Counterfactual means, that if something would not have happened something else would have happened. It's a key concept in Judea Pearl's work on causality. 

What makes you believe that Substack is to blame and not him unpublishing it?

He explicitly says that the people who argue that there's no gap are mistaken to argue that. He argues for the gap being small, not nonexistent. He does not use the term "near zero" himself. 

Similarly, there are a lot of people like Steve Sailer and Emil Kierkegaard arguing that there are racial gaps in intelligence, based on genetics. But when I read them on other stuff, they’re just not great thinkers. In contrast, while Jay M’s blog isn’t as popular or as fun to read for most people, he has a good piece arguing pretty convincingly against the genetic explanation of the gap.

The linked article says:

I do not believe that this is the important disagreement. Now, some (maybe even many) environmentalists argue that genetic differences play no role in the cognitive ability gap (e.g., Nisbett 2005), but I believe these environmentalists are mistaken to argue for such a strong position.

So the linked article says that Steve Sailer and Emil Kierkegaard are right when they say that there are racial gaps in intelligence based on genetics. Basically, he says there's a gap but wants to debate about its size.

Merchants were a lot weaker in China than in Europe. Chinese merchants also did a lot less sea voyages due to geography.

If a bunch of low-status merchants believed that the Earth is a sphere it might not have influenced Chinese high-class beliefs in the same way as beliefs of political powerful merchants in Europe.

Practicing grammar and correcting grammar on the fly seem to be two different things. 

If you want to improve, then I would prompt GPT-4 with something like "I'm a student looking to improve my writing and grammar ability, here's an essay I wrote. Given that writing, please teach me about grammar."

There are also people who's job it is to be a lot on the telephone and thus are well-reached by telephone even if they are younger.

They seem to have similar average BMI and the Swiss seem to have an even lower obesity rate. 

Belgium seems lower obesity rates than France but slightly higher average BMI.

Andorra has lower obesity rates but a significantly higher average BMI.

The UK, Spain and Germany are doing worse than France. 

A bit of chatting with Gemini suggests what Belgium, France and the Swiss share is a strong market culture so food is more fresh.

Eating a meal does not immediately increase the available amount of energy. After eating a meal the body has to first spent hours on processing the meal before the energy is available. 

If a hunter goes for a hunting trip they are usually eating the food after they did their hunting and not before starting their hunting trip. Our body is not optimized to at the same time sending a lot of blood to the intestines to gather resources and send the blood to the muscles for performance. 

But for anything that’s been studied in detail, there’s always lots of evidence to support any semi-plausible view. Do you have any idea how much evidence people can produce for UFOs or chronic Lyme or colloidal silver?

To me, the colloidal silver situation feels strange. It seems that it was used as an antibiotic in the past but we don't have good studies that tell us whether or not it works as an antibiotic. If there would be good evidence that it doesn't work it would likely be on the Wikipedia page.

Health authorities warn about the dangers of antibiotic resistance and how important it supposedly is to have new antibiotics that work through different mechanisms. At the same time, they don't fund the studies to see whether colloidal silver works as an antibiotic, probably out of some combination of it not being patentable and otherwise being a low-status idea.

For most practical purposes, if I need an antibiotic I would rather use one with a well-understood risk profile, so using colloidal silver as a home treatment seems a bad idea.