Richard Hanania Profile picture
President, @CSPICenterOrg. Former @UTAustin, @ColumbiaSIPA. Post pictures from books. Subscribe at https://t.co/32YL6Mtg2D
প্রদীপ্ত মৈত্র (Pradipto Moitra) Profile picture Meow And Yawn Profile picture Cheri Stahl Profile picture arnold stoper Profile picture fche Profile picture 41 subscribed
Mar 13 4 tweets 3 min read
You can't make this up.

The Biden administration tried to make financial aid easier to get for those in the country illegally.

But the system broke down because it froze you out if you didn't have a social security number.

The whole system is backlogged and now in chaos.


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The Department of Education was too busy finding ways to forgive loans to be able to distribute this year's financial aid and loans. Also, to deal with school reopenings after teachers unions forced them to close. Every leftist cause just feeds the cycle of incompetence. Image
Mar 8 5 tweets 2 min read
New racial insanity in California.

Nonwhite felons can now ask for a new trial based on the argument that whites were arrested less or got shorter sentences for the same crime.

Courts are not to consider criminal history in the analysis because that's also due to racism!
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San Francisco man caught with a loaded gun, finds a "race expert" to argue he shouldn't have been arrested and prosecuted because a police officer used the phrase "high crime area."

New form of welfare for CRT scholars who get to advocate for emptying the jails. Image
Feb 22 4 tweets 3 min read
There was cultural tension when Napoleon conquered Egypt.

The Egyptians were angry that French women behaved so freely and were a bad influence on local women.

Also, the Egyptians were confused as to why the French liked women in the first place instead of young boys.


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French and Egyptians had different standards of female beauty.

The Egyptians liked their women big. They had an expression: “She was so beautiful she could not fit through the door.”
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Feb 22 5 tweets 2 min read
Texas banned DEI in universities.

What happened?

University of Texas changed the name of its DEI bureaucracy and just went on as before, keeping most of their diversity goals and programs on the website.

One bureaucrat didn't even bother changing her job title at LinkedIn.
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Full report here. dc.claremont.org/where-are-they…
Feb 15 6 tweets 3 min read
This is beyond parody. Hard hitting American journalist finds that in a poor country food is cheaper, says it has radicalized him against his own society. I can understand the subway one. American urban dysfunction is something to be ashamed of, and there’s a point to make

But supermarkets are clearly one thing we’re very good at! If you’re critiquing America on the issue of supermarkets, you’re showing your anti-American bias.
Feb 15 6 tweets 3 min read
California to require all students take "ethnic studies."

A debate has broken out over whether kids should be taught that Jews are white, and therefore oppressors, or not.

Districts are split on the question.

This is what an education debate looks like in our largest state. Image Ethnic studies "scholars" say to be true to their science they must considers Jews oppressors.

They're standing by their principles! California politicians will probably in many cases compromise and end up simply teaching that all energy should be focused on White gentiles.
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Feb 12 11 tweets 4 min read
You know social science is fake. But it's actually much worse than you think. Many of the problems aren't even solvable in theory.

I wrote about why that is, and how one can develop healthy epistemological habits and a reasonable worldview anyway. richardhanania.com/p/epistemology… The typical qualitative paper find a statistical relationship and sees if it holds after "controlling" for potential confounders.

This pretends to do away with selection effects. In fact it does no such thing. See the cases of out of wedlock births and breastfeeding. Image
Feb 7 4 tweets 5 min read
Which side believes in more misinformation?

I used to think that the question was unanswerable because it depends on the questions you ask. People can come up with questions that conservatives get wrong ("Was the 2020 election stolen?") or that liberals get wrong ("Were 2016 vote totals changed by Russia?") Many studies do this, and they should be rejected as biased.

But a 2021 paper has convinced me that liberals are the side that is overwhelmingly closer to the truth on most factual matters.

This article found an objective way to get at the misinformation question. Researchers decided to track 20 viral stories each two week period over 6 months in 2019. Every two weeks, they grabbed the 10 most viral true stories and 10 most viral fake stories over that period.

They then recruited conservatives and liberals to see who believed in more false information, in 12 different waves. This is an unbiased method because the researchers aren't themselves deciding which questions to ask. They're looking at what articles go viral, and then asking people about them. If one side tends to see more fake stories go viral, that will show up in the data.

First finding: more conservative false stories go viral.

"Fully two-thirds (65.0%) of the high engagement true statements were characterized as benefiting the political left, compared to only 10.0% that were described as benefiting the right. The pattern among falsehoods was reversed, although the relationship was attenuated: 45.8% benefited the political right versus about a quarter (23.3%) the left."

Both sides share unflattering things about their enemies. But when liberals do it, the information they share on social media is more likely to be true.

Moreover, it could be that people at the extremes are more likely to believe false information. In fact, the more conservative you are, the more false statements you're likely to believe. "Very liberal" people do the best at this measure, and "very conservative" the worst.

Even more shockingly, the researchers controlled for the fact that more conservative misinformation goes viral. Yes, both sides were biased and more likely to believe what they wanted. But liberals were more likely to admit things against their ideological interests. They were just better informed or less biased across the board.

In sum, this is absolutely damning for conservatives

1) Conservatives share a terrible epistemological ecosystem, where false claims go viral much more often. This is not a small difference. Liberals dominate the real news industry, while conservatives are the leaders in fake news
2) Conservatives as a result believe more false information
3) One could try to argue that a few conservative "bad apples" spread misinformation, and that biases the results, because among the general public each side just endorses what makes them feel good. But conservatives believe more false information even when that is accounted for.

One might have suspected these results just from observing different kinds of news media. But this is the strongest piece of confirmatory evidence I've seen for the idea that one side is in an epistemologically superior position. The right-wing echo chamber is a major problem, and in many ways worse than the liberal establishment it criticizes.

Part of this is probably just IQ. Liberals are smarter, and smart people are more likely to believe in true things on average. Also, when tribes with slightly different means form, they can have radically different cultures. To compare conservatives to liberals, it's not enough to just ask what the average IQ or level of tribal instinct is for each group. One must understand that a group that is low intelligence and high on tribalism will form a fundamentally different culture than one with the opposite traits. This is why cultural differences are often more radical than individual differences between communities. A community is not simply the sum of its parts, but includes feedback loops.

Social science can often be very biased, but we shouldn't reject findings when the methodology being used is sound.

The simple truth is liberals are more connected to reality than conservatives.Image
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Some examples of the false statements. You can quibble here or there with what's actually false or what the slant of a story is in a few cases, but I don't think reasonable people will find much to disagree with here.
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Feb 6 5 tweets 3 min read
We know that Republicans have recently been nominating bad candidates and losing elections. I don't think most understand how bad things have gotten at the state party level, especially in swing states.

Consider the kind of people the GOP now attracts.

A 🧵 of the dysfunction. In Michigan, an important swing state, Republicans chose single mother Kristina Karamo to head the party last year.

She was just voted out, but claims that it was done improperly, so has refused to resign. Last week, the Michigan GOP had an event where both Karamo and the other supposed leader showed up, like the two popes, but neither was recognized as the head of the party.

Kamaro previously ran for Secretary of State in Michigan in 2022. She lost by 14 points and refused to concede. Now she refuses to leave the RNC!Image
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Feb 3 5 tweets 3 min read
DC had a program that randomly gave poor parents $10,800, taken as a lump sum or 12 monthly payments. What did they do with the money?

Washington Post profiles some winners. First, Canethia Miller, who took a $6K trip to Miami and bought her kids new outfits every day. Image By taking her kids on an expensive vacation they couldn't afford to look at rich people's houses and yachts, she says she motivated them to succeed. Image
Jan 30 9 tweets 4 min read
Why can Republicans no longer win?

Taylor Swift Democrats.

These are people who are comfortable with their biological sex and want normal lives and relationships.

They'd usually vote against the left. Except Republicans have become even bigger weirdos. richardhanania.com/p/taylor-swift… As my friend @mualphaxi points out, everything about Swift's aesthetics and role in the culture is implicitly conservative. But normalcy is no longer the conservative brand, nor success. Instead you get theories about the Super Bowl being an op to get people vaxxed or whatever. Image
Jan 29 16 tweets 7 min read
Political and intellectual movements rely on narratives that try to explain the world and provide solutions to problems.

I make the case for Critical Age Theory, the idea that many of our biggest problems can be traced to society privileging the old. 🧵richardhanania.com/p/critical-age… Critical Race Theory says that even if people aren't consciously intending to be racist, our systems are set up to favor whites over blacks in ways large and small. I believe this is true with regards to age. We can have a gerontocracy without gerontocrats. Image
Jan 28 4 tweets 2 min read
William Gladstone's great-great grandson went on an apology tour to ask black people for forgiveness for his ancestors being involved in slavery.

In Guyana, they protested him and held up signs like “The apology is a start Charlie, move quickly to reparation, or else." Image Gladstone gives a televised address to the nation at the University of Guyana where he apologizes and pledges money to an institute to study slavery and indentured servitude, the latter to win over Indians. Students heckle him and at another event someone asks for his estates. Image
Jan 26 8 tweets 3 min read
Circumcision is the only case in which our culture removes a healthy body part as a routine part of medicine.

As I explain in @QueerMajority, the evidence supposedly justifying such an extreme practice is laughable, and it needs to end. queermajority.com/essays-all/was… You could of course find benefits. Cutting off your arm would have benefits. Imagine we dulled the sense of taste so people wouldn't eat fatty foods, and then used science to say this is a good thing.

The benefit has to be *extreme* to justify such a drastic change to the body. Image
Jan 2 16 tweets 6 min read
Are men and women equally intelligent? The standard line among people who accept the reality of heredity is yes, but men just have more variation. I looked into the question, and it doesn't appear to be true. Men are probably 2-4 IQ points smarter.🧵 richardhanania.com/p/are-men-smar… The thing about the equality hypothesis is that it's been promoted by names like Arthur Jensen, Charles Murray, and Richard Herrnstein. Not ones you would expect to be cowed by political correctness! This makes the position credible. Richard Lynn has been the prominent dissenter Image
Dec 22, 2023 7 tweets 3 min read
Most of my reading is of people who I politically disagree with. What makes someone potentially insightful? Traits include.

*No zero sum thinking
*Belief in processes that aggregate info
*Rejection of even "light" conspiracy thinking.

I explain here.
richardhanania.com/p/towards-an-e… The smartest people on the right and left ended up agreeing on Covid. When there’s a new issue that doesn’t touch on ideological commitments, reasonable minds come to the correct position. Contrast to the Covid hysteria of the left and anti-vax on the right.
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Dec 13, 2023 15 tweets 6 min read
People are missing the most important political story of the year.

It doesn't matter much if young people are turning against Israel.

Society is dominated by elites, and what is really going to reshape our politics is The Great Jewish Realignment.🧵richardhanania.com/p/the-great-je… In analyzing political trends, people look at polls and say young people or the public or whatever are moving in a certain direction, and make predictions.

This is not completely useless, but the public will is thwarted by elites all the time. Especially on foreign policy. Image
Nov 27, 2023 21 tweets 8 min read
Some people say that Israel should fight a less aggressive war to avoid creating more terrorists.

This view reflects a deep misunderstanding of the conflict and Palestinian society. If anything the opposite is more likely to be true.

Here's why🧵richardhanania.com/p/israel-must-… There are three models you can have of Palestinian hate of Israelis

1. Linear: Oppression goes up, hatred increases
2. Logarithmic: Same as 1 but rises more slowly after a certain level
3. "Lose Hope": It is hope of victory that inspires them.

Which is likely to be true here?
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Nov 26, 2023 11 tweets 7 min read
Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us is on how westerners exported our ideas about mental illness across the world.

Western psychiatry treats mental illness like physical illness, universal, but the human mind is influenced by memes. By talking about mental illnesses, you create them🧵
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A girl died of an eating disorder in Hong Kong. In response, the government and media went around "raising awareness" about the disease and relying on western experts to understand it. As a result, one study showed a 25x increase in eating disorders.
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Nov 19, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
Reminder that Nayib Bukele single handedly brought down the crime rate in #ElSalvador but instead of admitting it, the media made up a bunch of excuses: "it was going down anyway", "he made deals with the gangs," etc

Here's why that's all nonsense. richardhanania.com/p/the-invisibl… "Vox complains that there aren’t enough public defenders in El Salvador to advocate on behalf of all the accused criminals. Should a country therefore let gangs roam free until it sets up a few more law schools and finds enough money in the budget to hire the new graduates?" Image
Oct 14, 2023 7 tweets 3 min read
Washington Post: "A trans woman joined a sorority. Then her new sisters turned on her."

They're portraying a 300+ pound man who wants to shower with women as being bullied by them.

How can you mock this? What joke could add to this article? washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/inter…

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"How's it going, fellow sisters?" Image