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BlogAnatoly Karlin Archive
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Paper Review
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Paper Review

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Magic Laogai Soil Theory
•�September 15, 2020
•�200 Words •�72 Comments
Alesina, Alberto F., Marlon Seror, David Y. Yang, Yang You, and Weihong Zeng. 2020. “Persistence through Revolutions.” Working Paper Series. National Bureau of Economic Research. The descendants of former Chinese landlords and rich peasants earn 16% more than average - despite them being barred from inheriting land or other asse
Magic Gulag Soil Theory
•�August 29, 2020
•�300 Words •�63 Comments
Toews, Gerhard, and Pierre-Louis Vézina. 2018. “Enemies of the People.” Working Paper. (h/t Emil) The presence of Gulag prisoners - especially concentrations of "enemies of the people", i.e. "politicals" who overwhelmingly hailed from the Tsarist-era educated elites in the professions, aristocracy, and kulaks - had positive long-run effects on development in those regions. This is... Read More
PAPER: Virtuous Victimhood Signalers as Dark Triad Personalities
•�July 30, 2020
•�300 Words •�41 Comments
We all know this, but always good to have priors confirmed. Ok, Ekin, Yi Qian, Brendan Strejcek, and Karl Aquino. 2020. “Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, July. We investigate the consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue. In our first three studies,... Read More
New Paper: Max World Population ≈ 200 Billion
•�May 5, 2020
•�400 Words •�171 Comments
A correspondent brought this new paper to my attention: Binder, Seth, Ethan Holdahl, Ly Trinh, and John H. Smith. 2020. “Humanity’s Fundamental Environmental Limits.” Human Ecology, April. This is in the same order of magnitude as my ~100 billion estimate. Our results also approximate those of models tied to current technologies. De Wit (1967) and... Read More
Faustian Europe
•�February 10, 2020
•�100 Words •�148 Comments
According to phylogenetic analyses, the oldest Indo-European common story features a Smith selling his soul to the Devil in return for power, before tricking him out of his prize. Which, as a frand observed, later came to be known as the tale of Faust. So Europe is a Faustian civilization in the most direct sense.
Noah Carl & Woodley on Persecution of IQ Researchers
•�October 19, 2019
•�1,400 Words •�56 Comments
"Intelligence researcher" doesn't exactly have a reputation as a safe, uncontroversial profession. There are perhaps 200 people in the world who do that full-time. Despite this small population, we seem to get a story - often multiple stories - of them getting denounced, defamed, deplatformed, threatened, and even physically attacked every single year. Thanks to... Read More
Identifiable Altruism
•�June 3, 2019
•�200 Words •�7 Comments
Yoder, Christian N., and Scott A. Reid. 2019. “The Quality of Online Knowledge Sharing Signals General Intelligence.” Personality and Individual Differences 148 (October): 90–94. Humans don't work for free. Gold. USD. Online reputation. There needs to at least be something, because otherwise there will be nothing.
Meisenberg in Defense of Group Differences Research
•�June 2, 2019
•�800 Words •�18 Comments
Meisenberg, Gerhard. 2019. “Should Cognitive Differences Research Be Forbidden?” Psych 1 (1): 306–19. In particular, Section 5 is a masterpiece in the art of reframing "liberal" objections to IQ research in a way that
Russians Are Vidya's Baddies
•�May 31, 2019
•�600 Words •�68 Comments
So the Call of Duty video game franchise that brought us the infamous "No Russian" mission, where you had to physically remove Russian civilians from an airport - not many complaints of "terrorism simulators" when it's Russkies who are getting gunned down - now has another offering, in which you as a Syrian rebel fighter... Read More
New Paper on "Child Penalties"
•�January 26, 2019
•�400 Words •�17 Comments
Female earnings decline after the birth of their first child. But according to a new paper released a few days ago: Kleven et al. (2018): Child Penalties Across Countries ... it happens to markedly different extents across different countries and cultural blocs. Robert Dur summarizes: The earnings hit is surprisingly well correlated to public opinion... Read More
People of Walmart
•�January 26, 2019
•�300 Words •�8 Comments
In my third post on the Age of Malthusian Industrialism, I suggested: Happily, it looks like some people have already started doing that. Barban, Nicola et al. (2017) - Genome-wide analysis identifies 12 loci influencing human reproductive behavior Here's a very interesting graph from the paper:
A Short History of Russian Homicides
•�December 4, 2018
•�1,300 Words •�213 Comments
The data is based on Goertzel, Ted & al. (2012), Homicide Booms and Busts A Small-N Comparative Historical Study. The lead author kindly emailed me the data used to build their graphs (their version is on the right), which I used to construct the above graph of Russian historical homicide rates from 1875 to 2018.... Read More
Where Do the WEIRDos Come from?
•�July 22, 2018
•�1,000 Words •�305 Comments
Gargantuan (174 pages) paper with an staggering amount of data about family systems and kinship related institutions by Jonathan Schulz et al. (2018): The Origins of WEIRD Psychology (h/t @pseudoerasmus). Our approach integrates three insights. The first, drawing on anthropology, reveals that the institutions built around kinship and marriage vary greatly across societies (21–23) and... Read More
Russians Like Some Immigrants More Than Others
•�July 6, 2018
•�600 Words •�87 Comments
Alexey Bessudnov (2016) - Ethnic Hierarchy and Public Attitudes towards Immigrants in Russia Interesting paper on attitudes towards immigrants in Russia. Big sample (n=24,500). It is written from very neoliberalism.txt perspective (e.g. Ctrl-F on "xeno-" yields 37 matches; "prejudice" yields 17 matches), but data is data. Highlights: 1. Russian regions by "xenophobia."
Naked Mole Rats Sort of Don't Age
•�January 27, 2018
•�200 Words •�10 Comments
It was already known that these adorable critters tend to live ten times as long as other mammals of their size. What is more surprising is that according to a new study funded by Calico, Google's life extension research branch, they seem to defy the Gompertz Law outright (i.e., the tendency of mortality to increase... Read More
Paper Review: the Wealth and Competence of Nations
•�October 25, 2017
•�900 Words •�13 Comments
Kulivets & Ushakov – 2016 – Modeling Relationship between Cognitive Abilities and Economic Abstract: It's well established that there is a very close correlation between average national IQ and GDP per capita, especially when corrected for resource windfalls and Communism.
Paper Review: Russia Regional PISA Results for 2015
•�June 14, 2017
•�400 Words •�7 Comments
Richard Lynn, Helen Cheng and Andrei Grigoriev - 2017 - Differences in the Intelligence of 15 Year Olds in 42 Provinces and Cities of the Russian Federation and Their Economic, Social and Geographical Correlates I don't know how, but Lynn, Cheng, and Russian psychometricist Grigoriev have managed to find Russian regional results for PISA 2015.... Read More
Paper Review: the IQ of Peoples
•�June 2, 2017
•�2,500 Words •�95 Comments
Grigoriev, Andrey & Lynn 2009 Studies of Socioeconomic and Ethnic Differences in Intelligence in the Former Soviet Union in the Early Twentieth Century Abstract: This is essentially a short history of psychometrics in the USSR/Russia. (1) The first measurement of Russian IQ was performed in 1909 by A.M. Schubert, who used the French Binet test... Read More
Paper Review: Artificial Wombs
•�April 30, 2017
•�600 Words •�42 Comments
Partridge, Emily et al. - 2017 - An extra-uterine system to physiologically support the extreme premature lamb *** Abstract: This is really cool. I have been ad
Paper Review: Crispening CRISPR
•�April 5, 2017
•�200 Words •�4 Comments
Tang, Lichun et al. 2017 CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing in human zygotes using Cas9 protein Abstract: Gwern Branwen's comments: Back in February 2015, qualia researcher Mike Johnson predicted that dedicated billionaire with scant regard for legalistic regulations could start
Paper Review: People Are Natural Natalists
•�March 12, 2017
•�400 Words •�9 Comments
Ashburn-Nardo, Leslie 2017 Parenthood as a Moral Imperative? Moral Outrage and the Stigmatization of Voluntarily Childfree Women and Men Abtract: Nationally representative data indicate that adults in the United States are increasingly delaying the decision to have children or are forgoing parenthood entirely. Although some empirical research has examined the social consequences of adults’ decision... Read More
Paper Review: IQ and Rationality
•�January 28, 2017
•�200 Words •�28 Comments
Ritchie, Stuart - 2017 - Review of The Rationality Quotient by Stanovich et al. From Stuart Ritchie's review of "The Rationality Quotient" by Keith Stanovich et al.: That's the extent to which actual IQ tests typically load on the g factor and each other. One might even go so far as to propose that rationality... Read More
Paper Review: Why We Retire at 65
•�January 28, 2017
•�300 Words •�12 Comments
Whitley, Elise et al. - 2016 - Variations in cognitive abilities across the life course New paper by Elise Whitley et al. on age and sex differences in IQ for n=~40,000 British sample. Five tests: Word recall, verbal fluency, and subtraction (loading ~0.5 on g), and number sequence and numerical problem solving (loading ~0.7 on... Read More
Paper Review: Icelandic Dysgenics
•�January 19, 2017
•�400 Words •�16 Comments
Kong, Augustine et al. - 2016 - Selection against variants in the genome associated with educational attainment This paper makes the case that there has been a decline in the prevalence of genes increasing propensity for more education (POLYEDU) in Iceland from 1910-1975. Here are some of the key points: The main mechanism was greater... Read More
"Paper Review" Items Across Entire Archive
Anatoly Karlin
About Anatoly Karlin

I am a blogger, thinker, and businessman in the SF Bay Area. I’m originally from Russia, spent many years in Britain, and studied at U.C. Berkeley.

One of my tenets is that ideologies tend to suck. As such, I hesitate about attaching labels to myself. That said, if it’s really necessary, I suppose “liberal-conservative neoreactionary” would be close enough.

Though I consider myself part of the Orthodox Church, my philosophy and spiritual views are more influenced by digital physics, Gnosticism, and Russian cosmism than anything specifically Judeo-Christian.