Incompetent police
We have yet another high profile case of a police beating in the USA, so it seems useful to talk about why we can't have nice things. First, let's step…
Homosexuality is a mental illness
To be precise, exclusive homosexuality is. But let's backtrack a bit. Scott Alexander has a new piece out that begins with this disclaimer: CONTENT NOTE: This essay contains sentences that…
Are fat people dumb?
There's a stereotype that fat people are lazy, less intelligent, and of course, they are widely considered unattractive in the west in modern times. But is this stereotype true? Well,…
The distribution of attractiveness
Recently there was a piece on ISF about this by 'Alexander' AKA. datepsych on Twitter: Is Physical Attractiveness Normally Distributed?. Basically, he takes the OKCupid results and thinks these show…
Interactive statistics: breeding’s equation AKA regression towards the mean
One of the things I did to teach myself R programming was to create a bunch of interactive statistics tools written using the awesome R Shiny package. These are still…
Rationality and the fair sex
Rationality is great. It's what separates humans from other species to a very large extent. There's not one but two philosophical movements named after this (rationalism of Descartes et al,…
Does school make students kill themselves?
I know, I know. It's fashionable to hate on formal education in the rationalist community. Here's an obligatory Twitter poll: And there's even some push-back in the funny article Why…
High heritability does mean that social interventions likely won’t work well
The scientific literature is full of claims like this one (Paige Harden 2021): This hereditarian pessimism about the possibility of social change, however, is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of…
The thick end of The Bell Curve
Adrian Wooldridge is currently popular with his book The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World (2021). I read the book a while ago, but forgot to do…
Smart fraction theory vindicated
In the last days of 2022, Noah Carl and I had a new paper out: Kirkegaard, E. O. W., & Carl, N. (2022). Smart Fraction Theory: A Comprehensive Re-evaluation. Comparative…