Richard Harper (@harpersnotes) profile picture

Some influences: Tooby, Cosmides, Symons, Pinker, (EvPsych); James Thompson, Timothy C. Bates (IQ and genius); Kenneth Harl (History, many Great Courses.)

Santa Barbara, California
Joined February 2009
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The assumption of assimilation is hubris.
2nd generation immigrants and violent crime. Very important new data from Denmark. Possibly the best ever released about the criminality of 2nd generation immigrants in Europe. It is known that immigrants from the Middle East and Africa to Europe have exceedingly high rates of violent crime. But some people have claimed that this is because of trauma and lack of integration or other such reasons, and that subsequent generations who grow up in Europe will be less criminal. Now we have this high quality data from Denmark showing us that this is not the case. The 2nd generation is overall at least as criminal as the full population from these places. And likely future generations will be as well.
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'Absolute power corrupts absolutely.' The basic premise behind the checks and balances of the US Constitution.
Jensen Huang: - traitor to his family, through his affair - traitor to his company, his investors, & his employees, through this scandalous PR nightmare - traitor to America, through selling billions of dollars of the world's most advanced AI chips through intermediaries to our main geopolitical rival - traitor to humanity, through dismissing and mocking all legitimate concerns about the catastrophic risks of developing Artificial Superintelligence that we can't predict, control, or align.
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Mu-receptor deep dive readings today. (I'm sleeping ~so~ much better! From 5-6 to 8-9 hours.) ... Stat Pearls Mu Receptors 2024; Front. Neurosci., 23 June 2025, Tolerance; Neuropharm, 24 September 2018, Untangling, Volkow; AI, evolution of the mu-opioid receptors.
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Sex, money, and politics. You can't unravel the corruption in any two without the third. And the most secretive, the most embarrassing, the most oh-so-politely hidden away, is the sex. The Epstein scandal is the curtain that MUST be pulled aside.
Thomas Massie: The Epstein scandal is “deeper and darker” than anyone imagined. “It’s bigger than Watergate.” “It’s bigger than Iran-Contra.” “It’s not about Joe Biden or Donald Trump.” “There are degrees of evil here that we’ve never seen at this scale … ” “Our government was compromised by wealthy, connected billionaires, and by Jeffrey Epstein himself.” “At the age of 14, these girls that were being sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein were told if they could go find another girl to take their place, then they wouldn’t have to be sexually abused.” “And some of them took that deal.” “It’s one thing to be evil to a child.” “It’s another thing to get a child to do evil.” “The light sentence that was given to Jeffrey Epstein in 2008 that allowed him to victimize hundreds of more women, we want to know, why was he given that light sentence?”
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Liars don't look you in the eye. Autists stare off into space. Therefore all autists are liars. (Find faces distracting. Sometimes have enhanced spatial cognition by having alternatively purposed facial recognition neural pathways.)
Jensen, why would I deceive you?
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Geophysics. Good AI explanation of Chandler Wobble, Euler's Disk, and Euler's Rotational Equations. (Because the periodicity of the Wobble is speeding up.) (Some minimal calculus.) google.com/search?q=chandler… ..
Pole Shift update 🐧💈 I had this idea waking up from a nap today: I wanted to track how many days backward from today (from the current pole's angular position) that one needs to look to find the previous day that lies at roughly the same angle (when looking down from the top, with zero degrees being to the east, 90 to the north, etc.) The thought I had was that this might show me something simple to grasp about the "speed" of the wobble cycle. Put another way: how quickly is the north pole "returning to the same angle" right now, versus how slowly it did this in the past? I had already observed earlier this year that in 2026 the 'return to zero was only about 301 days, as opposed to the 'typical' 433-day Chandler wobble expectation: nitter.gq/cognitivecarbon/status… In my chart, I locate a 'centroid' point using (somewhat arbitrarily) the last 640 days polar motion to determine the rough 'center' from which to then compute the angle to the day of interest. I'm not claiming this new chart is particularly rigorous or unique (perhaps others have done this too) but it does show me some interesting patterns, and I wanted to share it for those who are curious. If we look back to the 1980s, we can see that there was a cyclical pattern of about 5-6 years (A-B, B-C, etc.) In those cycles, the 'return home' took 450 to more than 500 days, instead of 2026's 301 days. I had also observed previously that there is a pattern to the step length as well: pole.mjttech.com/?start=1962… (I'm using a different source for historical data now, and this new source appears to be cleaner, in that some of the 'artifacts' I had noticed in the previous data set aren't there--but it doesn't change the patterns.) I don't claim to know what causes this change in angular return, nor do I claim to know what "normal" is, or anything else. I'm simply observing an interesting pattern from yet another viewpoint that validates claims that @zachariaspro and @nobulart have made about the change in annual or Chandler wobble when looking at these dynamics through their own lenses. You can play with the parameters yourself, here: pole.mjttech.com/?start=2025…
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Calley Means, Joe Rogan. Mostly agree with Toby here, but placing blame on DT is irrelevant because the main issue, the only issue really, is the system is totally broken and needs extreme radical reform. (Did DT make damning compromises to get anything done at all? Unclear.)
I watched all 138 minutes of Joe Rogan's interview with @calleymeans. Calley's logic is as follows (my comments are in parentheses): 1. President Trump and RFK Jr. are heroes, the best people on the planet. 2. They keep getting bamboozled by staffers who know the system better, are secretly working for industry, and are demons. 3. Trump and RFK Jr. are completely unaware of these machinations by staffers (in spite of the fact that the details are in the news every day and activists are explaining to them exactly what is going on). 4. When Trump and RFK Jr. find out after the fact that they have been betrayed they are furious (and then do nothing). (At no point does Joe Rogan ever ask why these betrayals are not met with firings of the people involved.) 5. Trump and RFK Jr. care deeply about these issues but this pattern just keeps happening because this is a structural problem and there is nothing Trump and RFK Jr. can do so we'll just have to pass a Constitutional amendment some day to address the problem of lobbyists. (The details of this proposed Constitutional amendment are never described.) That's the interview. 2 hours and 18 minutes of this logic over and over again. Heidi Overton! Plots with the DOJ to get the Supreme Court to take the glyphosate case! Writes the Executive Order to protect Bayer/Monsanto! Trump and RFK Jr. didn't know! Her punishment? Nominated to be the head of the FDA. What!??? And that's how you know the interview is a psyop. In point of fact, Trump or RFK Jr. could pull the Covid shots tomorrow. Trump or RFK Jr. could have stopped the approval of the Moderna mRNA flu shot or flavored vapes but refused to use their legal authority to do so. Both men know EXACTLY what is happening but they do nothing because THEY are captured by industry. The Informed Consent Action Network even sent a letter to @SecKennedy back in June listing twenty things he could do with the stroke of a pen (no Congressional approval or committee meetings necessary) to reform the vaccine program to make it safer and none of those reforms have happened. icandecide.org/wp-content/up… Meanwhile the White House, HHS, and MAHA tell the base to shut up so that industry can continue to get away with murder and the money will keep rolling in. I'm sick of the lies. I'm sick of the fact that the government is engaged in iatrogenocide and Calley Means thinks that the problem is soda pop. I'm sick of the endless psyops that keep the killing on schedule and the profits thick. I'm sick of pretenders who have not done the work. I'm sick of fake heroes who refuse to use their power to protect the citizenry. Listen to the moms. Pull the shots. Shut down these vile agencies. We don't need a Constitutional amendment. Everything necessary to stop the chronic disease epidemics can be done right now by President Trump and Secretary Kennedy with the powers that they already have. No more excuses.
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Election integrity reform was never going to happen. The people who run the elections want there to be ambiguity about their ability to fix elections so the donor class will pay more for the smoke and mirrors.
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The J6 hearings are now more important than ever as the midterm elections move the USA dramatically toward an overtly one-party political system.
It was a surreal moment at Brian Cole Jr court hearing on Wednesday. I even had to ask @RobGouveiaEsq if my ears had deceived me. Prosecutors openly stated they expected interference - from both @CIA and @CapitolPolice - in discovery requests by the defense. I mean … we already knew who we were up against in this fight, but that was a shocking admission. I’ve told you for a solid year that the pipe bomb event was a “multi-agency conspiracy.” Can you count how many we’re up to thus far?
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Human children learn by playing. This should be a foundational evolutionary educational psychology principle.
“A good video game usually introduces a new weapon not by stopping to explain everything it does, but by giving the player the weapon, enough information to make the possibilities legible, and then pointing him toward an opportunity to use it…”
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Hmm. Chapter 5. "Nothing Makes Sense in EvoDevo Except in the Light of Cell Biology." (Theodosius Dobzhansky "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" in 1973 in the journal The American Biology Teacher.)
Our new book is out. If you love developmental biology, this book is for you.
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AI reduces the time tax of bureaucracy.
Andreessen wrote that “software is eating the world.” What seems obvious today is that “AI is going to eat bureaucracy.” For the last couple of months, I have been running circles around the bureaucratic processes of my university. Here is a recent example. This summer I was charged with producing an assessment of a certificate program. Normally, as a professor, it is a significant fraction of your time. You often get to deduct this time from your teaching duties. It is a lengthy process that ends up with a complex report that might span 100 pages or so. I threw thousands of documents and all the expected analysis at my AI. There was still some manual labour, because I have not connected my AI to my email… But I did weeks or months of work in hours. And the result is massively better than what I would have done by hand. I am just burning through the legalese, the forms, everything. Where does that lead us? If you are not using agentic AI, you are seriously handicapped. You are going to be swarmed, overwhelmed. You won’t understand what is happening. But if you are using AI, if you are using it well, then the time tax of bureaucracy is melting with every month that passes. I’m soon going to automate entirely the bureaucratic component of my job. What a time to be alive.
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Jocko says discipline is freedom. Frank Herbert says unpredictability is freedom. Discipline yourself to be unpredictable. In politics as in martial arts.
Because destroying his own power and the power of people like him, including but not limited to presience, was the entire point. He didn't rule because he believed humanity would be better under his rule. He ruled to make of himself an object lesson in the hopes that when his downfall, which he eventually facilitated, finally came, humanity would grow up and stop following grand leaders like him. Or if you want the more poetic version on presience specifically, "to know the future is to be trapped by it." He was, deliberately, something of a contradiction. A dictator who wanted nothing more than not only a humanity that was truly free, but free and mature enough to survive their own freedom. Hence all the reverse psychology.
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Trump was a business man, that's how they profiled, used him. Epstein files was about corruption. Limited DOGE mostly went after enemies and small fry. His crypto coin. Iran War and yo-yo stock market profiteering. All reinforced corruption perception. Big picture: National Debt.
The Epstein Election and the End of MAGA "The issue once motivated Trump voters. This week, it helped doom Republicans" via @S_Fitzpatrick P.S. Remember when Israel First mocked me for talking about my polling results on the "Epstein Narrative" with @TuckerCarlson? Good times. theatlantic.com/politics/202…
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Jason and Medea, renaming The Furies as The Kindly Ones, Orwell's 1984 about young women- "the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans.." Hilary cackling over how Kaddafi died. Concepts like chivalry, honorable enemies, often useful in politics, now rare.
Very few on the left will object to this even on just basic decency or humanity grounds -- even if it's just to say: mabye we shouldn't publicly cackle and celebrate when someone is fatally shot in the neck? -- because online group-think means they'll be castigated by their audience and other commentators and they don't have the courage to endure even that kind of trivial criticism.
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The Power of Two? Some cartoon series where Two is the name of the one with power?
My actual prediction is not that you're going to get tired of winning. When TPOT runs the government (2025), you're going to honestly get so used to winning you don't even notice it anymore.
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Magnetic pole shifts are happening elsewhere in our solar system. The best explanation is the Galactic Current Sheet.
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The public school system serves the interests of the teacher unions. Every threat or potential future threat to their complete domination must be crushed, and the Tall Poppy story as told by Herodotus must be forever banned.
Homeschoolers generally outperform public school students. The public school system is failing across the country. And the left's response is to mock parents who choose to educate their own children and question their motives for wanting to be with their kids.

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Baris is the very best pollster.
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We will probably see more tweets about great betrayals over the next few months, trying to get into the motivations and effectiveness of them.
So basically, Duke Leto did not let Yueh’s betrayal happen; he failed to anticipate it because the entire Imperium treated Suk conditioning as an absolute that could not be broken. The diamond tattoo and the Imperial conditioning were designed to make a Suk doctor the one person a Great House could trust without reservation, incapable of harming a patient, so both Leto and Thufir Hawat rationally excluded Yueh from the short list of possible traitors. What the Harkonnens discovered, and what no one outside their circle knew, was that the conditioning could be overridden by an even stronger, more personal imperative: the torture and fate of Yueh’s wife. Once that lever existed, Yueh became both the instrument of the attack and the agent who quietly ensured Paul and Jessica’s escape. The tragedy is not that Leto was careless or complicit, but that he placed his faith in a system of control the Harkonnens proved could still be subverted by human attachment, the one variable the conditioning had never been built to withstand.
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