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…

Wonderful guest post by Danit Finkelstein on @PsychRabble's Unsafe Science, diving into the administration's proposed science budget. Especially relevant for social psychologists. "FY27 Science Budget: A Fuller Picture of Implications for Social Psychology and Beyond" 🔗 Substack Link: @danitfinkelstein/note/p-197383517?r=1rleq3" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">substack.com/@danitfinkelst…

unsafescience.substack.com/p/fy27-science… "The response has also clearly produced overreach. The keyword screen used for the Cruz database swept in research on the dusky-capped flycatcher (a bird, flagged because “diversification” appears in evolutionary biology), aerospace manufacturing grants (flagged for mentioning the percentage of Hispanic students), solar eclipse research, a grant to teach Hebrew at UMass (flagged in a database commissioned by an avowedly pro-Israel senator), and a postdoc on “How False Beliefs Form & How to Correct Them”, basic cognitive science on belief revision, terminated as “misinformation research.” Both things are true: the strongest examples are genuinely damning, and the implementation has been blunt enough to catch obviously unrelated work."

New post. Link in reply. "The strongest version of the administration’s case is not “social science is worthless,” but that NSF in particular drifted into funding work whose theoretical frameworks and PI activism were substantively continuous with each other, that this drift damaged broader public trust in science, and that resetting the directorate structure is one response."

@anecdotal Social psychologist here. I wish you were wrong. Some of us have worked long and hard to make it wrong. And yet it goes way beyond failed replications. unsafescience.substack.com/p/75-of-psycho…

I did, I said this.

@CarlosEAlvare17 @Merlin67684223 @ashleytrubin Oh, well, everyone who is anyone can find lots of articles arguing the scientific method is racist. Here's a good example: unsafescience.substack.com/p/the-scientif…

@Merlin67684223 @ashleytrubin Anonymous account dropping repeated strong statements against @ashleytrubin — a public academic reformer with a real reputation on prisons and social science. Your important contributions will be carefully filed, and I’m sure others will slide into your DMs for more wisdom.

It's still bonkers to me that insisting on methodological and theoretical rigor in academic research is treated as "conservative," a "fringe" view, or "heterodox."

@robsica In other news, our critique of microaggressions was recently accepted for publication. The draft version at Unsafe Science is pretty close to what was accepted.

🤔"Lilienfeld’s unscientific opposition to microaggressions"

@KiteBird3 @SwipeWright This is why the Gods, or, rather, Enlightenment intellectuals like Francis Bacon, created experimental methods (so personal biases can be irrelevant to empirical findings). P.S. Lots of the authors of these studies are women. unsafescience.substack.com/p/more-evidenc…

@SwipeWright The bias against women in STEM is the very much like the bias against women driving UBER. You never had a female body, so you are blissfully unaware. And when you go looking, you sample the wrong data so you get the wrong conclusion.

A zombie belief I frequently encounter in woke papers is that there's a tenure-track hiring bias against women in STEM. A new paper combining all research on faculty ratings for identical CVs for men vs. women show that not only is this belief false, the opposite is true.

@LGibbsFamilyDoc @SwipeWright At your service. Pretty similar over that time. unsafescience.substack.com/p/more-evidenc…

@SwipeWright Figure cited was from data from 10 yrs ago. Wonder if things are similar or more profound now!?

@the_apollonic saved for potential future use...

Dedicated to the enjoyment of @PsychRabble

The Creed of Marxism: "We, the Oxymoronic Thinkers, hold that all spontaneous depth shall be scheduled quarterly, all authentic expression shall be formatted per guidelines, and all genuine insight shall be pre-approved by the Subcommittee on Genuine Insight."

@FDuchastel888 @Ivarpi @gudmundson_per

@Ivarpi @gudmundson_per @PsychRabble

What if what we’ve been taught about stereotypes, bias and hidden prejudice is not just exaggerated — but wrong? Lee Jussim (@psychrabble) has spent decades challenging social psychology from within. New episode of Rak höger: enrakhoger.se/p/lee-jussim-a…

This is totally my favorite pod/interview since Peterson. Ivar did such a good job. Rollicking good time, laughed more on a pod than ... ever. Topics in chronological order: Stereotype accuracy Social scientists literally making stuff up and calling it science. Implicit bias and its many (many many) limitations, including a new paper (not mine) highlighting those limitations. How U.S. culture, driven in part by social science, has lost its "can-do, American know-how!" sensibility. And how dissident academics tried to warn academia and the wider culture that academia's relentless politicization practically invited the Trumpian Backlash.

@JoelWBerry @CathyYoung63 Not counting the 1944 movie, from which "gaslighting" derives. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslight_…

“The term ‘gaslighting’ to describe psychological abuse and manipulation came into use 60 years ago which means no one ever gaslit anyone before then.” “The word ‘Trinity’ didn’t exist until around 200AD which means the Trinity didn’t exist before then.” I’m not sure if Auron is stupid, thinks you’re stupid, or if he’s actually fallen so far that he’s adopted the Leftist postmodern view of language. Words don’t create reality, they convey reality. The principles of America being founded on a “Covenant” or a “Creed” or the “Logos” is all over the writings of great Americans going back 250 years to the founders. It was borrowed from the Bible and the covenantal nation of Israel. It wasn’t invented by progressives in the 60s. Again, I struggle to discern whether these people are stupid or sinister.

@BekahKnowsBS @triggerpod That post was a draft of a paper submitted for pub in a peer reviewed journal. It is now accepted (not yet pubbed).

@triggerpod @PsychRabble has many good pieces highlighting the many issues with microaggressions. Here’s just one: unsafescience.substack.com/p/the-dubious-…

"Microaggressions… don’t require evidence because it’s subconscious." Warren Smith explains how a student who “doesn’t show up to class” and “doesn’t do any assignments” suddenly couldn’t be held accountable after accusations of racism. “Why is it that one of the most progressive left-wing schools in the country is suddenly racist or white supremacist? It just doesn’t make any sense.” Watch this clip.

This👇 is Gatling style, James Cameron envisioning the Terminator level gold! 😎🤘 "And of course, their thundering hallucinations of racism rendered them incapable of even hearing, let alone heeding, the warning."

@the_apollonic damn. i missed this when you posted it. the tweet is a rhetorical masterpiece. i only discovered it because your panopticon tw came across my feed (and I loved that too) and thought, "haven't heard much from Apollonic in a while, let me check his feed..." and lo and behold....

Haven't left my house with a mobile phone with me in almost a decade. There's just no point to be so distracted. Panopticon Opera and its entertainers are a legion anyway.

Its possible. The same crew (Skeptic Research Center) has posted survey results finding that those with higher ed hold more inaccurate beliefs about racial income inequalities. My lab has a chapter on "Anti-Bigotry Extremism" collaborating with them in which you will find this (from them). (correct answer is False, Asians have the highest income, easy to find in U.S. Census data on race and income). Those w/MORE educ get this wrong more often.

@PsychRabble I suspect that it is partly accounted for by education teaching you the right/appropriate thing to say.

Delusional beliefs, documented. But what causes this bizarre relationship? Is it education itself? Is it all rooted in leftwing ideology? No idea. I now return to doing something useful that has nothing to do with any of this.

I am a bit unclear as to which in the Figure you reproduced = "p<.05 + similar effect size." (I read your blog and, on its merits, is, as usual, great stuff). BUT, is it "stat signif + pattern" OR two lines, "stat signif + pattern" AND "correspondence test" (which tests how well the replic effect size corresponds to the original)?

New blog post: There are 13 ways to analyse a replication study, but only one of them is coherent. Where I explain (based on our own recent preprint) why the SCORE project was right to focus on "p < .05 + similar effect size" when reporting the results. daniellakens.blogspot.com/2026/05/there-…

I have argued for this for about a year now. So far run into a stone wall. There is definitely something wrong with U.S. IRBs. I started creating a repository of articles critical of US IRBs here, so far, with about 10-12 sources, but added to regularly.. osf.io/qy4fm/files/os… I am now agitating among Rutgers faculty to organize.

@PsychRabble @DavidAOliverJr There is something so wrong with US IRBs. We recently implemented automatic approval for minimum risk studies. You get approval directly (but we audit studies afterwards). It reduces the workload, allows experts to do science, but there is still a check.

IRB nightmare produces lawsuit -- which, if victorious, may limit IRB interference in research for reasons that have nothing to do with protecting human participants. jamesgmartin.center/2026/05/a-litt…