Motivated reasoning and intelligence
Years ago, a very flashy finding by Kahan and colleagues (2017) got popular (1200+ citations). It goes like this, you give people some matrices of fake study data like these:…
Words can’t bring me down
At least, that's a philosophy of life that some people subscribe to. Others think that words are sort of magic and can hurt you. Even if they are general statements…
New test site: taketest.xyz
Using Claude code I am realizing some projects that were always waiting for a sudden burst of manic energy. These projects now only take some hours of chatting and revising…
Penalization for small n problems: case study of Steam games
For many kinds of ranking websites, users are naturally going to be interested in the leaderboard or top list, the best of the best. This is the same thing for…
Steam game ratings don’t show recency effect
Due to a data error, some of these findings are not entirely true. See next post. Previously, I showed that IMDB movie ratings are inflated for recent movies. I speculated this…
Newest results on the sex difference in intelligence
Richard Lynn noted a 'paradox' or incongruency many years ago (1994): A paradox concerning sex differences in intelligence and brain size has recently been noted by Ankney (1992) and Rushton…
Who makes the most highly rated movies?
Working with the IMDB data, we can also have another look at who makes the best movies. I previously examined this using the best foreign film category from the American…
Recency bias in IMDB ratings
In 2024 I wrote a post showing this plot (well, a similar one): The pattern is that newer movies have been getting progressively lower rated. Now there can be some…
Climate science and conspiracy theories
Joe Duarte (of Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science fame) has been complaining about some climate science denial/skepticism being linked to conspiracy theories study for years. He posted a…
Bryan Pesta tells his story + the closing of HDF
Some years ago we published the world's first admixture regression studies. These were done using a series of datasets starting with the relatively small PING, then moving on to PNC/TCP,…