1/6 Most of you have heard of the book Hidden Figures and the subsequent film. The role attributed to the lead character, Katherine Johnson, has been questioned by the veterans of manned spaceflight operations in the 1960s. Now those questions have been explored systematically 2/6 by two aerospace engineers who were part of mission planning of trajectories and rendezvous from Mercury through Apollo. Their commentaries plus supplementary material are posted at .hiddenfigurescritique.com

1/4 I'll elaborate a little. Let's say I'm writing an article or a chapter using data from the 1000 Genomes Project. I want to make statements about Sub-Saharan Africans and also statements about the Yoruba, Luhya, and Esan subsamples of Sub-Saharan Africans.

https://twitter.com/charlesmurray/status/1641156321599692803

2/4 Which is easier? To write sentences in which all are referred to as populations or sentences in which some groups are races and others are, um, what? Sub-races? Ethnicities? For me, it's a no-brainer. "Populations" is flexible, easily shifting from the continental level to

1/7 Good review, and I certainly can't complain that the reviewer didn't read carefully. I am of two minds about Bo's complaint that I tried too hard to not rile up my readers (a point that others have made as well).

https://twitter.com/Ideas_Sleep/status/1628109338517569548

2/7 My decisions about tone for Human Diversity were made early in the writing process, around 2017, when I was still optimistic that I could get some people on the left to read me in the wake of my post-TBC partial rehabilitation

For those of you who are not familiar with the Vietnam Era, this was tried by LBJ in 1966 with Project 100,000, which lowered the minimum required score for the Armed Forces Qualification Test. It was a disaster. The newly qualified soldiers were slow learners, routinely

https://twitter.com/monitoringbias/status/1627357155618684929

incompetent and undisciplined, and in combat were dangerous to themselves and their comrades. Their fatality rate was three times that of soldiers who met the previous qualification standard.

1/10 What better way to start the new year than with a puzzle about the coding of race and ethnicity by the @uscensusbureau. Specifically, a coding change from 2019 to 2020 changed the percentage of Latinos who identified racially as white from 66% to 24%. This is a huge change. 2/10 Three obvious possibilities:
(1) Latino racial self-identification is changing.
(2) Latino racial self-identification was misrepresented by the old measure.
(2) Latino racial self-identification is misrepresented by the revised measure.

1/4 I've come to think over the last 20 years that secular humanism has no moral bottom. Absent a core of absolutes of right and wrong, anything can be rationalized. Absent some divine origin for those absolutes, they cannot be absolutes.

https://twitter.com/curtdoolittle/status/1602874537586089984

2/4 Twenty years ago, I saw the potential for such rationalizations. Since then, I have watched the most secular elements of societies in the West rationalize ever-widening departures from what used to moral principles that secular humanism claimed it could sustain.

1/5 How much difference does a single-parent family make in criminality after controlling for genetics? Don't know, but here is a table with the relative roles of genes, shared environment, and everything else on some relevant traits. 2/5 The bad news for parents: The roles of shared environment for traits involving personality and most abilities are quite small. But look at the right-hand page (from Human Diversity, if you're wondering).

1/6 I have a lot of followers who are sophisticated about complex multivariate methods but who haven't read into the IQ/race controversy. As an exercise, please take a look at this article (it's not paywalled). mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/… 2/6 It's one example of a growing literature. It's not racist pseudoscience. One of the coauthors, Bryan Pesta, a tenured faculty member, was recently fired, with this article being a major reason.

Three examples of decisions that would never happen in a socialist bureaucracy (and none were made even by the head of NASA, let alone the head of govt):

https://twitter.com/chasingmoonbk/status/1549791213951361024

1. George Mueller’s decision to make the first test of the Saturn V “all-up,” meaning all three stages on the first flight.

1/5 I am pleased to announce the first in a series called "Data Tools." The link describes what I have in mind.
The audience for the first tool, "PUMA Descriptors," is researchers or journalists who use the American Community Survey. aei.org/research-produ… 2/5 I use the Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA) as the basis for characterizing the location of individuals in the ACS. You can identify the type of area--e.g., rural with a single small town, a stand-alone small city, satellite/suburb to a larger city, or megalopolis.

1/4 It is tempting to try to be cute ("Class, give me an example of a straw man") But Eric Turkheimer is an important figure & has, I am sure, actually read TBC. This tweet is unworthy of him. What follows are two pages from TBC.

https://twitter.com/ent3c/status/1398972040875581447

2/4 This one is from the Introduction, just 21 pages in, with italics added because Dick and knew that italics were necessary. And, as promised we did repeat the message elsewhere.

1/5 "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
John Adams

https://twitter.com/karlbykarlsmith/status/1371781023307079682

2/5 "To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea."
James Madison

1/4 A game to keep pontificators busy: Characterize the long-term effects of the plague (as I will call it, imprecisely) while it's still near its beginning. Put yourself on record now, exposing yourself to ridicule later. I'll go first. 2/4 The months of the plague will force-feed distance communication to millions of people who otherwise would have continued to think there's no substitute for face-to-face. Millions will become comfortable with Zoom, etc., years sooner than they would otherwise.