Plomin likes to say that various components of nurture “matter, but they don’t make a difference”. But the benefits of good teaching, of school lunches and breakfasts, of having textbooks and air-conditioning and heating and plumbing have been established irrefutably. And they actually are causal: we know why stable blood sugar improves mental concentration. Yet Plomin dismisses such effects as “unsystematic and unstable, so there’s not much we can do about them”.
What’s scariest to me (as the article writer notes) is that there are some very good conclusions in the book, which help to mask the horrifyingly bad ones. The pull-quote above demonstrates the kind of horrifyingly bad conclusions laid out in the book: Plomin argues that genes outweigh social interventions – it’s Eugenics 3.0.
It’s the same issue with global warming. Yes, terrible thing, but the economic impact of doing something to fix it will impact the people who have money.
100 companies are responsible for most of the problem of climate change.
That’s it. All the individual contributions of recycling, and lifestyle changes will do fuck all to fix it (which is not to say don’t do it, but don’t kid yourself) if those 100 companies continue to do business as usual.
Mars is essentially in the same orbit… Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.
Percival Lowell thought he saw canals and a blue strip next to the receding ice caps. But he recognized that the Martian atmosphere was probably far too thin to support Earthling life. He speculated that Martian life had adapted to it. E.C. Slipher, one of the pioneers of photographic astronomy of the planets, also believed he saw canals in his photographic plates.
I think the enduring, ignorant myths about population growth, what automation is good for, how machines are designed, built, maintained, and used, all these serve the the small-minded emotional needs of slightly clever rich scumbags like Musk, Bezos, and the extended families of every aristocracy ever. Their negative-sum exploitatations exist within their universe of stupidity, so they have to keep it going with ever more stupid magic bullshit.
So dumb magic bullshit like Malthusian collapse serves to scare people from one direction and dumb magic bullshit like self driving cars or blockchain legalism serve to make people think that someone is “working the problem”. They’re not working the problem and they are banning people from actually working the problem.
The rock will indeed spin on, no thanks to the rich dumbshits who rule.