The dangers posed when academics go outside their area of expertise

People who are highly credentialed academically tend to have their views given a great deal of weight because of the perception that they are generally smart and knowledgeable. While it is true that their training gives them some specific technical and analytical skills, it does not make them general experts. But the deference with which their views are treated can go to their heads and result in them pontificating on matters in which they do not have any real expertise but just enough knowledge to speak with confidence. This seems more likely to happen when the topics are those that have high visibility and broad, multidisciplinary elements. Academics who have strong views on it can be tempted to throw their hats into the debate even if they are not really that knowledgeable.

This seems to be the case with RFK Jr’s appointment of Retsef Levi to review the safety of Covid-19 vaccines. Levi’s academic background is in operations research, which is a niche theoretical field that applies very advanced mathematics and statistics to complex systems. Much of the work involves simulations and modeling and its practitioners look for real-world situations to which to apply them. Since the systems can vary considerably, sometimes you will find the operations researchers housed in business and management schools (as is the case with Levi at MIT) and sometimes in engineering schools (as is the case at Princeton University).
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A lapsed atheist’s journey back to faith

Christopher Beha has a long essay titled Losing Faith in Atheism wherein he describes his personal journey from Catholicism to atheism and then back again. As one who had a journey from religious belief to non-belief but have never had any reason to go back, I am always curious about what makes others revert and so I read his essay with interest.

The first part describes how he lost his faith and he describes reading the well-known books by the so-called New Atheists that I am sure many readers would be familiar with, such as The End of Faith by Sam Harris, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett, and God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. But he says he could not find anywhere in them an answer to the question “How am I to live?”.

To ask “How am I to live?” is to inquire as to not just what is right but what is good. It is to ask not just “What should I do?” but “How should I be?” The most generous interpretation of the New Atheist view on this question is that people ought to have the freedom to decide for themselves. On that, I agreed completely, but that left me right where I’d started, still in need of an answer.

He says that he started reading the modern philosophers, searching for answers. He says that there were two schools of thought that purported to provide answers: scientific materialism and romantic idealism.
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The billionaires, tech bros, and intellectual enablers of Epstein

One of the popular conspiracies of the right such as by QAnon is that the world is run by a secretive cabal of elites, a subset of whom traffic in girls and young women. What the Epstein files reveal is that while not on such a grand scale, there does seem to have been a cabal consisting of billionaires, tech bros, and intellectuals, almost all of whom are men, who used their dominance in the public sphere to propagate eugenics and master-race science. I want to highlight a link that commenter Dunc provided to an article by Virginia Heffernan titled “The billionaires’ eugenics project: how Epstein infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science”. The article is well worth reading in full and names names.

Heffernan used to have John Brockman, literary agent to many major writers, as her own agent and for a while he included her in the mailing list for a group known as Edge that comprised these people and this gave her an insight into this group. She describes what she discovered.

It’s alarming to see your name in the Epstein files, but I was braced to see mine. Years ago, I was part of a salon for intellectuals and pseudointellectuals called Edge founded by John Brockman. His mass emails evidently copied in Epstein and a dozen such email blasts made their way to the latest dump of hazmat. 

Brockman, my former agent for tech writing, told me Edge was an intellectual salon. Edge.org is indeed intriguingly sprawling, jammed with scholarly idols whose bios have “Booker” and “Nobel” in them. Members of Edge participated in conferences and symposia, and promoted each other’s work. Who was I to say no? Among Edge’s prodigious ranks were Ian McEwan, Yuval Noah Harari, Steve Wozniak, Richard Dawkins, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Daniel Kahneman.

But if I’d read the member list more closely, I might have hesitated. Edge was overwhelmingly male, for one. It was said to be an intellectual salon, but in the club photos were tech bro billionaires, including Edge members Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Larry Page. And too many members were men now largely renowned for misconduct, professional or personal: Marc D Hauser, Jonah Lehrer, Lawrence Krauss, and Marvin Minsky. 

Turns out I didn’t have to worry about meeting these people. Brockman kept me at a distance. As the latest Epstein files reveal, the token female members of Edge were actively excluded from schmoozing and conferences, especially the glittering events known as the Billionaires’ Dinners. 

Good policy. Otherwise, we might have struck up conversations with the anxious-looking teenage girls kept out of the photos. We might have overheard the Edge men praising race science, rape culture and genetic engineering. We might even have asked where the money came from. Then we would have come face to face with the illiterate child rapist and passionate eugenicist who bankrolled the whole thing. Jeffrey Epstein.

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Men who want to propagate

There is a small community of men who, for some reason, seem to want to sire as many children as possible, like the 13th century Genghis Khan who reportedly had so many children that now 16 million men have some of his DNA. Ten other men also reportedly have a huge number of descendants.

Ava Kofman writes about some men who seem to be envious of old Genghis and have started what are essentially baby factories, using surrogates to carry the babies they sire, and taking advantage of the few restrictions on the practice in the US. One of them had over twenty children, the majority of them under three years of age, who were found to show signs of neglect and lack of medical treatment, resulting in him being accused of child trafficking.
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Barack Obama sets off ET controversy

In an interview where guests were expected to give quick responses, Barack Obama said something that sent believers in extraterrestrial into a frenzy.

In a conversation with the American podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen over the weekend, Obama appeared to confirm the apparent existence of aliens during a speed round of questioning where the host asks guests quick questions and the guests respond with brief answers.

After he was asked “Are aliens real?”, Obama said: “They’re real but I haven’t seen them.”

He went on: “They’re not being kept at Area 51. There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”

Later, because of the uproar, he issued a statement clarifying what he meant.

“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” he said. “But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”

This is eminently reasonable and is what I also think. He would probably have been better served if he had said “They’re possible” rather than “They’re real” but sometimes when speaking off the cuff, one’s choice of words is not always the best.

But you can expect the tin-foil conspiracy theorists to go into overdrive.

Lead and criminality

I have written before about the possible connection between the presence of lead in the environment and violent crime by young men. Much of the evidence is correlational but nonetheless suggestive. What researchers such as Rick Nevin found was that the amount of lead in things like gasoline and paint was phased out at different times in different parts of the world (and in different states in the US) and that crime started to drop about two decades after the drop in blood lead content.

This study shows a very strong association between preschool blood lead and subsequent crime rate trends over several decades in the USA, Britain, Canada, France, Australia, Finland, Italy, West Germany, and New Zealand. The relationship is characterized by best-fit lags (highest R2 and t-value for blood lead) consistent with neurobehavioral damage in the first year of life and the peak age of offending for index crime, burglary, and violent crime. The impact of blood lead is also evident in age-specific arrest and incarceration trends. Regression analysis of average 1985-1994 murder rates across USA cities suggests that murder could be especially associated with more severe cases of childhood lead poisoning.

Now a new book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser takes a look at whether exposure to lead in childhood resulted in the creation of serial killers. Fraser notes that notorious serial killers Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Gary Ridgway all grew up in the same neighborhood near Tacoma, WA around the same time as her, a location with high lead content, which she uses as a springboard for her support of the lead -crime hypothesis.
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The disparagement of the achievements of indigenous peoples

Some time ago, I discussed a book Sea People that described the incredible navigational feats of the Polynesian people who were able to reach and populate all the tiny but habitable islands in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Westerners did not think that these ‘primitive’ people could do this and felt that the islands must have been populated by people traveling west from the Americas. Thor Heyerdahl was one of the key proponents of this idea and his balsa raft Kon Tiki experiment was aggressively promoted by him as showing that this was the case. That thesis is no longer considered tenable but that wrong idea still persists in the public mind.

This is not the only example of how western archaeologists and anthropologists, faced with what seemed like impressive achievements in countries that they deemed backward, discounted the possibility that indigenous people might have done them and instead created theories that gave the credit to others. In a review of a new book about the giant sculptures of faces known as moai found on the island of Rapa Nui (formerly called Easter Island), Margaret Talbot reviews some of the other examples of this tendency, the most extreme version being that of Erich von Daniken.
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How much drinking of alcohol is safe?

Alcohol is the most widely used legal drug. Its use has been sanctioned by long-standing use and efforts to ban it have been largely unsuccessful, as the Prohibition movement found out during the years 1920-1933 when the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages was completely banned in the US, after the 18th Amendment to the US constitution was easily passed in 1919. While private ownership and consumption of alcohol were not made illegal federally, some local jurisdiction did make those illegal too.

The legacy of prohibition is mixed.

The overall effects of Prohibition on society are disputed and hard to pin down. Some research indicates that alcohol consumption declined substantially due to Prohibition, while other research indicates that Prohibition did not reduce alcohol consumption in the long term. Americans who wanted to continue drinking alcohol found loopholes in Prohibition laws or used illegal methods to obtain alcohol, resulting in the emergence of black markets and crime syndicates dedicated to distributing alcohol. By contrast, rates of liver cirrhosis, alcoholic psychosis, and infant mortality declined during Prohibition. Because of the lack of uniform national statistics gathered about crime prior to 1930, it is difficult to draw conclusions about Prohibition’s effect on crime at the national level. Support for Prohibition diminished steadily throughout its duration, including among former supporters of Prohibition.

The 18th Amendment was repealed by the 21st Amendment passed in 1933, ending that experiment.

That drinking alcohol causes or exacerbates problems is clear, with men being the key drivers.
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My talk on “The Death of Free Will”

[Note: Given the controversial nature of this topic and the subtlety of the arguments involved that might require multiple exchanges and clarifications, I am lifting the three comment limit for this post, though the rule against acting like a jerk remains and indeed will always remain.]

On January 10, 2026, I gave a talk at the local Skepticamp Conference on The Death of Free Will. I am attaching the link to the video below. It is about 25 minutes long, followed by another 20 minutes of Q/A.

Since you cannot see the slides that well, I am attaching a pdf of the slides so that you can follow along.

Enjoy!

The relative decline of research universities in the US

The New York Times had an article that has set off alarms in higher education circles in the US that, according to some global rankings, China’s universities are rapidly advancing the amount and quality of their scientific research output, leaving US universities behind.

Look back to the early 2000s, and a global university ranking based on scientific output, such as published journal articles, would be very different. Seven American schools would be among the top 10, led by Harvard University at No. 1.

Only one Chinese school, Zhejiang University, would even make the top 25.

Today, Zhejiang is ranked first on that list, the Leiden Rankings, from the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Seven other Chinese schools are in the top 10.
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According to Mark Neijssel, director of services for the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, the Leiden rankings take into account papers and citations contained in the Web of Science, a database set of academic publications which is owned by Clarivate, a data and analytics company. Thousands of academic journals are represented in the databases, many of which are highly specialized, he said.

The research output of Harvard and other US universities has not declined. It has grown but the Chinese universities are growing faster. This is because China has put great emphasis on scientific research, seeing it as the foundation of its technological base for its growth as a world power.
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