The Wayward Axolotl

There is a lot of confusion over the concept of regression to the mean, so I thought I would try to explain what it is, and what it isn't. Let's start with a very simple example. Suppose you have 10 6-sided dice. Assume that these dice are all fair, so that the expected value on any given roll is 3.5. You roll each die once. Then you select the 5 dice that rolled the highest and set them aside. Probably the average of the top 5 dice is higher than 3.5, simply because you selected the highest rollers. Now roll those 5 dice a second time. Probably the average of the second roll is lower than the first: something closer to 3.5. That is regression to the mean. If you select a sample based on the measurement of a random variable X, the value of X within the sample is a biased estimator of X. Future measurements of X will tend to "regress" to the mean of X. No physical process is involved in this. It is simply the removal of sample bias by a second measurement or experime...

This is an excerpt from a book that I am writing. I am sitting in a coffee shop in Seattle, Washington. A few minutes ago, something amazing happened. I walked up to the counter, made eye contact with the pretty girl behind it, and said “Medium drip coffee, please”. She took my money, said “Thank you”, and gave me back some change. Then she asked me “Do you want room for cream?”. I said “Yes”. She poured coffee into a cup and handed it to me. I said “Thank you”. Then I found a table, sat down, and began to write. As I have just described it, the event was not remarkable at all. It was just a little slice of ordinary life. Behind that simple description, however, there lies an enormous amount of complexity. Once you start unraveling that complexity, it seems amazing that such an event could take place. For some reason, my brain generated the intention to buy a cup of coffee. That intention was selected from an almost infinite number of possibilities. Somehow, I knew that I coul...

In case you follow this blog and not my YT channel, I am posting a couple of links here. I created an ebook. It is a compilation of (mostly) cleaned up blog posts and video texts, with some new stuff. It makes a great last minute gift for your liberal uncle. Check it out here:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078H8KJLK. I have another book in the works, but I thought I would put out this one first. If you use discord and want to talk to me, you can find me on discord here: https://discord.gg/zfMtWK2. Merry Christmas!

“Cuck” is a favorite insult of the alt-right. It is used to refer to anyone who puts other races ahead of their own, personally or politically. For example, a family that adopts a black child would be described as “cucked”. More importantly to the alt-right, social policies are “cucked” if they put the interests of non-whites ahead of whites. The immigration policies of most Western countries are extremely cucked: they import large numbers of non-whites into white countries. The “cuck” insult is based on two metaphors. One is the metaphor of the cuckoo: a bird that lays its eggs in the nests of other birds. The host bird is deceived into raising the offspring of the cuckoo instead of its own. The term “cuckold” was commonly used to refer to a man whose wife has the child of another man. The other metaphor is conceptualizing the collective as an individual. An individual has reproductive interests, and (via the metaphor) a collective has them too. A collective that reproduces the g...

These days, most people seem to believe that overpopulation is not a problem, although the reasons for that belief differ. Also, most people view eugenics as both evil and unnecessary. The conventional “wisdom” on these topics is wrong. Overpopulation and dysgenics are serious problems. If we don’t solve these problems, they will destroy modern civilization. The idea that overpopulation is not a problem is usually based on the evidence of recent history: that we have been able to expand food production to keep up with population growth for a hundred years or so, and thus (I guess the reasoning goes) we will be able to keep doing this…forever?? The absurdity of this is pretty obvious. Imagine that you are walking up a mountain in the fog. You can’t see the top of the mountain, and it might take longer than you expected to reach the top. Just because you can’t see the top, and haven’t reached it yet, that doesn’t mean the mountain is infinitely tall. Just because we haven’t reach...

This is a story about a friend from my youth. I’ll call her Indigo. I met Indigo when we were both in the second year of university. I didn’t go to university immediately after high school, so I was a few years older than her when we met. We were in the same program, Cognitive Science, and we had similar interests in philosophy, psychology and linguistics. She was very intelligent and open to new ideas. We naturally became friends, and would often hang out between classes, talking about life, the universe and everything. Indigo came from a sheltered, middle-class background. I came from a much grittier background, and my life experiences were a lot different from hers. There was also a political difference. She had left-wing, collectivist views, and I had more right-wing, individualist views. We would argue political philosophy sometimes, but in a friendly way. When we finished our undergraduate degrees, we went our separate ways. She went somewhere to do a grad program in u...

Nazism is usually presented as a negative moral exemplar without any rational analysis. Nazism is also linked to the theory of evolution, again, without any rational analysis. Nazism is often referred to as “Darwinian’’, although what this means is never spelled out. Certain ideas that were incorporated into Nazism, such as eugenics, are now considered evil because of their association with Nazism. Any use of evolutionary theory to understand human nature and/or solve social problems is equated with Nazism and rejected as evil. This places some very important ideas off-limits to discussion and debate. In this essay, I am going to analyze and critique the Nazi worldview from a “Darwinian” perspective. I will also critique the popular moral narrative about the Nazis and WWII. In the modern Western mythos, Hitler is the epitome of evil. He is simply portrayed as an evil person motivated by hatred. The Allies are presented as morally good, and their victory in WWII is portrayed as ...