The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI) supports and funds research on how ideology and policy contribute to social and scientific progress
Microsoft's 'diversity and inclusion' policies undermined merit and biased the company's hiring process, says a former manager at its AI platform division.
A new CSPI report has been released: "The Accuracy of Stereotypes: Data and Implications," by
@psychrabble
and
@natehoneycutt
. It shows stereotype accuracy to be one of the most solid and replicable findings in psychology. Thread. 1/n
New report from CSPI: "About Those Baby Brainwaves: Why 'Policy Relevant' Social Science is Mostly a Fraud," by Jordan Lasker. It explains why the recent "baby brainwaves" study was not just bad research but indicative of a much larger problem. 🧵 1/n
Conservatives can take back universities by:
1. Banning DEI statements
2. Defunding DEI bureaucracy
3. Replacing CRT-sympathetic university leaders with serious people
All of this is possible.
STEM scientists vs. Social Justice activists on campus:
“One guy is an astronomer trying to figure out how supernovas happen, another guy is trying to get all the sexist astronomers fired."
Watch the full clip here:
“The sole qualification for being president of a university in a red state is that you’re good at lying to Republicans.”
Fake conservatives on campus provide cover for the Left to control universities.
Announcing the first CSPI Essay Contest: "Policy Reform for Progress."
Essays must propose a reform that makes it easier to develop or apply a new and important technology, like flying cars, commercial space travel, or anti-aging treatments. Details here:
Many argue stereotypes are harmful, even if true. But when people have individuating information about a person, stereotypes play almost no role in how individuals are judged. The fear that knowledge of stereotype accuracy will lead to discrimination is likely misguided. 4/n
Asian success threatens the Western psyche:
“When Japan became prominent, it was a problem for white people… That reaction was a tiny fraction of what’s going to happen when China becomes the largest economy in the world.”
Watch the full clip here:
Steve Hsu on what war with Russia would look like: “9/11 will seem like a holiday, because many more than that number of people will be killed on the first day.”
Watch the full clip for a comprehensive breakdown of Russian and Chinese military technology:
Why Jeff Bezos quit studying physics at Princeton, and what this says about the levels and limits of IQ:
“Bezos has more horsepower than the average Amazon engineer, but even he had trouble understanding quantum mechanics.”
Watch the full clip here:
Even adoption, in which everything about a child’s environment is changed, has limited effects on cognitive traits, often zero. This should make us extremely skeptical that much smaller interventions, like giving poor parents $333 a month, will improve such outcomes. 10/n
Martha Bradley-Dorsey tried to do a project for CSPI on the costs of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives at public universities. She was unable to find the information, but learned a valuable lesson about how bureaucracy protects its interests.
This has important implications for thinking about discrimination. If stereotypes tend to be accurate, there is no general tendency to exaggerate differences, and people act mostly upon individualized information, stereotypes are unlikely to be a major source of inequality. 5/n
"For one position I was trying to fill... I spent months waiting for a single person to apply who fulfilled the racial requirement... Unable to hire, my team became a bottleneck that delayed several projects integrating AI into Microsoft products."
Why Le Pen is dooming the French Right to failure:
"She's screwing the Right, but she's going to keep doing it because there are too many people who rely on her to make a living."
First, to recap. A study claimed that giving poor parents of newborns $333/month increased the brain wave activity of their babies. This became a major story, going out as a NYT news alert and being featured in Vox and other publications. 2/n
@PsychRabble
@natehoneycutt
Texts in political psychology regularly assert that stereotypes are false. Often, no citation is provided. When one is presented, it often says nothing of the sort. The following table shows examples of this. 2/n
Eric Zemmour says he’s running to be France’s next president because only he can stop the “great replacement.”
@phl43
explains who he is, what he believes, and why he just might win.
Pretty quickly, bloggers and academics started taking the study apart. Mostly, it was the oldest trick in the book: p-hacking. The researchers measured a lot of different things, and highlighted the few parts and analyzed the data in ways that made their results look good. 4/n
In fact, there are very strong correlations between what people think is true about statistical discrepancies between groups and what the truth actually is. The relationships consistently replicate and are much stronger than most effects found in social psychology. 3/n
David Bernstein breaks down the irrationality of race-based medical research:
“Medical researchers have to adhere to arbitrary racial categories that the government made up. The statistics they use are explicitly unscientific.”
Watch the full clip here:
Which BLM research gets cited? Not papers that can even potentially save black lives, but research designed to raise the status of left-wing activists and ideas. From Robert Maranto,
@wil_da_beast630
, and
@P_Diddy_Wolf
"Nobody at universities gets silenced because their ideas are bad. They get silenced because they're not as willing to take over the administrative infrastructure to silence people."
The NYT story went out as a "breaking news" alert. It stressed what an important finding this was, referenced debates about the child tax credit, and named and shamed Joe Manchin for standing in the way of its extension, plus Bill Clinton for moving away from cash guarantees. 3/n
"It may be that by breaking down established identity roles, narratives, and boundaries, modern culture introduces dissonance, indeterminacy, and choice, increasing the rates of identity crisis and, by extension, psychological distress."
Scott Alexander, Richie, Gelman,
@phl43
and a few other individuals cannot check every study. This one fell apart. How many other literatures are also built on p-hacking, file drawer effects, etc? The baby brain waves paper should make us skeptical of almost everything. 12/n
Bryan Caplan: drug addiction is an incentive problem and it's ok to blame drug addicts for their choices.
"If changing someone's incentives changes their behavior, it shows they were capable of changing their behavior before."
Watch the full clip here:
“There have been 10 pairs of twins in the NBA, probably all of them identical. Basketball is off-the-charts genetic."
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz on the behavioral genetics of sports stardom:
The problems of the paper, however, go way beyond what previous researchers have found. The literature it cited to justify its theory was also a house of sand. There was therefore little theoretical reason to take the results seriously from the beginning. 5/n
Moreover, one has to consider research like this in a larger context. For the most part, interventions to improve cognitive ability and behavior almost never work or have very limited effects. These include cash transfers, nutritional interventions, and deworming. 8/n
CSPI wants to congratulate
@ZachG932
upon his move to the
@ManhattanInst
, where he will continue to study all things woke. We're honored to have had him work with us as a research fellow over the last two years, and look forward to seeing what he accomplishes in the future.
Most studies are not only bad themselves, the results of p-hacking, file drawer effects, exaggerated relevance of findings, etc. They are often based on literatures and theories that are built on the same weak foundations. These are self-perpetuating cycles of non-sense. 14/n
"Young people identifying as LGBT experience lower mental health, even as affirmation and celebration for this identity has skyrocketed to unseen heights across the globe."
Philippe Lemoine on pseudoscientific COVID projections: “If people really knew and understood how those things worked, there’d be riots in the streets.”
Watch the full episode here:
Problems with the literature include failing to deal with the issue of multiple comparisons, small sample sizes and low power, inconsistent results, confounding with genes and family environments, representativeness problems, various reporting errors, and nonsense models. 6/n
Quite simply, we don't have systems set up to do good research and translate it into policy. Researchers need to find flashy results. Journalists need stories to tell, politicians have their own agendas. The entire ecosystem is destined to fail more often than it works. 15/n
New report by
@epkaufm
on academic freedom. Among conservative academics in the US, 70% report a hostile climate for their beliefs, 23% have been threatened with disciplinary action for speech. 40% of academics would discriminate against a Trump supporter.
Troller-Renfree et al. not only deviated from their pre-registered plan. To justify doing so, they cited new research that had been published since their original plan. But the new studies did not support and even contradicted their results. 7/n
So often when a careful researcher checks some conventional wisdom in the social sciences, claims about the robustness and policy relevance of the studies fall apart. This should change your priors about the literatures that haven't been looked at by skeptical researchers. 13/n
"Most academics are failing in a very deep way. It's not just that they're missing the truth; the way they approach their careers has something deeply wrong with it."
Bryan Caplan on why academics are so uninterested in doing work of real importance:
Hanania: “Why does the EEOC go after IQ tests but not college degrees? Both have a disparate impact.”
Heriot: “Colleges and universities are a Democratic constituency. The EEOC just likes them.”
Watch the full clip here:
Join the Salem Center/CSPI Forecasting Tournament in order to compete for a fellowship at the University of Texas. Rules are here. This thread will update with rule clarifications and the latest markets.
New podcast.
@RichardHanania
and
@Brian_Riedl
on entitlement spending. By 2033, the US will either have to establish across the board cuts or start taxing like a European welfare state. Brian Riedl goes through the numbers and the options available.
We even have previous research on cash transfers to poor people. Again, small, inconsistent, and nil results are mostly what we find. Why would we therefore put so much stock in a study on baby brainwaves, which doesn't even directly measure cognition or behavior? 9/n
It is great that researchers were able to discredit the study so quickly. At first glance, this is a sign of a system working. However, had it not been a NYT news alert, the study would've probably stayed under the radar and its results would've become conventional wisdom. 11/n
In the wake of George Floyd’s death, a leftist student group attacked Steve Hsu over his blog posts and a podcast he did on police shootings.
He was ultimately pressured into resigning from his position as Vice President of Research at Michigan State.
"University students majoring in social sciences and humanities were found to be about 10 points more LGBT than those studying STEM. 52% of students taking highly political majors, such as race or gender studies, identify as LGBT."
Richard on PayPal paving the way for Crypto:
“Sending money across borders without interference from government, this libertarian emancipatory vision... The dream is still alive, it's just shifted to something even more revolutionary"
Watch the full clip:
The reality is that most interventions and policies have a negligible or nil impact when it comes to improving cognitive ability or behavior. Unwillingness to face this fact leads to wishful thinking and the abuse of data for political ends. 16/n
Philippe Lemoine is coming to UT Austin on April 27th to give a talk on the poverty of epidemiology. Event starts at 4:00 PM, watch live or via Zoom.
@phl43
@salemcenterUT
Created to protect biomedical research subjects from harm, IRBs now likely cost more lives than they save. Here’s how they can be reformed.
The first essay in our CSPI Essay Contest series, by
@Willyintheworld
@phl43
and
@RichardHanania
on truth vs. propaganda in COVID politics: “The anti-vax stuff is obviously stupid… but society can only have two equilibria: overreaction and underreaction.”
Watch the full episode here:
"In any case, it doesn’t really matter. If this variant is really significantly more transmissible or better at evading prior immunity than Delta, then it will soon be everywhere and there is nothing we can do about it."
@phl43
on the Omicron variant.
The baby brain waves saga is a cautionary tale against the use of social science in politics. The two simply do not mix well. One day they might, and we can work towards that goal. But as things stand, skepticism of almost all complex policy relevant research of is warranted 17/n
The CSPI Essay Contest winners are:
1st: Andrew Kenneson
2nd: Maxwell Tabarrok (
@MTabarrok
)
3rd: Brent Skorup (
@bskorup
)
+ honorable mentions:
William L. Krayer
Willy Chertman (
@Willyintheworld
)
Their essays will be published on our blog this summer.
In January, the Japanese news site “Gigazine” published an article on the Baby Brainwaves study. Today they published a new article summarizing our latest report highlighting the original paper's many flaws.
What is going to happen in Ukraine in the coming months?
@CNicholson1988
reviews the strategic options for Ukraine, as he argues that Russia is done as an offensive force and Ukraine has a growing advantage in modern equipment.
Hanania: "Are there examples of government doing experiments, seeing what works, and then going with the thing that works?"
@MTabarrok
: "Somehow... there are not."
See here for the long version, which includes detailed statistical analyses of where the baby brain waves study went wrong and problems with the larger literatures it relies on, and also shows how the social science-to-policy pipeline is broken. 19/n
This week’s CSPI Podcast features
@hsu_steve
, a physicist, blogger, and serial entrepreneur. He joins Richard for an in-depth conversation on geopolitics and military technology, embryo selection, and all things China.
Jordan Lasker is a bioinformatician and PhD student. He joins the podcast to discuss his recent report for CSPI, “About Those Baby Brainwaves: Why 'Policy Relevant' Social Science is Mostly a Fraud.”
Among academics
Would discriminate against a Trump supporter-40%
Would support firing someone for finding against diversity-43% (PhDs)
Would be uncomfortable or unsure about sitting
next to a gender critical scholar-71%
next to a Trump supporter- 57%
.
@robinhanson
returns to the CSPI Podcast to talk about the AI debate. He and Richard discuss the likelihood of a superintelligence destroying humanity, how long we should wait before trying to align AI, and why smart people are drawn to doomerism.
Current probability of Republican victory in Senate races in the Salem Center/CSPI forecasting tournament.
AZ: 39%
GA: 48%
NC: 73%
NV: 57%
OH: 78%
PA: 37%
WI: 67%
If you disagree, sign up and see if you can beat the market on election night.
2021 was an excellent year for CSPI.
Our scholars’ research was cited widely, and their ideas are influencing elite opinion on consequential social, political and scientific issues.
To see what we've accomplished so far, read our year in review:
What do Republican voters want?
@epkaufm
writing
@unherd
finds that 29% of Trump voters would prefer he run again, while 55% would like someone who challenges PC and elites but with less baggage.
On this week’s CSPI Podcast, Richard talks to
@jimmyasoni
, author of “The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley.” They discuss the late ‘90s tech scene, Memetic theory, Elon Musk's cultural impact, and more.
This week, physicist, blogger, and serial entrepreneur
@hsu_steve
returns to the CSPI Podcast. He and Richard talk about the power of assimilation, affirmative action, IQ outliers, the virtues of autism, Steve’s cancelation story, and more.
.
@AlexTISYoung
is a genomics researcher at UCLA studying the genetics of cognitive ability and educational attainment. He joins the CSPI Podcast to talk about his work developing methods to uncover true measures of heritability for important traits.
See here for the short version of the report on the baby brainwaves study and why it has serious implications, just not the ones its authors claimed. 18/n
CSPI is proud to announce that it has received an Emergent Ventures grant to pursue our mission of researching how institutions and policy affect progress.
A new CSPI survey investigates how integration, age and racial identity influence black voting behavior. Younger African Americans are less likely to identify as Democrat and more likely to approve of the job President Trump is doing. From
@epkaufm
.
CSPI's essay contest deadline is fast approaching, but you still have time to submit:
- Theme: “policy reform for progress”
- 1st prize $5000, 2nd prize $2500, 3rd prize $1000
- 1000-2000 words
- Submit by March 31st
Get writing!
"Lemoine suggests that population networks play a much larger role in shaping the course of the disease... meaning that it may make less sense to conceptualize the pandemic as spreading through the population as a whole than... relatively discrete pockets"
Government science funding produces more PhDs and papers than ever before, but innovation is scarce. More money won't fix a broken system, but giving money directly to scientists might.
The fourth essay in our CSPI Essay Contest series, by
@MTabarrok
.
"Someone who builds rocket ships, or founds PayPal, or gets oil out of the ground is likely to have better ideas on how to run society than someone who has successfully navigated a bureaucracy."
"White female students who identify as very liberal and support shouting down speakers to prevent them from uttering harmful speech have a nearly 7 in 10 chance of identifying as LGBT."
.
@ATabarrok
joins the CSPI Podcast this week to talk about his involvement in Operation Warp Speed.
He and Richard also discuss the rise of crypto, underpolicing in America, and the collapse of challenges to liberal democracy.
Watch or listen here:
How stable is the Democratic coalition?
@epkaufm
presents evidence in the
@nytimes
that Hispanics and African Americans may be slowly slipping away from the Democratic Party.
.
@RichardHanania
and
@epkaufm
discuss whether wokeness can be explained by safetyism and a general risk averseness among those who work in universities. Make sure to subscribe in order to keep updated on CSPI full podcasts and highlights.
“Women are on the forefront of making the leftist kind of emotional ‘grievance politics’ arguments in both academia and the public square, as Richard Hanania and others have noted.”
A new paper shows that connecting QAnon to racism and anti-Semitism most reliably decreases support for the conspiracy theory, by
@jackethomp
and
@SierraThomander
"After all, research shows a leftist ideology, mental health issues, and LGBT identity go hand in hand in what’s known as the mental health-sexuality-liberalism nexus."
Journalist
@aaronsibarium
joins the CSPI Podcast to talk about his work covering identity politics from a conservative perspective. He and Richard also discuss their frustrations with right-wing media, and problems with the current conservative movement.
CSPI President
@RichardHanania
discusses with
@razibkhan
the storming of the Capitol last week, the prospects for impeachment and conviction, and the future of the Democratic and Republican parties.
Why mental illness is like quantum mechanics:
“There’s this hubris that you could observe mental illness, raise awareness, talk about it, and not change it.”
Watch the full clip here: