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…
Secular genetic-phenotype paradoxes: the Flynn effect and beyond
The Flynn effect is famously the result that IQ scores seem to keep going up. That is, at least, they did so from 1917 until 2010 or so (when decline…
Ancient history, dysgenics, genomics, and cyclical history theory
Prior post: Rise and fall of empires: genetic version? (2017) I found this stuff a while ago, and tweeted it, but I wanted to save it properly so it doesn't…
Book review: The Fight for our National Intelligence (Raymond Cattell)
Raymond Cattell was one of the early 1900s eminent psychologists. Like Meehl, he had a philosophical bent with some odd ideas in ethics. That ended up getting him into trouble…
FIGURE 1.6. Conventional versus surname estimates of status persistence.
Gregory Clark videos
Prior posts touching on Gregory Clark: What does money buy? Selected readings from lottery studies, Thinking about intergenerational stability of socioeconomic status Updated 2020-02-23: Actually, cancellation comes for Gregory Clark…
Tulsa race riot costs in comparison
So you've seen the pictures of the infamous Tulsa race riot. Wikipedia even has renamed it to "Tulsa race massacre". New York Times has no less than 1250 hits for…
Citizen Scientific Racism
Aaron Panofsky (Associate Professor in the Institute for Society and Genetics, Public Policy, and Sociology, UCLA) is your typical history focused Jewish, anti-racist academic. Some years ago, he wrote an…
Political bias in science: quotes from Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 book
Gunnar Myrdal, who was Swedish, expresses an early version of the views the media repeat endlessly these days. To give some examples: White prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low…
Persians and Parsis
One can find various quotes like this by Muslim philosopher Ibn Khaldun: Thus the founders of grammar were Sibawaih and after him, al-Farisi and Az-Zajjaj. All of them were of…
Before PISA and Binet
Some years ago, I discovered the Swiss dataset used in R. It has data from the late 1800s of Swiss subnational units, 47 French speaking 'provinces' i.e. sub-canton level (probably…