Top all-time · #1820
Razib Khan
Personal blog · gnxp.comscienceculture
Razib Khan's personal blog at gnxp.com covers science and culture. Since 2007, 43 different Hacker News readers have linked it 84 times, most often “Intercourse and Intelligence”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- Intercourse and Intelligence9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2007-08-06
- /blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-10-07
- Making what Harvard is about transparent2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-10-12
What Hacker News says?
Read Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism , Azar Gat. https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2014/07/23/reality-may-not-ha... > Basically, Gat is refuting a modernist view, which has arguably gone from being revisionist to normative, that the concept and execution of a nation is a historically contingent construction of early modern Europe, and more precisely Revolutionary France o…
Comment linking /WordPress/2014/07/23/reality-may-not-have-your-bias/
on “Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?”Submitted Intercourse and Intelligence as a story · 52 points
HN discussion> Imagined Communities - the notion of a "nation" is only 300 years old and has no objective basis, only the fact that a group of people agree that it is a thing. The Lombards, Saxons, Franks, Magyars, Mongols and many, many others would disagree. And the Khmer, Mon, Viet and Tai. https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/03/26/communities-only-e... > Overall it is worth reading Imagined Communities because of its purport…
Comment linking /WordPress/2018/03/26/communities-only-exist-only-in-the-minds-of-europeans/
on “Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?”Submitted An education bubble? Data from the explosion of AP tests as a story · 24 points
HN discussionhttps://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/03/06/on-the-semiotics-o... > term “Judeo-Christian” was coherent, useful, and defensible. In general, I take a very skeptical view of the term, because I think it misleads the public as to the nature of some important facts and dynamics in the history of the West. Not the OP. The term Judaeo-Christian is dumb because it implies some kind of equality in the contribution of Jewish…
Comment linking /new/2009/08/29/we-are-all-protestants-now/
on “China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal”Submitted Monopoly allows innovation to flourish as a story · 17 points
HN discussionI thought Razib Kahn also had a response worth reading. This is all out of line with my previous impression of the New York Times as a respectable paper. Is the new era of virality driven news taking its toll on them? My impression is that they wouldn't have published this 10 years ago but perhaps I'm being naive? https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2019/01/19/194105/
Comment linking /WordPress/2019/01/19/194105/
on “Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times”Submitted Measuring the shelf-life of student interest in their subjects, using Google... as a story · 14 points
HN discussion> Why are you so sure that IQ isn't just a useful fiction that masks a large number of underlying factors that we don't fully understand? Why are you so sure that it is the best predictor of success in these fields. Perhaps other traits are equal or better predictors of success in a particular field, like tenaciousness, or conscientiousness, and perhaps IQ doesn't matter as much if one of those aren't present. Becau…
Comment linking /WordPress/2018/04/11/the-insight-episode-17-stuart-ritchie-intelligence-and-genes/
on “IQ Matters Less Than You Think”Submitted The natural history of song – a human universal as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSee "A Farewell to Alms" for a really interesting discussion of the rise of low time-preference individuals in medieval England, and the role this played in fomenting the Industrial Revolution. Short interview with the author here: http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/08/10-questions-for-greg-clark...
Comment linking /blog/2007/08/10-questions-for-greg-clark.php
on “Don’t! The secret of self-control”Submitted “Men of character” on the rise, cold numbers fading as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSee, this is exactly the problem I'm talking about. For example, you are referencing Feldman&Riskin, as if they have made some cogent argument. They have not, their review is a mess. Consider Nick Patterson's response: > Let us discuss the genetics of Educational Attainment (EA) defined as the number of years of schooling and measured in adults over 30 years old. EA takes up a good part both of the book and the revi…
Comment linking /WordPress/2022/05/12/nick-patterson-responds-to-feldman-and-riskin-in-nyrb/
on “Can growth continue?”Submitted The Re-Enchantment of the World as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAcademia is probably unavoidably abusive because it’s all personal relationships[1] but PhDs are definitely abusogenic compared to professional doctorates like JDs or MDs. You absolutely need your supervisor[2]. [1] Academic science is one of the most feudal environments I have ever personally experienced, and human genetics perhaps even more so. A few large groups of collaborators with connected pedigrees share pos…
Comment linking /WordPress/2018/03/
on “Abuse isn’t an “advising style”: Consequences of MIT sheltering abusive mentors”Submitted Variation in general intelligence and our evolutionary history as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttp://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/intercourse-and-intelligenc... "Each additional point of IQ increased the odds of virginity by 2.7% for males and 1.7% for females."
Comment linking /blog/2007/04/intercourse-and-intelligence.php
on “Towards Better Online Dating”Submitted Personality variation by region (USA) as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> Once the Abbasid Empire fell (the Islamic Golden Age period), none of the successor civilizations pursued such studies further - and none of them were Arabian empires, so that left the Arab world to stagnate. This might give the misleading impression that Arabs were a large part of the intellectual ferment of the Islamic Golden Age. They got it started by forming an enormous new empire but it was the work of their…
Comment linking /WordPress/2020/07/05/how-the-arabs-created-the-iranian-golden-age/
on “Modern mathematics emerged from “The House of Wisdom” in the 13th century”Submitted A Prayer for the Emperor (2005) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionPart of me wonders if things could improve if the resources put towards "drug discovery" could go further if they were allocated to tooling to allow for individuals to synthesize drugs tailored to their present state. With increasingly more data available on the drugs released by FDA, EMA, etc, combined with cheap genetic sequencing and other measurements, part of me wonders if the statistical approaches with some s…
Comment linking /WordPress/2018/04/10/notes-from-the-personal-genomic-inflection-point/
on “Eroom's law”Submitted Verwoerd’s Revenge as a story · 2 points
HN discussionTo be more precise, there are actually only a few known bone fragments of Denisovans, so details about their morphology is not known. You can tell that they’re different species by analyzing the DNA to figure out when the lineage diverged from a common ancestor with Neanderthals. In the case of Denisovans and Neanderthals, if I recall correctly, they diverged like 400k years before the specimens which have been foun…
Comment linking /WordPress/2018/08/22/hominins-are-still-having-sex-caught-in-flagrante-delicto/
on “Mum’s a Neanderthal, Dad’s a Denisovan: discovery of an ancient-human hybrid”Submitted The coddling of the neoconservative mind (2019) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAs far as I can tell, the entire "Out of Africa" model taken for granted within the MSM is being treated with increasing skepticism/nuance by scientists actually studying the facts on the ground, leading to these odd & increasingly ancient "first modern out of Africa" stories which may be confusing the public more than they're illuminating the history of human populations. Razib Khan had a good short primer on this…
Comment linking /WordPress/2017/04/28/beyond-out-of-africa-and-multiregionalism-a-new-synthesis/
on “Jawbone of Earliest Modern Human Out of Africa Discovered in Israeli Cave”Submitted Making what Harvard is about transparent as a story · 2 points
HN discussionBe grateful you can’t remember Imagined Communities. It conflates nations, nationalism and the nation state in an attempt to argue that nationalism postdates the American Revolution. It’s possibly the second worst widely read book in the humanities. Other scholars wrote more intelligently and with far greater insight on the nation and its relation to the state, before and after Anderson. Before, Ernest Gellner, afte…
Comment linking /WordPress/tag/imagined-communities/
on “The Books That Wouldn’t Die”Submitted Twitter and the Rise and Fall of Information Republics as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> I'm quite sure my experience is a lot more common than most people realize, and I think much of the world isn't ready for it. Nonpaternity is quite rare overall, and still unusual even when the putative father has so little paternity confidence that he demands a paternity test. https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/12/04/how-paternity-test...
Comment linking /WordPress/2018/12/04/how-paternity-testing-is-like-international-trade/
on “23andMe Informed Me My Husband and I Are Related”Submitted The Next American Oligarchy as a story · 2 points
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