Falsifying the NPPN hypothesis

Here is a thought concerning the oft-expressed assertion that an overrepresentation in the number of Nobel Prizes awarded to individuals of Jewish descent is an indicator of Jewish intelligence, or what may be described as the Nobel Prize Per Nation (NPPN) hypothesis. What got me thinking about this was that on Russia Today, it was pointed out by a Los Angeles film critic that the film Jojo Rabbit, which has been nominated for six Oscars, is an average film that would never have been nominated for an award if its subject matter was not the Holocaust.

So, it should be possible to count up the number of Oscar nominations awarded to Holocaust-related films, then compare the Oscar nomination/Holocaust film ratio to the ratio of Oscars nominations given to all non-Holocaust films. My hypothesis is that the Holocaust film overperformance will actually exceed the reported statistical Nobel Prize overperformance of 99,900 percent, and thereby add additional weight to my statistical demolition of the ridiculous “115 average IQ” rhetoric.

I am not going to bother testing the hypothesis for the obvious reason that a) I have already proved what I wanted to prove to my own satisfaction, b) I don’t care who is, on average, smarter than whom, and c) I really don’t care about prizes, Hollywood, or Hollywood prizes. But if some film buff feels like putting in the effort, tell me how it works out and I’ll post the results here.

Of course, the most obvious disproof of the NPPN hypothesis is to simply turn the argument on its head. If it is true that a high ratio of Nobel Prizes per nation is a proof of high average national intelligence, then a low ratio of NPPN  must be a proof of low average intelligence. Since China only has 11 Nobel Prize winners despite having a very large population, (6.9 percent of its statistical share) and India has only 10 despite a population of 1.2 billion, (6.6 percent of its statistical share), the NPPN argument rests upon the idea that the Chinese and Indian people are considerably less intelligent than most of the nations on Earth.

It is also worth noting that although Jews are said to have won a total of 41 percent of all the Nobel Prizes in economics, there is no Nobel Prize in economics. It is actually the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, a prize that was established in 1968 by a donation from Sweden’s central bank, the Sveriges Riksbank, on the bank’s 300th anniversary and is not one of the prizes that Alfred Nobel established in his will in 1895.

Anyhow, the Nobel Prizes awarded to Barack Obama and Bob Dylan should be more than sufficient to demonstrate the total absurdity of the hyphothesis. The NPPN hypothesis is no more credible than the argument that the three greatest science fiction novelists are Lois McMaster Bujold, NK Jemisin, and Connie Willis because they have won the most Hugo Awards for Best Novel.

Neither credentials nor participation trophies are indicative of intelligence.

The horrors of dyscivilization

Of course the medical and scientific communities lied about unborn children not feeling pain:

Unborn babies may be able to feel pain before reaching 24 weeks, say scientists – meaning they could suffer as they are being aborted. Until now, the consensus of medical opinion has been that foetuses cannot feel pain before 24 weeks’ gestation, after which abortion is illegal in Britain except in special cases.

But two medical researchers, including a ‘pro-choice’ British pain expert who used to think there was no chance foetuses could feel pain that early, say recent studies strongly suggest the assumption is incorrect.

The studies indicate unborn babies might be able to feel ‘something like pain’ as early as 13 weeks, they say.

Reason dictated that no abortions be permitted until it was possible to conclusively determine when life began. But there has never been anything reasonable about the Promethean agenda to destabilize Western civilization and normalize child sacrifice.

And wishing that reality were different than it has been reliably observed to be is no basis for science. For technology, yes, but science, no.

Choose wisely

The former His Royal Highness didn’t:

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will no longer use HRH titles, will REPAY £2.4million of public cash spent on their Frogmore Cottage home and receive no more public cash.

Notice how behavioral patterns trumped situational status here.

UPDATE: Apparently reports that they will not be using HRH titles are not correct, as Meghan Markle has already sent out a tweet using it.

Where everybody knows your face

I’ve seen this facial recognition software in action. It’s both creepy and impressive.

Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos.

Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.

His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

Being publicly recognizable is not really a concern to someone like me, since I was never given a choice about going public on the Internet or not. But it is a massive problem for the average individual, even those who have been careful to avoid social media. Sooner, rather than later, nations and their lawmakers are going to have to decide whether to embrace or reject the use of identification technology. I assume that most of them are going to embrace it, although the governments that come after the complete collapse of the neo-liberal world order may not.

Apples to apples

I was pretty sure that I was faster than Derrick Henry back in the day, but I didn’t realize I was THAT much faster:

Also a standout track & field athlete, Henry competed as a sprinter at Yulee from 2010 to 2011. He posted a personal-best time of 11.11 seconds in the 100-meter dash at the 2011 FHSAA 2A District 3 Championships, where he placed seventh.

I found that mildly amusing, as my best high school 100-meter time was 10.82. Of course, it’s not just Henry’s speed that makes him a great running back. It’s one thing to run that fast at 135 pounds, it’s another thing to do it at 235. I remember watching Darrell Thompson play at the University of Minnesota during my college track days and thinking, “I wonder if I could do that? He’s slower than me… but then, he is probably a LOT harder to bring down.” Thompson and I were at the same meet once, but we didn’t run against each other. He was beaten by one of my teammates, though.

It’s even more amusing to see that Wikipedia considers Henry to be “a standout track & field athlete” when it doesn’t even mention my track & field career, which included multiple conference championships, both individual and team, at the high school and NCAA D1 levels.

UPDATE: An alternate history sidenote. In my very brief football career, which ended at the age of 8, I almost never got on the field because the coach always played this one boy who was very fast and strong at running back. The boy also grew up to be an excellent sprinter in high school, although we never happened to run against each other due to being in different conferences and regions. But there was no shame in sitting on the bench behind him, as he wound up being an All-American running back who held his conference’s career rushing record for 12 years.

Years later, that coach apologized to me for never even trying to give me a chance to get on the field. But I didn’t have a problem with it at the time, and it was probably a blessing in the end because I’m the only one of the three Minnesota sprinters mentioned who hasn’t had any knee or hip surgeries. I certainly wouldn’t still be playing soccer. But it is intriguing to think of how good one high school’s football and track teams might have been if I’d stayed in the public school system and continued playing football instead of soccer.

It’s not as if he’s wrong

The truth is that many of the U.S. military’s leaders and senior officials are losers, dopes, and babies. Just look at their track record. They’re fortunate that Trump isn’t as ruthless as Stalin, who would have had them all shot for their obvious inability to complete their missions, if not treason:

The president reportedly called Afghanistan a “loser war,” and told his military leaders: “You’re all losers… You don’t know how to win anymore… I want to win… We don’t win any wars anymore… We spend $7 trillion, everybody else got the oil and we’re not winning anymore.” It’s reported that Trump was so angry at this point that he wasn’t breathing properly.

In his most incendiary comment, Trump—a man who, remember, managed to get out of military duty in Vietnam due to a supposed bone-spur problem—is said to have told the assembled forces, “I wouldn’t go to war with you people… You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”

The comment reportedly left the room dumbfounded. Tillerson was “visibly seething,” and decided to speak up. The secretary of state said, “No, that’s just wrong… Mr. President, you’re totally wrong. None of that is true.” When the meeting ended soon afterward, Tillerson reportedly stood with a small group of confidants and said, “He’s a fucking moron.”

One senior official summed up the meeting: “We needed to change how he thinks about this, to course correct… They were dismayed and in shock when not only did it not have the intended effect, but he dug in his heels and pushed it even further on the spectrum, further solidifying his views.”

For all the feigned indignation of the Washington Post writers, the fact is that the god-emperor was absolutely right and is still absolutely right about the ineptitude of the U.S. military leadership. Notice the wildly inappropriate attitude of the senior official – almost certainly Deep State – who clearly believes that his views, and the views of his colleagues, take precedence over the views of the American people and their duly-elected President of the United States.

Julius Caesar won the Gallic War in eight years. The Allies won World War II in six years. This pathetic collection of inept, corrupt, and mediocre perfumed princes haven’t been able to defeat anyone since 1950. Except, of course, Grenada.

At this point, I don’t like the new U.S. Space Force’s odds against the space invaders. Or even the asteroids, for that matter.

The virtue of failure

Mike McDaniel, the 49ers run-game coordinator, explains how the various failures of the coaches on the Mike Shanahan tree has led to their astonishing success this year, with heavy influences on three of the four NFL teams still in contention:

“Our greatest strength has been our weakness, where our longest tenure at a place has been three years,” McDaniel says in August. “And we’ve had to do it with not always elite players. Some of the biggest shortcomings, the worst things that can happen to a coach, is the system that’s set up for failure. How do you get jobs? You win. People that win in the same place, those people get promoted. Well, often times those people—there are compounding variables for success. And they won because, Tom Brady, for instance.”

He continued: “What getting fired but still being the league allows you to do is you have so many different things where you have to figure out a way to make sh– work. And that has made us night-and-day a thousand times better; the best years we’ve ever coached have been the years where we had to scratch and claw for everything. To lose a ton and stay in the NFL—that was the perfect storm for us to expand and innovate.”

It reminds me of Mike Cernovich’s advice to me: scratch and claw. Reinforce success and abandon failure. Eventually, you’ll be able to refine your approach to find something that not only works, but succeeds.

The scholar of Middle Earth

Christopher Tolkien, the great champion of his father’s literary estate, has died at 95:

It is with great sadness that we can confirm that Tolkien’s son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien has died aged 95.

Christopher was born in Leeds, United Kingdom, on 21 November 1924. After a childhood in Oxford, he joined the RAF during the Second World War and was stationed to South Africa. After the war, he finished his studies and became a lecturer in Old and Middle English as well as Old Icelandic at the University of Oxford. After his father’s death in 1973, he became the literary executor of the Tolkien Estate and went on to edit and publish his father’s unpublished material starting with The Silmarillion in 1977 and ending with The Fall of Gondolin in 2018.

Upon hearing the news, Tolkien Society Chair, Shaun Gunner, said:

All of us in the Tolkien Society will share in the sadness at the news of Christopher Tolkien’s death, and we send our condolences to Baillie, Simon, Adam, Rachel and the whole Tolkien family at this difficult time. Christopher’s commitment to his father’s works have seen dozens of publications released, and his own work as an academic in Oxford demonstrates his ability and skill as a scholar. Millions of people around the world will be forever grateful to Christopher for bringing us The Silmarillion, The Children of Húrin, The History of Middle-earth series and many others. We have lost a titan and he will be sorely missed.

Tolkien scholar Dr Dimitra Fimi reflected on Christopher’s academic contribution:

Tolkien studies would never be what it is today without Christopher Tolkien’s contribution. From editing The Silmarillion to the mammoth task of giving us the History of Middle-earth series, he revealed his father’s grand vision of a rich and complex mythology. He gave us a window into Tolkien’s creative process, and he provided scholarly commentary that enriched our understanding of Middle-earth. He was Middle-earth’s cartographer and first scholar.

The Tolkien Society sends its deepest condolences to the Tolkien family.

Christopher Tolkien was the very model of the ideal literary executor. He not only protected his father’s legacy, but substantially added to it through his editing and publishing of the source material that were the foundation for his father’s landmark books. He was a good and faithful servant to his father and Middle Earth fandom, and both Christians and Tolkien fans can rejoice at the thought of the proud approbation with which his father will have welcomed him to his reward.

Very few sons of great men are worthy of them; as the son of a very successful man myself, I can testify to the soul-crushing burden paternal success tends to impose upon a young man, especially a young man of ambition. But through his embrace of a difficult role to which he was literally born, Christopher Tolkien undoubtedly proved himself worthy of his great father.

The Grey Havens

Must. Preserve. Delusion. Bubble.

It’s always interesting to see how Gammas are able to stubbornly deny any facts that contradict their personal narrative. As always, few things cause them to burn with rage like the knowledge that others are considerably smarter than they are.

Hey Voxxy poo, quick question, how do you justify the fact in your head that you’re a 150 IQ supergenius but then know that a complete moron like Owen says hes within 3 IQ points of you? I mean, Owen is a legitimate flat earther at this point and has never been a smart guy, except to the dumbest of people that buy all flavors of bullshit. Doesnt it kinda hurt your brand as ‘high IQ guy’ to also have another self confessed high IQ guy next to you that’s very much obviously not high IQ? I’m not saying Owen is stupid, hes probably average give or take a bit. Just wondering your thoughts on that!

First, I don’t justify anything at all. My IQ was measured at a high level as a child in studies at Harvard. After taking the IOWA tests in elementary school I was placed into an elite state math program. In fifth grade I was excused from most of my classes and was permitted to spend most of the school day in the library since I already knew all the material. I was in the 99th percentile for both the PSAT and the SAT back when they were aptitude tests rather than achievement tests. And I was both a National Merit Finalist and a member of Mensa, and was offered free rides at many universities.

Second, a 150 IQ does not make one a supergenius. I have known three people with IQs in excess of 170 very well, and I would not consider any of them to be geniuses, let alone supergeniuses. My best friend also has a very slightly higher IQ than me and he is not a genius either. More importantly, IQ is only a proxy measure for cognitive capacity, whereas genius is a description of genuine intellectual accomplishment worthy of historical note. Martin van Creveld is a genius. Prince was a genius. I have not yet accomplished anything I would consider to be worthy of the term.

And third, Owen is obviously quite intelligent. No one who is that rhetorically quick and effective is not. His ability to distill a complex dialectic argument down to a two-word rhetorical nuke, and to do so instantly, is almost unmatched in my experience. The fact that he is quite willing to entertain even the most outlandish theories is a sign of intelligence and curiosity; absolutely no intelligence is required to blindly accept the mainstream narrative despite the various anomalies that can be observed.

Ihateowenbenjamin is also back. He can’t figure out why I never email him back, but that doesn’t hinder his ability to practice armchair psychiatry. Notice, again, the desperate gamma need to believe that someone is not considerably smarter than he is, as well as the projection of his obsession with his own perceived intelligence.

Hey loser,

I saw you posted some of my email on your blog. Funny that you NEVER respond to any points brought up by anyone. It is always just sarcastic remarks to your idiotic followers about how smart you are. Why do you never respond?

Try responding to this. You talk daily about your lawsuit against Patreon, yet have NEVER said what it is about. WHY are you suing Patreon? Because Owen got kicked off? Clearly that is not enough reason to sue them… Are you denying that Owen broke TOS? How would you know if Owen broke TOS or not since you claim to almost never watch videos anyways?

Also you frequently mention that you were a “National Merit Semifinalist” or something along those lines. Please direct me to some proof of this! A picture, a link, a list, etc.

Also, comment on if you have ever considered that you may have Narcissistic Personality Disorder? You fit all the criteria. I guarantee you have this disorder. Your IQ is nowhere near 150 by the way!

But yea. it is clear you are a fraud. You never respond to any legitimate criticism. You have been caught lying on multiple occasions. in your mind you will deny this because of your personality disorder, you find ways to justify your lies.

Respond. Bet you can’t.

I have never said a single word about a “lawsuit” against Patreon, much less “my” lawsuit against them. I do not have any cause or standing to sue Patreon, since I have never been a user of their site. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, are there at present any lawsuits against Patreon; some of the recent changes to their terms of use were intended to impose lawsuits in the place of the previously selected alternative forms of dispute resolution. I am neither a lawyer nor a litigant, I am merely a humble philosopher and dark lord who occasionally finds some small amusement in reading corporate terms and policies and contemplating their vagaries.

Another certain Gamma tell is the inability to distinguish “can’t” from “won’t”.

What did I tell you?

Did I not say that Patreon was going to change its terms of use again before the end of February?

From: The Patreon team
Subject: Updates to our policies
Date: 16 January 2020

As part of our ongoing commitment to privacy and to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”), we are updating our Privacy Policy. We are also taking this opportunity to update our Terms of Use and Benefit Guidelines.

Now how could I know that? Here is another prediction. They will change them again before the end of March….