An admonition from Captain Obvious

For the last several years, I've been using Facebook as an effortless, free archival backup for TAE. I edited the privacy settings on my notes so that I was the only one able to view them. A few months ago, I happened to notice that the privacy settings for notes had disappeared, but I asked a couple of trusted people to scour my profile to see if they were able to view them. They were not. No harm, no foul. Then a few days ago I got a message from a friend saying he'd recently seen a couple of them in his newsfeed. Uh oh.

Apparently, the privacy setting for notes has been abolished and they are, by default, viewable by all friends, although each note now has an individual privacy setting. That left me with a couple of options, both of them awfully tedious. Either I delete my FB account, create a new one, and reconnect with 500 people (which would have at least come with the benefit of weeding out the undesirable ones), or discontinue the auto feed and go through and manually set each of the nearly 600 notes (blog posts) already there to be viewable only by me. I went with the latter.

I'm probably overly concerned about my identity being tied to TAE. For one, by default I assume people are paying a lot more attention to me than they actually are. There are obvious evolutionary reasons for this. To be pithy, it's better safe than sorry. As a hunter and gatherer, if I'm more wary than I need to be, at worst the vigilance costs me a little extra energy. If I'm not wary enough, it could lead to me being fatally ambushed or ostracized from the tribe. Secondly, there are more prominent guys like Randall Parker and Dennis Mangan who courageously refuse to hide behind a pseudonym, and the black helicopters haven't come for them, at least not yet.

Still, I'd prefer to maintain my anonymity. And, knock on wood, no one else has mentioned anything about the posts to me. They'll soon be buried deep in people's news feeds, so I should be able to keep that anonymity--as long as I get it through my thick head that nothing on FB or any other social networking site should ever be considered private. I could use that as a segue into a rant about how FB is immoral and despicable for having betrayed me, but The Simpsons reminds us of just how pretentious of me that would be:

Comic Book Guy: Last night's Itchy & Scratchy was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured that I was on the internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world.

Bart: Hey, I know it wasn't great, but what right do you have to complain?

CBG: As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me.

Bart: What? They've given you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? I mean, if anything, you owe them.

CBG: Worst episode ever.

IQ and Census response rates

Complementing the assertion that IQ and quality of life correlate positively with one another is the presumption that IQ is similarly correlated with higher levels of civic participation. Using data gathered by GMU professor Michael MacDonald, it has been revealed here that intelligent people vote more frequently than dullards do.

They also appear to be more compliant and timely in completing and returning their census information, despite the official pitch being that completing the form means more government money coming your way, a message that should appeal more to the lower classes than to those at the top. The US Census site has an interactive map that displays response rates by state as of April 9th. State response rates and estimated average IQ correlate at .57 (p = 0). Parenthetically, the correlation between IQ and eligible voting rate by state is a similar .65 (p = 0).

This is not simply the result of lower response rates among states with large immigrant populations--among the bottom five states, only one (New Mexico) has a sizeable Hispanic immigrant population to speak of (the others are Alaska, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and West Virginia--excepting Alaska, dull white states). It might also be assumed that low population density would be an explanatory factor (though I'm not really sure as to why, since the forms were sent out and to be returned by mail), but the top of the list is full of relatively sparsely populated places like Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Kansas.

Speaking of top responders, what jumps out immediately is how well the Midwest does compared to the rest of the country. The following table shows average state response rate by US Census region:

Region	Response
Midwest	71.1%
Northeast	64.1%
South	63.1%
West	62.5%

A friend has been pestering me to take a month off this summer and go backpacking through Europe with her to celebrate getting her Master's degree. Even though I'm only two years older than she is, the chasm in life stages is a lot wider than the marginal gap in age is (she's actually one of my older female friends). My responsibilities make it impossible for me to go traipsing through the Old Continent for several weeks, and anyway I don't want the upper body shrinkage walking for hours day after day will result in!

But, to at least tangentially tie the story to the post, I don't have any desire to leave the Midwest for an extended period of time, even a month. The people here are pragmatic, friendly, and neighborly. The demographics are good, the real standard of living is high, and the population density isn't suffocating. The weather can be grating, especially in the winter, but as far as I know, no one has located Eden yet.