An Unscientific American
Editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth’s departure from ‘Scientific American’ last week is an object lesson in the dangers of mixing facts and ideology.
Michael Shermer
· 12 min read
Science / Tech
A collection of 373 posts
The Last of the Human Warriors
Advancing technology is changing the way we fight wars and our understanding of heroism.
John Lloyd
· 6 min read
The Psychologisation Pandemic
Denial of “invisible” suffering is bad science and worse ethics.
Samuel Kronen
· 18 min read
Why Is Most Journalism About IQ So Bad?
It is easy to create a negative image of intelligence research because most people know very little about the topic. But distorting intelligence research does a disservice to the field’s hard-working scientists and the general public.
Russell T. Warne
· 13 min read
Racial Disparities and Child Protection
The politicisation of medicine has had terrible unintended consequences.
Naomi Schaefer Riley
· 8 min read
Males in the Tails?
Greater male variability, biology, and bell curves.
Theodore P. Hill
· 18 min read
Selling Happiness Through Illusions
The caring industry’s wellness and positivity products cannot provide self-esteem to those who do not already have it.
Ronald W. Dworkin
· 15 min read
XY Athletes in Women’s Olympic Boxing: The Paris 2024 Controversy Explained
The historical, political, and medical context of the Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting cases.
Doriane Lambelet Coleman
· 13 min read
‘Superintelligence,’ Ten Years On
AI catastrophe is easy to imagine, but a lot has to go consistently and infallibly wrong for the doom theory to pan out.
Sean Welsh
· 12 min read
Recycling Plastic Is a Dangerous Waste of Time
The recycling industry—and the world at large—has yet to fully reckon with a bombshell study that dropped last year.
Frank Celia
· 17 min read
The Future of the Space Industry
The privatisation of space travel is cutting the cost of rocket launches and powering innovation.
Rainer Zitelmann
· 12 min read
ChatGPT’s Moral Compass
We hear much talk of “aligning AI with human values” but relatively little delineation of what these values are.
Sean Welsh
· 15 min read
From Caregivers to Social Reformers
Directing physicians to treat their patients as racial statistics rather than an individuals is a grievous misdirection of their skills.
Ronald A. Lindsay
· 12 min read
The End of the World as We Know It
Far from enhancing American national security, or the security of the world, nuclear weapons will lead us to the edge of destruction.
Lawrence M. Krauss
· 7 min read
One Year Since the AI Pause Petition
Just because we can imagine something terrible happening, that does not mean it will happen.
Mathias Sundin
· 10 min read