Lizzy (@someonelizz on BlueSky too)

This will be a perilous week for young male staffers at CPAC.

This is a 12-year-old study that has failed replication three times. And the underlying claim is still probably right. The paper is Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014. 67 students at Princeton. Longhand note-takers scored higher on conceptual questions. Became the most cited paper in every “ban laptops” argument on Earth. Then three separate labs tried to reproduce the result. Urry et al. at Tufts in 2021, 145 students. No effect. Morehead et al. in 2019, two experiments. No effect. A meta-analysis pooling eight similar studies. No effect. So why am I saying it’s still right? Because a 2023 Norwegian EEG study with 256 channels found something the behavioral research couldn’t measure. Handwriting produces theta and alpha connectivity patterns between parietal and central brain regions that typing does not produce. Those specific frequencies are the ones your hippocampus relies on for memory formation. Your brain treats handwriting as a motor-spatial problem. Five brain regions fire in coordination: premotor cortex, parietal cortex, cerebellum, fusiform gyrus, sensorimotor cortex. Typing activates a fraction of that network. The original study measured the right outcome with the wrong methodology. The real finding lives at the neural level: handwriting rewires the encoding process itself.

His writing is utterly atrocious, made worse as he treats his audience like they have a single brain cell.

You’ll meet a woman who says she’s “sort of” aware of Roman Britain and she’ll casually give a detailed explanation of the decay of tin ore trade routes and the policies of Magnus Maximus. And you’ll meet a guy whose whole personality is Roman Britain intellectual and he’ll have watched 40 mins of AI slop

for those keeping track at home the reason some dudes are mad about buying dinner on dates is that it is possible to go on a fairly large number of first dates which go nowhere, and buying dinner isn't annoying the 1st time or the 5th time but probably is the 40th time

"I asked ChatGPT" "I asked Grok" Well, I asked the Muses and they made me sing in dactylic hexameter