“Cultural Differences in Response to Pain” revisited
I was sent this viral image about ethnicity and pain management: Tracing the source of this, it comes from a 2017 blogpost, which cites an article in NYPost. The complaints…
Review: Can we avoid another financial crisis? (Steve Keen)
Last year, I remembered that I think most books are too long. Perhaps one sensible response to this is to favor reading shorter books in general. So I sorted my…
Reviewing Karl Marx
By whatever accidents of history, the otherwise obscure German Jewish Karl Marx became an internationally known hero and villain (depending on your view). I was somewhat familiar with his ideas…
Personal productivity in 2025 in numbers
Ah yes, it's time to get back to work after the holidays. So let's start with the yearly recaps. First off is my own productivity numbers (which is what you…
Robert Sternberg returns
Robert Sternberg has licked his wounds and returned to the fray. OK, it was limited to some viral video (2M), but nevertheless. Here's a repost of it: Not really worth…
African beauty
A friend sent me this study yesterday, so let's cover it here: Taddess, B., Zhang, L., & Trejo, S. (2025). Leveraging Genomic Data to Document Within-Race Attractiveness Penalties Among Black…
European women and migrants: are children the solution?
I saw this funny and one might say provocative study: Schahbasi, A., Huber, S., & Fieder, M. (2021). Factors affecting attitudes toward migrants—An evolutionary approach. American Journal of Human Biology,…
Do national IQs predict differently across regions?
Going back to Lyman Stone's tweet: in fact, national IQ’s predictiveness of GDP is often very weak within-region, i.e. within-ancestry-groups. measurement error is obviously a plausible part of this, but…
Admixture in Americas 2.0
We are finally ready to share our big follow-up to the first Admixture in the Americas project from 2016. Fuerst, J., & Kirkegaard, E. O. W. (2025, December 5). Continental…
Does driver’s license training work?
Countries (and subnational divisions within some countries) differ quite a bit in how difficult it is to obtain a driver's license. The requirements here parallel those seen for various kinds…