Never take an advice from a salesman, or any advice that benefits the advice giver. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Complex systems are full of interdependencies — hard to detect — and nonlinear responses.

I can understand someone saying "listen, I love strangers but I am more comfortable w/my nationality, shared values" (homophily) or "neighbors get along better than rommates" (fractal localism). But making "others" genetically "inferior" using IQ "science" is quite sinister.

Take the following potent and less-is-more-style argument by the rogue economist Ha-Joon Chang. In 1960 Taiwan had a much lower literacy rate than the Philippines and half the income per person; today Taiwan has ten times the income. At the same time, Korea had a much lower literacy rate than Argentina (which had one of the highest in the world) and about one-fifth the income per person; today it has three times as much. Further, over the same period, sub-Saharan Africa saw markedly increasing literacy rates, accompanied with a decrease in their standard of living. We can multiply the examples (Pritchet’s study is quite thorough), but I wonder why people don’t realize the simple truism, that is, the fooled by randomness effect: mistaking the merely associative for the causal, that is, if rich countries are educated, immediately inferring that education makes a country rich, without even checking. Epiphenomenon here again.