Here it is: the distilled wisdom of 66 years on planet Earth. The list is numbered so you can mock them in comments more easily. Enjoy.
- Crime didn't skyrocket in the '70s and '80s because of drugs or poverty or family breakdown. It skyrocketed because of an increase in lead poisoning that had begun decades earlier.
- Over the past half century, Democrats have been remarkably successful at building a durable safety net for the poor. We spend more than a trillion dollars per year on social welfare, and it raises the average income of the poor from about $25,000 to $50,000.
- Tax cuts don't boost economic growth in any meaningful way.
- Among the non-affluent, college tuition hasn't risen over the past 30 years.
- Generally speaking, the public can tolerate immigrant flows equal to about a quarter percent of the population. Above that, a backlash becomes more and more likely.
- On average, Black students graduate from high school at a 9th grade level in both reading and math.
- The annual federal deficit is starting to look genuinely dangerous. Like it or not we're going to have to raise taxes sometime soon, and not just on the rich.
- Social Security can be made fully solvent forever fairly easily.
- Millennials are doing fine.
- There's been no particular increase in airplane mechanical malfunctions lately.
- The real dietary villain of the modern era is refined sugar.
- It may turn out that social media is bad for teens, but so far the evidence is fairly thin.
- One out of seven people have no interior monologue.
- Always adjust for inflation. There are rare exceptions, but you're not likely to ever run into them.
- Always disaggregate student test data by race. If you don't you'll frequently get badly misleading data due to demographic shifts. Always disaggregate poverty data by age. If you don't you'll be largely just capturing the reduction in elderly poverty thanks to Social Security and Medicare.
- There is no retirement crisis.
- The 2021-22 inflation surge was caused by the COVID pandemic and the bipartisan $2.2 trillion CARES Act. That's it. Nothing else had more than a minor effect.
- Despite lots of publicity saying so, maternal mortality has probably not increased. It turns out this was just a statistical artifact.
- During a pandemic, social distancing is good but three feet is probably enough. N95 masks are beneficial, but other masks aren't.
- Domestic discretionary spending hasn't increased in more than 60 years. It is currently below its long-term average of 3.8% of GDP.
- Half of all people have two-digit IQs.
- According to the Washington Post, a total of nine unarmed Black people were killed by police shootings nationwide in 2024 (through the end of October).
- In 2023, median family income in the US was $101,000. In 1980, adjusted for inflation, it was $70,000. In 1953 it was $40,000.
- Most people seem to have no idea what the racial makeup of America is. For the record, it's 58% white, 20% Latino, 14% Black, and 6% Asian.
- 93% of all abortions are done in the first trimester. 99% happen in the first 20 weeks.
- Of the top 50 software companies, 47 are American (22 in California). Roughly 21 of the top 25 AI companies are American.
- The internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber. AI will make smart people even smarter but will probably make dumb people a little smarter too.
- The life expectancy of the affluent (top 10%) is about 89. The life expectancy of the poor (bottom 10%) is 77.
- On a huge range of measures—economic, social, cultural, technological, and recreational—life in America is stupendously good. We should all feel a lot better about things than we do. One of the reasons we don't is that both liberals and conservatives have a vested interest in claiming that the country is on the precipice of imminent collapse due to moral decay.
- Vaccines do not cause autism.
- To the extent that environment affects children's development, it's mostly environment outside the home: playmates, teachers, shop clerks and so forth. Parents have a good deal less influence than they think. Needless to say, most people resist this conclusion strenuously, but consider: do immigrant kids grow up speaking with the accent of their parents or the accent of their friends? It's always the accent of their friends.
- A lot of famous studies have turned out to be wrong, but most people never hear about it. The Stanford prison experiment showing that even fake guards became abusive toward fake prisoners? Probably exaggerated. The marshmallow test showing that kids who delayed gratification had better life outcomes? Nah. Saturated fats are bad for you? Mostly a misinterpretation of the Framingham Heart Study. Orchestras that audition players behind curtains are more likely to hire women? Not really.
- Here's approximately how the federal budget breaks down (as of 2024): Social Security = 22%, Means-tested welfare = 17%, Medicare = 13%, Defense = 13%, Domestic = 13%, Interest = 13%, Veterans = 5%.
- Strange but true: COVID vaccines reduce death rates from non-COVID causes. Possibly this is because the vaccines prevent Long COVID.
- Roughly speaking, intelligence is 70% genes and 30% environment.
- It's true that correlation doesn't automatically imply causation, but it's a helluva strong clue. The proper response to a well done correlation study isn't knee-jerk skepticism, it's "That's interesting! We should to more studies to confirm it."
- Probably every sentence being served for every crime in the US should be cut in half. Our sentencing policies are ludicrously punitive and accomplish little.
- Half a century ago corporate profits were about 10% of the economy. Today they're 14%.
- Medical inflation is largely under control. Since 2000 it's been only about one point higher than overall inflation, and over the past three years it's been considerably lower.
- Fear of losing status is a far greater motivator than the prospect of gaining status.
- Human beings are fundamentally kind of shitty. But that's what civilization is for: it's a compact among ourselves to keep the worst of our excesses under control as long as everyone else has to as well. It's a bit of a miracle that this mutual surveillance agreement works, but it does, after a fashion.
- Fox News is a cancer. It should be burned to the ground and the earth salted behind it.
- The United States is the greatest economic powerhouse in history and looks set to continue this for a while. It's genuinely mysterious why this is so.
- It's unlikely we will be willing to make the carbon cuts necessary to rein in climate change. Geoengineering is probably in our future.
- AI is going to take your job away, no matter what your job is. Not today and probably not tomorrow, but it's not too many decades away.
My only disagreement is about the need for geoengineering. Greening deserts via permaculture and AMP grazing can accomplish a lot, without the unknown consequences of spraying chemicals into the atmosphere or some such.
Look for John Liu's Green Gold video on YouTube to see what can happen at scale.
Look for "Roots So Deep (you can see the devil down there)" on YouTube for stories of Adaptive Multi Paddock grazing.
Those are great videos. They also show that there are ranchers and farmers out there who aren't just stereotypical, reality-denying MAGAts and who think seriously about sustainability and climate change.
There's more to geoengineering than spraying chemicals in the atmosphere. For instance, iron fertilization of the ocean to drive phytoplankton blooms for carbon capture (iron isn't a chemical, it's an element) and alkalization of the ocean to neutralize acidification caused by carbon dioxide. Yes, greening deserts via permaculture and AMP grazing can accomplish a lot and it's not mutually exclusive. Time is short--we need to use *all* the tools.
I'm not convinced this is a great idea; but I work with iron as a reducing agent, and don't think it particularly safe just because it's an element.
If you actually work with iron as a reducing agent, then you would know that the concentrations proposed and being tested will be orders of magnitudes lower than that sufficient to act as a reducing agent in seawater. It will be used as a nutrient for phytoplankton.
And that it IS a nutrient in most interior and coastal waters.
Primarily it is limited in the open ocean.
Elemental iron is not water soluble. Ocean fertilization is done with water soluble iron compounds, in other words chemicals. (Incidentally, the correct distinction is between elements and compounds, not between elements and chemicals.)
LOL! Kudos for trivial and irrelevant pedantics!
Indeed. I cite "(iron isn't a chemical, it's an element)" as a sterling example of trivial and irrelevant pedantics.
If in AMP you mean Allan Savory's hypotheses / grazing systems, they are very limited in where and how effective these are for carbon sequestration. There are benefits, but they are nowhere near impactful enough to offset human GHG emissions. And besides, in those paddocks are cattle and their farts are problematic.
The problem with iron fertilization is that we don't know if the carbon captured by the blooms actually stays in the ocean - if the blooms die and decay, that just gets released back in to the atmosphere.
Well, you would be wrong. Almost all climate scientists agree that we are going to have to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. 1.5C is already guaranteed. 2.0C is basically unavoidable.
Greening the Sahel would be fantastic for the people who live in Africa. Planting coral in makeshift reefs is brilliant. It isn't until you realize that in Appalachia alone we extracted and used 45 Billion Tons of coal that it starts to sink in how vast the issue is.
The solution to climate change will be a reduced human population, which will happen naturally over the next century. Any attempt at geo-engineering will likely result in war. We can't all agree to get vaccinated to end a pandemic. And somehow we are going to agree on untested schemes to block out the sun? Seriously?
Reduced human population won't stop the warming from existing atmospheric CO2.....and if we haven't already passed the tipping point, we definitely will before we see significant population reduction.
In he end if we can't pull existing CO2 out of the atmospehre we have no 'solution' at all.
Interesting list! Some of these I will have to dig into a bit more.
32. But media and politicians will latch like a lamprey onto a study they like. And broadly speaking we treat science like gospel.
What would you substitute for the "gospel" of science?
43. I think it's clear that the biggest advantage for the US is the abundance of natural resources, not the least of which is land. Even in the Northeast, we do not approach the population density of Europe.
Combine that with an excellent advanced education network, and you have the tools for development, and the magnet to draw the best of the world's talent to decvelop those tools.
Kind of an interesting juxtaposition there. We have an abundance of natural resources, but import intellect.
About "importing intellect".
People seem, after time passes, to adopt standards of their societies, leaving progress to grind to a halt.
The idea of "importing intellect", in my mind, is, primarily, to expose different points of view, different ways of doing things, in order to progress.
Many (Republicans) seem to consider different points of view as bad.
Everything in moderation… Different points of view, at least in the extreme case of Israel v Palestine, is perhaps part of how we are about to have four years under Donald Trump.
We also have a truly enormous, integrated domestic market for our economy - the EU is a pretty poor substitute by comparison. That means US firms have a lot of room to grow in a situation where they don't typically have to worry as much about linguistic or cultural barriers on top of legal ones, and can get truly massive before they have to go out and be competitive internationally.
You can kind of see the benefit of that in China, too, although the country overall is much poorer.
here's mine:
well over half of the abuses committed in the name of what we now call woke are people following unnecessarily conservative legal advice. never let a lawyer make a decision.
Injustice makes people crazy. that includes both parties to the unjust transaction.
This list can be divided into descriptive statements about data (e.g., 23, 38, 39), inferences from data (e.g., 18, 19, 37), and opinion (e.g., 44, 45).
One should not let the almost tautological truth of the descriptive statements about data inflate your estimates of the inferences and opinions.
And the weird quasi-religious overestimation of AI continues. There seems to be some mental pipeline from 2000's le epic Reddit atheism to AI hype.
I need to keep a copy of this in my wallet. Re #1 there is evidence that the passing of Roe v Wade also helped lower crime due to reduction in unwanted children - https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion-and-crime-revisited-update-2/
"42. Fox News is a cancer. It should be burned to the ground and the earth salted behind it."
Do YOUR bit by cutting cable now.
About $2 of your cable fees goes to FoxNews, whether you watch it or not. If FoxNews had to survive on streaming fees, the anchors would have to hotbunk toupees.
Streaming is cheaper and more time-effective.
OAB is cheaper still--one-time antenna cost and that's it.
Regarding #14: Should we also adjust for GDP (as in #20)? In general, if you look at social welfare spending adjusted for inflation in the US over the past 40 years, it looks like it has risen dramatically; relative to GDP, not so much.
(31) Growing up in the Bay Area in the 1960s, I had a lot of classmates and friends who were nisei (children born in California of Japanese immigrants). While it may not exactly be an accent, there is a very characteristic way that they speak (quickly, with unaccented and slightly clipped syllables) that is immediately recognizable. My understanding is that Hawaiian nisei speak similarly. But it is also apparently less of a thing these days.
(44) We are not going to be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to reign in climate change, and there is no form of geoengineering that is going to work. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is just going to get bigger, with the haves living in their air-conditioned bubbles and the have-nots suffering all of the consequences.
"there is no form of geoengineering that is going to work"
And you know this . . . how?
The proximate cause is politics--there is and never will be agreement as to what to do or how to do it. Humans can't even agree on tiny, insignifcant steps, and since politicians are (mostly) elected, they can't implement the large-scale changes that are required to have even a minor impact.
The more fundamental cause is that we're already heavily oversubscribed to the resources the planet is able to provide for us. The human population at current levels of resource consumption is not supportable in the long term. Geoengineering doesn't fix that.
The Montreal Protocol showed that even significant not-so tiny steps are possible.
Global warming is too big, though, and I don't see us (humanity) succeeding to stop it before a large temperature rise.
I don't think human population is too large for the planet. The problem is that we (humanity) shoot each other too often, i.e. politics (and in most of the cases not elected politicians).
Aren’t we currently undergoing “geoengineering” just not in the desired direction?
I wouldn't call it "geoengineering," since the results are largely side effects rather than goals, but your point is valid. However, a change in direction sufficient to have a noticeable impact is politically untenable.
On AI everything I see indicates that it makes the dumb appear less dumb, but will likely blunt the intelligence of the smart as they delegate more to AI in order to increase efficiency.
If you're using a writing engine to do work, you're not that smart. What will you do when your boss calls you in and shows you some absolutely appalling garbage? "It wasn't me, it was the machine?" "Your name is on it. We can't fire the machine, in the same way we can't fire your computer. We can fire YOU, tho."
What an absurd, unsupported statement.
LLM engines currently are very bad as tools for doing just about anything important, and there's no evidence they're ever going to get much better. They're also shockingly expensive.
They can put out an impressive line of patter that make people go "Wow, cool!" When those same people pay a lot of money to try and use the tool to produce results they can make money on and, critically, are liable for if something goes wrong, it becomes a lot less cool.
Can you imagine an associate at a law firm using a writing engine to produce a legal brief, knowing that their asses personally are on the line if it is defective in some way? Can you imagine ANYONE doing that, knowing how BAD these things are at being used for precision work? They're not even good at replacing humans in customer service roles.
These things have to get a lot better and a lot cheaper. There's no evidence either is close to happening.
Yeah. I enjoy sending screenshots of erroneous AI advice to colleagues. There is a certain humor in the combination of confident presentation and incorrect content. Of course, the fact that you cannot identify errors without effort when you are not familiar with the subject matter is terrifying.
I use AI for my work. It is far from perfect but still amazing.
Google Gemini can answer questions like "What is the name of that neo bank in South Africa" or "What date did we wire money to company X" and provide a link to the email it got the info from.
I can use it to review a contract, compare it with a standard contract, and identify differences at the impact level rather than the text level.
You have to check everything ace it still hallucinates but it is far faster and more effective than doing the same thing by hand.
"I can use it to review a contract, compare it with a standard contract, and identify differences at the impact level rather than the text level."
Honestly, I kinda doubt this from what I've seen. It's either going to be big things that would be obvious on a redline, or through a checklist, or you're really playing with fire.
I remained convinced that describing LLMs as AI is a misnomer. Real AI, when we get it, which I don't expect to be for a while yet, will change the world drastically. LLMs will have an effect but I don't expect it to be a really big effect.
They've gotten better (although progress has slowed down), and the same goes for robotics. Betting against them kind of feels like betting against self-driving cars, which were absolutely over-hyped 7 years ago but are now feeling a bit under-hyped given how close we're getting.
But I don't think Drum is talking about Generative AI. He's been beating that drum for over a decade here.
No Pearl of wisdom concerning self-driving cars?-)
I see we're mixing facts and opinions now.
Here me out: Jon Stewart for President 2028!
oh no, Drew Barrymore.
So we're gonna trot Harris out again and hope trump shits the bed in the meantime?
Blond Harris.
There always are unintended consequences. Maybe we end up wiping out dozens of species in one fell swoop, crashing ecosystems? That'll be fun.
Maybe we might not be willing to make cuts to carbon and that forces humanity to resort to geoengineering. But I think the push comes from sheer panic when (if) one (or more) of the major tipping points breaks and it results in stark, tangible effects that presents a clear existential threat. Humanity will want solutions with immediate results.
If it ain't a problem today, humanity will wait until tomorrow; if the problem is today, humanity will want it resolved by tomorrow.
+1
The last paragraph is too true.
+1.
A new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies! A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!
Geoengineering is risky (=high chance of unwanted side effects), would have to be continued indefinitely, and is not a solution but only a costly delaying tactic if the underlying excess CO2 production continues. Geoengineering is analogous to borrowing money as a solution to impending bankruptcy!
High praise to Kevin for exposing himself to incomprehensible abuse!
Here's mine:
#7 - I doggedly disagree. What gets overlooked is that most of our debt (~70%) is owned by US. That is, by the Federal Reserve, the SS Trust Fund, other government accounts, and investment accounts that Americans personally own. So most of Federal interest payments stays right here at home. What about the other 30% of Federal debt? It is owned by foreign banks, but consider what that means: they are investing in OUR government (by buying Treasury bonds) and those investments make us stronger. The only downside of growing federal debt is that it "crowds out" private investment, meaning that it deprives the oligarchy of some of their potential profits. And since the oligarchs own most of the media and think tanks, OF COURSE they constantly bombard us with propaganda about how horrible federal debt is.
#19 - It's just not true that non-N95 masks are useless. This is based on secondary statistical data that doesn't account for how people use masks. Any barrier that reduces the transport of aerosols into the nose and mouth will reduce the chance of infection. Of course, an N95 mask is by far the best, but even a cloth mask is still better than no mask.
#44 - I can't accept capitulation on the "likelihood" of reducing carbon emissions. Geoengineering (assuming this refers to solar radiation modification) is extremely dangerous and unpredictable. Besides, we are one of only a small handful of countries that is resistant to carbon pricing (which is really the only way to effectively phase out fossil fuels). Europe is doing it. Canada is doing it. China is doing it. India will do it in the near future. Japan, Korea, South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, . . . they are all getting on board. The only big emitters that are holding out are those controlled by Vladimir Putin (Russia and the U.S.)
"assuming this refers to solar radiation modification"
There are other forms of geoengineering. For instance, iron fertilization of the ocean to drive phytoplankton blooms for carbon capture and alkalization of the ocean to neutralize acidification caused by carbon dioxide, again to support phytoplankton for carbon capture.
I don't get why no one ever suggests that the Federal Reserve could simply forgive as many trillions of dollars of federal debt as it wants to. I know people will freak out that this would cause inflation but there is no reason why it would. I honestly can't see any downside.
Yep. Japan has ca. twice the debt/GDP and they're not seeing hyperinflation. This is just bog ordinary right-wing hyperventilating.
OK, I'll bite: while it is true that most of the interest is paid to Americans, it is also nonetheless true that the payments have to be made.
So, while some Americans enjoy a nice income stream from all that interest, absent austerity the only way to make said payments is to borrow more money, and this is likely to mean the government will face higher rates. And that means everyone else's borrowing gets more expensive, too.
Or we could just let inflation rip. But either way the people who take it on the chin are the non-rich.
The potential for economic instability and distortions when the government is borrowing 7% of GDP during peacetime while unemployment is low seems significant.
At some point it will become unsustainable, sure, so it won't go on forever. But it really would be desirable, I think, to raise more revenue, now, while we can do so in controlled fashion. (Or at least could have had Orange Man not won).
"Or we could just let inflation rip"
LOL! Japan has twice the debt/GDP as the US. Where's their inflation?
LOL indeed. The US cannot count on Japanese-style domestic saving to fund perpetual deficits. High foreign ownership of US debt creates greater vulnerability to external shocks. Also, the dollar's reserve currency status, while beneficial, isn't guaranteed forever. And the US has stronger demographic tailwinds and growth potential, meaning deficits are less justifiable during good times
None of this means the US faces imminent crisis, but rather that it has less flexibility than Japan to sustain very high deficits indefinitely. The US enjoys significant advantages (reserve currency, dynamic economy, demographic growth) but these actually argue for more fiscal discipline rather than less - preserving these advantages requires maintaining credibility with creditors and markets.
Bottom line: while Japan's experience shows that high debt levels can be sustained under certain conditions, those conditions (high domestic savings, deflation, aging population) don't apply to the US. America's different circumstances suggest it should take a more prudent approach to fiscal policy, particularly during periods of economic strength. This doesn't require immediate austerity, but rather a gradual path toward more sustainable deficits.
The counterargument about Japan, while superficially appealing, overlooks crucial structural differences between the two economies. It's rather like arguing that because a sumo wrestler can healthily maintain a certain weight, an athlete in a different sport should be able to do the same - the underlying conditions and requirements are simply too different for direct comparison.
tldr: The United States is already suffering from high mortgage rates and inflationary pressures. So, as much as I wish we were a lot more like the Land of the Rising Sun, we're sadly not like Japan, and our experience with vast-in-scale public borrowing isn't likely to be like theirs, either!
Also, while the image of Japan we get in the west is all glitzy cities and bullet trains, the reality is Japan is now one of the poorest high income countries. Real output per head has barely grown in thirty-five years. And, while strong urbanism, good transport and low crime account for a lot, there's tons of poverty now in Japan (curiously this doesn't get mentioned in tourism videos), much of it concentrated among young people and older women.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/japans-living-standards-are-too-low
So, even if the US could "sustain" massive peacetime deficits for decades, I'm not sure Japan's path is one we should want to emulate. Unlike Japan, we'll just get reduced living standards and growing poverty: we won't get Japan-like crime levels, walkability or cleanliness.
Tax cuts simply put accountants out of work. It works to "allow" politicians to get more "donations". Other than that, nada.
Any tax change puts accountants to work; leaving the code alone puts them out of work.
I'm in northern Iceland now, I've spent the last 10 years here at this time of year.
This is the first time I've ever been able to go for a walk outside without a jacket and sweater and hat.
Until today; we've gotten about six inches of snow in the six hours, and it's supposed to keep falling all night and into the day tomorrow.
But the reason for all of this, beyond the weather gleaning that suggests to people something about climate change being real, is everyone hates our president elect. Everyone.
So #45 is that #45 re-elected as #47 has not made folk inclined to like Americans. go figure.
Does Iceland seem like it's about to split in half from volcanoes?
23. For average income, I'd be interested in the breakdown of single-income households to multi-income households.
Re 23: Some fraction of increased family income is due to an increase in the proportion of adult family members in the workforce. This measure in isolation isn’t very informative. ‘Needs context’, as the fact-checkers say, including median-wage data (even better, quantile data on both), productivity expressed as GDP/hour worked, disaggregated by industry.
(7). People have been wrong about the National Debt my whole life and far longer. It's just money that the Federal Government has created and spent and not yet taxed. There are consequences to taxing less than what is spent, but none of them involve default or other skyfall events.
I'm really beginning to believe this after being a national debt hawk mot of my adult life. I wonder if Harris had proposed a LARGE tax cut aimed at 400K earners and below if that would have resonated with voters more than the Child Tax Credit and other programmatic tax cuts
I like Kevin's list. Sensible! Only a few nits to pick. I'll start with this one:
Generally speaking, the public can tolerate immigrant flows equal to about a quarter percent of the population. Above that, a backlash becomes more and more likely.
This seems like a made up number. The long term (going back to 1820) net rate of immigration to the US is about 0.7%. I'd suggest that's a more likely number for an immigration backlash trigger, at least provided we're building enough housing and infrastructure.
One piece of evidence is the late 90s during the Clinton boom. Times were good, jobs were plentiful, and incomes were rising. But it's probably fair to point out that the immigration backlash was beginning to stir about then. But the net rate of immigration as I understand it likely peaked above 1% in that era (that is, above 3 million!) once undocumented immigrants are taken into account (as they should be). So yeah, people began to feel more negative about immigration, but the level that induced the angst was about four times Kevin's estimate.
Yeah - the number he gives lacks any foundation: it is massively greater than the historical range in the proportion of first generation immigrants.
The historical range maxed out around 16%. See below:
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/02/07/second-generation-americans/
It's odd how immigration and tariffs have become such a cornerstones of bien pensant opinion.
I agree with you on immigration rates. It's hard to visualize what 800K people -- 0.25% of 300 million -- looks like spread across the country. Instead, I visualized what Portland (proper), population oof 600K would be able to absorb, and it seems that about 3000K people, or about 0.5%,wouldn't stress out the infrastructure too much.
Although, where it becomes tricky is that it's not uniformly distributed, so there will be a lot more stress on low income neighborhoods. So, there's that.
I guess Kevin couldn’t wait until Thanksgiving dinner for his old man rant. More than half of this list is nonsense but I half expected it to devolve into something like “the blue man group is a total rip off of the Smurfs.” So I kept reading
So instead you imagine we want to read your anonymous nonsense?
And yet you did.
(8). SS can be made financially solvent very easily, but money won't take care of us when we get old, people will. People will raise the food we eat, build and maintain our shelter, produce the energy that sustains us, and provide the medical care we'll need. If the right people with the right education and infrastructure (social as well as physical) are in place, we'll be fine. If not, money won't help.
And this is why TFR matters.
13. One out of seven people have no interior monologue.
Really? Wow.
Interior monologue is something I think about quite a bit, and it was on my mind this morning while walking the dog. Walking is a great stimulant for thinking, whether alone or with another, even if the other is a dog. Dogs generally are good listeners, and when you're having a conversation with yourself, dogs (unlike people) tend not to butt in.
One difference between the conversations we have with people and the conversations we have with ourselves is that the first are often ordered toward an outcome and the latter more likely to be open, curious, and spontaneous, even chaotic, and filled with strange associations that spark, among other things, a sense of wonder. It's the conversations with myself where I most feel 'this is who I am.' We feel the greatest kinship with others when we feel free to have conversations with them that are most similar to the conversations we have with ourselves.
Another difference between the two is that conversations with ourselves are nonstop, even if we turn the volume down at times, or go to sleep.
A factor that is having an increasing impact on our thoughts is media. Through most of human history, people were not so constantly aware of the what was happening in the outside world. Now we are inundated with media from the moment we wake and reach for the phone to the moment we turn out the light and go to sleep again. Media is not benign (some is cancerous, like Fox, #42), and on the whole we are poor consumers of who we surrender our conscious thoughts to.
Anyway, I cannot imagine what it's like to have "no interior monologue." One in seven people? Is there data on that? I hadn't heard that before, and it sounds like an impossibility anyway. A person without an interior monologue would be a machine. A computer can be shut down or turned off. But a human being? Even the most lifeless beings I can imagine (say, Melania and Ivanka) must have something going on inside, right?
Some people lack a conscience. They never feel remorse. If they have a little voice saying what they are doing is wrong they probably ignore it.
Mark Twain has an amusing short story about that.
sigh- there you go again, using facts, science and statistics.
Come january, it's a new era for America, so stop looking behind the curtain and kiss the ring
40) Fear of losing status is a far greater motivator than the prospect of gaining status.
I've known this for very long time as a teacher. In the classroom, it is routinely demonstrated by how students typically respond to their grades. You can add as a corollary: If you have no status to speak of, neither losing status nor the prospect of gaining status will motivate you. (You can check out "learned helplessness" to discover more about this).
This is tied to "Half of all people have two-digit IQs." If half of all students are below average, think about how the bottom half of that lower half will respond to grades as incentives/disincentives.
Agree here, disagree there.
One thing you can say, he's got some balls.
For the record, it's 58% white, 20% Latino, 14% Black, and 6% Asian.
"Latino" is not a race. It's an ethnolinguistic group, the equivalent more or less of "Slavic"
And race is not a biological construct either.