Pete Bornschein

Peter Bornschein, Are Cultural Explanations for Racial Disparities Racist? in advance - PhilPapers philarchive.org/rec/BORACE-8

@ajo96th @SocRepProject @Brotolo_ As best I can tell, this person thinks “constitutional” means “what the founding fathers envisioned,” as opposed to “what the constitution says or implies.”

@SocRepProject @Pbornsch @Brotolo_ That doesn’t answer the question posed. The founders also gave us the ability to amend the constitution. The 16th amendment did that so why is the income tax unconstitutional

The income tax is unconstitutional.

@SocRepProject @Brotolo_ How does this Ron Paul quote support the claim that the income tax is unconstitutional despite the existence of the 16th amendment?

@Pbornsch @Brotolo_

@SocRepProject @Brotolo_ Can you explain why you believe the income tax is unconstitutional given your awareness of the 16th amendment?

@Brotolo_ This may come as a shock, but I’m actually aware of the 16th’s existence

Very good.

Draconian restrictions on academic freedom at Texas Tech. The Chancellor has written a memo to the 5 TT University Presidents, essentially banning any substantial SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) content. Want to write your thesis on the fraternal birth order effect? (Gay men tend to have more older brothers.) Nope. "Graduate theses and dissertations may only center on SOGI topics as a strictly temporary teach-out exception, explicitly limited to currently enrolled students." Want to study Rach Cosker-Rowland's book on Gender Identity? How about classic psychological works that invoke gender identity, e.g. Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of gender development? All that's out too. I'm hardly a fan of gender identity in its contemporary guise but this is nuts. I hope @TheFIREorg or @AFA_Alliance take an interest. Link to memo below.

@CJFerguson1111 You need to have that on a t-shirt.

@AffordAnything This seems like silly moral panic to me.

The WSJ just ran the most depressing headline in human history. The piece is a first-person column from two retirees. They say that without bosses, deadlines, or meetings, there's nothing to interrupt zombie doomscrolling. "We retirees have a particular vulnerability," writes one of the co-authors, Stephen Kreider Yoder, a retired WSJ editor. "We have time on our hands and no external authority telling us to snap out of it." "Let's have a show of hands: "How many retirees have ended a day looking up from the phone, wondering where the time went and feeling the mental equivalent of having finished off a family-size bag of potato chips?" "Yeah," he writes. "That's what I thought." We spend decades trying to buy back our time ... and then spend it staring at our screens.

If, like me, you don’t know much about Australian history and wish to remedy that, I highly recommend this podcast by ⁦@JohnRuddick2⁩. 👇 @PoliticalHistoryofAustralia" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">youtube.com/@PoliticalHist…

Social contract theorists say that the government’s authority is created by a contract between citizens and the state, whereby we agree to obey the laws and pay taxes, and the state agrees to protect us. I wrote the following dialogue to satirize the Social Contract Theory.

@PAHoyeck @dioscuri Do you have any idea why he blocked you?

@dioscuri Really wish he hadn't blocked me :(

At least twice a month I get an email from a smart scientist or engineer excited to share their 72-page solution to the problem of consciousness. When I am dead, the gods of the underworld will tell me if any of them were right.

Dangerous false beliefs might seem foolish, but they actually serve an social important function. Believing in something that can actually hurt you (e.g., denying covid) is a desirable feature of a belief, not a bug. This costly signal effectively communicates a social identity to others, and it also signals that someone values this identity so much that they are willing to take personal risks to obtain the social benefits of group membership. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

Some rare good news

@IlyaSomin Left-wing support for rent control would decline drastically if Trump came out in favor of it.

I hope so, too. But they’re not yet completely there even on tariffs. And there’s lots of left-wing support for rent control. The right, of course, has its own widespread economic fallacies, most notably on trade and immigration.

"While I admit that wars occasionally have good overall consequences, it’s very difficult to identify these wars in advance.  And unless you’re willing to bite the bullet of involuntary organ donation, 'good overall consequences' are insufficient to morally justify war." betonit.ai/p/the_common-s…

Horseshoe theory remains undefeated When you do something to knock supply and demand out of whack, and have no solutions, last refuge is to blame greedy firms

"We present...a “heptalemma”. It shows that seven initially plausible theses about physical reality are jointly inconsistent with the predictions of quantum mechanics..." I don't work in this area, but "heptalemma" is badass. philpapers.org/rec/DEBAHF-5

Can Congress prohibit home distilling? Judge Edith Jones explains no. That the 150 year old law prohibiting home distilleries runs afoul of the Taxation and Necessary and Proper Clauses (with opinion sections "Necessary" and "Proper"). This is a Big Deal opinion

👻"we have some basis to think that philosophers *should* open-mindedly engage with controversial views" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/me…

Stalin’s Apostles by @Tonisenior came out this week and it is really excellent: gripping and superbly written. It makes a strong case that Kim Philby and the rest of the Cambridge Five were far more destructive, important, unpleasant and fundamentally evil than they are normally remembered as having been.

Many public discussions center around trends and statistics that are not real at all. For over a decade, there was widespread public discourse about the causes of high and rising maternal mortality in the US. But, as I've written about before , CDC analyses showed that the apparent rise from 2003 to 2017 was due to a change in measurement ourworldindata.org/rise-us-matern… , when a pregnancy checkbox was added to death certificates, which flowed directly into maternal mortality counts in most cases. Rather than mortality rising, the rate had been stable. Many deaths had been previously missed, and many other countries were undercounting maternal deaths. This isn't an isolated case. - People often cite the IHME's estimate of childhood height having fallen in the UK over the past decade. Looking at the data sources, it missed one of the key sources of data on height - a national dataset measuring the height and weight of almost all schoolchildren in the UK, which showed no decline (that data wasn't publicly available until an FOIA request) - and instead the IHME estimates were likely extrapolated based on a global model and smaller, less reliable surveys. neilobrien.co.uk/p/honey-we-did… - I often hear claims about disruptive science having declined over time based on a highly influential paper in Nature. nature.com/articles/s4158… But the key results were affected by a coding bug, which would have showed a decline simply due to this artefact arxiv.org/abs/2402.14583 - The idea that interstate migration in the US has collapsed has led to lots of concern about dynamism and unemployment. But recently, it's been shown that much of the apparent decline was a statistical artefact of how the survey filled in missing responses, causing it to systematically overcount non-movers. Correcting this shows only a very slight decline over time link.springer.com/article/10.100… - The dramatic rise in autism diagnoses, which has spurred lots of commentary about pesticide use and vaccines, actually reflects changes in how autism was defined. In the 1960s, autism described severely disabled, mostly nonverbal children: if a child was verbal or succeeding at school, they were excluded from the diagnosis by definition. The criteria then widened across successive editions of the DSM. Alongside it, it became much easier to get assessed, from requiring a specialist with months-long waiting lists to something that could be done in a few appointments. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25922345/ -- I think this is a persistent problem of people undervaluing data quality and measurement. It may sound dull or academic to care about these issues, but numbers and statistics are a big part of public discussions. They can be the premise of debates that can go on for years and sometimes even decades, and mislead people about social and policy interventions to fix them. So before spending time arguing about the causes and consequences of a trend or statistic and what should be done about it, it's worth digging into the data to see if it supports the premise at all. I suspect there are many other discussions affected by this too. Are there others I've missed?

Manhattan Institute is pleased to announce that historian Sean McMeekin has won the 22nd annual Hayek Book Prize for "To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism" (@basic_books, 2025). McMeekin will receive a $100,000 award and deliver the annual Hayek Lecture in New York City on June 4. manhattan.institute/hayek-book-pri…