Category: Culture
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The rot in the heart of the “meritocracy”
70 Students to Retake Exams After Cheating Case: Seventy students were involved in a pattern of smartphone-enabled cheating last month at Stuyvesant High School, New York City officials said Monday, describing an episode that has blemished one of the c…
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The wages of a life science Ph.D. (not high!)
A few people have emailed me about this article in The Washington Post, U.S. pushes for more scientists, but the jobs aren’t there. Other people cover this area well (for example), so I’m not going to say much. But first, ignore the article in …
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Still not understanding the nature of affairs
I’m primarily science blogger, with an amateur interest in history. But I’m still disturbed that over 10 years after 9/11 elite media still can’t be bothered to be precise and accurate about the affairs of the Muslim world. As a neo-I…
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Why the kids don’t know no algebra
A few days ago I stumbled upon a really interesting post. And I’m wondering if my readers are at all familiar with the phenomenon outlined here (it was a total surprise to me), The myth of “they weren’t ever taught….”: Stage One: I will d…
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The end of corruption?
Steve Sailer has been on the cousin marriage “beat” for a while now, every since his 2003 piece on the practice in Iraq. Why is cousin marriage bad? Because large interrelated clans can create sets of societies within societies. Here’…
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Remembering failed engineering
When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s “hippies” were figures of amusement and the 1960s was all The Wonder Years. As a child you’re not told of the “dark side,” the true history, which may seem disturbing. When I was i…
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Calcification of the merit castes
After ragging on Chris Hayes for a week I decided to check out the conversation above between Hayes and Mike Konzal about his new book, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. As Mike suggested the book does seem more nuanced in its take th…
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One test to rule them all
Educational Realist elaborates on some of the concerns I have had with Chris Hayes’ ballyhooed piece on the failure of elites: Hayes is correct about one thing, though: the elites are locking out the hoi polloi from highest-level institutions. Bu…
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Political ideologies as optimization strategies
Chris Mooney’s latest book has got me thinking about the nature of political ideology. One of the major insights from works such as The Origin and Evolution of Cultures is that human societies can adapt and map themselves upon the environment wit…
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The return of the repressed: savage tunes
Fascinating paper, Evolution of music by public choice, in PNAS.* The paper is open access, but ScienceNow has a serviceable summary. One somewhat obvious implication from this sort of research, which utilizes human preference to shape a cultural form…
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The Dao of Learning
Accidental Blogger points me to a rather funny event, the yearly victory of some brown kid in the National Spelling Bee. ‘I was nervous’: Texas whiz kid beats teens in 2012 National Geographic Bee. This Texas whiz kid, Rahul Nagvekar, beat …
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An Orientalist fantasy
A few months ago I had a post up about Game of Thrones, where I argued that to a great extent the book and the world that George R. R. Martin created was racist because that’s true to how pre-modern worlds generally are constructed structurally….
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White supremacy and white privilege; same coin
A few weeks ago I met Chris Mooney for some drinks & snacks, and we talked about his new book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science–and Reality. It was an interesting conversation. We have a long history, so it wasn̵…
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Porn, a new age, an old age, and all that
I’ve been commenting on internet porn for nearly 10 years. One reason is that as someone who graduated high school in the spring of 1995 I’m probably in the very last cohort of American males for whom pornography was an item subject to scar…
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The “Shaggy assertion” – just pretend you’re right
As most long time readers know I generally screen to at least a cursory level comments by people who have not posted before. Except for purposes of entertainment only I won’t publish Creationist comments. Naturally some comments are offensive, bu…
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Rise and fall of celebutantes
Kim Kardashian was at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. Wow. But it made me wonder whatever happened to Paris Hilton? Did she drop off the face of the earth? Here’s Google Trends: The bottom panel is news, the top panel public s…
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America: as if it is 1970
I noticed that The Washington Post had an article up, Number of biracial babies soars over past decade, based on 2010 Census data. I was immediately curious if my expectations were correct in this case, because the term “biracial” has a ver…
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Game of Thrones is racist!
I wasn’t going to post more today, in light of the April Fool’s joke I played on you. But here’s me going at it again. Lots of stuff I wouldn’t normally stumble upon hits me via Pulse, and today I see this in Salon, Is “Game o…
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Jonah Lehrer, science fiction writer
He’s back, and he’s out with a new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. I am talking of course about Jonah Lehrer, the enfant terrible of cognitive neuroscience. OK, perhaps more Wunderkind. In any case, I was struck by this post on his web…
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Post-Neolithic revenge of the foragers
If I have something to share, why not share it? Over the past few weeks I’ve been ruminating on some of the possible intersections between historical population genetics and anthropology, especially in light of the discussion that I’ve had …