Unfortunately many of the people who are talking about things like gender differences they have no idea what they are talking about. They don't know the literature. They don't know there is a literature. They don't understand biology

Relatively small differences in the average can produce walloping differences at the extremes

Almost all the people hyper focused on things are almost all men and all the people who are hyper focused on people are almost all women

Men are more interested in things generally speaking and women are more interested in people

Differences at the extreme are where the differences really start to manifest themselves. So you can have a small difference at the level of the average but out at the extremes it starts to make massive difference

Let's pick the one in a hundred most aggressive person from the random population. Well, they are all men. And that's why all the people in prison are men

If you took a random woman out of the population and a random man and you had to bet on who was more temperamentally aggressive, if you bet on the man you'd be right 60 percent of the time

Even if you don't know the history but have a complete understanding of human beings, you would say - well, equality of outcome does not make sense

If you have real true freedom, you'll never have an equality of outcome

Hard work

I know some guys that work all the time. They don't just work, they work so efficiently and so effectively and make use of every second in ways you can't even imagine unless you're in that sort of position. Doing that doesn't mean you'll succeed but not doing it certainly means that you will fail

I can't imagine anything we could possibly strive for in our society that would make it into hell faster than equality of outcome. Historical evidence for the pathology of that root is so strong. You have to be historically ignorant beyond belief or malevolent or resentful beyond comprehension in order to think that that's a good idea

You can be anti radical left without falling all the way into the far right

White lies and black truths

There are white lies and black truths. A black truth is when you use the truth in a way that isn't truthful - just like a white lie is when you lie in a way that isn't harmful. You can use the truth to wound and hurt and what that really means is that you've misused the truth and so it's actually a complex form of lie

If you have good measures of conscientiousness and IQ, you can predict someone's success in the competitive landscape with a correlation of about 0.6

To direct the market means to impose the heavy hand of the state and it's potential pathologies on the market but to leave it alone completely means that it wanders randomly through an indeterminate landscape

University is actually not a business. It's like a church is not a business

Men who are men don't need money, they need function

Economic inequality drives crime

Don't let the inequality in your neighborhood get out of hand because the crime rate will skyrocket

In order for society to progress you have to allow the individual to compete in a relatively untrammeled space so that they can innovate

Motivation driven by necessity

One of the advantages of zero is that you're driven by brute necessity and that can really be motivating. That's I think why the children of first generation immigrants often do so well. They're driven by necessity

If you don't have any money, it's really hard to get some. Once you have some, it's not so hard to get some more

Smart people who work hard are disproportionately likely to succeed

Biggest predictors of success

We know what predicts success - IQ and conscientiousness are the biggest predictors of success

If you let a monetary system run, all the money ends up in the hands of a very small number of people