A Risk Not Worth Taking: An Open Letter to My Colleagues in The Academy
We need a strategy that insulates us from hate, no matter what empirical research uncovers about the world.
Brian Boutwell
· 4 min read
Science / Tech
A collection of 318 posts
Getting Voxed: Charles Murray, Ideology, and the Debate on IQ
“The impulse to think that environmental sources of differences are less threatening than genetic ones is natural but illusory.” Charles Murray
Censorship, the Authoritarian's Snake Oil
The desire to censor is not entirely impossible to understand. When you encounter an idiotic YouTube comment or forum post.
Matthew Mott
· 6 min read
Paradoxes of Probability and Other Statistical Strangeness
Nowadays, researchers can access a wealth of software packages that can readily analyse data and output the results of complex statistical tests.
Stephen Woodcock
· 7 min read
Why Citing a Scientific Study Does Not Finish An Argument
A single study is rarely anything more than suggestive, and often it takes many replications under a variety of circumstances to provide strong justification for a conclusion.
Jonathan Anomaly, Brian Boutwell
· 7 min read
The Rhetorical Trap at the Heart of the "Neurosexism" Debate
The Motte and Bailey Doctrine has been a successful rhetorical device for anti-sex difference academics and authors for some time now, but it is beginning to fray at the edges.
Claire Lehmann, Debra Soh
· 7 min read
Reviving "Essentialism" and Other Scientific Straw Men
In fact—it’s even more interesting than that. Multiple matings do (perhaps surprisingly) benefit females in all sorts of ways across all sort of species.
Robert King
· 10 min read
Epigenetics Has Become Dangerously Fashionable
“Many of our expert epigenetics research colleagues are deeply embarrassed by the warm, uncritical response their work has attracted from the social sciences,”
Brian Boutwell, Conor Barnes
· 6 min read
Not Everything Is An Interaction
Despite strong genetic influences on IQ (and there are strong genetic influences on IQ), we can’t calculate the proportion of credit for Einstein’s intellect that is owed solely to his genes.
Brian Boutwell
· 4 min read
A Tale of Two Bell Curves
The truth, surprising as it may seem today, is this: The Bell Curve is not pseudoscience.
Bo Winegard and Ben Winegard
· 12 min read
Why Powerful People Fail to Stop Bad Behavior by Their Underlings
Although the failure to stop an unethical practice is often attributed to character problems such as greed, sexism or the relentless pursuit of self-interest, our explanation is subtler.
Jessica A Kennedy and Cameron Anderson
· 6 min read
Censorship-Free Social Media: the Next Big Thing, or Just Another Echo Chamber?
One of the forefathers of the modern internet, John Gilmore, famously remarked that the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
Matthew Mott
· 6 min read
Sociology's Stagnation
The curricula of sociology departments are so deeply flawed that they will need to be revised from the ground up.
Brian Boutwell
· 11 min read
If You’re Reading This Essay, You Should Probably Have (More) Children
A number of popular articles (and books) have implored people to have fewer children as a way of minimizing anthropogenic global warming.
Jonathan Anomaly, Brian Boutwell
· 6 min read
Medicine Must Not Forget the Psychosocial
The real beauty of the biopsychosocial approach is that it has application to the individual (both in terms of causal explanation and of treatment offered), to the wider population, and to research.
Tim Rogers
· 8 min read