Post of the year: 2024

Winner: David Reich

1. Winner — The David Reich paper. Evidence of selection for intelligence, lighter pigmentation, and socioeconomic status in Europeans within the last 10,000 years.

2. The origin of the woke: a George Mason view, by Werner. A synthesis of Robin Hanson’s signalling theory of politics and wokeness studies, hypothesizing that elites are incentivized to signal woke beliefs to communicate that they are willing to cooperate with non-Whites.

3. The Vast Emptiness of Social Psychology, by Cremieux. A case by case debunking of widely-believed myths in human psychology.

4. Robin Hanson’s new cultural drift idea. He posits that cultures can change randomly due to social trends, memetics, material conditions, and technological progress; there is no reason to think that these changes are adaptive at a macro-level; and if there is no competition between cultures, then the ideas that win are the ones that spread. If fertility is, to some extent, culturally and memetically spread; that low fertility is a result of cultural drift; then it follows that the only way for the low fertility culture to be competed out of is for the low fertility monoculture to drift backwards to high fertility or for it to disappear.

5. Guy tests hundreds of bay area foods for microplastics. Basically all of them have them to differing degrees, but most of them are under federal limits (is that supposed to be a consolation?). Processed foods, old army rations, and food heated inside plastic containers have more of them on average.

6. Worst Boyfriend Ever, the best new substack of the year, which chronicles how a 25 year old man cheats on his girlfriend multiple times in excruciating detail.

7. Neoreaction: a postmortem, by Spandrell. An older figure reflects on why the NRx blogosphere died, why ethnonationalism is dying, how robust cathedralism is as a political system, and how authoritarianism was abused by the old and neurotic during the COVID pandemic.

8. The Eve Theory of Consciousness, by Andrew Cutler. I don’t think we will ever get to the bottom of why we became conscious, but this seems to be the best theory we have at the moment.

9. True Discipline’s thread on what is going on in South Korea.

10. The Blue Zone distraction, by Cremieux. Those hotspots with a bunch of supercentarians? Fake.

11. The politics of hereditarianism, by Spandrell. Argues that hereditarianism is true, but a terrible political message. Largely agree, and wrote a spiritual sequel to his article on my blog.

12. Gwern’s (first ever) interview with Dwarkesh Patel.

13. E Pluribus, Pauciores (Out of Many, Fewer): Diversity and Birth Rates, by Gurun and Solomon. A preprint which argued that increased racial diversity explained 20-44% of the reduction in American fertility came out this year.

14. Mid women get spanked less, by Aella. A statistical deep dive in the non-linear correlations between self-reported attractiveness… And basically everything.

15. Deep dive: money does not buy much happiness, by Maxim Lott. Scientific inquiry into what causes happiness has been rather… Sad. The strongest predictor of happiness seems to be personality, which is largely innate.

16. Incels rising, by uncorrelated. An empirical study of whether inceldom has risen in the past 30 years, and it turns out it has, though perhaps not in the way people thought it did.

17. Why political theory is overrated, by Shako.

18. How the alt-right won, by Walt Bismarck. Not sure about the conclusion myself, but definitely a must-read.

19. Why is academia liberal now?, by Wehrkat/Norman Angleson. In the past academics were only slightly more liberal than conservative, but now they are overwhelmingly left wing. Neither IQ, age, openness, or changes in political beliefs within the general population are good explanations; the most empirically supported hypothesis is discrimination.

20. Walt Bismarck’s interviews with his 17 yo intern [1] [2]. Both of them are hilarious.

21. Politics is astrology for incels, by Deep Left Analysis.

22. How immigration causes people to flee opportunity, by Arctotherium.

23. Is Public Health Declining, by Wehrkat/Norman Angleson. A massive empirical investigation as to whether the public has gotten more unhealthy, and the final finding is a null that trends in the direction of better health. Fairly decisive evidence against a strong version of the mutational load hypothesis.

24. The Long-Term Fiscal Impact of Immigrants in the Netherlands, Differentiated by Motive, Source Region and Generation. by Jan van de Beek, Joop Hartog, Gerrit Kreffer, Hans Roodenburg. The usual findings

25. Taking the Flynn Effect seriously, by Cremieux. Latent and observed differences between cohorts seem to consistently yield different results, particularly the latent methods do not find the same FE gains that are found when observed methods are used.

26. Data-Driven science: a paradigm shift or a misnomer?, by Liminal Revolutions. Argues that the new form of computational data science is not a “science” at all, and is closer to engineering.

27. Max: “If you do not have the capacity to question our most deeply held social values (anti-racism, anti-sexism, etc), the likelihood that you have the capacity to wrestle with and say something useful about other questions fundamental to our social and philosophy structure is near zero.”

28. Why is Israel Fertile?, by NonZionism. Documents that high Israel fertility is largely due to its Orthodox minority and the mimetic effect that they have on the rest of Israel. More babies around = people want to have more children.

29. Do Looks Matter in Dating?, by Nuance Pill. It seems that they function as a selection criteria in early dating, but that do not predict success in relationships very well after that period. In a similar veign, height is a poor predictor of relationship success within men.

30. America has Black nationalism, not balkanization, by Richard Hanania. An alternative take on racial diversity in America that views Whites/Hispanics/Asians as a semi-compatible combination of peoples, while Black people are the odd ones out.

31. Roko’s proposal to live on giant icebergs.

32. Robin Hanson and Scott Alexander’s back and forth on medicine. First Scott, then Hanson, then Scott, then Hanson. I largely side with Hanson.

33. Social media and depression: a nothingburger.

34. What is anti-semitism?, by NonZionism. TL;DR: anti-semitism is when problems are caused by Jews, and the solution is to kick the Jews out.

35. Why advice does not work, by Dynomight. Multiple issues here: perhaps the advice is bad, perhaps it is driven by signalling, perhaps everybody’s path in life is different, or perhaps when advice works it is called something else: common sense.

36. Race in America and the Dork Right, by Bronze Age Pervert. Touches on a certain profile that has inhabited the HBD community, which can be described as a non-White, dorky, and high IQ immigrant who seeks to ally with the White left against the Blacks and lower class Whites. A foolish political strategy that stems more from a pathological mind than any kind of practical sense.

37. Why Marxism was replaced by Rawlsianism, by Joseph Heath. The short of it is that the left really likes equality, that a close reading of Marx would suggest that economic equality is not a result of Marxism, so they jumped ship to a philosopher who supported their cause.

38. Are men smarter than women?, by Richard Hanania. A well-researched and argued article that finds that men are likely about 2-4 IQ points higher than women.

39. Mediocrity as an extistential risk, by David Pinsof. I do not like this writer’s style — too profane and nihilistic, but this article in particular was well-written.

40. Interracial marriage increases racism, by Deep Left Analysis. The idea is that if assortative mating exists between races, then genetic differences between monoracial people will increase across time.

41. Autism disagnoses are rising, but not phenotypic autism, by Emil Kirkegaard. Self-explanatory title — the culprit is the change in diagnostic criteria across time.

42. Traditional Values are self-evidently correct, by Person Online.

43. 10 papers that changed human genetics, by Razib Khan.

44. AI Doomerism as Science Fiction, by Richard Hanania.

45. Uberboyo on Freud and Jung’s rivalry.

46. We have passed peak pollution, by Hannah Richtie. Short, but important article.

47. The Dissident Right and its Discontents, by The Distributist. We might hate the term the ‘dissident right’. But it is here to stay.

48. Why you should believe more conspiracy theories, by The Alternative Hypothesis. A meta-level analysis (not the academic kind) of the idea of conspiracy theories and a defense in belief in them.

49. Wokism is just beginning, by Nathan Cofnas. I don’t agree with his model of wokeness, but I agree with his conclusion.

50. The Biosingularity is Near, by Anatoly Karlin. Defense of the use of AGI/human enhancement to stimulate growth.

51. Murder as a measuring stick, by Arctotherium. Evidence that modern medicine has suppressed the increase in violent behaviour among the general population.

52. The changes in vibes — why did they happen?, by Tyler Cowen, where he details why he thinks the zeitgeist began to favour the right around 2024.

53. Secularism is here to stay, by Keith Woods. Mirrors my own forecast of religion.

54. Why atheism is failing, by the Machiavellians. An ironic choice to put under Keith’s article, but rationalist atheism is not the only form of secularism.

55. ‘Woke Right’ is the new paranoid style in American politics, by Josh Neal. James Lindsay’s abuse of the term “woke right” (advice: mute that word on twitter) is mostly a rehashing of how the old right was dismissed as neurotic and provincial by Hofstader.

56. Manchildren: a symptom or a disease, by Sectionalism Archive. An article that is critical of zoomers and millennials who stick with childish media, but argues that this is a symptom of decline more than a cause of it.

57. The post-capitalist economy, by Bingo. The right cannot address the current economy by appealing to the same free market principles that it adhered to in the cold war era. Now we live in a managerial, corporatist economy and must accept that reality.

58. Don’t hold frame: do this instead, by GLO. An alternative take on the concept of holding frame within relationships that is less focused on dominance and more on a shared vision and narrative of the relationship.

59. Where parents can make a difference, by Inquisitive Bird. The idea that behavioural genetics studies suggest that parenting does not matter at all was perhaps.. a bit hasty.

60. The Mediterranean race does not exist, by Sectionalism Archive. Genetic deep dive that looks into whether there is a Mediterranean race, and it does not appear to.

61. East Asian Extinction Fertility is Genetic, by Futurist Right. A self-explanatory title which prompted me to write a defense of the idea that differences in fertility between groups could be genetic, despite the fact that the trait is generally not heritable.

62. How real was the Flynn Effect?, by Peter Frost. Not very real.

63. Fake Tradition is Traditional, by Scott Alexander. Tradition has always been arbitrary and performative. Nietzsche talks about this (no really, he does).

64. Ouroborus, by Polytropos. One of the better posters on twitter writes a series of aphormisms on philosophy and Nietzsche.

65. The myth of nordic rehabilitation, by Inquisitive Bird. An article that details that Nordic countries do not have unusually low levels of criminal rehabilitiation, contrary to popular belief.

66. New study: Intelligence and Group Differences in Preference for Breasts over Buttocks, by Emil Kirkegaard. Yes, you did read that right.

In terms of my own posts, I would say the best were:

1. A meta-analysis of dysgenic fertility by country.

2. My response to Spandrell’s post on the politics of hereditarianism.

3. Looking back on what I have learned in my 20 years of consciousness. TL;DR: research the biggest questions first, reason from first principles, don’t be a rationalist, most hard work is wasted, conventional wisdom is usually true, the world is generally mediocre, advice does not work, Nietzsche was the best philosopher, and morality is signalling. I thought it was too vain to post it on my mainstack, so I posted it on the offstack where I schizopost about anime and philosophy, but it attracted quite a bit of attention anyway.

4. I developed a new (I don’t really know if it is actually new, just that I had to discover it independently) way to calculate selection differentials that involve group differences to answer whether executions were the cause of the decline of violent behaviour in medieval England. From what I could see, it is unlikely they were the primary cause, contra to the HBD canon.

5. My review of the literature on mutational load, which suggests that it is unlikely that its effects are large enough to cause a genotypic collapse soon.

6. I’m not sure if any of my media reviews would qualify, but if any of them were to, it would be my review of Re:Zero — S1 and S2.

Edit: I left out a few notable contenders, such as the Blue Zone, taking the Flynn Effect seriously, mediocrity as an existential risk, and a few others. I also called it the post of 2025 — a little ahead of myself.