My first politically motivated retraction
I finally managed to join the cool kids retraction club. The Scandinavian Journal of Psychology (SJoP) published a paper of ours about wokeness and mental health. I wrote about it…
Reader questions from 13th Feb 2025
Back in February I posted the first of a series of paid subs ask me questions threads. Readers has some questions, so I'll attempt to answer them. This is in…
Why are female intellectuals crazy?
I have a speculative model of sex differences among people with extreme beliefs. Here I just mean extreme in the sense of statistically uncommon, say, being a full-blown libertarian, HBD…
How strongly is leftism correlated with mental illness? Is it real?
Earlier this year, Finnish researcher Oskari Lahtinen published a new scale of wokism or critical social justicism: Lahtinen, O. (2024). Construction and validation of a scale for assessing critical social…
Tattoos and piercings, what do they tell you about someone?
Richard Hanania and I recently wrote on Twitter/X: Naturally, my reply and his general level of trolling on the platform attracted a lot of angry, dumb replies from people with…
High IQ trans and nonbinary confirmed
If you have been paying attention, you will probably have noticed that a lot of the trans and non-binary people seem to be quite bright. Indeed, that's one of the…
Can you only talk to people within X IQ of your own?
There is this claim sometimes seen when discussing highly gifted people. One interested reader emailed me to ask where it was that Arthur Jensen made this claim: Anyway, what I…
Autistic children attend a course delivered by a specialised teacher Caroline Berge (L) at the College du Parc in Aulnay-sous-Bois, northeast of Paris on October 9, 2019. (Photo by Christophe ARCHAMBAULT / AFP) (Photo by CHRISTOPHE ARCHAMBAULT/AFP via Getty Images)
Autism diagnoses are rising, yes, but autism, probably not
We can read in many outlets that the reason autism is increasing in prevalence is that clinicians are becoming more aware of it. The idea being that autism was already…
Jan-Erik Lönnqvist vs. Emil Kirkegaard on mental illness and the left
Occasionally, academics launch an unprompted attack on me. Unprompted in the sense that I had never previously heard of this person as far as I know. Recently a Swedish professor…
Preferences can be sick: mental illness from an evolutionary perspective
In the continuing debate about mental illness, we have roughly the following situation: Bryan Caplan representing the Thomas Szasz camp Scott Alexander representing the pragmatist "define mental illness in a…