I personally recommend that all parents donate to the Localdeity Enrichment Fund, an important yet frequently overlooked cause area.
Whoever wrote that article is confused, since in the table in the section labeled "Analogy vs Simile: The Differences" they have several entries the wrong way around (compared to the two paragraphs preceding it).
It seems to me that you could use the same comparison for either an analogy or a simile. An analogy would usually be in the present tense, "X is like Y", and followed by more explanation of the concept the analogy is meant to illustrate. A simile would more frequently be in the past tense as part of a narrative, and more frequently use other verbs than "is"—"X moved like a Y"—and probably wouldn't extend beyond the current sentence, usually not even beyond that phrase. I think a bare statement of "X is like Y" might go either way.
The term "privilege" is bad here; prefer "advantage". "Privilege"—privi-lege, private law—implies that there's an authority deciding to grant it to some people and not others, which would be unjust (since most things that affect intelligence, such as genetics and childhood nutrition, happen long before a person does anything to "deserve" it more than others), which in turn encourages people to get angry and suspicious, and encourages the advantaged to feel embarrassed or even guilty by association when they've done nothing wrong. Calling it "privilege" is only useful if you want to encourage that kind of conflict.
That said, there are plenty of people who downplay the importance of intelligence, and/or exaggerate the degree to which it can be improved through hard work, educational interventions, school funding, etc. However, those people are much more likely to be social justice activists than rationalists. The #3 top voted post in the 2023 Less Wrong review was about how to use genetic technology to improve intelligence (and other qualities) in the general population. It's interesting to note that the 2023 post is trying to fix the problem of people not being as smart as they would like to be, while this post's recommendations do not include trying to fix that problem.
Other reasons:
Biases towards claiming agreement with one’s own beliefs
If the institution is widely trusted, respected, high status, etc., as well as powerful, then if Alice convinces you that the institution supports her beliefs, then you might be inclined to give more credence to Alice's beliefs. That would serve Alice's political agenda.
Weaker biases towards claiming disagreement with one’s own beliefs
If the institution is widely hated—for example al-Qaeda, the CIA, the KGB—or considered low status, crazy, and so on, then if Alice convinces you that the institution opposes her beliefs, that might make you more sympathetic to her, make you distrust arguments against her beliefs, and/or defuse preexisting arguments that support for Alice's position comes mostly from these evil/crazy institutions.
In Judaism, you're not supposed to marry a non-Jew unless they convert to Judaism (a lengthy process from what I've heard), so I suspect the families on both sides of the deal are usually equally religious.
In any case, googling for "grief and genetic closeness study" yields this:
A Twin Loss Survey was completed by MZ and same-sex DZ twins following loss of a cotwin and nontwin relatives. Twin survivors (N = 612; MZ = 506; DZ, n = 106) included twins whose age at loss was 15 years or older. Participation age was M = 47.66 years (SD = 15.31). Hamilton's inclusive fitness theory generated two hypotheses: (1) MZ twins will recall greater grief intensity at loss than DZ twins; (2) loss of a twin will receive greater grief intensity ratings than loss of nontwin relatives. [...] Part I: Hypotheses regarding grief intensity were supported.
And this, where the highlights are:
- Surviving MZ twins grieve more intensely for deceased co-twins than surviving DZ twins.
- Female twins grieve more intensely for deceased co-twins than male twins.
- Twins grieve more intensely for deceased co-twins than for other deceased relatives.
- Survivors' grief intensity varies with genetic relatedness to the deceased.
Everything you say seems straightforwardly correct or a logical guess. I'd add:
I think there's at least decent truth to it. One study:
This study examines gift giving at Israeli weddings. In accordance with kin selection theory, we hypothesized that wedding guests possessing greater genetic relatedness to the newlyweds would offer greater sums of money as wedding gifts. We also hypothesized that family members stemming from the maternal side (where the genetic lineage has higher kinship certainty) would offer the newlyweds more money than those stemming from the paternal side. Data on the monetary gift sums of the wedding guests from 30 weddings were collapsed according to two criteria: (a) genetic relatedness (0%, 6.25%, 12.5%, 25%, and 50%) and (b) kinship certainty (maternal or paternal lineage). Both hypotheses were supported.
I think I had also heard of studies that looked into either "how devastated would you feel", or "how devastated did you feel", regarding the death of a family member, and that these also fit the "genetic closeness" predictions. I don't know exactly how they were done—obviously genetic closeness will correlate highly with family structure that gives you actual closeness, and one must control for that. But my impression is that the effect is real and significant, though of course not all-consuming.
There's also an interview with someone who studied identical twins a lot, with various interesting things to say.
I think the hemisphere stuff is quite literal. I think it's general knowledge that the right eye feeds into the left side of the brain, and vice versa (Actually, looking it up, it is the case that the left is controlled by the right and vice versa, but I see some claims that the information feeds into both sides, in a nearly balanced manner[1]; but I don't know if Ziz knows that); and Ziz's whole "unihemispheric sleep" thing tells you to keep one eye closed and distract the other eye so that eventually one hemisphere falls asleep.
Claude sez: "When nerve fibers cross at the optic chiasm, approximately 53-55% of nerve fibers cross to the opposite hemisphere, while 45-47% remain on the same side. This means that each hemisphere receives slightly different proportions of visual information from both eyes." Wiki on Optic chiasm confirms: "The number of axons that do not cross the midline and project ipsilaterally depends on the degree of binocular vision of the animal (3% in mice and 45% in humans do not cross)".
BTW, on Ziz's obituary someone wrote:
Like Jesus, he will arise from the dead.
not sure if sincere or trolling...
The date on that comment is Jan 30 2025. Methinks 90% likelihood it's causally downstream from the recent murders and that the poster knows Ziz was never dead.
Some people have complained that, when their opponents "steelman" their position, in practice it can mean they steelman a particular argument that is not their main argument. This struck me as a remarkably explicit and self-aware example of that.
I don't know what the solution is. Maybe tell people not to use "steelmanning" in such cases, maybe tell people to stop expecting "steelmanning" to necessarily mean it won't miss a central argument. Maybe decide that you should, e.g., say "I'm steelmanning this particular argument", because if you say "I'm steelmanning the case for this conclusion" then that means you're supposed to capture all important arguments for that conclusion.