Spencer Starr's an Intellectual Superstarr

24/09/2026

Unusually sophisticated interview of Garett Jones, who is in my opinion, the most rigorous scholar who is skeptical of mass migration into the United States without any standards or assessments or points based system kind of reforms first.

All serious people who are very pro mass immigration or anti mass immigration should seriously check out Jones's work on this topic. It is covered in his books "Hive Mind" and "The Culture Transplant."

Garett Jones is Associate Professor of Economics at the Mercatus Ce...

23/09/2026

Even just Part 1 of this article alone is absolutely devastating to any near term AI apocalypse argument for any possible rational AI

https://skepticalpragmatist.substack.com/p/why-ai-wont-kill-us-by-2030-and-probably?fbclid=IwVERDUAUgHClwZG9mAWV4dG4DYWVtAjEwAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHqnSHOwo4PFgXb6kfwN3GjKQQiMeOtk4HXeIK-2icRAi3WMotvB6mCxUOdDU_aem_BL3pZn6ZNK7VUV9kfNIqCg

A physicist checks the arithmetic on AI extinction scenarios

17/09/2026

This might just be the best thing I have ever written, read it:

On expertise, “The Real Thing,” the importance of saying “I don’t know,” and the bare minimum of intellectual responsibility

14/09/2026

This is one of the most important articles I have ever written, and I am very proud of it. Read it or lose my number! Jk. You should read it though:

13/09/2026

Just because something is printed in a textbook doesn't make it true/accurate/correct.

This claim about Adam Smith having discovered the principle of marginal subjectivism in according to his lecture notes sounded super sus to me, so I looked it up, and it is absolutely a misleading exaggeration. Adam Smith did not discover "marginal subjectivism" 100 years before the marginal revolution.

I wish he had and he had included it in The Wealth of Nations, but he hadn't and he didn't.

11/09/2026

I genuinely put a lot of thought and work into this article y'all:

An attempt to extract the empirical hinge points from an unusually substantive immigration debate

10/09/2026

The quality of empirical academic research results can be thought of as a function of 6 variables:
f(m, d, b, h, e, n) = quality

Where m is the level of rigor of the research methods employed by the researchers, d is the quantity and quality of the data available, b is the level of bias among the researchers, h is the honesty of the researchers, e is the effort put in by the researchers, and n is the number of active researchers.

One great tragedy of the last 35ish years or so is that m, d, and n have all shot up in the United States tremendously, and that's great. But over the same time period, especially over the last 15ish years, the bias has gone up and the honesty gas gone down. So the potential research results quality has shot up, but I am really not sure about the actual quality.

The levels of WHITE HOT ideological bias in some fields is just astonishing. Some of them don't even pretend not to be anymore.

04/09/2026

This was a genuinely thought provoking article, Hanania makes some solid points. Maybe people do understand overlapping Bell Curves more than I think they do:

The real basis of the race and IQ taboo

03/09/2026

This whole Jason Arday tragedy has made me really sad and really frustrated, and I glad Coleman Hughes here helped to articulate part of it for me.

But Coleman didn't go far enough. Jason Arday selfishly choosing to rob his wife and kids of a husband and a father is very sad, and it really made me emotional when I first heard the news that he had died.

Here's the thing though: Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, and Roland Fryer Jr., three first rate black economists I really respect and admire, have all at one point or another gone through the type of mass public shaming and attempted prestige invalidation that Arday went through recently. Sowell and Loury during the 80s and Fryer during the 2010s & 2020s.

Tons of scholarly colleagues called them frauds and paid shills. Loury had to resign in shame from the Reagan administration for smoking crack and cheating on his wife. Fryer got death threats and Harvard tried to fire him for a fabricated (according to their own internal investigation) sexual misconduct allegation, but couldn't because he was tenured.

In fact, the parallels between Loury, Fryer and Arday go even furtgher. Glenn Loury was the first black tenured professor in the economics department at Harvard and Fryer later on, Fryer became the youngest ever tenured black Harvard professor (in any department) at the age of 30. So their falls from grace publicly were also dramatic.

So why didn't they kill themselves from the shame?? Because they weren't total fu***ng frauds to a ridiculous degree like Arday. That's the difference! Sowell, Loury, and Fryer are all certified geniuses according to people who have known all 3 of them. Arday was not an intelligent man. He knew he was a fraud. That's what I think led to the tragedy, and because of that, I told Cambridge entirely responsible for this.

It is extremely rude and humiliating to appoint an unintelligent person who loves making up crazy stories as a tenured Cambridge professor, rude to them, just because they are black, especially when there are tons of genuinely brilliant black scholars out there. By doing so, you are treating them as a racial mascot, and that's despicable. Black people are people, they are not mascots.

Jason Arday’s death is a genuine tragedy, and no one should celebra...

03/09/2026

"The problem is when you say 'These ideas should be censored', you are really talking in the passive voice.

In the active voice, you would say 'Person A should be entitled to censor person B.' And once you say it in the active voice, I think you can realize how problematic it would be." ~ Arnold Kling

Source:

How big a problem is misinformation for a democracy? How do we arri...