…but height is.

Quien es su papi?

Life isn’t Gaussian… but height is.

This, ftr, is the difference between 15th and 100th percentiles in height at one year of age.i To put this in a more broadly digestibleii if perhaps unpalatable terms for the inadequate, the following is the difference between 15thiii and 100th percentiles on the political adeptness curveiv :

putin vs obama on wheels

___ ___ ___

  1. The blond bomber is actually 3 weeks older than his little friend, but let’s be real, that gap ain’t closing anytime soon.
  2. Hey, not everyone is willing to take the plunge into the meshuga that is parenting. If there’s anything an entire generation of unemployed, basement-dwelling, video game addicted redditards has demonstrated for all the world to see, it’s that parenting most manifestly isn’t for everyone.

    Updated : Recent convo in #trilema in which I defended the good name of parenting against two mighty rivals was too relevant not to paste in here. So here it is :

    mircea_popescu: Fortune is by definition random when playing the powerball : you’ll get half your money on average. Fortune is deeply not random when discussing girls. Joe rapes Rachel and as a result Rachel is thankful and Joe has a new slave. Moe tries to talk to Sarah and is forced to waste 30 hours doing “sensitivity training”. Ironically, from this perspective the decision to drive to Arizona [for Elliot] to play lottery is even judicious. Better odds than trying to play the pool party, at any rate.
    asciilifeform: Same fortune as in powerball, only diff is that the respective tickets were bought by joe and moe’s parents

    mircea_popescu: This is not so. If i believed my kids were going to be anything like me I’d even consider having some.
    asciilifeform: I did say ‘same powerball’ rather than ‘choose parents carefully’.

    mircea_popescu: What do you mean, explicitly ?
    asciilifeform: Well, Joe is a hero, and Moe is a zero, and this quite likely was apparent to a skilled eye when both just learned to walk, neh ?

    mircea_popescu: Zeros are apparent. It’s a field of “zero. Likely zero. Zero zero likely-meh. Zero. Zero zero zero. Zero zero zero. Zero zero zero. Zero zero zero. Zero zero zero. Zero zero.” You know, actually a lot like how Google Go “brain” looks. Large field of zeros.
    pete_d: So you have confidence in your ability to shape slavegurl into whatever form you please, then why not chitlin ? Surely starting earlier has its advantages

    mircea_popescu: I have no such confidence. Some girls are extremely good at shaping themselves into an extremely sharp tool in the right sort of context ; and the result is by very far much sharper than anything ever produced naturally, or through alternative means. Nevertheless, it does not work for most women ; and i never tried nor would i be bothered to try on children.
    asciilifeform: IIRC he doesn’t lift random scum off the street to work on.

    pete_d: Sure, but nor is fleisch und blut ‘random scum off the street’
    asciilifeform: ~=.

    mircea_popescu: Why not ? I mean, i see the point to a certain degree, the street in practice DOES select, for the worst. But I think he just meant “crapshot” rather than proper, street scum.
    *pete_d sees that he’s going to be defending biology now, it’s so sure it’s the wisest against two such opponents

    mircea_popescu: Problem is biology has no intention of defending you. Reversal to the mean is the controlling phenomenon there.
    asciilifeform: Al ‘Uncle Al’ Schwartz’s father, for instance, was – IIRC – a tailor, who never read a book cover to cover in his entire life. And mircea_popescu has it.

    mircea_popescu: If we are to learn anything from the history of the 2nd millennium, is that marrying performance and lineage is suicidal. So fucking costly a stupidity, in fact, as to sink monarchy, ie, the most perfect form of social organisation possible.
    pete_d: mircea_popescu: granted, but sultan had whatever 200 pups, a couple were fit for higher life, so why not mp, sultan of tmsr ? too many castles needed to house them ?

    mircea_popescu: The model creates a very bloodthirsty litter. I’m not saying it is impossible. I’m just saying it’s a pretty distant bridge.
    pete_d: That’d be the point i imagine

    mircea_popescu: It would ?
    pete_dushenski: Create tension, conflict, and competition in the brood, let winrar emerge therefrom. Have two kids ? God help the spoiled brats. I mean, look at me!

    mircea_popescu: And who’s gonna write the poems ? women only ? literature by females results in the collapse of the empire.
    pete_d: Winrar can write poems just fine. Samurai seemed to at any rate.

    mircea_popescu: Actually matching the Japanese gender split of literary production and Japanese political situation over time is bound to be shockingly instructive.
    pete_d: Besides, what’s life without a little risk, a little ‘crapshot’ now and again. Maybe child is crapshot too far, but it’s a matter of degrees. /me is prolly ex post rationalising, but how not.
    mircea_popescu: Maybe.

    asciilifeform: ‘Hey come and play powerball with me, i haven’t won yet but TOGETHER YES WE CAN!1111’
    pete_d: Less powerball and more Poker World Series.

    When I don’t out-and-out lose a debate against these two, it sure as hell feels like a win. See ? Life isn’t so terrible on this end of the continuum :P 

  3. You can’t say I’m not generous now! “Oh you know Pete?” “Which one?” “The generous one” “Oh ya, Pete D, what about him?” is pretty much how it goes, henceforth and forevermore.
  4. Of politicians extant. There’s no point in saying “Ali woulda killed so and so in the ring if he had the chance.” He didn’t have the chance. He fought Foreman, not Klitschko. Just as Rommel couldn’t have fought Napolean, it’s just how it goes.

    It’s also worth noting that, quite like Mr. “Doesn’t understand how the world works,” I don’t personally wear a helmet on my bike either. Why ? Isn’t that, like, unsafe and dangerous and mean to endangered spotted 3-toed rhinos and shit ? Sorry Timmy, I know that’s what they told you in government daycare for 20 of your 25 years on this planet, but the fact of the matter remains that helmets are for pussies and some of us would rather die “too young” and “preventably” than live forever and in doing so pollute the environment with their puerile, helmet-protected twittery. It’s one thing if you’re a hoplite or a centurion, it’s quite another if you’re just going for a pedal around town. Man up wouldja.

3 thoughts on “…but height is.

  1. Pete D. says:

    Aaaand updated.

  2. Saifedean Ammous says:

    It’s not powerball. A lot of it is in the genetics, and a lot is in the nutrition and the environment. Most people today feed their kids crap and treat them like crap and think missing all their developmental milestones is just a quirky crapshoot of fate.

    Deep Nutrition by Catherine Shanahan is particularly enlightening here, as is Weston Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. The Brighton Baby folks have a step-by-step manual for how to engineer an extraordinary baby. The beautiful thing about having a child is that you can give him the start you would have given yourself if you could, which you cannot. If you think you are a worthwhile human being, then it’s in your hands to make a better version of yourself to be your companion and ally for the rest of your life!

    • Pete D. says:

      Whether he’s a companion or not – and even if my efforts at healthful nutrition and careful genetic selection don’t reach their full potentiality in terms of intellect – I’m hoping that at the very least he can use his inordinate size and bloodborne loyalty to head up my personal security division.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *