The Dark Fiddling Pirate Jussim

"the biggest benefit of a paid subscription is that you [help]...resist the extremist turn of academia and maintain islands of integrity in a sea of academic political corruption." How? I've dedicated the $ to projects, not my pockets. unsafescience.substack.com/p/paid-subscri…

@robsica Heh. Propaganda by another name... That people sometimes believe their own propaganda does not make it "not" propaganda.

"We need a diagnosis that captures the subtle but consequential ways contested beliefs become embedded as fact and lead to moral conclusions." tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

@JohnMKainer @jessesmithsoc @ashleytrubin @realDrTT @jennfrey @LuElla_DAmico @JukkaSavo IDK. Sounds like Platos call for rule by a philosopher king. The problem with any such system is its inherent authoritarianism. OTOH its not like I have any better ideas. In general, I can behind ideas that are the worst except for all the others.

I just finished teaching Durkheim’s division of labor, and towards the end he talks about the need for a new science that has the job of uniting all the disciplines, similar to how philosophy underpinned everything prior to the intense specialization. Perhaps that’s who we need to do the evaluation? Faculty who specialize in unified explanations that strength across the sciences and the humanities.

My most recent essay in @MindingCampus explores reforming our universities by reforming the way we mentor grad students and new faculty. mindingthecampus.org/2026/03/19/men…

@JohnMKainer @jessesmithsoc @ashleytrubin @realDrTT @jennfrey @LuElla_DAmico @JukkaSavo Hmmm. Devil is always in the details. How'd you evaluate that?

2. I’ve seen it before and it always makes me want to side with @JukkaSavo about shuttering departments and then starting over. My proposal in the piece is much more modest. We reform one part of the university (the teaching side) by actively mentoring grad students to be great teachers.

@JohnMKainer @jessesmithsoc @ashleytrubin @realDrTT @jennfrey @LuElla_DAmico 1. What do you mean? 2. As you know (I think you've seen this before), I think lots of stuff needs reform.

@PsychRabble @jessesmithsoc @ashleytrubin @realDrTT @jennfrey @LuElla_DAmico all of you have written about the need for reform in our universities. What do you think about reforming our universities by reforming the way we mentor graduate students and new faculty?

@paulbhutchings Either that, or all the denouncers have moved to BlueStasi...????

@PsychRabble Gone mainstream?🤣

I just realized, I have a new streak/record in progress: Its been 2.5 yearsish since I have been subject to a mobbing/cancelation attack. I joined in Twitter in 2017, the attacks started in 2018 and occurred intermittently thru end of 2023. Nothing since then, though. I can't say I miss it but lord did those things (ultimately) give my professional life booster rockets. For a list of those attacks, see this post, link in reply.

"The best way to protect the ability to publicly dissent is to publicly dissent." unsafescience.substack.com/p/my-vita-of-d…

Excellent post. Highlights: 1. Current "stereotype threat" researchers have been redefining the term to the point of triviality: Original: Fear of confirming stereotypes of one's group undermines performance on high stakes tests for Black and female students. Revision: People do not like being exposed to negative stereotypes of their group. 2. Those doing the redefining mostly just "defend" stereotype threat, either w/o acknowledging that the most informative tests (pre-registered, large sample tests) have almost or always found no effects, or acknowledging it in the most superficial manner and "moving on."

Registered replication report, in press at AMPPS, N=1709, multi-lab, finds no stereotype threat effect on women's math performance. osf.io/preprints/psya… ht @minzlicht, of interest to @LGConwayIII

Thread on Danish & W. European preparations to defend Greenland from a U.S. attack. Ht @the_apollonic. Down the thread: Denmark capitulated to the Nazis w/o a fight in 1940 and has committed to never again making that mistake. Also down the thread, Danish official: The US is not functioning normally.

@daaldridge @FandF_Project I estimate that at least 1/3 of those whose works are produced here are center-left, some even pretty far left without the dogmas. unsafescience.substack.com/p/we-tried-to-…

@PsychRabble @FandF_Project True but in my experience so called centrist liberals in academia will never actually oppose the Far Left. They will both deny Left Wing capture has occurred and/or say it’s a good thing that it happened.

The Great Awokening is not winding down, at least not in sociology. In which Ashley assesses the frequency with which terms like "racism," "sexism," "lived experience," "settler colonial" etc. appear in sociology journals -- and they are still generally increasing.

In which a well-known rabbi defends California's right to exist. drive.google.com/file/d/163dINA…

@daaldridge @FandF_Project Hell, you do not need to be right of center, or an academic, to oppose this. Its more like "sane person anywhere."

@FandF_Project @PsychRabble That’s why Right of Center academics should out themselves and openly and avowedly oppose this. Typical liberals are squishes who will conform to whatever seems dominant. They were McCarthyist in the 1950s as they are Woke collaborators now.

@coolamericana @wil_da_beast630 History of the Americans podcast. thehistoryoftheamericans.com

@wil_da_beast630 Where does an American start when seeking to read credible authors about the history of NA?

There were max 5M native North Americans ever.

@JohnMKainer @wil_da_beast630 @realDrTT @ashleytrubin @robkhenderson @McCormickProf @natehoneycutt @JukkaSavo I am convinced it is a fundamentally intractable problem with no obvious solutions. This renders me open to everything from small changes around the edges to, as you describe it, selective use of the nuclear option.

Yes, I did. To me, it’s the nuclear option… but I am having a hard time coming up with alternatives. I’m been thinking about how academic freedom represents a kind of intellectual anomie. The norm of academic freedom is to allow people to say and write anything. This is difficult to defend in practice when one considers teaching as a serious profession. Are teachers really allowed to say whatever? Are we really expected to examine arguments from all sides? If so, the above article suggests that 90% of the time, social scientists would be playing devils advocate to argue conservative positions on the topics at hand to account for the leftwing bias in 90% of social science scholarship.

The findings from this study are shocking, especially when you consider the number of abstracts reviewed. 90% of articles had a left wing skew… that’s roughly 540,000 of a possible 600,000 articles that tilted to the left.

@JohnMKainer @wil_da_beast630 @realDrTT @ashleytrubin @robkhenderson @McCormickProf @natehoneycutt And did you see @JukkaSavo's proposed solution? link.springer.com/article/10.100…

@JohnMKainer @wil_da_beast630 @realDrTT @ashleytrubin @robkhenderson @McCormickProf Heh. Indeed. @natehoneycutt found something very similar, when analyzing 26 years of abstracts for presentations at SPSP, a major social psych org. That story can be found here (see his video, its only about 14 min). unsafescience.substack.com/p/the-singeing… 1/2

@arturnilsson @EpistemiclyRich Seems amusingly relevant here: x.com/PsychRabble/st…

@arturnilsson @EpistemiclyRich Heh. You confuse being pissed off for having your own work critiqued to the point of being dismissed as useless, with my "relevance." Shall we compare "contributions to science" over, say, the last 10 years? You choose the metrics.

Hmmm. They only measured rightwing authoritarianism. Put differently, whether it makes you "more authoritarian" is a q that can't be answered by this research, and will have to await a replication that also measures leftwing authoritarianism. Bonus: The linked paper clearly used Duckitt's RWA scale, which Duckitt duly referred to as RWA. The authors of the linkedd paper then did not refer to RWA, and instead, referred to "authoritarianism." That this subtle form of political bias was not caught even by Pinker testifies to how pernicious it can be.