Streetlights

Dear Scots, those have been a wonderful couple of days with you. I could not be a happier mayor. You are always welcome to come back to Cologne! #tartanarmy @ScotlandNT #euro2024

Steven Pinker explains the cognitive biases we all suffer from and how they can short-circuit rational thinking and lead us into believing stupid things. Skip to 12:15 to bypass the preamble.

Tl;dr an undergraduate paper last year claiming females hunt just as often as males got picked up by the media and amplified before it was discovered their analysis was deeply flawed and unreliable. Here several anthropologists present a very gracious rebuttal.

There was no group difference in reaction times and accuracy between males and females (using contraception and not). However, within subject analyses revealed that regularly menstruating females performed better during menstruation compared to being in any other phase, with faster reaction times (10ms c.ca, p < .01), fewer errors (p < .05) and lower dispersion intra-individual variability (p < .05). In contrast they exhibited slower reaction times (10ms c.ca, p < .01) and poorer timing anticipation (p < .01) in the luteal phase, and more errors in the predicted ovulatory phase (p < .01). Self-reported mood, cognitive and physical symptoms were all worst during menstruation (p < .01), and a significant proportion of females felt that their symptoms were negatively affecting their cognitive performance during menstruation on testing day, which was incongruent with their actual performance.

New paper casts doubt on the often reported huge rise in maternal deaths in the United States over the past 20 years. They put the blame firmly on a change in the reporting method.

Rushed through last minute before parliament is dissolved using emergency powers.

Should've been debated in the commons at least.

Was Roger Penrose not completely insane when he proposed his Orch OR theory of the mind? Still doesn't explain the hard problem of consciousness, but a step closer?

Excellent essay from Coyne and Maroja that picks apart six widespread examples of biology being corrupted by (often well-intentioned) ideology.

Brilliant mind. I was lucky enough to meet him at an invited lecture once and he was nice enough to sign Freedom Evolves for me.

Another horseman falls.

There is a lot of disinformation flying around about this. The original myth about Cass "dismissing 98% of all data" started because an activist on twitter read the wrong paper.

Question everything, especially if it agrees with you.

Seen the "98% of studies were ignored!" one doing the rounds on social media. The editorial in the BMJ put it in much better terms:

"One emerging criticism of the Cass review is that it set the methodological bar too high for research to be included in its analysis and discarded too many studies on the basis of quality. In fact, the reality is different: studies in gender medicine fall woefully short in terms of methodological rigour; the methodological bar for gender medicine studies was set too low, generating research findings that are therefore hard to interpret."

The mighty Hitch and one of his great orations. I often wonder what would he think of the world, such as it is, in 2024.