Fondly remembering that Gad Saad has gifted us hilarious examples of evolutionary psychology's "just-so" storytelling E.g., women don't want a mandatory paternity test shoved on them, because they're duplicitous harlots, and not for any other reasons www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/homo...

Gad Saad, the evo psych hack and IDW reject, has published a new evo psych "paper". It is an extended twitter screed that's indistinguishable from standard Nazi talking points. This is apparently what passes as scholarship in the Springer journal 'Theory and Society'

Rainbow lorikeets got published in Science. Big congrats to all rainbow lorikeets and bird lovers in general www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

"[Edge's] male members were preaching master-race ideology. Citing their work, Brockman predicted in 2005 that the “dangerous idea of the next decade” would be that “groups of people differ genetically in their average talents”." www.thenerve.news/p/epstein-bi...

There are so many fucked up things with the current administration that it's hard to focus on one but this recent move is basically a death sentence for the planet. I've been involved with more boots on the ground actions over the years than I can count and this really bums me out.

A story of how science should work: an issue with methodology is picked up in this paper, authors agree they made a mistake and retract: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Meanwhile, many papers using Richard Lynn's fraudulent National IQ data are still unretracted www.statnews.com/2024/06/20/r...

More Invisible Cities (my comfort book)

Steven Pinker in 2019: “I was not aware of the charges against Epstein at the time. And no, I was not paid for the letter" www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pete... Epstein files: [shows Pinker was paid $10,000 for the letter] www.justice.gov/epstein/file...

Still processing how so many of the worst happenings of the past 15+ years -- the resurgence of Nazism + race pseudoscience, the anti-feminist culture war bullshit, crypto, the Uber-fication of the economy, etc. -- can all be traced back to Epstein and his rapist pals

It's also one of the world's most famous scientists sending up the balloon to his fellow powerful men that a young woman with no institutional affiliation or financial clout dared to speak out about their raping habits. *She* is organising a conspiracy; *he* is merely giving a friend the heads-up.

This email from Dawkins in the latest Epstein documents is a kind of perfect glimpse into the psychology of old boys club: Dawkins whinges about the "nasty young woman", but also has an undercurrent of unease, and seeks reassurance from Brockman that the child sex trafficker wasn't all *that* bad

Now the right-wing metabolic response on Alex Pretti's murder is that he retroactively deserved it because he was on camera behaving *unruly* towards ICE a few days prior. Apparently kicking the tail light of the death-squad vehicle warrants an execution. These ghouls...

No surprise, but seems the right-wing has already metabolised the murder of a man by secret police for excercising his constitutional rights. "Well, he shouldn't have been out there with a gun, i-it's dangerous". They act the based tough guys, but their one ultimate value is subservience to The Boot

Can't help but keep thinking that if this is what ICE feels emboldened to do in broad daylight--straight up murder--what the fuck are they getting away with behind closed doors in the concentration camps they have set up? It's going to take years to uncover the full damage they've inflicted

Man, writing is so hard. You're constantly confronted with your own limits, all the papers you have not read, all the terminology and facts you keep forgetting, etc. No wonder people turn to alcohol or worse (generative AI) when writing.

Still crazy to me that the richest man in the world is a straight up white supremacist and constantly trying to incite a "race war". Seems like we really need to do something about that if we want to survive the next decade

A movie that came out in 2025 that deserves way more love is "Mountainhead". Extremely funny satire of tech billionaires and AI zealots.

I'm currently giving this a hate-listen, because why not: Bret Weinstein on the Joe Rogan podcast for the 2000th time. In it, Bret will apparently finally reveal to us his groundbreaking new theory for evolution youtu.be/WX_te6X-0aQ?...

A part of me was naively hopeful that, with the erosion of science in the USA, other countries/governments would increase science funding in a race to become new tech leaders (looking at you Australia). Of course, that was a pipe dream.

I'm increasingly interested in race science as a form of cultivated, weaponized statistical illiteracy. Take this figure, one of the most common propaganda plots, plotting national IQ data against education polygenic scores. "The correlation is so high! Clearly IQ differences are genetic!" Oops!

I talked a bit with Jason about Grokipedia and it is, without exaggeration, like if you trained an LLM solely on white supremacist blogs and had it try to write Wikipedia entries. Some of the most insane stuff I’ve seen on the internet

????????

Elsevier's Intelligence has "gone woke". Never thought I'd see the day

What the fuck are we doing, people? I'll skip the part where I talk about the pitfalls of polygenic scores, because it really doesn't matter. First: you don't get to say "we are not stigmatising people with these conditions" and then have a debate about how these conditions made Hitler into Hitler

Love your work Nathaniel, but saying that Watson believed in and promoted racial pseudoscience, but also that he personally didn't have hatred in his heart for Black people, is a meaningless qualifier. That's just describing how racism operates

What a fantastic obit of Watson. Unfortunately, his life story is a common trope: guy who thinks he's hot shit experiences failure for the first time, and instead of learning from that, goes full bigot and gets really into The Bell Curve.

Yes but you see the racists thought about this and came up with a brilliant answer, which is that Northern European populations experienced cold winters which put enormous selection pressure on high IQ alleles because uhhh, they had to plan ahead. No other populations had needed to plan ahead before

So James Watson died, and it's interesting observing the Nazis eulogise and lionize him. There's the standard stuff about his racism and sexism and "cancellation" making him a hero. Then there's the labelling of Watson as a "genius". Genius? Haha

We're excited to share the final version of our paper, where we demonstrate how confounding remains a thorny problem for claims about causal genetic influences on human behavioral and socioeconomic outcomes. (w/ @jedidiahcarlson.com @oliviarxiv.bsky.social Ruth Shaw @arbelharpak.bsky.social) 🧵👇

Rereading Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. I like to think these are describing thermodynamics, evolution, biology.

Recently learned that Pewdiepie's new schtick is that he loves Linux and protein folding. I'd to apologise to the world on behalf the Linux+protein lover community, we denounce this cringe Nazi

Damn, ok, the opening to this review goes beast mode www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The Royal Society has a code of conduct that we can all read ( royalsociety.org/-/media/abou...), which Elon has violated, but they can ignore it and say "well, it's not our job to "police" the conduct of our Fellows". Maybe they hope Elon will reward them for Obeying In Advance, but he won't.

Extraordinary. We've known for a while that JD Vance and the rest of the Trump admin all follow the same race-and-IQ obsessed weirdo freak accounts on twitter (like this eigenrobot loser), and that miasma of idiocy is what runs America now

UK Biobank data is being used here for blatant race pseudoscience by a white supremacist blogger, Jordan Lasker. @ukbiobank.bsky.social this looks to be a clear breach of terms and an unauthorised use the data, no?

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite scientists, thinkers, and writers of all time, Stephen Jay Gould. He would have been 84 year old. “Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity.” -S. J. Gould

I watched "Eddington" the other night, and Ari Aster has proven once again that he is the undefeated best writer-director of this generation

Hold on, I thought trying to retract papers for political reasons was only something "woke" mobs did? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Lots to unpack here, but the main thing I want to comment on is the absurdity of it all. Science/academia in the U.S. is being rapidly destroyed by the Trump admin, but all that pales in comparison to "woke" peer review, amirite folks? Cc'ing: @caitlinmoriah.bsky.social

Important details about that new embryo selection company, its dubious scientific claims, plus its many affiliations with white nationalism 👇👇👇

Numerous FAQs & think pieces were written promising GWAS participants & the broader public that sociogenomics was focused on education improvement, environmental interventions, and away from the hereditarian past. All quickly betrayed.

Just stating the obvious: - academic jobs are super competitive, even with a good CV - Colin severely overstates how impressive his CV is (he doesn't know how to use R or Python) - Colin makes no mention of the fact he was in the middle of a massive scandal and has had many papers retracted

The New York Times Had To Work With A Eugenicist So They Didn’t Get Scooped By A Bigot @defector.com defector.com/the-new-york...

Really highlights how the world of the far-right is kinda like Plato's cave, but they're all in the cave voluntarily, and it's just them making shadow puppet shows for each other and getting scared

I've been MIA for a while, but it makes me happy to see everyone now hates this racist dipshit Jordan Lasker guy as much as I do. Some niche lore on Jordan: he's such a pathological liar that even other neo-Nazis eventually got sick of his bullshit: tgstat.com/channel/@TGH...

The Trump admin is terminating scientific grants under the pretence combating antisemitism. They are going to any use any pro-Palestinian activity on campus as an excuse to do this to all American universities, effectively killing science and free speech rights in one go

A while ago I decided to give up on maintaining my own Neovim config because I was just making a worse replica of LazyVim, so now I just use LazyVim and haven't looked back

Mature #HIV-1 contains >2000 copies of “spacer peptide 2”, but we didn’t know why. We now see that SP2 binds the matrix protein and triggers the change into its mature arrangement. Summary video from @margotriggi.bsky.social

As expected, the Royal Society does nothing like a bunch of cowards. Nazism, spreading lies, and destroying scientific institutions are A-OK according the Royal Society

It's finally official and verified: The X user "Cremieux" is ID'd as a guy called Jordan Lasker. Lasker has been LARPing as an expert in genetics on X to promote racist pseudoscience. @sashagusevposts.bsky.social has been calling out his bullshit for ages