Take Five, Daily Laws, Lottery Tickets

Links and recommendations

Earlier this year I was briefly interviewed by a student at the University of Richmond prior to delivering a lecture for their special speaker series. You can watch here:

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From the archives:

A collection of maxims about human nature, along with some thoughts.

Notes on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature

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Links and recommendations:

• Collect as many lottery tickets as you can by Ada Yeo

• When A.I. Comes for the Elites by Peter Turchin

• "Tell me about a complicated man..." by Zina Gomez-Liss

• Capitalism’s Overlooked Contradiction: Wealth and Demographic Decline by Philip Pilkington

• 'A Plague on the Industry': Book Publishing's Broken Blurb System by Sophie Vershbow

  • An interesting piece that offers a glimpse into how one area of book publishing works. The idea that ditching blurbs would promote “equity” is stupid, though. Publishing will always favor affluent and well-connected people; abandoning book endorsements won’t help anything. It’s true that talented poor writers are at a disadvantage, but managing to get the interest of just one notable person to endorse their work can go a long way.  

• How art forgot the arriviste by Janan Ganesh

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Three interesting findings:

1. When poor unmarried women give birth, eight out of 10 are still romantically involved with their child’s father. Few stay together. Twelve months after the birth, half will have split, and by the time the child turns 3, fully two-thirds will have done so. (source: Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas).

2. Assortative mating for spouses is far greater for intelligence (0.40) than for other behavioral traits such as personality (~0.10) or physical traits such as height and weight (~0.20). (source). On average, within a marriage, there is a 10 point IQ score gap between spouses.

3. The average male college student in the U.S. is capable of only 24 push-ups. (source). Pathetic. A physically healthy 18-24 year old male should be able to crank out 50 pushups with proper form on the spot.