throwaway4666

I don't hate email per se but these days receiving an email usually means someone wants something from you (money, paperwork, or even just a reply) and that's stress inducing. You see your email notifications and sigh 'okay, now who wants what from me again?'

>Second, twin studies have shown that intelligence is highly heritable, with about half of variance explained by genetics (and half "non-shared environment", also known as random chance) - we might not know what genes are responsible, but you don't need to know the genes to compare identical and fraternal twins.

Heritability does not imply the existence of a genetic mechanism. Twin studies have a number of flaws that further demonstrate my points about standards of methodology that geneticists wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. Even not taking into account stuff like equal environment assumption, identical twins simply do not have the same DNA. Yes, even identical twins, look it up. There are also a number of things that are heritable without involving a genetic mechanism at all, such as the various microbiomes or epigenetics. And of course there are things like transmission of de novo mutations over up to two generations (e.g. affecting germinal cells of one's fetus).

Regarding the 'IQ is the best finding we have on psychologist' point. Being the best in a field that's a largely grift doesn't make one any less of a grift. IQ (and g) still has flaws that no one in the hard science would consider it. For instance, it is gaussian for no reason and despite most social outcomes performances being fat-tailed, meaning the theoretical covariance between IQ and any kind of relevant task is undefined (and its in-sample variance finite but meaningless). There's also zero neurological or genetic data confirming the existence of g, making it a purely imaginary construct that only exists in the minds of psychologists. That this is the best they can come up with just speaks even worse of the field as a whole.

I think Hikaru being American is the main reason for the boom.

Yes, I'm sure it was the irrelevance that triggered the downvotes.

Well of course if you're an emigrant you're going to have a poor opinion of it. Meanwhile the majority of Russians have a positive view of Lenin.

Notice how none of them are actual geneticists. Prominent figures in the actual genetics community (e.g. Graham Coop or Ewan Birney) have dismissed most of his stuff.

"Intelligence research" is, like most of psychology, an elaborate grift designed to give a handful of people cushy tenured jobs. Actual geneticists, that is, people who study how genes actually work, wouldn't touch the standards of rigor of "intelligence research" with a ten foot pole. Note how people supporting Hsu tend to be psychologists while people dismissing his research tend to be geneticists. It's also worth nothing that Hsu is also out-of-field himself (he used to be a physicist) and only got recently into genomics. That he got stuff wrong that's basically understoood by the whole genetics community isn't that surprising.

This is such a typical economist thinkpiece, attempting to compute stuff that doesn't exist and drawing wild extrapolations or equivalences so you can put a number, any number, on something. Seriously, look at this paragraph:

>Statistically, every $10 million to $24 million lost in U.S. incomes results in one additional death. One portion of this effect is through unemployment, which leads to an average increase in mortality of at least 60 percent. That translates into 7,200 lives lost per month among the 36 million newly unemployed Americans, over 40 percent of whom are not expected to regain their jobs. In addition, many small business owners are near financial collapse, creating lost wealth that results in mortality increases of 50 percent. With an average estimate of one additional lost life per $17 million income loss, that would translate to 65,000 lives lost in the U.S. for each month because of the economic shutdown.

Only in the mind of an economist does this make a shred of sense. Normal people just shake their head and go "wtf, people's lives aren't equal to virtual money that failed to exist". Actually rigorous people shake their head and go "wait, these statistical associations are just correlations and not necessarily transitive, so every time you translate money into outcomes you end up taking intellectual shortcuts that add up until you're spouting nonsense". You need to lack both sensitivity and rigor to put numbers on things like that, a quintessential property of libertarian economists.

Having had an xyz domain name I have to warn people that many mail servers will automatically think you're a spammer if you send email with it. No idea why.

Telegram does have E2E encryption if you toggle secret chats, it's just not by default because most users don't care about privacy and just want the cool features.

Were you educated in the American school system by any chance?

Let's be honest the real reason to use Telegram wasn't security, I mean whenever the topic comes up here moxie (or his advocates) pops up and tells us it's trash and we should all use signal instead.

The real reason to use telegram is that it's miles away the best messenging program out there. It's as user friendly as whatsapp while having completely seamless desktop/mobile integration (something whatsapp and signal have failed to do), it only requires a phone number for the initial signup, and generally speaking it has all sorts of cool features and less bullshit than alternatives.

Then there are the little things - you can create multiple accounts and switch seamlessly, you can delete whatever message from whomever for everyone without leaving a trace (if it bothers you just switch to secret chats), all links are listed in each convo, you have pretty much unlimited and unrestricted cloud storage, etc.

Then you have all the gravy like cool tools for groupchat admin, channels, and bots of course. You can order a taxi or search up a book on scihub (bypassing countrywide blocking) with telegram. You can even do bizarre stuff like discover people around you or verify your identity on a service with telegram.

Yeah my texts are probably being read by the FSB. So what? Better that than the NSA, frankly. If I really want secrecy I'll use Tor or Signal.

All of it can be dispensed with if you pay even more