I imagine extroversion correlates negatively with school achievement and positively with income.

I'm not conscious of the Han/Tang distinction at all, and I've never heard any reference to it from my other Chinese friends. So I don't see that as a plausible fault line. 
 
FWIW, as a basic Mandarin speaker, I can tell you that Cantonese is pretty darn incomprehensible to me...

but at the end of the day i have little sympathy for opening up the floor on these comment boards to meta-opinating because most people offering the opinions are nobody's. i've seen it happen on other weblogs, and it quickly turns into a farce like the cultural revolution as every nobody has an opinion on "meta" if not the primary substance of the weblog. 
 
Understood. I'll stick to private emails in the future when it comes to these sorts of concerns.

in any case, on a per-post basis assman probably brings the most virally driven web-traffic besides jason malloy with his culture-quant analyses, and so introduces the wider public to GNXP ideas. i tends to rub me the wrong way when people who don't generate a lot of web traffic themselves lecture those who do on the details of delivery.* perhaps we could turn this into a polished webzine with a style guide and a list of "must do's" and "must don'ts," become to HBD what reason is to libertarianism? but at that point we'd have to start paying people, and the shift from simply giving a free hand to bright young scholars who just want a place to publish unedited prose. i'm sure the style critics around these parts are ready to start offering up their labor hours to organizing a new money losing opinion journal? :-) 
 
Fair enough; I won't argue with web traffic statistics. 
 
But we don't just want others exposed to our ideas, we want as large a fraction as possible to walk away with both a positive impression and a better understanding of the facts, and as small a fraction as possible to be so disgusted that they close their minds to HBD, right? Not all publicity is good publicity here?

how do you know his aims are your aims anyhow? you presume quite a bit by that very assumption. 
 
I am judging him against what I perceive to be GNXP's overall aims rather than my own, but I admit that the latter probably biases my perception of the former. 
 
So, taking your point into account... I still have trouble coming up with mature aims for him that justify his gratuitous public nastiness. There is no limit to how rational and hardheaded we can be without resorting to that.

agnostic, Grey Trouble gave the wrong reason why your "sludgebucket" remark was inappropriate, but that doesn't mean you're right. 
 
Our society will face a choice within the next few decades between constructively dealing with our education/IQ problem, and descending toward Idiocracy. You may think that an informed society cannot choose option #2. But you would be wrong. There are things that a rational person can be more disgusted by than Idiocracy, and one of them is a world where your expressed level of contempt for the vast majority of humanity is fully accepted. Put yourself, if you can, in the shoes of a highly intelligent person with an only slightly-below-average level of Agreeableness, who stumbles upon GNXP for the first time. Upon reading the "sludgebucket" sentence, are you more or less inclined to take GNXP seriously? 
 
This isn't Roissy in DC. Entertainment value is not the primary metric by which your writing here will be judged. I'm not saying that we need to be 100% serious 100% of the time. But I am saying that we are fighters in a civilization-scale war, and you do our cause a disservice when you drive away capable potential recruits.

I would prefer a robotic civilization only to an Idiocracy that truly left no place for nerds. If the choice is instead between robots and a pluralistic society wherein average intelligence is low but nerds are left in peace to do their thing, well, the latter isn't too different from what we have now.

I am also something of an Anglophile when it comes to culture and in particular governmental institutions. However, I favor practical law and order over perfect idealism, so I find myself rooting the most for Singapore. 
 
This latter preference is strong enough that I don't actually think Saddam Hussein was _that_ bad of a guy. I still supported the principle of having a second Iraq war, but only for game-theoretic reasons.

DoJ: Is there any reason to expect that the same improvements won't be equally workable to everyone? 
 
Many of the easiest genetic enhancements will involve taking stuff that's known to work well and giving it to those who don't have it. So I would expect downside variance to decrease, if everyone has roughly equal access to the technology. 
 
I suspect that if mean IQ rises, then the society will change so that higher IQ is needed to survive - leaving about the same proportion unable to cope. 
 
(I assume you mean "thrive" rather than "survive". Modern technology has tended to make survival easier, not harder.) 
 
While there will probably be an effect in the direction you suggest, I really doubt it will be large enough to leave blacks anywhere near as poorly off as they are now.

Modern problems are often best solved by modern solutions. 
 
The same high-tech economy that currently tends to put blacks at a disadvantage also has the ability to offer germline engineering services to remove this disadvantage from all their grandchildren (and maybe even "smart pills" capable of helping the current generation). All that is really needed is the political will; I don't think there remains any serious doubt that a Manhattan Project-type effort could easily overcome the technical barriers within our lifetimes.

Certainly the so-called "War on Drugs" has been a cause of this sorry situation, but merely legalizing drugs won't rectify it. We need to make judges and magistrates responsible for the warrants they issue. If we don't, they'll just continue handing them out like confetti. We need to require police to knock and identify themselves. We need to make police responsible for unnecessary destruction of property and for excessive force against persons. Regrettably, I'm at a loss as to how to convince the American sheeple to demand these things. 
 
They aren't demanding these things because they intuit that a little abuse of power in the "War on Drugs" statistically improves their lives. 
 
Let me say this one more time: not enough of them will care about individual sob stories, or worst-case extrapolations to a totalitarian future. I normally don't have that high of an opinion of voter rationality, but this seems to be a rare case where the median voter is being more rational than the cognitive elite is giving them credit for. While the "War on Drugs" is a very ugly hack, the median voter still has reason to believe that it serves their interests better than any alternative you've offered them. And they may not even be wrong. 
 
If you want to actually change national policy, you'll need to focus on providing a compelling case to non-users. Additional economic growth is a lot more compelling than preventing some totalitarian scenario that they don't believe they're at risk for anyway. Actually convince them that they don't benefit from the abuse of power, then the abuse will disappear.

"Orsee why we' they may turn out okay." should read "Or they may turn out okay." (Something strange happened when I highlighted a block of text; sorry about not catching that in the preview.)

It seems that you are saying that national/societal productivity has mattered more in history than individual freedom, and that therefore it always should. I happen to disagree with this. 
 
No, I don't think it always should be that way. I am just calling attention to the fact that there are what amount to evolutionary constraints here. If, for example, the US traded off its power projection abilities for substantial immediate gains in individual freedom, the long-term effect on individual freedom may not actually be positive, depending on what countries like China and Russia do in response to the power vacuum. Orsee why we' they may turn out okay. But voters aren't going to support a gigantic roll of the dice. 
 
There is a balance that must be struck between immediate freedom and ability to defend that freedom over the long haul. I am completely in favor of reducing the size of the state, and, if there is an "evolutionarily stable" way to do it, replacing the state entirely with independent smaller-scale organizations. But let's not make Marx's mistake of not subjecting the utopian vision (or the path to it, for that matter) to the same level of critique as the status quo.

Basically, if you want individual freedom you can't fine-tune the laws to maximize personal ambition and work ethic. Video games, comic books, and fantasy novels also reduce ambition. There has to be some threshold above which individuals live their own lives free of social engineering. 
 
I agree with this sentiment. But the average voter is willing to give up a bit of freedom for a higher standard of living, and they're even more willing to give up someone else's freedom for it. It doesn't help when they've been indoctrinated to believe that drug users are sinners that are going to burn in hell, etc. 
 
The only practical way I see to increase freedom in the face of this sort of resistance is to ensure non-users get a tangible benefit from the proposed change in policy. I don't think pro-drug legalization folks have paid enough attention to this yet; I believe they will have to if they want to stop residing in the political fringe and actually win elections. 
 
(In the meantime, I am curious what is the actual magnitude of the effect of drugs like marijuana, and in particular whether the effect is smaller than that of other diversions that are actively socially approved. I honestly have no idea... and I have to wonder whether policymakers have any idea, either.)

Marijuana does seem to make people less ambitious and less successful, and people who already have problems probably shouldn't use marijuana. 
 
Well, there's the rub. 
 
There is a conflict between individual self-interest and national self-interest here -- ambition and success have very important positive externalities that often aren't captured in the individual's utility function. There has been selection throughout history for policies that maximize national power, with stuff like pensions being selected for (ugh), and killing/driving out your country's most productive minority being (thankfully) selected against. Selection for policies maximizing individual freedom has only occurred to the extent that it has, on net, also benefited national power. 
 
With statistically productivity-reducing drugs, the challenge is to identify a policy that offers more freedom than the present one without, on net, increasing drug use any more than the additional costs (calculated from a national self-interest standpoint) of trying to enforce the present policy. Sadly, killing hundreds of random citizens is actually a negligible cost in this calculation; I understand why you guys like to emphasize this, but it's not going to be convincing, and that's not because "people are dumb and irrational" either. After all, the more productive my fellow citizens are, the more I benefit from innovations, lower prices, etc.; and it's not unreasonable to accept an additional 0.0002% chance of random death for such benefits, given that I'm gonna die eventually anyway. 
 
What is needed is a policy that simultaneously offers more freedom to drug users while not statistically decreasing net productivity (and ideally increasing it, so that non-drug users have reason to actively favor the policy rather than just being indifferent to it), and a convincing explanation/demonstration that it does this. I'm not sure we have discovered such a policy yet. But I think they exist.

I think Liv's comments are obviously using humor to make a point. I don't understand those who are offended by them.

One other quantitative mental model I have re: diversity is that of modern portfolio theory. 
 
As long as a group tends to have an absolute advantage (economic comparative advantage is not enough) in anything relevant, the modern portfolio theory model suggests that you want some of those people around. What fraction of your society you want them to comprise, that depends on the details of the utility function you're trying to optimize.

You are a 
 
Social Liberal 
(70% permissive) 
 
and an... 
 
Economic Conservative 
(81% permissive)

I warned every conservative I could that re-electing Bush would be a monumental disaster. 
 
Oh, I was convinced that re-electing Bush would be a monumental disaster. 
 
The problem was, electing Kerry looked like it might be an even greater disaster. Living in the non-swing state of California, there was no way I was going to make a symbolic show of support for either candidate. 
 
It didn't help that none of the third party candidates were viable either.

Part of my interest in this topic is that I believe that advanced technology is increasingly giving individuals and small groups the ability to hurt many people. A small fraction of society is increasingly dangerous. How many psychopaths can an advanced technology society tolerate? How can this trend be reversed? 
 
I could not agree more. 
 
I'm not aware of a better solution to this problem than something like the Transparent Society advocated by David Brin. If mobile cameras are everywhere, the chance that somebody catches you in the middle of your doomsday plot becomes reasonably high. On the other hand, David D. Friedman points out that the complete loss of privacy sets us back at least several centuries socially. So we'd certainly like to see a better solution, but does one exist?