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…
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…
New study on the effect of university education on political views in the UK
Someone sent me this new study that I hadn't included in my review from back in January: Scott, R. (2022). Does university make you more liberal? Estimating the within-individual effects…
Those unwanted results from the Ontario’s Mathematics Proficiency Test
You may recall a few months back that Canada's highest court declared a math test for school teachers to be ... unconstitutional: As a result of a recent decision of…
IQs by university degrees from SATs
There's a bunch of these claims floating around. The good ones are based on Razib Khan's 10 year old write-up, which I also reblogged later. It looks like this: The…
IQ can be increased by more education but can intelligence? Does it matter?
Maybe you are thinking: wait I thought IQ was more or less the same as intelligence? IQ tests do measure intelligence well, right? Well, sometimes it is, sometimes it is…
How bad is low level lead poisoning? Probably not that bad
For some months, I've had a window open with some lead poisoning studies by economists. We know generally not to trust economist work without carefully checking out their tables and…
The art of skeptical statistics
In the very enjoyable book The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data David Spiegelhalter mentions as example of an experiment that sounds too good to be true: In…
The indoctrination effect of universities: overstated
Dictionaries define indoctrination as: the act of indoctrinating, or teaching or inculcating a doctrine, principle, or ideology, especially one with a specific point of view (dictionary.com) the process of repeating…
Misleading plots on secular trends and education
This mistake is very common, and here we look at an arbitrary example I was sent promoted by Rob Henderson on Twitter. This error is quite common (first example I…