Do Advocacy Groups Belong in Academia?
Science seeks to explain the world, but explanation conflicts with condemnation, which is an important component of injustice and in turn advocacy.
Uri Harris
· 11 min read
Science
A collection of 155 posts
On the Fallibility of Memory and the Importance of Evidence
As individuals making personal judgments about the truthfulness of Kavanaugh and Ford, we are not held to the same standards as our justice system.
Tyler Watkins
· 18 min read
Forget Nature Versus Nurture. Nature Has Won
Plomin tries to present this cascade of new information about the genetic influence on human behavior in a way that will positively affect human behavior – but his own work suggests the impact of such arguments will be limited.
Gregory Cochran
· 7 min read
A Striking Similarity: The Revolutionary Findings of Twin Studies
The British psychologist Cyril Burt had been accused of falsifying the results of twin studies and related research into the heritability of IQ.
Henrik B. Dynesen
· 10 min read
Why Can’t a Woman be More Like a Man?
For those who believe that gender is a social construct, and there are no differences between men and women’s brains, this paper is something of a reality check.
Toby Young
· 11 min read
‘Indigenous Ways of Knowing’: Magical Thinking and Spirituality by Any One Name
The idea of bringing traditional ways of knowing together with empirical data and science is important.
Josh Dehaas
· 7 min read
The Strange Truth About Alternative Facts
Now if a single moral judgment depends on a unit of analysis, then surely a political philosophy that imagines some sort of societal structure that maximizes some moral values (whatever they may be), must also depend on a unit of analysis.
Stuart Doyle
· 5 min read
The Empathy Gap in Tech: Interview with a Software Engineer
The tech industry more broadly is rarely discussed in terms of friendliness towards those with high functioning autism, such as Gideon.
Claire Lehmann
· 15 min read
Where Did We Come From? An Astonishing Hypothesis
The possibility that non-life became life over a million or so years, rather than hundreds of millions of years, is astonishing.
Geoffrey Lehmann
· 19 min read
The Neuroscience of Intelligence: An Interview with Richard Haier
Is it possible to see if someone is high in g by their brain activity on a PET scan or fMRI scan – and if so, what does it look like?
Claire Lehmann
· 8 min read
Should We Be Worried About GMOs?
GMOs interact with wider global systems that they could potentially undermine, with terrible consequence.
Simon Beard and Rachel Polfer
· 6 min read
Beaked Up Birds: A Review of Big Chicken
Agriculture brought with it enormous benefits, including a larger trading network, a greater division of labor, and even some genetic changes that we’re better off with than without.
Jonathan Anomaly
· 6 min read
Against the Demonization of Drugs
Drugs are able to save lives and ruin them; enhance your mind and numb it; heal your body and destroy it.
Sana Al-Badri and Marco Vega
· 12 min read
What is Mindfulness? Nobody Really Knows, and That's a Problem
Researchers should systematically assess potential side effects when studying mindfulness treatments.
Nicholas T Van Dam and Nick Haslam
· 5 min read
Is There a Biological Case for Criminal Justice Reform?
“We’ve successfully banished the notion of punishment in that realm,” Sapolsky writes. “It may take centuries, but we can do the same in all our current arenas of punishment.”
Hal Conick
· 6 min read