4D ago
HOT
11 sources
Among high-ability groups, outcomes may hinge more on personality and mental health than intelligence, but IQ looks dominant because it’s measured cleanly while personality is noisy. Measurement error attenuates correlations, steering research and policy toward what’s convenient to quantify rather than what matters most.
— It warns that evidence hierarchies and selection systems can misallocate attention and resources by overvaluing the most measurable traits.
Sources: Some Quotes, Beyond Body Count: How Many Past Partners Are Too Many?, The answer to the "missing heritability problem" (+8 more)
5D ago
HOT
7 sources
Researchers can market routine or weak methods as 'rigorous' to legitimize striking claims in sensitive domains like sexism in hiring. The Moss‑Racusin case, as described here, used unvalidated measures and a single explanatory model, yet became widely cited; close replications reportedly flip the effect to male bias.
— If 'rigor' branding masks fragile findings, media, funders, and universities risk building DEI policy on unreliable evidence.
Sources: Scientific Rigor versus Rigor Posturing, REVERSAL: Science Faculty's "Subtle" Gender Biases Against Men, Reviewing Nature's Reviews of Our Proposal to Replicate The Famous Moss-Racusin et al Study on Sex Bias in Science Hiring (+4 more)
5D ago
1 sources
The authors argue that decades of microaggression research study self‑reported perceptions, not the alleged racist acts themselves, and then treat simple correlations as evidence of harm. They say the field has not tested whether racism is the cause and has not identified causal pathways from microaggressions to outcomes.
— This undercuts a cornerstone of DEI training and clinical guidance, pressing institutions to demand causal evidence before mandating microaggression programs.
Sources: Research on Microaggressions and Their Impacts Assesses Neither Microaggressions nor Their Impacts
5D ago
HOT
9 sources
Treat university reform as an emergency governance problem requiring external antidotes—funding conditions, transparency mandates, and independent oversight—because insiders face status and incentive conflicts that block self‑correction. The point is not adding rival ideologies, but restoring neutral competence and accountability.
— This reframes campus reform from culture war to institutional design, guiding policymakers on where authority should sit to repair knowledge‑producing institutions.
Sources: From Heterodox to Helpless, The Buckingham Manifesto for a Post-Progressive Social Science, Washington’s New Status Quo (+6 more)
5D ago
1 sources
Analyzing millions of college syllabi, the authors find courses on contentious issues overwhelmingly assign ideologically aligned texts while rarely pairing them with prominent critiques. Example: Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow is ubiquitous, yet James Forman Jr.’s Pulitzer‑winning counterpoint appears with it in under 4% of syllabi, and other critics even less, keeping total counter‑assignments under ~10%.
— If classrooms systematically shield students from major disagreements, it challenges universities’ claims to intellectual diversity and informs concrete curriculum and governance reforms.
Sources: We Analyzed University Syllabi. There's a Monoculture
6D ago
4 sources
The article argues that as women’s influence in culture and politics rose after the 1960s, preferences shifted toward safety, environmental caution, and regulation, dampening risk-taking and large-scale projects. It links this to the end of rising per-capita energy use and a decline in pro-progress language in books around 1970.
— It reframes stagnation as a cultural-demographic tradeoff, not just a policy or technology problem.
Sources: Progress Studies and Feminization, Some Links, Some Links, 8/17/2025 (+1 more)
6D ago
1 sources
The article argues that what’s labeled 'wokeness' is best explained by demographic feminization of institutions, not a new ideology. As fields tip to female majorities (newsrooms, law, the judiciary), feminine conflict styles and priorities purportedly drive cancellation dynamics and policy shifts.
— If accepted, this reframes culture‑war causality from ideas to demography and could redirect debates about hiring, governance, and free speech toward structural gender composition.
Sources: The Great Feminization
6D ago
2 sources
The Columbia leak reportedly shows extremely low score submission overall with large racial gaps in who submits (Asians most, Blacks least). That selection inflates reported scores for underrepresented groups and makes academic modeling noisy, allowing race‑preferential admissions to persist after SFFA. Cross‑metrics (e.g., ACT) show rejected Asians outscoring admitted Blacks while models controlling for GPA/tests still find Asian under‑admission.
— It suggests test‑optional policies can function as a legal and statistical cloak for continued racial preferences, pointing toward standardized testing as a compliance and transparency tool.
Sources: Columbia Is Still Discriminating, A Failed Elegy for Affirmative Action
7D ago
1 sources
California just funded a $6 million study to figure out how to confirm who is a descendant of enslaved people as a first step toward possible reparations. Standing up a verification bureaucracy at scale raises questions about data sources, standards of proof, appeals, and fraud. It signals movement from symbolism to the administrative machinery needed for race‑based payouts.
— Building identity‑verification infrastructure for reparations would reshape benefits administration, legal standards, and political coalitions around race and historical redress.
Sources: Wednesday: Three Morning Takes
7D ago
2 sources
Kaufmann claims public opinion on transgender issues has moved 'backwards' after 2022, breaking a decades‑long pattern of steady liberalization on cultural topics. If sustained, this marks the first significant reversal for the cultural left’s agenda in modern polling history.
— It challenges the 'inevitable progress' narrative and signals that future cultural fights may not move monotonically left, reshaping strategy for parties, media, and institutions.
Sources: Post-Progressivism, Fewer Young People Are Identifying as Non-Binary or Non-Heterosexual
8D ago
5 sources
Despite national opinion cooling on 'woke' issues after 2021–22, professional-class Millennials continue to enforce pronoun rituals, land acknowledgments, and identity‑segmented spaces inside elite institutions. This creates a branding mismatch for Democrats that persists even after electoral losses because gatekeepers in their 30s still set norms. A measured ad test (2.7‑point shift against Harris on pronoun framing) illustrates the electoral cost of this cohort‑led persistence.
— If a specific cohort entrenched in institutions sustains unpopular cultural signals, party strategy and institutional reform must confront demographic‑cohort capture rather than assume trends will self‑correct.
Sources: Millennials are still living in peak woke, Bari Weiss Conquers the World, Was I Wrong about Woke? (+2 more)
8D ago
4 sources
International assessments show second‑generation immigrant students’ test scores correlate strongly with their parents’ country‑of‑origin averages, even when they attend the same schools and after socioeconomic controls. Gains from first to second generation are small on average (≈1 IQ point), and big positive outliers reflect immigrant selection (e.g., highly educated Indian migrants), not rapid host‑country assimilation.
— If human capital largely persists across borders, education and immigration policy should account for inherited skills and selection effects rather than assume quick convergence.
Sources: The Assimilation Myth, The American Assimilation Myth, The Son Also Rises (book) - Wikipedia (+1 more)
9D ago
2 sources
The Education Department retroactively reviewed special‑education grants and canceled funding for deaf‑blind programs in eight states after finding DEI‑related language (e.g., 'inequities, racism') or policies it said conflicted with a new emphasis on 'merit.' Letters cited 'divisive concepts' and even noted a school district’s unrelated 'Center for Black Student Excellence' as a conflict. About $1 million per year—serving over 1,000 deaf‑blind students in the affected states—will stop at month’s end.
— It shows anti‑DEI enforcement migrating from HR and higher ed into K‑12 special education via retroactive, keyword‑based grant cancellation, signaling how ideological battles can reshape services for vulnerable students.
Sources: Programs for Students With Hearing and Vision Loss Harmed by Trump’s Anti-Diversity Push, Students With Hearing and Vision Loss Get Funding Back Despite Trump’s Anti-DEI Campaign
9D ago
1 sources
Under public pressure, agencies can reverse politicized grant cuts by funding through an intermediary rather than reinstating the original awards. This keeps services alive but often shortens timelines and injects uncertainty for families and providers. It also lets officials avoid acknowledging error while changing course.
— This shows how ideological campaigns and their walk‑backs are implemented via procedural workarounds that affect program stability and public trust.
Sources: Students With Hearing and Vision Loss Get Funding Back Despite Trump’s Anti-DEI Campaign
9D ago
3 sources
In high‑salience identity conflicts, some journalists lean on 'consensus' and 'believe‑X' formulations instead of demonstrating proof and keeping the burden of evidence on claimants. The Kamloops case shows a reporter invoking government statements and social consensus despite a lack of confirmed remains.
— If consensus talk routinely substitutes for proof in atrocity claims, public trust and policy choices will track status and identity rather than verifiable facts.
Sources: Wokeness Runs Home - by Chris Bray - Tell Me How This Ends, The Kamloops ‘Discovery’: A Fact-Check Two Years Later РThe Dorchester Review, DEI Cuts Causing Black Unemployment to Surge
9D ago
1 sources
The author argues that across five decades, social scientists largely avoided quantifying how large race‑based preferences were in hiring and promotions. Without that baseline, current claims that DEI cuts caused recent Black job losses rest on conjecture rather than measured effect sizes.
— It spotlights a critical evidence gap that weakens today’s labor‑market and civil‑rights policy arguments and calls for transparent, retrospective audits of preference magnitudes.
Sources: DEI Cuts Causing Black Unemployment to Surge
9D ago
HOT
16 sources
Access to work, payments, housing, and mobility is increasingly governed by private scores and rankings (credit scores, platform ratings, search order) rather than formal legal rights. Punishment is often de‑ranking or deplatforming, which can matter more than court sanctions for everyday life.
— If ordinal rankings quietly outrun law, governance debates must account for private power exercised through scoring systems.
Sources: Authenticate thyself, Technofeudalism versus Total Capitalism, Dr. Frankenstein’s Benchmark: The S&P 500 Index and the Observer Paradox (+13 more)
10D ago
2 sources
Treat descendants of American slaves, Caribbean immigrants, and recent African immigrants as distinct ethnic groups in statistics and policy. Their different histories of stigma and incentives produce different behavior patterns and outcomes, so one 'Black' bucket mismeasures risk and misdirects remedies (including affirmative action).
— If adopted, this reframes racial-disparity debates and retargets criminal‑justice and equity policies toward the populations actually bearing the historical burden.
Sources: Bravado in the absence of order (1), How Immigration is Changing the Black-White Earnings Gap
10D ago
1 sources
New national data (1995–2024) show second‑generation Black immigrants earn as much as White women and nearly match White men at the top decile, while native Black–White gaps remain large. Education appears to drive the second‑generation’s gains, and residential patterns help buffer 1st/2nd generations.
— This reframes racial inequality debates by showing immigrant selection and education can rapidly narrow Black–White earnings gaps when we disaggregate by origin and generation.
Sources: How Immigration is Changing the Black-White Earnings Gap
10D ago
HOT
8 sources
Compare homicide rates within the same racial group across states rather than overall state averages. This reduces confounding from different population mixes and shows that places like Washington, D.C. can be far safer for whites (21% of national white rate) yet far deadlier for blacks (208% of national black rate), with Hispanics near average (113%). This lens can change how we judge state performance and policy impact.
— It reframes partisan crime claims by showing demographics drive much variation and that performance should be measured within groups, not only by aggregate rates.
Sources: Do Blue or Red States Have Worse Crime?, Who Was Greatest Baseball Player Ever?, Blacks are 97x As Likely to Be Murdered in D.C. (+5 more)
10D ago
HOT
14 sources
The piece defines 'dominion capital' as the coordinated use of professional skills, networks, and shared narratives to enter institutions and redirect them toward the status and material interests of activist-aligned professionals. It extends this to a thesis that left-progressive politics centers on inserting the professional-managerial class into resource flows and protecting that position by controlling what counts as legitimate discourse.
— This framing offers a concrete mechanism for how ideology translates into class power and policy outcomes, informing debates on institutional trust, governance, and populist backlash.
Sources: Dominion capital: III, The struggles of states, the contentions of classes, We Need Elites To Value Adaption (+11 more)
11D ago
1 sources
Tracking top STEM PhDs and the profoundly gifted to age 50, Lubinski and colleagues find systematic sex differences in work preferences and life values (e.g., men prioritize long hours, status, and salary more; women prioritize people‑oriented work and life balance more). Among those most able to choose their careers, these differences plausibly channel men and women into different fields and senior roles.
— This evidence complicates bias‑only narratives about gender disparities in STEM and leadership and should inform how DEI, education, and workplace policy weigh interests versus barriers.
Sources: Sex Differences in Work Preferences, Life Values, and Personal Views
11D ago
3 sources
The McMaster authors argue researchers have a duty to 'attend to how their contributions will be used' and to 'modify their presentation' accordingly. This elevates anticipatory framing—tailoring how findings are communicated based on expected political uptake—alongside methodological rigor.
— It reframes scientific neutrality by making political downstream effects a stated part of research ethics, raising questions about gatekeeping and how evidence informs policy.
Sources: The Disaster At McMaster, Part 1, Some Thoughts On “Mankeeping”, Pinker is wrong: We should "go there"
11D ago
1 sources
A new study of 1.4 million images and videos across Google, Wikipedia, IMDb, Flickr, and YouTube—and nine language models—finds women are represented as younger than men across occupations and social roles. The gap is largest in depictions of high‑status, high‑earning jobs. This suggests pervasive lookism/ageism in both media and AI training outputs.
— If platforms and AI systems normalize younger female portrayals, they can reinforce age and appearance biases in hiring, search, and cultural expectations, demanding scrutiny of datasets and presentation norms.
Sources: Lookism sentences to ponder
12D ago
HOT
9 sources
The author contrasts two punishment logics: one that scales only with the wrongness of the act, and another that adjusts sanctions by the actor’s identity or role. He argues institutions increasingly use the latter via 'safety' rationales, leading to double standards and eroding impartiality.
— This reframes campus, conference, and corporate discipline as a due‑process problem—judging acts vs judging identities—rather than a culture‑war skirmish.
Sources: Integrity, Safety, & Conference Venues, Boosterism, The rise of the trauma star (+6 more)
12D ago
4 sources
If over 80% of students say they submitted classwork that misrepresented their views to align with professors, higher education may be rewarding performative conformity over honest reasoning. This incentive structure trains graduates to signal orthodoxy rather than engage in open inquiry. The behavior reportedly extends beyond classrooms into friendships and dating, eroding trust.
— It implies universities are selecting and socializing future leaders by ideological compliance, with downstream effects on institutional culture and public debate.
Sources: Faking Wokeness to Fit In, Who's More Obedient, Left or Right?, Some Links (+1 more)
12D ago
2 sources
The article claims legal and institutional reforms won’t durably roll back woke norms because environmentalist elites will reinterpret laws to restore equality-of-outcome aims. It proposes converting elites to hereditarian views so that cultural and legal interpretations shift at the source.
— It recasts the fight over DEI from procedural fixes to an elite‑beliefs campaign, raising profound ethical and political implications for education, media, and governance.
Sources: A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution, Beating Woke with Facts and Logic
14D ago
2 sources
Complex, lightly enforced rules create a 'tax on honesty': people who tell the truth lose out to those who fudge facts. SNAP’s 'household' rule penalizes poor roommates who share groceries unless they lie, and ancestry boxes in selective admissions invite strategic self‑identification. Policy shaped this way selects for rule‑benders, not need or merit.
— If governance rewards deception, trust and fairness erode while resources and opportunities flow to the best liars rather than the intended beneficiaries.
Sources: The honesty tax, America’s Growing Shadow Economy
14D ago
3 sources
Using polygenic scores, a 30‑year‑old European‑ancestry couple can expect roughly a 5–7 IQ‑point bump for a child and sizable disease‑risk cuts by selecting among IVF embryos. At current prices (≈$25k selection plus IVF), a blogger estimates lifetime earnings gains around $240,000, implying a positive return even before health benefits. A stealth startup, Herasight, claims r≈0.42 IQ prediction in Europeans and competitive disease R² versus rivals.
— If embryo selection already delivers measurable gains, policy, ethics, insurance, and inequality debates will need to grapple with rapid, market‑driven uptake of stratifying reproductive technology.
Sources: Embryo selection in 2025, Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection - by Scott Alexander, How Embryo Selection Technology exposes the Transferability Paradox
14D ago
1 sources
Polygenic scores trained on European datasets underperform in non‑European populations, yet institutions often deny biologically meaningful group differences. Embryo‑selection tools thus work best for Europeans, creating a two‑tier system while exposing a contradiction between practice and prevailing narratives.
— It forces regulators, clinicians, and media to confront ancestry‑specific performance and its ethical and political implications for equity and how we talk about race and genetics.
Sources: How Embryo Selection Technology exposes the Transferability Paradox
14D ago
3 sources
Instead of treating race as looks or a pure social construct, the article argues it is fundamentally about who appears in your family tree (genealogical ancestry). This frame explains why 'English' vs 'Irish' could be meaningful historically despite limited visual distinguishability and why American visual sorting confuses surface cues with lineage.
— Defining race as ancestry clarifies debates in identity politics, medicine, genetics, and census policy by separating genealogy from phenotype and rhetoric.
Sources: Tree of Knowledge, Are children of interracial unions less genetically related to their parents than to unrelated individuals of the same ethnicity?, The case for race realism - Aporia
14D ago
1 sources
The article formalizes two competing worldviews: an 'orthodox' position that treats race as a social construct and disparities as products of racism, and a 'hereditarian' position that treats race as a biological phenomenon potentially linked to group differences in psychology. By laying out numbered propositions, it frames the dispute as testable claims rather than slogans.
— This clarifies the terms of a heated debate and invites evidence‑based adjudication rather than definitional or moral stand‑offs.
Sources: The case for race realism - Aporia
14D ago
3 sources
Kaufmann argues 'woke' specifically means making historically marginalized identity groups sacred and morally policing society around them. Right-wing tribal gatekeeping may mimic tactics but lacks those sacralized totems, so it isn’t 'woke' by definition. He invokes Sartori’s warning against 'conceptual stretching' to keep terms analytically useful.
— This framing counters sloppy equivalence claims and grounds debates about illiberalism symmetry in clear, testable definitions.
Sources: By Definition, there can be no Woke Right, Trumpian Amoralism Cannot Defeat Woke Moralism, Wokeism Is Not A "Gnostic Heresy" - Keith Woods
14D ago
2 sources
If elites assume equal innate ability across races and sexes, persistent disparities are explained as oppression and bias, making wokism the most logically consistent worldview under that premise. Smart people gravitate to this coherence, while the right appears confused because it shares the equality premise but resists its policy conclusions.
— This reframes the culture war as a dispute over a foundational empirical claim, implying that elite alignment hinges on whether mainstream institutions preserve or abandon the equality thesis.
Sources: Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem, A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution
14D ago
3 sources
A YouGov survey finds 79% of Americans agree some people have 'better genes,' and 59% say it's appropriate to say someone has 'good genes.' Majorities also see physical attractiveness (73%), sex (70%), and gender (73%) as mostly genetic.
— Elite discomfort with heredity language appears out of step with voters, shaping how institutions should frame debates on biology in sports, medicine, and education.
Sources: What Americans think about Sydney Sweeney, 'good genes,' and nature vs. nurture, Should Human Biodiversity Be as Respectable as Giraffe Biodiversity?, Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem
14D ago
3 sources
Brandon Van Dyck traces a line from postmillennialist Calvinism—demanding worldly perfection before Christ’s return—through the Social Gospel to today’s secularized drive to eradicate 'social evil.' He contrasts this with traditional Christianity’s emphasis on fallen nature and soul-purification, noting how certainty about utopia breeds moralized politics. He also references where George Floyd–era protests concentrated to ground the thesis empirically.
— If modern progressivism inherits a perfectionist religious logic, debates over policy and dissent become arguments over heresy, shifting strategy for persuasion, coalition‑building, and institutional design.
Sources: A Few Links, 8/25/2025, Floyd Summer and the Deformation of Guilt, Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem
14D ago
HOT
23 sources
In liberal democracies, anti-oppression vocabularies can give actors a low-cost way to impose reputational sanctions on rivals. Over time, beliefs that maximize punitive leverage spread, turning 'liberation' frames into tools for exclusion and control. This requires no conspiracy—just selection on what reputationally pays.
— It shifts reform debates from 'raise awareness' to redesigning sanction structures in media, HR, and platforms that reward moralized punishment.
Sources: Domination and Reputation Management, The End of the Post-Holocaust Era, Dominion capital: III (+20 more)
14D ago
1 sources
The author argues that 'woke' functions like a religion’s signaling system: people signal moral virtue and, via self‑deception, convince themselves the signals reflect truth. Because this equilibrium runs on reputational incentives, neither logical refutation nor cutting state support will end it.
— It reframes anti‑woke strategy from argument or law to changing incentive structures that reward or punish signals.
Sources: The origin of woke: a George Mason view
14D ago
4 sources
Lower heritability from molecular methods likely reflects their assumptions—additive effects only, no assortative mating, exclusion of rare/structural variants, and treating genome‑wide relatedness as a proxy for trait‑causal similarity—rather than a failure of genetics. Family‑based designs (twins, adoptees, extended kin) broadly agree on higher heritability, suggesting the 'gap' is a measurement artifact in newer tools.
— If true, common critiques that genetics 'doesn’t explain much' rest on miscalibrated methods, affecting policy arguments in education, health, and social inequality.
Sources: The answer to the "missing heritability problem", Twin Studies and the Heritability of IQ, Our Genetic Constitution (+1 more)
14D ago
2 sources
The authors argue that socio‑economic status doesn’t just reflect genetic differences; over generations it feeds back on the gene pool through assortative mating, migration, and fertility patterns. This creates measurable genetic stratification aligned with social hierarchies without endorsing hereditarianism.
— If social structure imprints on population genetics, debates over inequality, education, and 'nature vs nurture' must account for dynamic gene–environment feedback rather than one‑way causation.
Sources: Genes, money, status... and comics - by Adam Rutherford, Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences | Nature Human Behaviour
14D ago
2 sources
The article argues stereotypes are distilled from extended intergroup experience and often describe group averages well. This flips the common claim that ignorance and lack of exposure generate prejudice, suggesting more contact can harden, not dissolve, group generalizations.
— If exposure increases stereotype formation, 'educate yourself' strategies may backfire, reshaping debates on integration, diversity training, and immigration scale.
Sources: Word of Power Levels of the Rising Sun, What's Wrong with Stereotypes? - by Michael Huemer
14D ago
HOT
8 sources
Using linked tax, test, and admissions records, the study finds top‑1% students receive large Ivy‑Plus boosts via legacy, athletics, and non‑academic credentials that don’t predict success, while SAT/ACT scores do. Test use narrows the admissions gap for comparable low‑income applicants, whereas test‑optional policies risk entrenching wealth-based advantages.
— It reframes the testing debate by showing tests can be a pro‑equity tool against status‑coded 'holistic' criteria.
Sources: Who gets into the best colleges and why?, What ability best measures intelligence?, Most smart people don't attend elite universities (+5 more)
14D ago
5 sources
For studies in sensitive domains (e.g., DEI, education, health) that quickly influence policy, require a registered replication report with adversarial collaboration before agencies act on the findings. Locking methods in advance and involving skeptics reduces p‑hacking, journal bias, and premature institutional uptake.
— Making adversarial replications a gatekeeper would curb ideology‑driven science from steering hiring, funding, and regulation on the basis of fragile results.
Sources: REVERSAL: Science Faculty's "Subtle" Gender Biases Against Men, Reviewing Nature's Reviews of Our Proposal to Replicate The Famous Moss-Racusin et al Study on Sex Bias in Science Hiring, Hasty Theories (+2 more)
14D ago
HOT
12 sources
The risks critics attribute to 'viewpoint diversity' hiring—identity-like role expectations and ideological rigidity—already operate in academia through DEI statements and enforced orthodoxies (e.g., implicit-bias dogma). These incentives select for political conformity and discourage open engagement. The debate should shift from hypothetical harms to unwinding existing politicization.
— It reframes campus reform from adding opposing quotas to depoliticizing hiring criteria to restore epistemic credibility.
Sources: Oh Man — Imagine If Universities Were Politically Biased In Their Hiring, Christopher Rufo vs. The New Yorker, Domination and Reputation Management (+9 more)
14D ago
1 sources
The piece argues that civil‑rights–era disparate‑impact standards and diversity mandates displaced meritocratic selection, steadily eroding the competence needed to run interdependent systems. It links mishaps in the Navy, utilities, pipelines, ports, rail, and air traffic to this long‑run capacity decline. The claim is that when selection for skill is politically constrained, failure cascades across tightly coupled infrastructures.
— If correct, it shifts debates on DEI and civil‑rights enforcement from symbolism to system safety, implying reforms to hiring, testing, and legal standards to restore capacity.
Sources: Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis
15D ago
HOT
6 sources
The article alleges the DOJ task force is declaring universities guilty in public and freezing large federal grants before investigations run their course. Using fiscal chokepoints this way compels rapid institutional change without traditional due process.
— If agencies normalize funding freezes as leverage before adjudication, it rewrites the balance between administrative power and procedural protections across sectors.
Sources: The Leader of Trump’s Assault on Higher Education Has a Troubled Legal and Financial History, Trump Is Accusing Foes With Multiple Mortgages of Fraud. Records Show 3 of His Cabinet Members Have Them., Programs for Students With Hearing and Vision Loss Harmed by Trump’s Anti-Diversity Push (+3 more)
15D ago
3 sources
UK universities’ growing dependence on high‑fee non‑EU students (especially from China and India) shifts incentives away from merit and research toward placating consumer demand and sustaining enrollment. Coupled with regulator pressure to embed DEI, this funding model nudges institutions toward bureaucracy and activism over scholarship.
— If finance structures drive mission drift, reform must target revenue models and regulatory mandates, not just campus culture.
Sources: Diversity is the Inverse of University, The Crisis of the University Started Long Before Trump, Quarter of UK University Physics Departments At Risk of Closing, Survey Finds
15D ago
2 sources
The guest argues that schools of education have embedded an equity-first, anti-tracking ideology that keeps students of widely different abilities in the same classes. He says this persists despite public dislike and thin empirical support, and that tracking plus individualized pacing better serves both advanced and struggling students.
— If ed-school dogma, not evidence or voter preference, drives classroom grouping policy, reform must target teacher training pipelines and governance rather than only district-level rules.
Sources: Jack Despain Zhou: in defense of tracking, Ending New York’s Gifted Programs Would Hurt Students
15D ago
1 sources
Evidence cited here says New York City’s G&T students outpace peers by 20%–30% in math and reading by middle school, with the biggest gains among low‑income and Black/Hispanic students. Treating gifted seats as 'elitist' may remove one of the few proven ladders for high‑potential kids from poorer backgrounds.
— This flips the equity framing by positioning gifted education as a pro‑mobility tool, challenging DEI‑motivated phase‑outs that could widen achievement gaps.
Sources: Ending New York’s Gifted Programs Would Hurt Students
16D ago
1 sources
The piece argues feminism didn’t dismantle patriarchy but outsourced masculine authority to the state, which then centralized 'provision, protection, and punishment' in agencies, universities, corporations, and media. Political parties traded benefits and protection for women’s votes, entrenching a paternalistic, punitive bureaucracy that eclipsed household‑level male roles.
— This reframes debates on feminism, DEI, and administrative power by claiming identity‑driven bureaucratization reproduces—rather than dissolves—masculine dominance through the state.
Sources: The Fall of the Alpha Male State
16D ago
2 sources
Many state laws bar males from women’s teams but still permit females on men’s teams, which contradicts the stated safety and fairness rationale. A consistent approach would codify both male-only and female-only categories (with optional third categories) to avoid one-way exceptions. This reframing moves the debate from culture-war slogans to coherent rule design.
— It forces policymakers to defend or revise asymmetrical rules, affecting K–12, collegiate, and governing-body standards nationwide.
Sources: Keep Men Out of Women’s Sports—And Women Out of Men’s, Sex, Politics, and Executive Power
16D ago
HOT
8 sources
LLMs generate plans and supportive language for almost any prompt, making weak or reckless ideas feel credible and 'workshopped.' This validation can embolden users who lack social feedback or have been rejected by communities, pushing them further down bad paths.
— As AI tools normalize manufactured certainty, institutions need guardrails to distinguish real vetting from chatbot‑inflated confidence in workplaces, media, and personal decision‑making.
Sources: The Delusion Machine, When the Parrot Talks Back, Part One, AI broke job hunting. I think I have a fix. (+5 more)
17D ago
HOT
9 sources
AI tools marketed as 'undetectable' now help users pass technical interviews, craft essays, and even manage dates in real time. As these products scale, the cost of cheating drops while detection lags, pushing institutions to compete in a losing arms race.
— If core screening rituals no longer measure merit, hiring, education, and dating norms will need redesign or risk systemic loss of trust.
Sources: Economic Nihilism, Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in the Next 12 Months, A Prophecy of Silicon Valley's Fall (+6 more)
18D ago
4 sources
Across 18 batteries (427,596 people) and a targeted Project Talent reanalysis that matched reliability and length, verbal ability showed a higher loading on general intelligence than math, with spatial, memory, and processing speed lower. A mixed‑effects model controlled for test battery and year, and the within-PT comparison was restricted to 14–18-year-old white males to hold composition constant. This challenges the default assumption that math or spatial subtests are the purest single indicators of g.
— If verbal measures are the strongest single proxy for general intelligence, institutions may need to reconsider how they weight verbal vs math/spatial skills in admissions, hiring, and talent identification.
Sources: What ability best measures intelligence?, LLMs: A Triumph and a Curse for Wordcels, Is g Real or Just Statistics? A Monologue with a Testable Prediction (+1 more)
18D ago
4 sources
Politically appointed governing boards are asserting power over trustee-selected presidents, using ideological criteria like DEI records as veto triggers. Florida’s Board of Governors’ 10–6 rejection of a unanimously chosen UF candidate is a first for the state and signals a broader shift of control from campus governance to state politics.
— This centralizes higher-ed governance in partisan bodies, reshaping leadership pipelines and institutional autonomy across states.
Sources: A case study in the new politics of higher education, From Heterodox to Helpless, Higher education is not that easy (+1 more)
18D ago
4 sources
In a 70,000‑applicant field experiment in the Philippines, an LLM voice recruiter made 12% more offers and 18% more starts than humans, achieved 17% higher one‑month retention, and showed less gender discrimination with equal candidate satisfaction. This indicates AI can improve match quality at scale.
— If AI reduces bias and raises retention in hiring, HR policy, anti‑discrimination enforcement, and labor‑market dynamics will shift toward algorithmic selection as a presumed best practice.
Sources: Links for 2025-08-20, AI broke job hunting. I think I have a fix., AI-led job interviews (+1 more)
18D ago
1 sources
In controlled tests, resume‑screening LLMs preferred resumes generated by themselves over equally qualified human‑written or other‑model resumes. Self‑preference bias ran 68%–88% across major models, boosting shortlists 23%–60% for applicants who used the same LLM as the evaluator. Simple prompts/filters halved the bias.
— This reveals a hidden source of AI hiring unfairness and an arms race incentive to match the employer’s model, pushing regulators and firms to standardize or neutralize screening systems.
Sources: Do LLMs favor outputs created by themselves?
19D ago
2 sources
National professional associations are quietly setting policy inside state agencies by training officials and embedding templates for ESG, DEI, and procurement scoring. Examples include NAST pushing ESG as fiduciary duty, NAMD making 'equity' the foundation of Medicaid reform, ASTHO coordinating public‑health messaging with the White House, and NASPO adding race/gender criteria to bids. This shifts practical authority from voters and legislatures to unelected guilds.
— If governance runs through professional associations, reform debates must target these gatekeepers and their standards, not just elections or statutes.
Sources: Some Links, 8/31/2025, New Zealand's Institute of IT Professionals Collapses
19D ago
HOT
6 sources
The Columbia deal uses a consent‑decree style settlement—$200M fine, DEI elimination, and an independent admissions monitor—in exchange for unfreezing federal funds and closing investigations. If repeated, these terms could become de facto national standards for any university taking federal money.
— It shifts higher‑ed reform from internal politics to enforceable federal agreements that can rapidly standardize rules across elite institutions.
Sources: Trump Has Conquered Columbia—Are More Universities Next?, The Leader of Trump’s Assault on Higher Education Has a Troubled Legal and Financial History, Harvard to the Finland Station (+3 more)
20D ago
2 sources
Polling reportedly shows men favor expanding nuclear power far more than women in the U.S., with similar results in Denmark. If institutions that set cultural and policy agendas skew female, their aggregate risk preferences could dampen adoption of high‑energy technologies like nuclear.
— This implies energy policy outcomes may hinge on the gender makeup of gatekeeping institutions, not just partisan ideology or economics.
Sources: Some Links, Why women should be techno-optimists
21D ago
1 sources
Studies comparing transwomen to women sometimes normalize performance by body mass or size, which can mathematically erase the very sex‑linked advantages (height, lean mass, absolute power) under debate. Policymakers should require preregistered, sport‑relevant absolute metrics (times, distances, watts) and transparent adjustment rationales before using such studies to set eligibility rules.
— Clarifying how normalization choices flip conclusions improves evidence standards for sex‑category policy and prevents media from amplifying misleading 'parity' claims.
Sources: Nancy Armour Ignores The Simple Truth That ‘Transwomen’ Are Male
21D ago
4 sources
Khan says corporations first used ESG/woke branding to legitimate dominance, and are now using anti‑woke rhetoric to the same end while lobbying to loosen antitrust. She points to DOJ’s settlement in the HPE–Juniper merger and a broader return to 'greenlighting' deals as evidence of capture behind the culture‑war fog. The frame treats left‑ and right‑coded moral talk as interchangeable tools to distract from concentration and regulatory rollback.
— If culture‑war narratives systematically mask consolidation, analysts and voters should judge administrations by competition outcomes and lobbyist influence, not rhetoric.
Sources: Lina Khan: Woke and anti-woke serve Big Business, Don’t fall for K-pop’s kind faces, Polarization, purpose and profit (+1 more)
23D ago
1 sources
The author argues that in populations with similar access to education and information, a general-knowledge test can outpredict a one-off reasoning test for underlying problem-solving ability. Knowledge acts like a long-term average of cognitive performance, while a single reasoning measure is a noisy snapshot.
— This reframes how schools and employers should design assessments and interpret scores, pushing toward batteries and context-appropriate proxies rather than standalone reasoning tests.
Sources: Is g Real or Just Statistics? A Monologue with a Testable Prediction
23D ago
1 sources
The Justice Department dropped four pending disparate‑impact suits against police and fire agencies and then directed prosecutors, via an attorney‑general memo and a presidential executive order, to avoid bringing similar cases. This marks a deliberate pivot away from using statistical disparities to police hiring tests in public‑safety departments.
— If disparate‑impact theory recedes in federal civil‑rights enforcement, hiring standards, DEI compliance, and consent‑decree leverage across public agencies will reset nationwide.
Sources: Pushing Back on Disparate Impact
24D ago
HOT
8 sources
When national frameworks avoid specifying clear consequences, local implementers fill the vacuum with prevailing norms—in this case, anti‑punitive practices—while trainers insist failures are 'not the model.' This makes the system operationally unfalsifiable and hard to reform because poor outcomes are blamed on 'implementation' rather than design.
— It highlights how policy-by-framework can evade accountability and entrench ineffective practices across institutions.
Sources: The High Costs of Classroom Disorder, Integrity, Safety, & Conference Venues, Vague Bullshit (+5 more)
25D ago
5 sources
A test-prep operator using Mastery Learning for six years says it requires far more teacher time and administrative courage, so established schools resist it. The approach mostly appears in new, purpose-built programs because retrofitting raises workload and parent‑management costs. The bottleneck is labor and governance, not pedagogy.
— It explains why proven instructional models don’t scale and points to AI or staffing redesign as the lever, not just teacher training.
Sources: Some Quotes, Literacy lag: We start reading too late, How Katrina saved New Orleans schools (+2 more)
26D ago
3 sources
Among children of the rich, only a minority maintain their parents’ status; many drop a quintile or more. Al‑Gharbi’s claim, highlighted by Henderson, is that this loss fuels the Great Awokening as status‑anxious strivers channel disappointment into moralized politics against institutions and winners. The mechanism ties measurable mobility data to elite cultural radicalism.
— If elite downward mobility is a driver of ideological fervor, debates about campus culture, media, and policymaking should factor in status dynamics—not just ideas or institutions.
Sources: Downward Mobility, Siren Song, Psychological Distress, Rage of the Falling Elite, Second Son Syndrome
27D ago
2 sources
The manifesto proposes building a formal research program to study 'woke' ideology—its claims, methods, and institutional effects—using standard social‑science tools. Instead of polemics, it calls for systematic empirical work that treats contemporary progressivism as an object of analysis.
— Institutionalizing this field would shift culture‑war debates into testable research agendas that could reshape funding, curricula, and editorial standards.
Sources: The Buckingham Manifesto for a Post-Progressive Social Science, Sociology Journals Are Normalizing the Sexualization of Children
28D ago
2 sources
The piece argues that reaction‑time tests like the IAT, born from cognitive priming work, were treated as pipelines to the soul and exported into HR, education, and law. But their promise outstripped what they can validly measure about real‑world prejudice, making them poor anchors for policy or training.
— If core DEI tools don’t validly predict discriminatory behavior, institutions need to rethink training, audits, and legal reliance built on 'implicit bias' scores.
Sources: The Great Implicit Bias Bamboozle, Does Data Matter in Psychology?
30D ago
HOT
13 sources
When evidence is weak or negative, guideline writers and institutions can invoke patient autonomy and informed consent to keep controversial treatments going. This shifts decision authority away from evidentiary standards (like GRADE) and toward values claims, especially under activist pressure. It effectively turns a safeguard into a workaround.
— If autonomy routinely overrides evidence, medical guidelines and regulation become politicized, undermining trust and setting a precedent for evidence-light care in other domains.
Sources: Autonomy Does Not Trump Evidence: A Response to Dr. Gordon Guyatt, Cornell Quietly Violated My Civil Rights. Now I'm Taking Legal Action., Long Covid Can Be Both Psychosomatic And Real (+10 more)
1M ago
4 sources
Language is a shared system, so individual preferences can’t override clarity when they create ambiguity for others. Using plural they/them with plural verbs for a specific person produces confusion in ordinary sentences (e.g., whether 'they' means one person or a pair). A better norm should minimize burden on other speakers while respecting identity 'within reason.'
— Reframing pronoun policy as governance of a commons shifts debates from identity claims to coordination costs that institutions must manage.
Sources: Pronoun Trouble, Which pronouns, trans shooter?, Where Woke Was Wonderful (+1 more)
1M ago
2 sources
Across U.S. racial groups, an almost perfect inverse relation between average IQ and homicide holds—until you include Black Americans, whose homicide rate far exceeds the IQ‑based prediction. Using CDC victimization rates and Lynn’s group IQs, the article estimates IQ accounts for only about 30% of the Black–White homicide gap. That leaves most of the disparity unexplained by poverty, family structure, or IQ alone.
— It forces crime and inequality debates beyond familiar explanations, pressing researchers and policymakers to identify the remaining drivers of the gap.
Sources: What explains the black–white homicide gap?, Aporia: "What explains the black–white homicide gap?"
1M ago
2 sources
When officials and bystanders fear reputational punishment, the groups most willing to escalate outrage and transgression gain leverage. Over time, this incentive landscape selects for dark‑triad, performatively coercive actors to lead activism and even enter public office. The result is governance and culture increasingly steered by personalities optimized for intimidation rather than cooperation.
— It reframes institutional capture as an emergent selection problem, implying reforms must change incentives that reward performative coercion.
Sources: pathological identity as political praxis, Some Links
1M ago
1 sources
A formal assignment model shows firms can boost profits by adopting technologies and jobs that strongly match workers with extreme non‑pecuniary preferences (purpose, sustainability, politics, working conditions). This equilibrium predicts polarized firms and sectors with higher profits, lower average wages, and a smaller labor share; sustainable investing further amplifies the polarization.
— It explains how cultural polarization transmits into firm strategy and labor outcomes, reframing ESG and corporate political stances as profit‑seeking responses with distributional costs.
Sources: Polarization, purpose and profit
1M ago
1 sources
Western brands are outsourcing 'authentic' diversity to K‑pop style idol groups assembled by global talent factories, then using that image to sell products. Behind the cheerful representation claims are restrictive 'slave' contracts, relentless output schedules, and tight behavioral control typical of the K‑pop system.
— It reframes corporate representation as potential labor‑washing, forcing scrutiny of how global entertainment supply chains turn identity into marketing while hiding worker conditions.
Sources: Don’t fall for K-pop’s kind faces
1M ago
4 sources
Institutions often encourage some groups to organize by identity while stigmatizing others for doing the same. These double standards erode legitimacy, fuel resentment, and obscure who actually benefits from inequality. A consistent rule‑set across groups would clarify incentives and reduce zero‑sum signaling.
— Explaining polarization through inconsistent identity rules points toward reforms that apply the same standards to all groups, improving trust in public institutions.
Sources: Musa Al-Gharbi on Why We Have Never Been Woke, Parties in Cologne elections agree to speak of migrants only in positive terms, as German political dumbassery plumbs new depths, Colonization, Replaceable Man, and Love of One’s Own (+1 more)
1M ago
HOT
10 sources
Rufo reports that the second Trump administration is coordinated and confident, focused on abolishing DEI, ending disparate‑impact enforcement, and defunding university‑NGO networks. Once‑radical right ideas (from Deneen, Yarvin, Caldwell) are being discussed at Heritage and reflected in agency action, suggesting a consolidated governing program.
— If culture‑war rhetoric has become an operating blueprint for the federal bureaucracy, U.S. policy, law, and elite pipelines will be reshaped for years.
Sources: Washington’s New Status Quo, Trump Has Conquered Columbia—Are More Universities Next?, Trump Strikes a Blow Against “Woke AI” (+7 more)
1M ago
1 sources
Nature reviewers allegedly argued a replication of Moss‑Racusin (2012) should also replicate prestige features—its PNAS venue, editor (Shirley Tilghman), and an 'interdisciplinary team'—rather than just the methods. Elevating status markers as replication criteria converts replication from a technical test into a defense of hierarchy. In politicized areas, this can systematically deter tests of headline‑friendly results.
— If prestige criteria are used to block replications, institutional credibility and evidence‑based policy suffer, especially in sensitive DEI domains.
Sources: Reviewing Nature's Reviews, Part II
1M ago
1 sources
The author says a long‑running consent‑decree regime that ended the federal PACE aptitude exam has finally lapsed/been undone, opening the door to validated, IQ‑like entry tests again. In its place, agencies had relied on self‑ratings and 'Direct Hiring Authority' name‑requests that entrenched insider selection. Paired with a second court ruling limiting agency autonomy, this signals a quiet shift back toward meritocratic hiring and tighter legal checks on the bureaucracy.
— Restoring objective exams and trimming deference could reset who gets power inside the federal state and how accountable agencies are to law rather than internal networks.
Sources: A Quiet Administrative Revolution
1M ago
2 sources
Many viral, 'stunning and brave' stories trigger a distinct pleasure when someone from a group seen as barred or stereotypically weak does a forbidden or unlikely task. Kurzban labels this reaction 'boosting' and notes it can be evoked even when the original barrier has largely vanished, suggesting audiences crave the transgression narrative itself.
— If praise is increasingly allocated for identity-coded boundary crossing rather than absolute performance, media incentives, awards, and HR norms may drift from merit toward narrative fit.
Sources: Boosterism, Eat, Pray, Leave
1M ago
1 sources
A new study finds Black defendants with stereotypically Black names are no more likely to be prosecuted by grand juries than those with stereotypically White names. The authors estimate racial bias accounts for at most 0.3% of the Black–White felony conviction gap, suggesting jury-stage discrimination is minimal.
— This challenges a common explanation for disparity and shifts reform focus toward other stages and drivers in the criminal justice system.
Sources: Six More Myths About Gender, Race, and Inequality
1M ago
1 sources
A JPE paper measures not just answers but respondents’ confidence and pays for truthful reporting, then finds women outperform men on 'intelligence' and compete optimally under risk. The authors also report women score higher on financial literacy once measurement is incentive‑compatible. If robust, core gender‑gap claims in psychology and economics would need revision.
— This challenges long‑standing narratives about gender differences by showing how test design and incentives can reverse headline effects used in policy and workplace debates.
Sources: It would take more than one paper to establish these claims
1M ago
3 sources
Protests after George Floyd’s death were overwhelmingly concentrated in countries with Germanic Protestant roots, with the U.S., Netherlands, U.K., Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Belgium, Australia, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, and Norway leading per capita. Even inside countries, Dutch‑speaking Flanders far outpaced French‑speaking Wallonia, and English‑speaking Canada exceeded Quebec. Latin Catholic and Eastern/Central European countries showed much lower rates.
— This suggests secularized Protestant cultures are uniquely receptive to collective‑guilt moral movements, challenging the idea that such activism is universally resonant.
Sources: Floyd Summer and the Deformation of Guilt, A Few Links, 8/25/2025, That Old Black Magic
1M ago
1 sources
The piece argues that African conceptions of witchcraft—unseen, malign forces causing misfortune—map onto modern academic ideas like implicit bias, stereotype threat, and systemic racism that posit hidden causes of group disparities. A Canary Islands case, where migrants allegedly killed fellow passengers accused of witchcraft, illustrates the salience of this worldview. Centering certain 'lived experiences' may import culturally specific metaphysics into campus theory.
— If bias frameworks are partly cultural imports rather than neutral science, DEI policy, pedagogy, and research norms may be re‑evaluated for epistemic assumptions and universality.
Sources: That Old Black Magic
1M ago
1 sources
By eliminating placement tests and remedial math, colleges are routing underprepared students out of math‑heavy majors and into low‑return programs. The diversion disproportionately affects Black and Hispanic students, turning 'equity' into a new form of tracking that closes off BSTEM pathways and depresses lifetime earnings.
— This flips the equity narrative by arguing that standards removal can widen, not narrow, group disparities in skills, majors, and economic outcomes—pushing policy back toward honest sorting and hard K–12 preparation.
Sources: The Equity Trap
1M ago
5 sources
Exploiting waitlist variation, attending an Ivy‑Plus college raises a student’s odds of reaching the top 1% of earnings by 50%, nearly doubles elite grad school entry, and almost triples landing at prestigious firms versus attending a flagship public. Admissions rules at a handful of schools therefore directly influence who occupies top economic and institutional roles.
— It links selective-college gatekeeping to downstream elite composition, making admissions policy a lever over national leadership pipelines.
Sources: Who gets into the best colleges and why?, Most smart people don't attend elite universities, Thursday assorted links (+2 more)
1M ago
1 sources
Romania scores near the bottom in OECD PISA tests yet ranks among the top countries in math, physics, and informatics Olympiads. The article argues this paradox comes from a system built to aggressively identify and intensively train top students—via selective schools, competitions, teacher networks, and national camps—rather than to raise the median.
— This spotlights a 'barbell' education strategy where prioritizing elite pipelines can yield world-class outputs even when mass schooling lags, challenging equity-first, one-size-fits-all reforms.
Sources: Why Romania Excels in International Olympiads
1M ago
2 sources
If race- or sex-based preference schemes are unconstitutional, then misstatements about meeting those schemes’ 'goals' cannot be material to obtaining benefits under the wire‑fraud statute. Courts also limit wire‑fraud to schemes targeting 'property,' which discretionary tax abatements may not be. Together, this undercuts using fraud prosecutions to police DEI compliance.
— It reframes DEI enforcement as a legal overreach that collides with Supreme Court doctrine, reshaping how prosecutors, cities, and agencies can pursue identity‑based targets.
Sources: Even Federal Prosecutors Still Practice DEI, Solving a Fiscal Crisis With AI
1M ago
1 sources
Researchers created 80 'PhD student' bot accounts on EconTwitter varying gender, race, and school prestige, then tracked follow-backs from 6,920 users. Follow-backs were 25% higher for female vs male, 21% higher for top‑school vs lower‑ranked, and 12% higher for White vs Black, with the race gap persisting even at top schools. The result quantifies platform‑level networking advantages that complicate simple discrimination narratives.
— If online professional networks quietly reward prestige and gender while disadvantaging Black students, institutions and media should rethink how platform norms shape early‑career opportunity and claim 'equity' gains.
Sources: Discrimination on #EconTwitter
1M ago
2 sources
Reanalyses of Milgram show the most authoritarian prod ('You have no other choice, you must continue') produced the least compliance, while appeals to the importance of the study worked better. People didn’t obey raw power; they complied when the request felt purposeful and prosocial.
— This reframes how governments, schools, and employers should seek compliance—persuasion tied to shared goals beats coercive commands.
Sources: You MUST read this post, When Good Intentions Alienate: The Unintended Consequences of Anti-Racist Zeal
1M ago
2 sources
A campus experiment by Legault, Gutsell, and Inzlicht found that compliance‑framed anti‑prejudice pamphlets ('erase racism,' 'stop prejudice') increased modern anti‑Black prejudice compared to doing nothing, while autonomy‑framed messages reduced it. If true at scale, public shaming and mandatory trainings may harden bias rather than soften it.
— It urges institutions to replace coercive DEI messaging with autonomy‑supportive approaches or risk worsening the very attitudes they aim to improve.
Sources: When Good Intentions Alienate: The Unintended Consequences of Anti-Racist Zeal, Pickleball Is What Diversity Workshops Wish They Were
1M ago
1 sources
Treat hiring like grantmaking under overload: run a quick competence screen, then allocate interviews or offers by lottery among the qualified. This converts today’s de facto randomness into transparent, low‑work selection and deters spammy mass applications. It borrows from microbiologists Fang and Casadevall’s grant‑lottery proposal when peer review can’t reliably discriminate at the top.
— It reframes HR policy and AI‑era labor markets around mechanism design rather than ever‑stricter filters that fail under scale.
Sources: AI broke job hunting. I think I have a fix.
1M ago
4 sources
A review of experimental 'audit' studies where faculty evaluate identical male and female applicants reports that biases more often run against men than against women. The author contrasts these randomized designs with observational gap studies that can’t establish causality.
— If true, it undercuts prevailing sexism narratives in academia and calls for rethinking DEI hiring policies and compliance regimes.
Sources: More Evidence of Biases Against Men than Against Women in Faculty Hiring, Scientific Rigor versus Rigor Posturing, REVERSAL: Science Faculty's "Subtle" Gender Biases Against Men (+1 more)
1M ago
1 sources
Editors and reviewers can reject replications of famous studies by claiming participants’ prior exposure will bias responses, rendering replication 'impossible.' This sets a perverse incentive: the more public a fragile finding becomes, the harder it is to test. Replication design can mitigate awareness, but the blanket objection functions as a gatekeeping tool.
— If popularity can immunize weak results from scrutiny, science policy must curb this gatekeeping or risk policy built on untested claims.
Sources: Reviewing Nature's Reviews of Our Proposal to Replicate The Famous Moss-Racusin et al Study on Sex Bias in Science Hiring
1M ago
HOT
7 sources
People may endorse system-sustaining beliefs not from ignorance but to avoid social and economic penalties. Rational adaptation to reputational incentives makes individuals propagate and police prevailing ideology even when it harms them collectively.
— This reframes ideological conflict as an incentive-design problem, pointing to platform rules, workplace policies, and sanction norms rather than education alone.
Sources: Domination and Reputation Management, Blame the Self-Seen Victim, Faking Wokeness to Fit In (+4 more)
1M ago
4 sources
Institutions celebrate splitting animal taxa into finer species, but label inquiry into human population structure as 'pseudoscience.' The IUCN’s new four‑species classification for giraffes sits alongside Wikipedia’s sweeping condemnation of 'race science,' revealing asymmetrical norms about what kinds of biodiversity are discussable.
— This inconsistency shapes which research agendas and policy debates are permissible, affecting medicine, education, and governance.
Sources: Should Human Biodiversity Be as Respectable as Giraffe Biodiversity?, The Imago DEI, Tree of Knowledge (+1 more)
2M ago
2 sources
The post alleges a top journal and an ex–National Institutes of Health executive urge researchers to downplay or avoid Native American alcohol problems to prevent stigma. It argues that this steers science away from studying biological or biochemical solutions to group-level vulnerabilities.
— If true, it suggests ideological gatekeeping in science that could distort public health priorities and undermine trust in institutions.
Sources: Nature: Stop Noticing American Indians' Drinking Problems!, Autonomy Does Not Trump Evidence: A Response to Dr. Gordon Guyatt
2M ago
4 sources
Cornell sociologists Cristobal Young and Erin Cumberworth apply 'multiverse analysis'—running all reasonable analytic choices—to disputed social‑science papers. Many famous effects shrink or vanish under this audit, but the piece argues the Regnerus same‑sex parenting study remains robust across specifications. Requiring robustness maps could deter cherry‑picking and clarify where findings are genuinely stable.
— Making multiverse audits a norm would depoliticize contested research by forcing transparent accounting of researcher degrees of freedom before claims enter policy and media.
Sources: New Vindication for the Regnerus Same-Sex Parenting Study, Scientific Rigor versus Rigor Posturing, REVERSAL: Science Faculty's "Subtle" Gender Biases Against Men (+1 more)
2M ago
1 sources
Sports like pickleball, with easy entry, doubles play, and a playful vibe, create repeated cross‑age and cross‑background contact that builds familiarity and trust. This everyday, voluntary cooperation can achieve 'diversity' outcomes more reliably than compliance‑oriented trainings. Institutions should design and subsidize such activities if they want durable intergroup cohesion.
— It redirects diversity policy from classroom moralizing to environment and activity design that fosters organic, repeated, low‑stakes cooperation.
Sources: Pickleball Is What Diversity Workshops Wish They Were
2M ago
1 sources
The second Trump administration isn’t improvising; it has a clear, institutionalized mission and a wider cultural permission space after BLM’s ebb. Ideas once deemed fringe—Deneen’s post‑liberalism, Yarvin’s NRX‑tinged critiques, Caldwell’s civil‑rights skepticism—are now discussed at Heritage as heirs to the Reagan consensus. Staffers project calm, focus, and implementation, signaling durable regime change rather than a one‑off disruption.
— If Trumpism is now the governing baseline, intellectual and policy fights across agencies, universities, and NGOs will be reorganized around this new center of gravity.
Sources: Washington’s New Status Quo
2M ago
1 sources
A new model averages two WAR (wins above replacement) systems and adjusts for era, integration, and competition strength to compare players across 120 years. It argues that the size and inclusiveness of the eligible population matters as much as individual stats when declaring a Greatest of All Time.
— It reframes cross-era merit judgments in sports and beyond by making demographic and institutional context an explicit part of evaluation.
Sources: Who Was Greatest Baseball Player Ever?
2M ago
2 sources
The study lead says he’s comfortable with a performance-enhancing drug era star outranking a pre-integration star because the model bakes in era-wide effects. This treats chemical enhancement and racially restricted competition as measurable distortions rather than purely moral absolutes.
— It challenges institutions to articulate how different forms of unfairness are weighted when judging merit.
Sources: Who Was Greatest Baseball Player Ever?, Why World Athletics Is Right to Use the SRY Gene Test
2M ago
1 sources
In confidential interviews, 77% of students said they disagree that gender identity should override biological sex in sports, healthcare, or public data—yet would not say so publicly. This points to a spiral of silence on concrete policy questions, not just vague 'politics.'
— If campus norms suppress majority views on sex-based policy, institutional signals and surveys may misrepresent preferences, distorting rules, research, and trust.
Sources: Faking Wokeness to Fit In
2M ago
1 sources
Labeling women’s emotional labor for men as 'mankeeping' packages a real male loneliness and friendship problem in language that likens men to objects or animals. That framing risks alienating the population researchers hope to help and signals acceptable disdain in elite discourse, undermining trust and compliance.
— If naming conventions can stigmatize targets, social‑science and health research must police its own rhetoric or risk sabotaging interventions and public legitimacy.
Sources: Some Thoughts On “Mankeeping”
2M ago
3 sources
World Athletics will require a one-time SRY gene test to enter the female category, shifting eligibility from hormone levels or identity to a genetic marker tied to male development. The article argues this is the clearest proxy for sex and rebuts the gene’s discoverer who opposes its use. It spotlights edge cases and prioritizes competitive fairness over more subjective standards.
— This sets a precedent for biology-first eligibility rules that could influence other sports and institutions navigating sex-based categories.
Sources: Why World Athletics Is Right to Use the SRY Gene Test, Keep Men Out of Women’s Sports—And Women Out of Men’s, What Americans think about Sydney Sweeney, 'good genes,' and nature vs. nurture
2M ago
4 sources
Internal emails at Cornell allegedly instructed a closed, invite-only process to preselect a 'diversity hire,' with no public posting or open competition. This suggests a replicable blueprint: avoid listings, interview one candidate at a time, and minimize discoverability to skirt Title VII risk.
— If common, this exposes universities to broad legal challenges and reframes DEI hiring as a governance and compliance problem, not just a culture-war dispute.
Sources: Cornell Quietly Violated My Civil Rights. Now I'm Taking Legal Action., Oh Man — Imagine If Universities Were Politically Biased In Their Hiring, From Heterodox to Helpless (+1 more)
2M ago
3 sources
Eric Kaufmann launched a Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham, hosted a 'Post-Progressivism' conference, and issued a manifesto with articles slated for Theory and Society. This marks a coordinated, named movement to reorient social science away from DEI-era orthodoxies toward 'glasnost' and consilience with the natural sciences.
— If heterodox reform consolidates into institutions and journals, it could reshape research agendas, editorial standards, and speech norms across universities.
Sources: The Buckingham Manifesto for a Post-Progressive Social Science, Post-Progressive Social Science: A Manifesto, Post-Progressivism
2M ago
1 sources
The piece aggregates studies where faculty evaluate identical male and female dossiers and finds the weight of evidence shows bias against men. Because these audits hold qualifications constant, they identify bias more cleanly than observational gap studies that can’t establish causation.
— Basing DEI and hiring reforms on audit experiments rather than correlational claims would sharpen policy and reduce ideology-driven misdiagnosis.
Sources: More Evidence of Biases Against Men than Against Women in Faculty Hiring
2M ago
2 sources
Debate focuses on male physical advantages, but females may hold event-specific edges (e.g., flexibility, certain endurance contexts). If policy rests on biological performance differences, these should be acknowledged to justify symmetrical eligibility rules. This widens the fairness lens beyond a single direction.
— It challenges one-way fairness narratives and could influence how governing bodies define categories across different sports and events.
Sources: Keep Men Out of Women’s Sports—And Women Out of Men’s, Are women better at jigsaw puzzles?
2M ago
1 sources
Marathon Petroleum allegedly added DEI hiring targets to its bonus formula while removing a safety metric, according to a 2021 CEO email and internal materials. External hiring goals reportedly included 30% women and 30% 'BIPOC,' with executive and employee pay linked to these targets. Supplier‑diversity spending also surged, indicating a broader incentive shift.
— If safety‑critical firms weight DEI outcomes over safety in compensation, ESG may be misaligning incentives in ways that raise operational risk, warranting investor, regulator, and insurer scrutiny.
Sources: Did Marathon Petroleum Prioritize DEI Over Safety?
3M ago
1 sources
Kaufmann lays out a deliberate strategy—conference, manifesto, journal special issue, funding, then an edited volume—to build 'post‑progressive social science' as a field. He explicitly cites CRT’s 1980s–2000s trajectory as the model for creating legitimacy and scale.
— If successful, this strategy could rebalance agenda‑setting power in academia and reshape which topics and methods are considered credible.
Sources: Post-Progressive Social Science: A Manifesto
3M ago
1 sources
A back-of-the-envelope simulation using 2017 university ACT percentiles and enrollment suggests only about 13.8–15.6% of Americans with IQs above 125 attended a top-25 'elite' undergraduate school. Even at very high ability (≈145 IQ), the model estimates only around 50/50 odds of elite-college graduation. The upshot is that elite degrees miss most of the high-ability pool.
— This challenges credentialism and argues hiring, research funding, and leadership pipelines should seek talent beyond elite-college pedigrees.
Sources: Most smart people don't attend elite universities
3M ago
1 sources
The Office for Students is portrayed as using extensive powers to push diversity, equity, and inclusion into university selection and curricula. Combined with fee reliance on international students, this shifts universities toward compliance and branding over scholarship, resembling 'quangocracies' (state‑adjacent NGOs).
— It reframes higher‑ed decline as a governance design problem—regulatory incentives and political mandates—rather than isolated campus culture.
Sources: Diversity is the Inverse of University
3M ago
1 sources
The author suggests the pleasure of 'boosting' may come from evolved egalitarian 'leveling' mechanisms (à la Chris Boehm) that reward underdog boundary‑crossing. That would explain why audiences and institutions keep seeking transgression narratives even after formal barriers have dropped.
— Linking a dominant praise pattern to reverse‑dominance psychology reframes how media, schools, and HR allocate attention and awards, and why 'stunning and brave' persists.
Sources: Boosterism
4M ago
1 sources
Using Habermas’s lifeworld/system split, the author claims the same DEI norms are humane and pro‑social when adopted voluntarily inside communities, but oppressive when enforced by bureaucracies under threat of job loss. In practice, social sanction in a subculture (e.g., a Burn) feels like ordinary etiquette, while HR-style compulsion triggers backlash and performative conformity.
— This reframes culture‑war fights around consent and institutional scope, suggesting policymakers and leaders should favor voluntary norm formation over coercive DEI regimes to reduce polarization.
Sources: Where Woke Was Wonderful
4M ago
1 sources
The author claims the traditional theological basis for moral equality—the Imago Dei—fails conceptually because some humans lack the capacities usually tied to God’s image while some animals exhibit them. If equality lacks a coherent foundation, using it to mandate uniform laws becomes a category error, and policy should instead reflect real human variation.
— This reframes DEI and rights debates from data skirmishes to a first‑principles challenge that could justify differentiated rules where biology matters.
Sources: The Imago DEI
7M ago
1 sources
Averaging polygenic scores across regions can pick up environmental differences, not just genetics. The paper cautions that geographic PGS maps may be misread as innate group differences when they partly capture schooling, mobility, disease spread, and other context.
— This warns media and policymakers against genetic determinism in regional comparisons and urges more careful interpretation of population genomics in public debates.
Sources: Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences | Nature Human Behaviour
8M ago
1 sources
If institutions truly stop using race (no DEI, no disparate‑impact rules), selection effects will likely enlarge measured group gaps in admissions, testing, hiring, and discipline. Without a publicly accepted hereditarian account, those gaps will spur demands to re‑impose equity policies, recreating the conditions for 'woke' norms. The argument says durable reform needs a plan for explaining persistent disparities, not only new rules.
— It forces policymakers and anti‑DEI reformers to confront how their frameworks will handle persistent outcome gaps without relapsing into equity mandates.
Sources: Was I Wrong about Woke?
8M ago
2 sources
A Finnish twin study tracking 20 years of pay finds genetics accounts for roughly 40% of women’s and slightly over 50% of men’s lifetime labor earnings. Shared family environment contributes little, and results hold after adjusting for education and measurement issues.
— This challenges assumptions that family background or schooling alone drive earnings and pushes inequality and mobility debates to grapple with substantial genetic influence.
Sources: Heritability of lifetime earnings | The Journal of Economic Inequality, Associations between common genetic variants and income provide insights about the socio-economic health gradient | Nature Human Behaviour
11M ago
1 sources
The article claims 'peak woke' metrics miss that older, more liberal‑pluralist leaders still occupy many posts. As Boomers and Gen X retire, Millennials and Gen Z—more DEI‑oriented—will control universities, bureaucracies, and boardrooms, deepening speech and due‑process restrictions. The recent lull reflects consolidation, not retreat.
— It shifts debate from short‑term vibes to a cohort‑driven forecast of institutional norms, implying today’s policy fights are previews of a stronger, longer regime.
Sources: Wokism Is Just Beginning
2Y ago
1 sources
By following rare surnames through elite rosters (universities, professions, legislatures) over centuries, Clark argues social mobility is much slower and more consistent across countries than standard parent‑child measures show. He also contends endogamy increases persistence and that racism and simple wealth inheritance cannot account for the patterns.
— This reframes equality‑of‑opportunity debates by suggesting deep, persistent family‑level advantages (e.g., inherited 'social competence' and assortative mating) drive outcomes more than near‑term policies alone.
Sources: The Son Also Rises (book) - Wikipedia