is permissible. We make decisions on imperfect information all the time. I don't see why using information on the distribution of characteristics relevant to the job by sex or race is any less legitimate than using test scores to decide who to admit to college, even though they give only imperfect information about how smart applicants are.
That aside, I think your point is correct. The existence of significant differences by race or sex makes statistical discrimination more likely, so if you disapprove of it is a reason to have laws against it. Of course, it is also a reason to believe that such laws will result in an inefficient allocation of people to jobs, making the society poorer, which is a reason not to have such laws.
>Do you think (accurate) statistical discrimination is morally permissible?
If it is /accurate/, then why think that statistical discrimination is NOT morally permissible? Thus, to take a controversial example, if (eg) women really are X% more likely than men to want to take time off work to care for children, and an employer reasonably believed so, then why would it be /wrongly/ discriminatory to consider that statistical fact—along with the others relevant to job performance—in deciding whether to hire this woman or that man? Of course, current laws (at least where I am) prohibit such reasoning.
Some people have the intuition that it would be unfair to the (1-X)% of women who will not take time off work to care for children. (Maybe this example isn’t the best because some people have the intuition that it’s impermissible to consider a woman taking time off work even if you are *certain* it will happen)
Is it also unfair for a college to reject someone who got a low score on the SAT exam due to all of his guesses on questions he couldn't answer turning out, by chance, to be wrong, accept someone who guessed on the same number of questions but had the good luck to guess right on almost all of them? Is it wrong to reject a job applicant who doesn't have letter of recommendation from his previous job in favor of one who does, when you know the reason for the difference might be that the employer of the former was too lazy or too busy to write the letter?
In a world of imperfect information, mistaken decisions will sometimes be made.
>it’s impermissible to consider a woman taking time off work even if you are *certain* it will happen
This is implausible—assuming that /being at work/ is correlated to workplace productivity, and that this is a legitimate goal for employers to have. So I'd like to see some argument for this.
>it would be unfair to the (1-X)% of women who will not take time off work to care for children
This is more troubling. But it is an unavoidable problem, since pretty much all our decision-making involves using proxies for what we really want.
Some proxies are better than others—it is generally better to get more information, but this typically comes with increasing costs, which will need to be balanced against the increasing accuracy. It would be ridiculous to exclude candidates /just because/ they are women, even if there is some chance that they will take time off work, since there are so many other statistical factors relevant to performance. Theoretically, you could (eg) ask people (not just women) about their caring responsibilities, which would be one factor in predicting how much time they will be taking off work.
But you have to stop collecting information somewhere, and, when you do that, there will probably be someone excluded who, /if only you had gathered YET MORE information/, would have been chosen over the person you actually chose, and who would similarly claim that their exclusion is unfair. In my view, the employer may determine how much information to seek on purely profit-maximizing grounds, and my suspicion is that /being a woman of child-bearing age/ will still remain in the statistical mix.
And thus the women of child-bearing age /who have NO plans to take time off/. I am very sympathetic to their complaint. In my view, they should be allowed to tell the employer this, and the employer should be allowed to take it into account. But that's illegal. So blame the law.
> This is implausible—assuming that /being at work/ is correlated to workplace productivity, and that this is a legitimate goal for employers to have. So I'd like to see some argument for this.
You should ask the people who made it illegal (blame the EEOC; the legislators who enacted Title VII would not have supported this outcome). I wasn't endorsing the intuition that it's morally impermissible to consider the effects of a woman taking time off work, only pointing out the obvious fact that a lot of people think it is.
If women were excluded from consideration for employment as firefighters, that would be one sort of statistical discrimination. If statistics were ignored in hiring, but other factors resulted in fewer female firefighters, that would be a different sort of statistical discrimination.
Sometimes discrimination means excluding persons for stupid reasons. Sometimes it means treating members of different categories (plants and animals) differently for good reasons. Which do you have in mind?
Suppose you know (with certainty) that racial group A has median job performance higher than that of racial group B. Suppose that you need to hire one person from a pair of applicants, a member of A and a member of B, and you have no additional information about their expected job performance. Is it permissible to hire the member of A solely on the basis of race, or should you flip a coin?
Why are those my choices? Shouldn’t I try to figure out something about the actual applicants, rather than their groups?
A better example would be, you have 300 applicants for one position. Is it prudent for you to throw out all the apps from the group with the lower average?
Even in this stronger case, it depends on things other than the group average. We can imagine a situation where one group had a higher average but a very low variance. The other group has a lower average, but a very high variance. Clearly, more excellent candidates will come from the low average group. The person hiring would need to do the work of figuring out which candidates are actually good.
And that is separate from the issue of moral permissibility. The person hiring may have an obligation to try diligently to find the best candidate. But if so, they owe this obligation to their boss, not to the job candidates, society, or the state. If they fail in this dimension, they should be liable for being fired or otherwise disciplined by their boss. It should not be the case that the hiring company should be liable to the applicants or the state.
I didn't discuss it in this post, probably will in my next post, but there is a plausible evolutionary explanation. Reproductively speaking, being male is higher risk than being female because females possess the scarce input to reproduction — womb space. So it is, from the genes' standpoint, worth trying harder to produce high quality males even at the cost of producing more low quality ones, defective products as a result of the difficulty of producing high quality products.
The post I'm working on is on why some humans are not smart. That is one explanation, a subset of "intelligence may not produce reproductive success." A version I find more persuasive is that smart males may find ways of getting sexual pleasure without producing children they will have to spend time and effort rearing.
How do you square that theory with the fact that animals sometimes masturbate? Presumably animals that masturbate are still less intelligent than humans who don't, which means the ability to avoid reproductive sex is available to even those whose intelligence is as low as an animal's?
The example I like is the one you gave a while back, in 3 or 4 posts, of Murray Rothbard disseminating information he knew to be false in order to advance libertarian principles.
People I admire, most notably Dave Smith, in awe of MR, regrettably repeat some unjustified critiques of your dad, for whom Rothbard harbored an inexplicable (and unrequitted) enmity.
I wish I could find those old posts, though they're burned into my memory, including, as I recall, your reference to them as "noble lies," an expression that was new to me.
"The less obvious point is that a widespread policy of exaggerating the costs of climate change makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, for those following that policy, academics or journalists, to know whether they are correct to do so."
And I think that's intentional, at least on the part of some people. If something *might* be horribly dangerous, people will tend to treat it as such even if they're not sure, and thus follow the policy the exaggerator prefers.
A priori, I would note that we split into races several orders of magnitude more recently than we split into sexes.
Nevertheless, we can observe that it was still long enough ago to produce differences in gross physiognomy (including of course skin color), and we know some consequential changes, like lactose tolerance and Ashkenazi intelligence, happened even more recently. One should not be *surprised* if it turned out there were racial differences in intelligence or other mental characteristics. But the parallel with sex is pretty rough.
Climate catastrophe is a weapon of war. A lie can he thought of as the most peaceful act of violence. Its morality should be contextualized the same way you would other violent acts.
Russia has enormous oil and natural gas reserves. Russia does not believe in the free market, they believe in leveraging those oil and gas reserves to exert political and social power. They are using fossil fuels as a weapon in a new kind of war. Climate catastrophe was designed to counter this weapon.
The idea is to accelerate the development of alternative energy sources to rob Russia of her power as quickly as possible. Ordinary market forces aren't up to the task, because ultimately the task is an act of war (like the Manhattan project) and the free market is had incentivizing things like major war weapons.
I may be mistaken, but I thought Russia was believed to subsidize the European greens, possibly because shutting down reactors and coal power plants makes Europe more reliant on Russian natural gas. Is there evidence the other way?
My guess would be that Russia funds anti-nuke energy groups that focus on destroying conventional energy sources instead of developing new ones, the west, the opposite. This seems to square with the NATO reporte.
Even if Russia is successful in the short-term with regards to shutting down reactors in Europe, the artificial distrust of fossil fuels injected into the public by the Climate catastrophe myth still creates an incentive for long-term development of alternative fuels.
New reactors are being built in America and climate change is what is motivating the belief in their necessity.
Both Sofia Kovalevskaya and Emmy Noether were able to have careers in mathematics that started before the Great War. Their abilities spoke for themselves. Mathematics is a field where that can be done fairly straightforwardly.
I am heartily sick of noble and not so noble lies, but I do wish you selected examples from both sides of the US political chasm. It might be even better to select a few examples from issues no longer relevant to anyone but historians, allowing people to examine the evidence without bringing along their pre-existing beliefs.
Perhaps, of course, you believe that US right wing liars are all ignoble - none having any higher motive than Me! me! me! or worse. But even a dyed-in-the-wool leftie like me can see that some US right wing people have sincere beliefs, and yet say what they think will work to advance the associated goals, even knowing that what they are saying isn't true.
False equivalence - the race & gender stuff is taken as faith and remedies mandated by every western government. Climate alarmism has similar hegemony - preventing the US and Canada from further developing their fossil fuels and Germany energy to implode.
I agree that the right has many bad ideas. Which ones have that sort of reach and resource mobilization ?
Seems like the only victory is occasional speed bumps in the way of the left’s March.
I don't know if you count Bush as the right, but the Iraq war consumed a lot of resources.
I agree, though that feels different considering it seemed like both parties were fully behind that effort. I don’t recall it having a partisan valence — reactionaries would criticize forever wars as a uniparty pursuit not left vs right.
Feel free to offer examples of noble lies believed in by right wingers.
In the comment thread to the previous post we had a right wing lie which I pointed out, but I don't know whether that, or other versions of the claim that the 2020 election was stolen, qualify as noble lies in the sense of statements made by people who know they are false but think that the world will be better if people believe them. I mostly interpret them as either things people believe because they want to believe them or things people say they believe because of social pressure or political considerations.
To go back a few years, how about the "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq? It's always hard to know people's actual motivation, but it seems to me that some of the people promoting belief in those weapons really believed that Hussein's regime was bad enough that it ought to be overthrown, and farthermore believed that this could be done without making things even worse. A causus belli was required, not to mention something to motivate potential allies. "Weapons of mass destruction" served this purpose, so they were solemnly declared to exist.
Likewise, I think, the "stolen election of 2020" meme is sometimes coming from people who truly believe that any Democratic presidency is a disaster. I suppose they sometimes convince themselves that this couldn't possibly be the true will of the people, and thus there must have been fraud, regardless of lack of evidence. But I doubt that's the only reason for that persistent claim. Some just want people to believe anything that gets rid of the disaster of an opposing president, regardless of truth or falsehood.
.
You may be right about the Iraq case. I didn't follow that story closely enough to tell whether it originated with people who believed it, but I did discuss it as a hypothetical example of a noble lie in an old Substack post:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/ends-and-means-part-two
There are probably people who push the stolen election narrative for the reason you give and don't believe it themselves, but I don't think of such people as the main source of that story.
> I think, the "stolen election of 2020" meme is sometimes coming from people who truly believe that any Democratic presidency is a disaster.
Well the 2020 election was indeed stolen.
If anything most of the people denying the rather brazen fraud fall back on noble lie-type arguments about how questioning the "free and fair election" results in "undermining democracy".
There is a sense in which it was arguably stolen — unethical actions that plausibly changed the outcome, such as the major media concealing the Hunter laptop story. What makes you confident that it was stolen in the direct sense of vote fraud? Trump and his supporters made a lot of claims along those lines, but some were provably false and none seem to have been proved true, despite efforts by Trump supporters.
Do you agree that some of Trump's claims of fraud can be proved false — I'm thinking of the Detroit claim that Jorg made and then retracted, which Trump also made? If you realize that Trump lies, what is your reason for believing that some of his claims were true?
I'm less interested at the moment in whether the election was stolen than in how people, including you, reach conclusions on such questions.
> What makes you confident that it was stolen in the direct sense of vote fraud?
Well, there's the synchronized stopping of the reported count across multiple states followed by statistically impossible jumps for Biden, the multiple instances of observers being kicked or tricked out of the counting room followed by the count resuming, in one case the counters literally blocking the windows so the observers couldn't see what they were doing, the video of counters running the same ballots multiple times through the machines, the sword eyewitness affidavits, the miscellaneous statistical irregularities, etc.
More generally, the Democrats are constantly moving heaven and earth to stop even basic common sense anti-fraud measures, like *making sure the voter is who he says he is*.
How do you know that those claims are true? The Detroit claim involves a statistical impossibility, more votes than voters, it was made by Trump and can be seen to be false by just looking up the numbers.
If you assume that Trump is routinely willing to lie, which I do on lots of evidence including that, is there still reason to believe the election was stolen, facts you can verify for yourself rather than assertions made by Trump and some of his supporters?
The alternative explanation of the Democrats rejecting anti-fraud measures is that they believe their supporters are more easily deterred from voting by requirements that make it more trouble to vote. That might be wrong now that Trump has altered the pattern of who votes for which party, but probably was correct until recently.
> Feel free to offer examples of noble lies believed in by right wingers.
Well, there are people who take that attitude towards religion, most famously Peterson.
Good example. Are there people who act accordingly — pretend to believe when they don't because they think the results of more people believing are good and don't want to spread unbelief? The cases I am familiar with, which I think include Peterson, are people who say that religion has good effects but are not willing to pretend that they believe in it.
Hard to identify false believers, but I can imagine cases where you knew someone well enough to distinguish private from public beliefs.
There are lots of people who claim religious belief but don't act like it, do things that would condemn them to Hell if their claimed beliefs were true. I assume claim the belief for self-interested reasons but for some it might be a noble lie.
Do you think (accurate) statistical discrimination is morally permissible?
One could reverse the argument that evolutionary implications undermine support for laws against race/gender discrimination; the evolutionary implications give reason to expect discrimination would persist in a free market, so knowing the implications actually yields *support* for the necessity of such laws (if you thought statistical discrimination should be made illegal).
I believe statistical discrimination is morally permissible. In the strong sense of permissible — should there be a law against it — I think that discrimination due to prejudice or racism is permissible. I'm a libertarian and believe that relations such as hiring or renting should occur only if both parties want them.
In the weaker sense — is this something one shouldn't do — I still think statistical discrimination is permissible. We make decisions on imperfect information all the time. I don't see why using information on the distribution of characteristics relevant to the job by sex or race is any less legitimate than using test scores to decide who to admit to college, even though they give only imperfect information about how smart applicants are.
That aside, I think your point is correct. The existence of significant differences by race or sex makes statistical discrimination more likely, so if you disapprove of it is a reason to have laws against it. Of course, it is also a reason to believe that such laws will result in an inefficient allocation of people to jobs, making the society poorer, which is a reason not to have such laws.
>Do you think (accurate) statistical discrimination is morally permissible?
If it is /accurate/, then why think that statistical discrimination is NOT morally permissible? Thus, to take a controversial example, if (eg) women really are X% more likely than men to want to take time off work to care for children, and an employer reasonably believed so, then why would it be /wrongly/ discriminatory to consider that statistical fact—along with the others relevant to job performance—in deciding whether to hire this woman or that man? Of course, current laws (at least where I am) prohibit such reasoning.
Some people have the intuition that it would be unfair to the (1-X)% of women who will not take time off work to care for children. (Maybe this example isn’t the best because some people have the intuition that it’s impermissible to consider a woman taking time off work even if you are *certain* it will happen)
Is it also unfair for a college to reject someone who got a low score on the SAT exam due to all of his guesses on questions he couldn't answer turning out, by chance, to be wrong, accept someone who guessed on the same number of questions but had the good luck to guess right on almost all of them? Is it wrong to reject a job applicant who doesn't have letter of recommendation from his previous job in favor of one who does, when you know the reason for the difference might be that the employer of the former was too lazy or too busy to write the letter?
In a world of imperfect information, mistaken decisions will sometimes be made.
>it’s impermissible to consider a woman taking time off work even if you are *certain* it will happen
This is implausible—assuming that /being at work/ is correlated to workplace productivity, and that this is a legitimate goal for employers to have. So I'd like to see some argument for this.
>it would be unfair to the (1-X)% of women who will not take time off work to care for children
This is more troubling. But it is an unavoidable problem, since pretty much all our decision-making involves using proxies for what we really want.
Some proxies are better than others—it is generally better to get more information, but this typically comes with increasing costs, which will need to be balanced against the increasing accuracy. It would be ridiculous to exclude candidates /just because/ they are women, even if there is some chance that they will take time off work, since there are so many other statistical factors relevant to performance. Theoretically, you could (eg) ask people (not just women) about their caring responsibilities, which would be one factor in predicting how much time they will be taking off work.
But you have to stop collecting information somewhere, and, when you do that, there will probably be someone excluded who, /if only you had gathered YET MORE information/, would have been chosen over the person you actually chose, and who would similarly claim that their exclusion is unfair. In my view, the employer may determine how much information to seek on purely profit-maximizing grounds, and my suspicion is that /being a woman of child-bearing age/ will still remain in the statistical mix.
And thus the women of child-bearing age /who have NO plans to take time off/. I am very sympathetic to their complaint. In my view, they should be allowed to tell the employer this, and the employer should be allowed to take it into account. But that's illegal. So blame the law.
> This is implausible—assuming that /being at work/ is correlated to workplace productivity, and that this is a legitimate goal for employers to have. So I'd like to see some argument for this.
You should ask the people who made it illegal (blame the EEOC; the legislators who enacted Title VII would not have supported this outcome). I wasn't endorsing the intuition that it's morally impermissible to consider the effects of a woman taking time off work, only pointing out the obvious fact that a lot of people think it is.
What are you really suggesting?
If women were excluded from consideration for employment as firefighters, that would be one sort of statistical discrimination. If statistics were ignored in hiring, but other factors resulted in fewer female firefighters, that would be a different sort of statistical discrimination.
Sometimes discrimination means excluding persons for stupid reasons. Sometimes it means treating members of different categories (plants and animals) differently for good reasons. Which do you have in mind?
Suppose you know (with certainty) that racial group A has median job performance higher than that of racial group B. Suppose that you need to hire one person from a pair of applicants, a member of A and a member of B, and you have no additional information about their expected job performance. Is it permissible to hire the member of A solely on the basis of race, or should you flip a coin?
Why are those my choices? Shouldn’t I try to figure out something about the actual applicants, rather than their groups?
A better example would be, you have 300 applicants for one position. Is it prudent for you to throw out all the apps from the group with the lower average?
Even in this stronger case, it depends on things other than the group average. We can imagine a situation where one group had a higher average but a very low variance. The other group has a lower average, but a very high variance. Clearly, more excellent candidates will come from the low average group. The person hiring would need to do the work of figuring out which candidates are actually good.
And that is separate from the issue of moral permissibility. The person hiring may have an obligation to try diligently to find the best candidate. But if so, they owe this obligation to their boss, not to the job candidates, society, or the state. If they fail in this dimension, they should be liable for being fired or otherwise disciplined by their boss. It should not be the case that the hiring company should be liable to the applicants or the state.
Also, the way subscribers support your work is by making you seem more important to other people on substack.
More men are really dumb, too, if you want to take that argument to its logical conclusion.
Correct. More geniuses and more morons.
I didn't discuss it in this post, probably will in my next post, but there is a plausible evolutionary explanation. Reproductively speaking, being male is higher risk than being female because females possess the scarce input to reproduction — womb space. So it is, from the genes' standpoint, worth trying harder to produce high quality males even at the cost of producing more low quality ones, defective products as a result of the difficulty of producing high quality products.
Don't discount the benefit to the group of stupid males being more eager to take risks that smarter males would avoid.
The post I'm working on is on why some humans are not smart. That is one explanation, a subset of "intelligence may not produce reproductive success." A version I find more persuasive is that smart males may find ways of getting sexual pleasure without producing children they will have to spend time and effort rearing.
How do you square that theory with the fact that animals sometimes masturbate? Presumably animals that masturbate are still less intelligent than humans who don't, which means the ability to avoid reproductive sex is available to even those whose intelligence is as low as an animal's?
The example I like is the one you gave a while back, in 3 or 4 posts, of Murray Rothbard disseminating information he knew to be false in order to advance libertarian principles.
People I admire, most notably Dave Smith, in awe of MR, regrettably repeat some unjustified critiques of your dad, for whom Rothbard harbored an inexplicable (and unrequitted) enmity.
I wish I could find those old posts, though they're burned into my memory, including, as I recall, your reference to them as "noble lies," an expression that was new to me.
"The less obvious point is that a widespread policy of exaggerating the costs of climate change makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, for those following that policy, academics or journalists, to know whether they are correct to do so."
And I think that's intentional, at least on the part of some people. If something *might* be horribly dangerous, people will tend to treat it as such even if they're not sure, and thus follow the policy the exaggerator prefers.
It is more useful to use a language that one masters: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/the-other-problem-with-noble-lies#:~:text=race%20enemies.%20The-,Holdomor,-%2C%20the%20deliberate%20mass
One needn't use languages with which one struggles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor#Etymology
When somebody uses communication software, nobody is a reader: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/the-other-problem-with-noble-lies#:~:text=for%20doing%20so%20%E2%80%94-,readers,-may%20be%20able
We're people having public conversations here.
A priori, I would note that we split into races several orders of magnitude more recently than we split into sexes.
Nevertheless, we can observe that it was still long enough ago to produce differences in gross physiognomy (including of course skin color), and we know some consequential changes, like lactose tolerance and Ashkenazi intelligence, happened even more recently. One should not be *surprised* if it turned out there were racial differences in intelligence or other mental characteristics. But the parallel with sex is pretty rough.
Climate catastrophe is a weapon of war. A lie can he thought of as the most peaceful act of violence. Its morality should be contextualized the same way you would other violent acts.
Russia has enormous oil and natural gas reserves. Russia does not believe in the free market, they believe in leveraging those oil and gas reserves to exert political and social power. They are using fossil fuels as a weapon in a new kind of war. Climate catastrophe was designed to counter this weapon.
The idea is to accelerate the development of alternative energy sources to rob Russia of her power as quickly as possible. Ordinary market forces aren't up to the task, because ultimately the task is an act of war (like the Manhattan project) and the free market is had incentivizing things like major war weapons.
I may be mistaken, but I thought Russia was believed to subsidize the European greens, possibly because shutting down reactors and coal power plants makes Europe more reliant on Russian natural gas. Is there evidence the other way?
My guess would be that Russia funds anti-nuke energy groups that focus on destroying conventional energy sources instead of developing new ones, the west, the opposite. This seems to square with the NATO reporte.
Even if Russia is successful in the short-term with regards to shutting down reactors in Europe, the artificial distrust of fossil fuels injected into the public by the Climate catastrophe myth still creates an incentive for long-term development of alternative fuels.
New reactors are being built in America and climate change is what is motivating the belief in their necessity.
Typo: “The essential difference between male and female is their rule in reproduction. “
Thanks. Fixed.