Colin Wright
@SwipeWright • 295,814 subscribers
Evolutionary Biology PhD | CEO/Editor-in-Chief @RealLastStand | Fellow @ManhattanInst | Academic Advisor @Theory_Society | Truth First. 📧: cwright1859 @ gmail
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ANNOUNCEMENT: WE’RE SAVING SCIENCE! We’re often told that science is “self-correcting.” But that’s not really true. Science doesn’t correct itself like a thermostat adjusting the temperature in your house. Science is a human institution run by human beings. And human beings are vulnerable to career incentives, groupthink, moral fads, political pressure, and fear. And when those forces capture academic journals, peer review stops being a filter for bad ideas and starts becoming more of a credentialing system for fashionable nonsense. This isn’t exactly new. In 1996, the physicist Alan Sokal managed to publish a totally gibberish article in the journal Social Text full of trendy postmodern jargon. His point was simple: if you flatter the ideological commitments of certain academic editors, nonsense can pass as real scholarship. Two decades later, James Lindsay, anti-Communist, Helen Pluckrose , and Peter Boghossian pulled off the “grievance studies” hoax, placing over a half dozen absurd papers in peer-reviewed journals. One paper used dog parks to analyze rape culture and queer performativity. Another rewrote parts of Mein Kampf in the language of feminist theory. The problem wasn’t just that fake papers got published. It was that they were completely indistinguishable from the real thing. And today, the problem is even worse. We now have serious SCIENCE journals publishing papers about feminist lesbians marrying brine shrimp. We have disturbing papers that aim to “queer” and sexualize infants. We have scholarship on “lesbian-queer-trans-canine relationalities” and “trans-dog intimacies.” But while Clown World papers are concerning because it makes a complete mockery of academia, the same broken, ideologically captured system is also publishing research in legitimate science and medical journals that pushes sex and gender pseudoscience, relies on deeply flawed data, and influences policies on the medical transition of children and young adults. That’s not funny. That affects real people. It affects medicine. It affects law. It affects children. And when critics try to respond, they often discover there’s no serious mechanism for correction. Submitted Letters to the Editor often go completely ignored. Contrary evidence is rejected without comment. As a result, the best critiques are often relegated to personal blog posts, social media threads, or newspaper op-eds, while the original paper remains in the literature wearing the armor of “peer review.” That is untenable. So Kevin McCaffree, editor-in-chief of Theory and Society (Theory and Society (Springer Nature)), and I decided to do something about it. Today, in the Wall Street Journal, we announced a first-of-its-kind article type called “Peer Review.” The idea is simple: publication should be the beginning of academic scrutiny, not the end of it. A Peer Review article can critique a paper from any scholarly journal. It can address problems with methods, evidence, logic, definitions, theory, or interpretation. But it has to focus on the claims and arguments, not personal attacks. Submissions are capped at 2,500 words and go through a straightforward merit review instead of endless gatekeeping and ideological screening. We ask just one basic question: Is this critique coherent, serious, reasonable, or even popular enough to deserve scholarly attention? If yes, it gets published. And the authors of the original paper get a built-in right of reply, so readers can see the critique and the response in a legitimate academic venue. That’s how science is supposed to work. Science becomes self-correcting only when real people build the mechanisms that allow correction to happen. That’s what we’ve done. Now it’s time for academics to use it. Read our announcement on the The Wall Street Journal below. 🔗
Colin Wright985,569 görüntüleme • 22 gün önce
!["Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence. What we need is to win...the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change." No thanks.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1840231811554664541/ext_tw_video_thumb/1840221461954396160/pu/img/ndEnFgPRYknY2Cl8.jpg)
"Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence. What we need is to win...the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change." No thanks.
Colin Wright34,189,777 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
Noam Chomsky on the pseudointellectualism of postmodern literary theorists. "If you look at what's happening, I think it's pretty easy to figure out what's going on. I mean, suppose you're a literary scholar at some elite university or an anthropologist or whatever. If you do your work seriously, that's fine, but you don't get any big prizes for it. On the other hand, you take a look over in the rest of the university, and you got these guys in the physics department and the math department, and they have all kind of complicated theories, which, of course, we can't understand, but they they seem to understand them. And they have principles and they deduce complicated things from the principles and they do experiments, and they find either they work or they don't work. "And so that's really impressive stuff, so I want to be like that too. So I want to have a theory in in the humanities, you know, literary criticism, anthropology, and so on. There's a field called 'theory.' We're just like the physicists. They talk incomprehensibly, we can talk incomprehensibly. They have big words, we'll have big words. They draw far reaching conclusions, we'll draw far reaching conclusions. We're just as prestigious as they are. "Now if they say, well, look, we're doing real science and you guys aren't, that's white male sexist, bourgeois, whatever the answer is. How are we any different from them? Okay. That's appealing." h/t King Crocoduck
Colin Wright11,874,577 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
While mowing the lawn around a tree, this days-old fawn I didn't see jumped up and fled when I got too close. It could barely walk, let alone run, and it stopped on the side of a road out in the open sun and laid down. That's not a very safe place for a fawn. So I carried it to a nearby tree away from the road with good cover at the base, in a spot where all the adult deer pass by so it should see it's mom when she returns. This thing is so darn cute it hurts.
Colin Wright55,578 görüntüleme • 5 gün önce
The Democrats will expand the Supreme Court. BUTTIGIEG: "I think it's not so radical to suggest a different makeup of the Supreme Court. By the way… You know what article of the Constitution says that there are 9 Supreme Court justices? Trick question, it's not in there!"
Colin Wright702,066 görüntüleme • 5 ay önce
"I had to educate you on what heritability was in a recorded room." Oh, is that what happened? Pretty sure you attempted a "gotcha" question by asking me to define heritability on the spot, but then I got it right, and you even acknowledged it. Stop lying.
Colin Wright115,635 görüntüleme • 28 gün önce
This is a pertinent clip from Sam Harris on the moral difference between Israel and her enemies. The moral difference comes down to understanding the answer to this question: what would each side do if they had the power to do it? TRANSCRIPT: The truth is that there is an obvious, undeniable, and hugely consequential moral difference between Israel and her enemies. The Israelis are surrounded by people who have explicitly genocidal intentions towards them. The charter of Hamas is explicitly genocidal. It looks forward to a time, based on Koranic prophesy, when the earth itself will cry out for Jewish blood, where the trees and the stones will say “O Muslim, there’s a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.” This is a political document. We are talking about a government that was voted into power by a majority of Palestinians. The discourse in the Muslim world about Jews is utterly shocking. Not only is there widespread Holocaust denial—there’s Holocaust denial that then asserts that we will do it for real if given the chance. The only thing more obnoxious than denying the Holocaust is to say that it should have happened; it didn’t happen, but if we get the chance, we will accomplish it. There are children’s shows in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere that teach five-year-olds about the glories of martyrdom and about the necessity of killing Jews. And this gets to the heart of the moral difference between Israel and her enemies. And this is something I discussed in The End of Faith. To see this moral difference, you have to ask what each side would do if they had the power to do it. What would the Jews do to the Palestinians if they could do anything they wanted? Well, we know the answer to that question, because they can do more or less anything they want. The Israeli army could kill everyone in Gaza tomorrow. So what does that mean? Well, it means that, when they drop a bomb on a beach and kill four Palestinian children, as happened last week, this is almost certainly an accident. They’re not targeting children. They could target as many children as they want. Every time a Palestinian child dies, Israel edges ever closer to becoming an international pariah. So the Israelis take great pains not to kill children and other noncombatants. What do we know of the Palestinians? What would the Palestinians do to the Jews in Israel if the power imbalance were reversed? Well, they have told us what they would do. For some reason, Israel’s critics just don’t want to believe the worst about a group like Hamas, even when it declares the worst of itself. We’ve already had a Holocaust and several other genocides in the 20th century. People are capable of committing genocide. When they tell us they intend to commit genocide, we should listen. There is every reason to believe that the Palestinians would kill all the Jews in Israel if they could. Would every Palestinian support genocide? Of course not. But vast numbers of them—and of Muslims throughout the world—would. Needless to say, the Palestinians in general, not just Hamas, have a history of targeting innocent noncombatants in the most shocking ways possible. They’ve blown themselves up on buses and in restaurants. They’ve massacred teenagers. They’ve murdered Olympic athletes. They now shoot rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas. And again, the charter of their government in Gaza explicitly tells us that they want to annihilate the Jews—not just in Israel but everywhere.
Colin Wright4,194,923 görüntüleme • 2 yıl önce
A major medical journal published a POEM by an MD about forgetting that she was on call, not knowing how to perform the necessary procedure when she finally showed up late, and plausibly being responsible for that patient’s death. She learns to forgive her laziness and incompetence by shopping online, watching TV, and playing with her dog. I’m not kidding. This was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a serious, high-impact journal run by the American College of Physician that publishes clinical guidelines, systematic evidence reviews, and methods papers. The poem contains no indication of sorrow, regret, or taking responsibility for what happened. This isn’t the message you’d want or expect a leading medical journal to elevate as part of its stated mission to “promote excellence in medicine.” Unbelievable.
Colin Wright82,179 görüntüleme • 28 gün önce
Another week, another attempt by woke academics to push sex pseudoscience. In my video, I explain why a new paper in Neurotoxicology claiming that "sex is a spectrum," a "mosaic of factors," and a "conglomeration of variables" isn't just wrong, but totally self-refuting. It tries to argue that the term "sex differences" is an "underdefined generalization that creates a distinct binary" when sex is actually a "spectrum." So instead of saying "sex differences," the authors propose a new term: "Sex-Associated Variables," or SAVs. These SAVs, according to the authors, include morphological, genetic, and endocrine factors. The authors state that "The use of SAVs allows for a more nuanced analysis of potential sex differences by using several different sex related characteristics as a defined variable that can be correlated with outcomes, rather than a reductive category." But ask yourself this: How do the authors know which variables are "associated" with being male or female without knowing what males and females are independently of these SAVs? The entire point of the paper is to deny a gamete-based view of sex on grounds that it is overly "reductive" and fails to capture the complexity of sex differences. But the authors are totally oblivious (or at least willfully ignorant) to the fact that their ability to assign SAVs to a particular sex, not just in humans but in non-human animals as well, necessarily presupposes the validity of the gamete-based view of sex. Watch the video for a more detailed breakdown. I've covered this argument, and many others, in great detail in my scholarly paper "Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes." If you want a solid framework that exposes the central flaws in woke pseudoscience surrounding biological sex, I strongly recommend reading it. It's open access and relatively short. Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes:
Colin Wright37,772 görüntüleme • 15 gün önce
Anthropologist Michael P. Masters made two false claims on Joe Rogan’s latest episode. First, he incorrectly claimed that “we all start out as females.” This is a widespread misconception. In reality, humans begin development in a sexually undifferentiated state with bipotential gonads. Sexual differentiation occurs around weeks 6–8 of embryonic development. Second, he referred to an “island in the Pacific” where children are supposedly born female and then turn into males at puberty. He claimed these children “are girls” and that their “ovaries descend as testicles” during puberty. The place he is referring to is likely Papua New Guinea, but this is more often associated with a village named Salinas in the Dominican Republic. More importantly, he is misrepresenting the condition. It affects around 1 in 170 male births in Papua New Guinea, and about 1 in 90 male births in Salinas, and these children are NOT girls. They are boys (male) who merely appear female at birth due to a rare genetic condition called 5-alpha-reductase deficiency. This condition prevents the body from producing dihydrotestosterone (DHT) in utero, which is necessary for the development of male external genitalia. This is the same condition that male athletes Caster Semenya and Imane Khelif have. Contrary to what Masters says, these individuals are NOT born with “ovaries” that later “descend as testicles.” They are born with normal internal testes, which descend at puberty, at which point they also develop a penis. They are simply boys with a DSD that frequently gets them incorrectly recorded as female at birth. h/t Zagros Ozkan for the clip!
Colin Wright404,392 görüntüleme • 5 ay önce
This new PhD dissertation from the University of Victoria’s School of Indigenous Governance contains two typos in the first sentence. The author uses her “intersecting lenses of being a chronically ill neurodivergent Two-Spirit Mississauga Nishnaabe Lucbanin artist and scholar” to convey the importance of “ancestral knowledge encodements” through beadwork. She claims “colonization” is why we think “body, mind, spirit, land, and material expressions of culture” are separate things. This is what happens when universities treat “Indigenous knowledges” as co-equal with science and view any criticism of these claims as forms of colonial oppression.
Colin Wright82,955 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Sam Harris articulating why "using human shields" versus "being deterred by them" tells you "everything you need to know about the moral imbalance between Israel and her enemies." TRANSCRIPT: The truth is that everything you need to know about the moral imbalance between Israel and her enemies can be understood on the topic of human shields. Who uses human shields? Well, Hamas certainly does. They shoot their rockets from residential neighborhoods, from beside schools, and hospitals, and mosques. Muslims in other recent conflicts, in Iraq and elsewhere, have also used human shields. They have laid their rifles on the shoulders of their own children and shot from behind their bodies. Consider the moral difference between using human shields and being deterred by them. That is the difference we’re talking about. The Israelis and other Western powers are deterred, however imperfectly, by the Muslim use of human shields in these conflicts, as we should be. It is morally abhorrent to kill noncombatants if you can avoid it. It’s certainly abhorrent to shoot through the bodies of children to get at your adversary. But take a moment to reflect on how contemptible this behavior is. And understand how cynical it is. The Muslims are acting on the assumption—the knowledge, in fact—that the infidels with whom they fight, the very people whom their religion does nothing but vilify, will be deterred by their use of Muslim human shields. They consider the Jews the spawn of apes and pigs—and yet they rely on the fact that they don’t want to kill Muslim noncombatants. Now imagine reversing the roles here. Imagine how fatuous—indeed how comical it would be—for the Israelis to attempt to use human shields to deter the Palestinians. Of course, that would be ridiculous. The Palestinians are trying to kill everyone. Killing women and children is part of the plan. Reversing the roles here produces a grotesque Monty Python skit. If you’re going to talk about the conflict in the Middle East, you have to acknowledge this difference. I don’t think there’s any ethical disparity to be found anywhere that is more shocking or consequential than this.
Colin Wright1,635,248 görüntüleme • 2 yıl önce
Here's something I'm seeing more and more in "woke" research papers: ritualized, emotion-filled confessionals about the authors' "positionality" designed to signal academic rigor. These aren't actual research methods, although they're often in the Methods section. In this paper, the section is called "Reflexivity and Rigor." One author's "experience as a Black, genderfluid, queer clinician and academic" apparently shaped the research questions, while the other authors are described as "white, heterosexual, cisgender women." Then we get this: "These ongoing dialogues created intentional spaces to question ideas and examine how each author's social location informed their meaning-making." They also "shared excerpts from analytic memos...which captured the first and second authors' emotional reactions to the transcripts and their analytic insights." All of this apprently "deepened the authors' understanding of the data and helped to manage bias; thus, ensuring a thoughtfully interrogated analysis." This is bizarre. Academic publishing is supposed to minimize bias. That's the whole point of blinded peer review. But instead of concealing the authors' immutable characteristics, these papers foreground the authors' skin color, sexuality, and gender identity. The authors claim this helps "manage bias," but I suspect it does the opposite. Instead, it signals to reviewers: We are good, progressive, emotionally empathetic people doing The Work. Please treat us accordingly.
Colin Wright67,927 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
![You know what PHYSICS education needs more of? Indigenous pseudoscience. This new paper wants to integrate "Indigenous Knowledge Systems" into physics classrooms to "advance epistemic justice." You see, physics is frequently characterized as "culturally neutral" and "universally valid" despite being "grounded in Western epistemology," and this cultural bias "marginalises Indigenous ways of knowing." We need a "pluriversal engagement framework that operationalizes Indigenous Knowledge Systems integration...to teach thermodynamics [and] community-based astronomy initiatives linking Indigenous cosmologies with physics concepts." By "embedding Indigenous knowledge within physics curricula in universities of technology and similar Global South contexts," we can finally get to back to what physics education is supposed to be all about: "advancing epistemic inclusion." Just think of what SpaceX could achieve if Elon Musk integrated Indigenous Knowledge Systems into rocket design. They would be truly unstoppable!](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2055282425152909402/amplify_video_thumb/2055282042284204032/img/IMhA4-9fVAqlGT-W.jpg)
You know what PHYSICS education needs more of? Indigenous pseudoscience. This new paper wants to integrate "Indigenous Knowledge Systems" into physics classrooms to "advance epistemic justice." You see, physics is frequently characterized as "culturally neutral" and "universally valid" despite being "grounded in Western epistemology," and this cultural bias "marginalises Indigenous ways of knowing." We need a "pluriversal engagement framework that operationalizes Indigenous Knowledge Systems integration...to teach thermodynamics [and] community-based astronomy initiatives linking Indigenous cosmologies with physics concepts." By "embedding Indigenous knowledge within physics curricula in universities of technology and similar Global South contexts," we can finally get to back to what physics education is supposed to be all about: "advancing epistemic inclusion." Just think of what SpaceX could achieve if Elon Musk integrated Indigenous Knowledge Systems into rocket design. They would be truly unstoppable!
Colin Wright63,830 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Mass censorship is coming to Canada. It's going to get really bad.
Colin Wright605,223 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce