The EA case for (German) colonialism
Back in 2017, Bruce Gilley published this article: Gilley, B. (2017). The case for colonialism. Third World Quarterly, 38(10), 1. For the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a…
New study didn’t really show IQ declines*
Dworak, E. M., Revelle, W., & Condon, D. M. (2023). Looking for Flynn effects in a recent online US adult sample: Examining shifts within the SAPA Project. Intelligence, 98, 101734.…
New paper: On group differences in the heritability of intelligence: A reply to Giangrande and Turkheimer (2022)
So it was finally published, our reply to our frenemies Eric Turkheimer and his student Evan J. Giangrande. For good measure, it's these two guys: The saga begins in 2020:…
Does tutoring work? It depends on the test
A reader sends me this question: Hi Emil, I'm wondering what your opinion is on the question of whether reading comprehension skills can be improved through tutoring. I'm an American…
Social media, mental health, and political polarization
Richard Hanania has a nice post: How I Changed My Mind on Social Media and Teen Depression. He looked into the trends of mental health problems and whether this could…
Brief introduction to test bias in mental testing
Although Meng Hu has recently provided a very thorough review of test bias methods, I thought it would be helpful to have a more visual, intuitive approach for those not…
Obesity and the secular decline in testosterone
One thing I didn't address in the last post about the decline of everything manly is that obesity is a potential cause of secular declines in testosterone. That's because the…
It’s not just sperm quality decline
Recently Scott Alexander wrote a long piece in his usual fashion Declining Sperm Count: Much More Than You Wanted To Know. He takes the usual meta-skeptical rationalist approach of reviewing…
There is no IQ threshold effect, also not for income
We've been over this before, but it's a perennial topic. People like to claim that beyond a certain level of intelligence, additional intelligence doesn't help to get X, where X…
2022 in books
As per usual, a brief recap of what I read in 2022. You could consider this my personal notes, or mini-brook reviews á la Bryan Caplan's recent post. Visually, looks…