Listening to the Today programme

Whenever I hear the BBC dutifully using the phrase "so-called Islamic state", I think 'the terrorists won, they made our political system a little bit more stupid and authoritarian.'

Linkage

Very nice article about how smartphones and social media play games with our minds. It turns out not everybody “nudges for good”.

Natural selection in the contemporary United States. (NB: "contemporary" means about a generation ago, so contemporary in a biological perspective.)

New nature study on genetics of education

There's a new Nature study out on the genetics of education. Pretty cool and interesting stuff.


The background here is that after candidate gene studies failed, people suspected that education and similar things are the result of small effects of many genes. To get a good estimate of those effects you need to "go large" with big N studies. So far this agenda seems to be living up to the hype. We still can't explain much of the variance, but we're explaining much more than we could before.

... Aaaand there's already people calling for this kind of work to be defunded. Blame genetics or culture – those people are idiots.