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

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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

The thing is, if you asked any of these people about the right-wing currently gutting science, they'd feebly say something about how it's the lefts fault. That or they simply don't care and they wanted science to die anyway, which is also likely. Also, Richard Dawkins fucking sucks lol

It matters that scientists speak out against what is being done to US science. Staying silent is neither "objective" nor "staying out of politics". Silence now *is* political - it supports the status quo, says "nothing to worry about". We need to sound the alarm. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Wow! The DOGE feedback mechanism is working exactly as thus planned!!

Since the topic of "should science get involved in politics" has once again sprung up, here's Joseph Thornton talking about the Creationism effort to undermine scientific education, and how scientists initially tried not to get involved.

How are people STILL doing this? Look outside, the lunatics who believe science is a "woke cabal" are dismantling scientific institutions right now. Don't want science to be political? Ok, don't vote either, don't say anything, just lay down and get trod on. That's what Elon wants from you too!

Feels strange to be sharing great science papers at the moment, but I love this paper published late last year from Georg Hochberg's team: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Evolution consistently produces molecular "spandrels" with no functional benefit

NIH thankfully coming to.the realisation of "hey, if Trump isn't complying with the law, what if we just didn't comply with his "law" either?" popular.info/p/breaking-n...

btw, Jonathan Pallesen is yet another race science freak that has garnered favour from Elon Musk. He's published some pseudoscience on Jewish IQ polygenic scores www.theguardian.com/world/2024/j...

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news @veritasium.bsky.social, but there's a mistake in your new Youtube video:

Actually, yeah, I can believe that, because running research facilities is expensive. Do you realise how expensive it is to keep a single -80C freezer running? Musk frames this as him saving money for science, but in reality, he is single-handedly killing science in the US

Just watch all those pundits that cry "keep politics out of science" (whenever it's suggested that scientists shouldn't be passive in the face of bigotry and pseudoscience) stay absolutely silent about this clear case of a political ideology interfering with science

This sort of complaint about Bluesky is funny to me. Impact on society? Do you think scientists can improve society by... tweeting? Plus, I've never seen the academics who make these "Ivory Tower" complaints ever lead by example and engage with "dissenting opinions" themselves.

Good tips here. A couple of things I'd add that I've personally found helpful: 1) write down questions you have as you go 2) read the bibliography of a paper and follow up on citations that pique your interest. Usually more efficient than using Google Scholar to find relevant reading material

What limits rubisco function? Is it the chemical mechanism? Evolution? In this paper, @prywes.bsky.social et. al explore this question by assaying >99% of single amino acid mutants in Form II rubisco (1/7) doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Just to recap, Elon: - unbanned Nazis - follows and replies to numerous Nazi accounts - believes in Great Replacement theory - supports the AfD - did a Nazi salute in public, twice... but most media orgs won't call him what he is--a Nazi--because... idk, it's rude or something

Gotta say, it doesn't feel good that a few extremely powerful and evil billionaires are shaping the trajectory of history in terrible ways in front of our very eyes