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Whether we're looking at universities, corporations, or the military, there's the same phenomenon of the participation of competent White men being disincentivized. It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, our guys are having their prospects in life artificially reduced, and their ability to participate in the power process severely curtailed. On the other hand, the viability of the institutions is collapsing, and with it the prestige associated with them.

Telling young guys to become plumbers is a cope, and bad advice in general. They should instead be encouraged to start engaging in entrepreneurial institution-building. Withdraw participation from the compromised system, and set up competence hierarchies that will accumulate the cultural capital evaporating in real time from the legacy institutions.

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It depends. We do need tradesmen as much as entrepreneurs, and many great inventions were the results of the younger sons of intelligent aristocracy moving down the social descent to take over the lower class occupations after the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. That’s how Edward Dutton described the historical process until 1830 and I think he’s on the right track.

But we do need to build up the local units of clan, parish, fraternity, and guild to serve as the insurance and bank and protective agency for the members. That was how the Britons dealt with the withdrawal of the Roman legions, by forming town councils which would form various statelets under the kinglets. And this is a vital step even if there was no collapse.

We tends to look down on the normies but, seriously, what would we expect? When they are utterly dependent on big state, big bank, big hospital, big media, and big corporation, they are left without material independence. Who will look after the kids? His mom who can’t go to bathroom by herself? Those damp his courage. He HAVE to believe in the System. This was where most attempts to address the challenges failed since 1933. There was too much flashy focus on federal politics and voting and petitions. If the dissenters really care to make an impact, these local units should be the very first things to do. The more secured people feels about their everyday needs, the more willingly will they challenge the Oligarchs’ claims. THAT is where we need the entrepreneurial energy. Not complaining about the “sheep”.

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That’s exactly what I did. I left the military then left the corporate world then left school and realized starting my own business was the best route to go. It was becoming clear being competent and ambitious was a threat so I took that and now I own my own business free from the nonsense. Best decision I ever made.

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Parallel structures seem to be the best solution for a lot of the problems we’re seeing these days.

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I was about to send this article to my 22 year old nephew , a carpenter. Mr. Carter I do not grasp your 2nd paragraph. “Cope” ?

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Jan 11Liked by Theophilus Chilton

Here's a fun story about declining college standards. I work as a tutor. A few weeks ago, I was going through an ACT reading comprehension passage with a student. The first sentence read --

Astronomers sometimes describe the shape of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, as a thin-crust pizza with a plum stuck in the middle.

The student asked what a plum was.

This student took his ACT on December and got a 27/36 in Reading. This is an approximately 81st percentile score. The State thinks that this student's language ability is *well above average*!

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author

That's horrifying. Let's hope the kid just never got out much!

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I used to be a teacher and it still infuriates me how - in the 1980s - the 'educational theory' 'expert' clerisy decided that multiple-choice tick-boxing was a valid substitute for making kids form their own sentences.

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I mean, I actually feel kind of good about this. Ideally the ACT would be as close to an IQ test as possible, meaning that a person who literally didn't know what a plum was could still get the answer right simply by inferring the relationship between the words in front of them. The goal after all is to select for competence, regardless of where it comes from.

Or maybe not, maybe not knowing what a plum is reflects some fundamental underlying lack of curiosity about the world; which is otherwise harmful even, perhaps especially, when combined with high intelligence. I don't know.

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It's definitely lack of curiosity. When I told him what it was, he got annoyed. "Why didn't they just say apple?!"

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Well that’s depressing, then again I don’t exactly think 81 percentiles should be encouraged to go to college, but still... depressing.

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Ah, I just would have said it is very much like a pluot.

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Ah, well, it’s not meant to be taken literally. It applies to all genus prunus.

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Look, if you want to apply something to your prunus that is your business.

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My prunus are in my bio! They are Plum/Cherry/Peach. Respect my prunus, BIGOT!!!!

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I respect only my own prunus. Other prunae are inferior. I am the uber-prunus.

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My late-20s White son is a welder (not as a cope, but because he wanted to be a welder). For several years, the company he works for has been finding it more and more difficult to hire competent welders. After the first owner saw the handwriting on the wall and sold the company, the new owners' concept was to hire late teens - early 20s untrained White males and teach them to weld. This foundered on the rocks of "Workin' be hard, man!"

The company was then sold again. To save money, the latest owners are hiring Hispanics who can't weld and can't speak English so they can teach them to weld. So far the result has been a decline in quality that is leading to a decline in sales. Year-end bonuses declined by 2/3 this past year. The old hands such as my son aren't happy and are slowly leaving as they find good jobs at still well-run employers.

This will not end well for anyone.

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It’s not just the skill gap. Teaching a young person to do something well is definitely important, but convincing them that there is a good reason to ply that trade well and grow is harder. Especially when any person smart enough to learn useful skills is also smart enough to see the reality we’re facing.

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This is where your son should do what we push him to do, become an entrepreneur and start his own firm together with a few other old hands, and get their own training programme set up.

Because being competent and having skills is just the start, entrepreneurship is about sovereignty and solving the hard problems.

It's time for him to grow up, and for you to invest what money you have in the family business.

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An excellent idea, but my son is not of the entrepreneurial bent. He's like his mother--an excellent employee but a terrible employer.

I fear he is too comfortable in his rut. We talked a bit yesterday, and he is of the opinion that the place will keep staggering on for quite some time. He's probably correct in his assessment, but I've made that mistake before and it was costly. Some things simply can't be taught from one generation to the next.

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I think the cries of “peer reviewed” may be the most infuriating of all. Just a total abdication of responsibility to think about or observe anything for yourself. A Midwit’s pedantic nature and unearned sense of superiority won’t allow them to be religious in any conventional sense. However, they want so desperately to be regarded as a part of the priestly class that they’ve hollowed out and built a religion out of “science”.

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I had the audacity to get a PhD in Physics and for a brief few years get to smell my own farts of majesty. Then I become an aerospace software engineer and the a rocket science (God help me) and got a cold hard slap of safety critical reality.

Hyperbole aside I did a condensed matter science PhD (crystals, nanoscience, thin films) that was heavily experimental and very humbling but still the accountability of engineering really brought things closer to home.

One thing we were taught by wiser people during our studies was that peer review was “only a means for a paper to enter the scientific discourse. It wasn’t and isn’t a mark of correctness”. You can quote many papers that are terrible but have a useful bit in them. Or even cite them as not what to do.

The trouble is that idea is being gaslit by activists to be the same as “correctness” in the public’s understanding which is: you test it, use it and abuse it and the bloody thing still goes. Like a Toyota Hi-Lux basically.

And this has let so many midwits who really should know better even being midwits to force this “peer review = correctness” into real life situations. Completely passing engineering validation and verification.

And what’s worse is the midwit will still expect his water, food, cars, phones, buildings and all other things to be properly tested and deemed safe. And show no trace of awareness to this contradiction.

And they’ll even tell you they didn’t have a second breakfast.

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You still sound like you like your farts. Lots of false humility. You’re the midwit fella.

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"Gaslit" doesn't mean amplified or misconstrued. To "gaslight" is to manipulate or antagonize through deception.

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"by people whose intellectual abilities are far below being able to understand what the scientific method even is."

I wish it were so restricted. It is not. Not in the academe or industry. Scientism is first and foremost practiced by scientists themselves with few exceptions. What is lacking IS NOT intelligence, but wisdom. I daresay few if any scientists have ever read Bacon or Newton or Hobbs or Locke and certainly not Smth. We scientists have eschewed the eclectic and embraced the esoteric. We learn more and more about less and less. AND YET we have the nerve to predict and bloviate about policy matters far beyond our brains.

This was all predicted long ago by Hutchins and Adler and Sayers.

Read the Western Canon or be conquered by a different cannon.

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With regards to the replication crisis and "peer review," there is a deeper problem with "science" itself - or to be more correct - with what passes for "science" these days. The problem is an intellectual wrong turn in the philosophy of science that started with Karl Popper and was transmitted down through his disciples Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend. Popper got hung up on Hume's inductive skepticism because he couldn't live with the uncertainty of induction. He became a deductivist.

"Science" suddenly got defined as nothing more than falsification, rather than the objective branch of human knowledge built on models ranked by their predictive power. The academe replaced predictive power with "peer review" and that was the beginning of the corruption. David Stove's "Popper and After" explains all of this.

The probability logic of such luminaries as Laplace, Sir Harold Jeffries, Bayes, E.T. Jaynes, Claude Shannon, and R.T. Cox (to name a few) got replaced with "peer review". William Briggs' book "Uncertainty" is another good read that helps shine some light on this mess and the poor state of science currently. We don't vote on science, but that's exactly what we do now.

The "null hypothesis significance testing" (NHST), a bastardized form of frequentist statistics taught in no actual statistics curriculum, became de riguer for publishing. Gerd Gigenenzer has written about this repeatedly, including on the origins of NHST. (In short, publishers smashed together the two parts of their respective statistics that both Fisher and Neiman-Pierson DISAGREED on and now we have scientists who view "chance" as a force of nature, rather than as being a statement about the limits of our knowledge.) The Supreme Court helped reify - and incentivize this - this with some terrible decisions on what constitutes science in courts. (Frye, Daubert, and Kumho Tire).

Good sources, background, and detail on all of this can be found at the Broken Science Initiative. https://brokenscience.org/

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"As the bar has been lowered and the ranks of Gender and Queer Studies programs have been filled, the quality of college students has declined precipitously". That's quite the assertion, is it yours? Any sources?

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there's a false choice b/t sci and religion: either "we should trust only science" is a logical or a fact-based proposition; in the first case it's apriori and opens the door to other types of non-experience based thinking; in the last case, the scientific method becomes contingent and so, not necessarily trustworthy. Either way there's no need to "trust" science.

But there needs to be a more pertinent reason we don't trust experts: because we should be making our own. We should be showing to people the beauty of being on the right.

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And if an expert, or anyone else, throws the "Dunning-Kruger Effect" at you, feel free to let them know that the Dunning-Krueger Effect is mostly non-sense.

I wrote a small piece about it here:

https://thedistro.substack.com/p/confidence

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"The rest is due to bad experimental design, etc., caused by overarching ideological drivers that operate on flawed assumptions that create bad experimentation and which lead to things like cherry-picking data" - which, in turn, leads to bad experimental design. It's like a recursive function, spiraling ever downward towards the base case of complete quackery.

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Midwit - Really though, I don't understand using that as an insult. A midwit is someone with average IQ, which is the bedrock of America. Lots of midwits contributed to the Moon landing. You can make some shit happen with 110 points.

No original ideas? Not accurate. There are *fewer* original ideas, and they are more constrained to a narrow field of study, and they don't usually represent an entire paradigm shift, but there can still be useful contributions.

You're painting with some pretty broad strokes here.

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Oh shit I'm a midwit.

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Tanks on Harvard Yard: lol!

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"Colored People are ruining science and academia."

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Not at all, my anti-fascist friend. To borrow from George Will, the soft bigotry of low expectations is ruining science and academia.

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