

Imprudent Acts and Great Bastards: Sex Advice from 1861 - Hooke
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/02/12/imprudent-acts-and-great-bastards/

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sheensleeves
The article: "This fact is applied to the offspring of great geniuses, who are
supposed to be thinking of something else when they beget their children, and
hence their descendants are often much below them in intellect."

In a blog post, I read that this is called "regression to the mean," and IIRC
you are basically the average of your four grandparents in IQ. So he's wrong,
but clever.

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SapphireSun
> IIRC you are basically the average of your four grandparents in IQ. So he's
> wrong, but clever.

Assuming that's true, it would be better phrased as "you are on average the
average of your four grandparents in IQ" otherwise you'd never have geniuses
;)

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Torgo
A similar book from 1904 is "Vivilore":
[https://archive.org/details/vivilorepathwayt00meleuoft](https://archive.org/details/vivilorepathwayt00meleuoft)

I got a copy of this in a table of junk in an auction. It's an interesting mix
of good advice, sexist advice, absolutely terrible advice, and complete junk
like phrenology and palm reading.

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bradleyankrom
The rare case in which the comments are more entertaining than the article.

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normloman
haha yeah that justin stewart guy is a riot

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kbenson
I knew a guy with a similar problem. He only liked the women he was pursuing
before he slept with them, because he did so much sweet talking and
manipulation to get to that point, that he didn't respect them for falling for
it afterwards (in his words, in a candid moment). He was aware the problem was
him, and not them, but that doesn't always make it immediately easy to change.

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UhUhUhUh
If I were to seek advice from an era and a place that sure wouldn't be America
(or England) in the 1800s. Tell me about the France of Rabelais or Villon, the
Italy of Machiavelli, even the plague-ridden London of Shakespeare, the China
of the Tang. And so forth.

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Dirlewanger
Any modern-ish scientific writings like these (18th century onward) where the
English, although awash with fluffy phrases and words that make any writer
cringe, is readable enough to where one can grasp the gist are a pleasure to
read. People spoke with such authority and a matter-of-factness that nowadays
is laughable. The concept of there being unknown unknowns must have never
registered for so many of the day.

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innguest
> The concept of there being unknown unknowns must have never registered for
> so many of the day.

"I think history is a lot more interesting and makes a lot more sense when you
finally realize that people in the past were just as aware and smart as us, as
opposed to the bumbling idiots we often assume them to be." \-- rthomas6 :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9032743](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9032743)

I disagree with rthomas6 from the cross post linked above. I think in the past
people were intellectually dishonest which led them to write and act like
know-it-all pathological liars.

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TomSawyer
Yeah, that doesn't happen anymore. Our elite are the real deal.

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kbenson
No, but perhaps the common person has enough education now to see and call out
the bullshit that may have been able to pass in ages past.

It's not that our elites are better, it's that they aren't viewed as exempt
from common mishaps and misbehaviors as they perhaps were in the past.

