Viewing profile — carrionpigeon

"Witch Trials" I read as more tongue-in-cheek than provocative, given the content of the Harry Potter books. A decent pun, by my standards. I already listened to much of it, but ga…

I think the main strength of this activist movement in academia is that it operates through fear. In an environment where much depends on word of mouth and personal reputation, peo…

I, too, am suspicious of this statement. It brings to mind the context of the similar one issued by the University of Chicago a few years ago. While the administration was publicly…

I removed my original reply upon realization the poster to whom I responded was likely too angry for debate given the tone of the parent post, which I re-read after sending mine. P…

It's still like that in most of the US. And until today, abortion into the 2nd trimester was legal in the entire US, minus some delta in one state as this case reached the Supreme …

This strikes me as wildly implausible. The US broadly has very permissive abortion laws compared to most of Europe, but I have never once heard of anyone migrating to the US over g…

The great (unintentional?) irony of that argument is that before seatbelts, that was arguably how cars used to be manufactured. Back then, drivers were often killed in car crashes …

This never occurred to me before. I'm thinking back to my time in high school, when I would see rich 16-year-olds drive up in massive SUVs or trucks. The justification parents had …

The main reason I "[hate] shopping carts" is that the wheels seem to invariably be defective. I remember reading in the late 90s / early 2000s (the era of 'Walmart is taking over' …

Karl Marx, who was residing in Britain at the time, also wrote much on the topic. He had nothing but withering criticism of mainstream/elite British attitudes for the war, namely t…

This is an oversimplification. It started out as: all things being equal, pick the black one. It applied to cases where one was torn between two equal candidates, and the idea was …

> claiming that so-called race can be determined from one's DNA is indeed pseudo-science. That's taking it way too far. Genotyping populations identifies variation, and in cases wh…

I remember reading about Brazil resorting to head measurements to see if one were one's claimed race and were not cheating to get an advantage. Just a cursory search seems to show …

I was curious about how the Indians handle this, too, so I read Republic of Caste by Anand Teltumbde. It's a long, rambling, but detailed description of how the reservation system …

Even then, 1 year off is a 20% income reduction on paper. 2 years would be 40%. Want to catch people voluntarily taking off work versus being 'legitimately' unemployed? (For exampl…

Our institutions reflect our public discourse, and right now, discourse is dominated by race. When it comes to school admissions, the elite schools and colleges want to see their s…

When I was in high school, one student's parents (one doctor and one lawyer --- very financially well-off) took off work for one year just so they could claim having no income on t…

I doubt that biographical details about Stalin's erudition and connection to his political actions generalize. It's entirely possible for a well-read dictator to perform quite admi…

This approach is extremely dangerous. It's baffling to me that it could be seriously considered after No Child Left Behind. One key variable that needs to be addressed in evaluatin…

I cannot help being underwhelmed by papers on the so-called 'microbiome.' Very seldom is it something more complex than proportion/prevalence of species X correlates with behavior/…